Nice empirical piece on increases in income equality in the US since 1980.

Looking at other aspects of financial markets, such as margins and leverage.

About dominant narratives and the difficulties in working out whether the TARP bailouts did any good. Prominent Chinese economist worries about boom and bust in the Chinese economy.

Study finds low levels of consumption multiplier for government spending. Tracing where the US stimulus money goes:

The money is not going to areas that would more directly stimulate the economy but instead to provide ongoing life support to deficit-ridden federal, state and local agencies.

But with the US federal government doing so much more, corporations are lining up to get their hands on taxpayer-provided goodies.

About regulations as repeated games of action and response. An Austrian economist (Steve Horowitz) comments on the financial crisis, financial regulation and central banking.

The UK has had its worst six months for public finances on record. Arguing against raising the top marginal rate to 50%. I thought we had played this policy experiment …

Indian heart surgeon offers cutting edge cardiac procedures at a fraction of the cost:

The approach has transformed health care in India through a simple premise that works in other industries: economies of scale. By driving huge volumes, even of procedures as sophisticated, delicate and dangerous as heart surgery, Dr. Shetty has managed to drive down the cost of health care in his nation of one billion.
"Japanese companies reinvented the process of making cars. That's what we're doing in health care," Dr. Shetty says. "What health care needs is process innovation, not product innovation."

And again. He aims to open up a large facility thereby bringing medical tourism to the Cayman Islands.

If the government pays for something, it rations it: generating controversies such as this. More. The NHS on itself:

Only the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the Wal-Mart supermarket chain and the Indian Railways directly employ more people.

Diseconomies of scale, anyone? There was an old Cold War joke that went: the NHS and the Red Army are the two biggest employers in Europe, and the defence of Western Europe rests on the hope that the latter is as inefficient as the former.

A talk about economic gangsters. About the book. Juarez, Mexico as a city where gangs successfully (if that is the word) compete with the state. The largest narco-gang, La Familia, is religious. Religion provides a good binding agent, which particular religion matters less: British troops are finding (and fighting) Taliban fighters with British accents and tattoos, in part a drug-gang connection.

Governments driving up demand and restricting the supply of housing has led to a rise in rents in Oz. Evidence that home loan stress was a major factor in the defeat of the Howard Government.

1950 Time cover story on the builder who pioneered mass developments.

Housing prices in California continue to be inflated. With adverse effects on job prospects and employment.

Examining prospects in the UK housing market. Though suburbia is getting more positively regarded.

Another success for local government as investor:

Nearly 35 years after taxpayers spent $55.7 million building the Pontiac Silverdome and a year after a $20 million sale fell through, city officials have sold the arena once called the most desirable property in Oakland County.
The price: $583,000.

My local government is the most indebted in Melbourne, mainly because it decided it had some comparative advantage in being a property developer. Guess what, it did not.

With the total abandonment of any local currency, formerly hyperinflation-ridden Zimbabwe has been transformed:

In February 2009 Zimbabwe was the only country in the world without debt. Nobody owed anyone anything. Following the abandonment of the Zimbabwe Dollar as the local currency all local debt was wiped out and the country started with a clean slate.
It is now a country without a functioning Central Bank and without a local currency that can be produced at will at the behest of politicians. Since February 2009 there has been no lender of last resort in Zimbabwe, causing banks to be ultra cautious in their lending policies. The US Dollar is the de facto currency in use although the Euro, GB Pound and South African Rand are accepted in local transactions.
Price controls and foreign exchange regulations have been abandoned. Zimbabwe literally joined the real world at the stroke of a pen. Money now flows in and out of the country without restriction. Super market shelves, bare in January, are now bursting with products. …
There are common denominators in all hyperinflations. Generally government finances reach a point where large budget deficits cannot be financed by taxes or borrowings. The choices come down to austerity (with the government cutting back its spending) or by funding the deficit by creating local currency through the printing press, leading to the inflation tax. This is always a political decision, but the line of least resistance is the printing press. Cutting government expenditures and laying off bureaucratic staff is anathema to most politicians.
In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has made it his mission to remain President for life. This has caused him to infiltrate his supporters into the army and police force. He also used Government finances as a way of funding patronage. His use of the printing press was liberal and nobody was prepared to stand up against him. This eventually led to inflation gathering momentum to the point where the armed forces were getting rebellious – they wanted more money. When Mugabe caved in to these demands, the Zimbabwe Dollar plunged.
Shortly after Mugabe was elected President in 1980, the Zimbabwe Dollar was worth more than the US Dollar. The ongoing abuse of the financial system eventually produced a runaway inflation. The largest bank note issued in Zimbabwe was for One Hundred Trillion Dollars ... These notes are now collector’s items and I had to part with US$2 to a street vendor to acquire the note …

Two very stupid people who clearly hugely underestimated the pattern-recognition software in human brains.

The school that has a maths pirate: love pieces like this. Via newredshoes.

Great photos of pollution in China.

About Wikipedia™ and its denizens (the comments are surprisingly good).

About the online world of cyber crime.

Cool graphic of missions to Mars. Long before there were 9/11 truthers there were moon–landing truthers: images of the Apollo 17 landing site.

The story about the disappearance of the dinosaurs is getting more complicated.

About empathy among animals.

About the slow replacement of Sumerian population in ancient Mesopotamia.

Study suggests that current estimates of minimally viable species numbers are too low.

Evidence that television has improved the status of women in India.

Tracing the neuroscience of cognitive dissonance.

Militants hide in bear’s cave: bear objects.

Fertility is continuing to fall:

Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate. … Poor countries are racing through the same demographic transition as rich ones, starting at an earlier stage of development and moving more quickly. The transition from a rate of five to that of two, which took 130 years to happen in Britain—from 1800 to 1930—took just 20 years—from 1965 to 1985—in South Korea. Mothers in developing countries today can expect to have three children. Their mothers had six. In some countries the speed of decline in the fertility rate has been astonishing. In Iran, it dropped from seven in 1984 to 1.9 in 2006—and to just 1.5 in Tehran. That is about as fast as social change can happen.

Top Chinese general advocates space defences as “inevitable”.

Polish outrage over Russian military exercise simulating attack on Poland.

Negotiations with Iran close to collapse. Iran’s President is claiming victory. Russia and the US seem to heading towards a common policy to stop Iran getting nuclear weapons.

Slides from presentation given by the Fort Hood shooter in 2007: the spelling is a little erratic. Claims about what he also said during that presentation. Via jordan179. The issue of “missed signals”. US intelligence were apparently aware of his attempts to contact al-Qaeda. There seems to have been some coordination problems. The FBI’s embarrassment. Probing his links with a mosque one of whose former imans thinks the shooter is a hero. About the rush to avoid considering his actions in a jihadist context. And also on pc’s dangerous obfustications. Further. (A case, methinks, of a strong dose of reality that the “reality-based community” cannot cope with.) About making sure pc does not block needed actions. PC kills (1): colleagues had worries about the shooter’s behaviour but did not want to be seen to be discriminating against a Muslim. PC kills (2): suggesting that the Clinton era ban on carrying weapons on US army bases be rescinded.

Considering the use of hit squads to fit terrorism. Italian judges sentences 23 CIA agents in absentia for their kidnapping of a Muslim cleric.

Two men arrested because they think cartoons are worth killing over. Apparently, all non-Muslims are guilty.

Syria and Israel are to hold peace talks: why nothing will follow from this. A prediction that has already come true. Hamas reported to have rockets that can hit Tel Aviv. Israeli navy seizes ship full of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.

Pakistani militant group with ties to Pakistani intelligence admits involvement in Mumbai attack. With Pakistani army apparently helping to run militant training camps. The fears over the long-term security of Pakistani nukes and Pakistan’s instability:

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day “good-will visit” to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively. …
A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. …
Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said. …
During my stay in Pakistan—my first in five years—there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown.

Pakistan is a fractured and dysfunctional society with a riven and dysfunctional state poisoned by religious pathologies and status obsessions (particularly vis-à-vis India).

British frustration with President Obama’s lack of decision on Afghanistan. German frustration with President Obama’s silence and lack of decision on Afghanistan. President Obama is continuing to take his time reaching a decision. Leading counter-insurgency expert is less impressed. Great photos from Afghanistan.

Noting that economists tended to be against racism and slavery: hardly surprising, given the presumptions of common rationality and the benefits of consensual exchange.

Arguing (again) for monetary rather than fiscal stimulus. About the importance of framing in monetary policy (almost more a philosophy argument than an economics one).

About the ins and outs of gold:

… the IMF sale may be the last gasp of this trend. It is selling just over 400 tonnes, notionally to fund increased lending to developing countries, but in reality to bail itself out of financial problems caused by its bloated bureaucracy. The IMF wants to become more financially independent to resist external pressure for reform.

One could do a great comparative study of the IMF, ABC and Department of Defence displaying similar organisational pathologies despite quite different purposes, accountability procedures and selection beliefs.

About the future of the US dollar as a reserve currency and (pdf) China’s dependence on the US:

… assuming the United States continues to manage its monetary and fiscal affairs in a reasonable fashion and the US capital market remains open, the dollar is not likely to be seriously displaced. …
In short, having acquired large amounts of dollar securities, for practical (and self-interested) reasons, China is now stuck with them for the foreseeable future; there is no low-cost way for China to disgorge them at its own initiative.

More.

On not blaming the efficient market hypothesis for the failures of regulators and financiers. Particularly when most investors do not follow it:

The book is fun reading, but its main premise is fantasy. Most investing is done by active managers who don't believe markets are efficient. For example, despite my taunts of the last 45 years about the poor performance of active managers, about 80% of mutual fund wealth is actively managed. Hedge funds, private equity, and other alternative asset classes, which have attracted big fund inflows in recent years, are built on the proposition that markets are inefficient. The recent problems of commercial and investment banks trace mostly to their trading desks and their proprietary portfolios, and these are always built on the assumption that markets are inefficient. Indeed, if banks and investment banks took market efficiency more seriously, they might have avoided lots of their recent problems. Finally, MBA students who aspire to high paying positions in the financial industry have a tough time finding a job if they accept the EMH.

Lovely study of differential success in local government (pdf) in Nigeria as a result of different taxing and bureaucratic capacity. A nice comment on aid and accountability:

This piece speaks in a uniquely illustrative – if perhaps unintentional way – to the fundamental and ultimately invariable attribute of aid: it is, by definition, non-local unearned income. As a paradigmatic contrast, taxation is local priced income, priced in that a population demands services in return for paying the government…. Aid thus substitutes for the process of domestic resource mobilization; and when viewed from this perspective, the corrupting influence of aid in perverting basic links of accountability becomes much clearer.

When corruption is accountability:

In many African countries, voters have settled expectations about politicians; they know that once elected, politicians will not deliver on their public policy promises. So voters insist that a candidate’s promises be paid in advance. So they demand salt, sugar, soap, alcohol and cash.
Because voters hold politicians to account during campaigns, they care less about policy outcomes. Elected officials, knowing that voters don’t care what happens in public office, have little incentive to work for the public good. So they indulge in loot in order to generate the resources to buy votes at the next election. Corruption and incompetence are thus promoted by the democratic process. …
The history of Western Europe shows that accountability grew out of the revenue imperatives its rulers confronted. …
… checks and balances grew as a product of a double-sided process. First as attempts from above to give a credible signal to asset holders that their money would be used responsibly and repaid; and second, as a demand from below that if they should be taxed or if they should lend the state, it should give them voice on how their money will be used.
Therefore, democratic accountability was a product of a political settlement between a self interested state and a tax-paying or money-lending citizenry, not as an altruistic motive of rulers. The demand for honest government from below, without the self interest of the state to supply it from above cannot produce accountability.
Administratively driven anti-corruption reforms in Africa today fail because they turn this logic of accountability on the head. Instead of fighting graft, voters use it to hold government to account. What Africa needs are incentives that facilitate the state and the citizens to develop a vested interest in honest government.

Pointing out (again!) the localised nature of the US housing bubbles:

Between 2000 and the bubble's peak, inflation- adjusted housing prices in California and Florida more than doubled, and since the peak they have fallen by 20 to 30 percent. In contrast, housing prices in Georgia and Texas grew by only about 20 to 25 percent, and they haven't significantly declined.
In other words, California and Florida housing bubbled, but Georgia and Texas housing did not. This is hardly because people don't want to live in Georgia and Texas: since 2000, Atlanta, Dallas–Ft. Worth, and Houston have been the nation's fastest-growing urban areas, each growing by more than 120,000 people per year.

Lots of commentators are continuing to ignore such structural issues. And also.

Reasons to be pessimistic about the US labour market. Prof. Robert Shiller on the odd place the US economy is in, including sharp turnaround in housing prices in some markets. While the Chairman of the Fed cannot see any bubbles at the moment.

Fannie Mae has consumed billions in US taxpayer funds in a disastrous attempts to boost home ownership. Indeed, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s share of subprime losses keep climbing. Fannie Mae’s new cunning plan for failed mortgages? Turning them into renters. There can be no greater indicator of how absolutely pathological US federal policy has been in this area. (And now the same Feds are taking over US health care, with lots of new bureaucracies.)

About restrictions in the supply of houses in Oz:

… the increased first-home buyer subsidy "seems to have contributed to a boom in house prices at the lower end of the market; an unusual phenomenon in recessionary times which will have tended to offset the affordability gains from historically low interest rates".
Mr Stevens told the conference that, while alleviating skilled labour shortages, strong population growth was putting pressure on urban housing and infrastructure.
Though the credit crunch on apartment finance was temporary, he pointed to structural problems in "land supply, zoning and approval" that meant increased housing demand was not fully flowing through to increased housing construction.

And also:

House price inflation can only co-exist with over-investment in housing if constraints on new housing supply are preventing this investment from translating into additional houses being built. … Australia is producing fewer houses per person than at any time since the late 1960s. We face a shortage of housing stock due to what Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens has called supply-side impediments to the building of new houses. These constraints explain why housing investment is showing up in higher prices rather than increased supply.

With unequal social effects:

… home ownership in the 10 years from 1996 rose only 0.8 per cent despite strong economic growth and low interest rates in that period.
The Flinders Institute for Housing, Urban and Regional Research analysis found home ownership fell by 15 per cent over the two decades to 2006 for low income earners over 45 years of age and medium-high income earners under 45 years.
Other findings included large gains in national income from the resources boom were "wasted" by increasing house prices and accumulating debt to unreasonable levels. ….
Dr Joe Flood, the institute's adjunct professor, said the "the writing is on the wall for the 'Australian dream'."
"The country that promised limitless land, cheap housing and near universal home ownership to all comers now has the most expensive housing in the world amid very tight housing and land markets and little prospect of restoring the balance," Dr Flood said in a statement on Monday.

NZ is also having a housing surge:

The number of sales had risen sharply, the time it took to sell had shortened, and prices had risen 8 per cent since the start of the year and were only 4 per cent below their record high two years ago.
This reflected a shortage of new houses - caused by a strong population gain from net migration and a lack of building activity - as well as low mortgage rates.

William and Mary College elect their first transgender homecoming queen.

A WWII veteran on equal rights. And also.

Ugandan religious leaders believe life imprisonment is a more appropriate penalty for homosexuality than death. About the American evangelical connection.

Kenya wants to count its homosexual population: a bit difficult when homosexuality is a criminal offence.

School Board votes to remove display showing successful homosexuals. More.

Texan rightwingers unhappy that Senator has recommended an openly gay prosecutor for a judgeship.

Asking why, in the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, Muslims can serve but not (open) gays and lesbians. And also.

Comparing gay and straight couples:

The [same-sex] couples had an average age of 52 and household incomes of $91,558, while 31 percent were raising children. That compares with an average age of 50, household income of $95,075 and 43 percent raising children for married heterosexual couples.

About the constraining hypocrisy of Hollywood:

The dichotomy between Hollywood’s claimed social benevolence and its actual practices was seen starkly in July, when prominent gay TV director Todd Holland publicly revealed a practice of his own, which is probably common in the L.A. and New York film and TV industries: He advises gay actors who want to succeed to “stay in the closet.” …
… For example, Harris Interactive and Witeck-Combs found that 82 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 — the audience Hollywood targets — believe gays and lesbians should be legally allowed to marry or enter into domestic partnerships.
“When the public isn’t forced to make moral judgments in the polls,” says Witeck, “they are very accepting of gays and lesbians as people.”
In fact, the mounting data suggest something far more revealing about Hollywood than about the U.S.: Tinseltown has long been criticized as an isolated subculture that holds itself in excessively high regard, viewing everyday Americans as behind the times. There is every possibility that Hollywood is projecting its old biases about America, without learning how the public really feels.

About the difficulty with gay rights and faith:

Frankly, anti-gay religious beliefs are the number one obstacle to almost every measure gay rights groups tackle. The single skill that could turn the tables in their favor is the ability to effectively reach people of faith.
So why are so many gay rights groups so shockingly ineffective on matters of faith?
… If we allow any issue to be set up as a contest between people’s faith and fair treatment of LGBT people, then we’ve lost already. …
In his 1993 book A Place at the Table, gay author Bruce Bawer wrote of some gay activists, “They think that their enemy is conscious oppression and that their salvation lies in the amassing of power, when in fact their enemy is ignorance and their salvation lies in increased understanding.” Sixteen years later, the observation is just as true.
… it’s important to work within different faith traditions individually. A devout Mormon needs to hear from other devout Mormons, not from a Catholic priest. Even within the same faith, people care much more what leaders in their particular sect have to say; not all rabbis are equally influential with all Jews, for instance. This is why it’s so important to work directly with many different people of faith, because each can change minds that others can’t.

Huge drops in world poverty rates, except in Africa.

Apparently, it is easier to be happy if you have more income.

Study finds evidence that open capital markets markedly increase growth in manufacturing wage rates.

Nice set of talking points on why drugs should be legalised.

A young woman’s personal experience of the coercive power of minimum wages.

Lecture on Austrian trade cycle theory (nicely presented). The PowerPoint™ available from here. The story about over-shooting the production possibilities frontier does not sit right with me: it surely would be better put in terms of misinformed use of resources.

China is planning a rail revolution:

Over the next three years, the government will pour some $300 billion into its railways, expanding its network by 20,000 kilometers, including 13,000 kilometers of track designed for high-speed trains capable of traveling up to 350kph. Result: China, a nation long defined by the vastness of its geography, is getting, much, much smaller.

Europe and England&Wales have quite different approaches to wills and bequests.

Paper finds that, for large fiscal adjustments, tax cuts tend to generate more growth than spending increases and spending cuts quicker budget balancing than tax increases.

About laffer curves in search-and-rescue (pdf). A case in point (of moral hazard in national parks).

Arguing that the recent financial crisis strengthens the argument against (pdf) discretionary central banks.

Nice review of Superfreakonomics:

Their research into Chicago prostitution reveal that prostitutes’ wages have plummeted in real terms in the last 60 years. Why? Simple really. Sex is much easier to come by than it was then. Between 1933 and 1942, more than 20 per cent of American men had their first sexual experience with a prostitute. Now it’s around five per cent. … Learning that a prostitute in Chicago is statistically more likely to have sex with a cop than to be arrested by one doesn’t necessarily tell you much about incentives …

Interview with the Gates’ about their global health aid activities. What strikes me is how anti-poor-people many of the on-site comments are. But if you look at your own (very successful) societies primarily as a set of problems then of course prospects will be framed mainly in terms of looming failure, not possible (let alone likely) success.

Paris’s rent-a-bike program has run into problems:

Many of the specially designed bikes, which cost $3,500 each, are showing up on black markets in Eastern Europe and northern Africa. Many others are being spirited away for urban joy rides, then ditched by roadsides, their wheels bent and tires stripped.
With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them.

Chavez has introduced water rationing and blamed capitalism.

Post (apparently in an intended series) on the bad calls of a TV investment guru.

An unemployed Ottawa man makes money being paid to take people’s place in queues.

Comparing US per capital GDP growth and median family income growth 1950-1980 and 1980-2007.

Not a lot of bank failures in the US this time around. One would hope not, after all that bailout money was tossed around.

Estimating tax rates needed to erase the US budget deficit.

Summary of the US health care reform bill. One employer on what it will mean for his business.

US companies are hoarding cash: regime uncertainty anyone?

Texas has now overtaken New York and California for headquarters of Fortune 500 companies, as people flee and increasingly debt-ridden and dysfunctional California while Texas attracts internal migrants.

Study suggests climate change can create volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Study finds significant cosmic ray effect on clouds:

"The evidence has piled up, first for the link between cosmic rays and low-level clouds and then, by experiment and observation, for the mechanism involving aerosols. All these consistent scientific results illustrate that the current climate models used to predict future climate are lacking important parts of the physics.

The paper (pdf).

Study of English temperatures (the longest-maintained series in the world) shows English summers were slightly cooler in the C20th than in the C18th.

About 1% of land ice is in glaciers, 10% in Greenland and 89% in Antarctica, which just had its lowest level of summer ice melt since measurement began. Headlines will not follow.

Story on the BBC admits that there is a genuine scientific debate over global warming.

Reaching agreement that the climate models need more work.

An intelligent post and debate about geo-engineering possibilities and using temperature tax/subsidies.

Looking at the cost of solar versus coal.

Having some fun with frustration about delay in disaster:

In this headline on a New York Times story about the difficulties confronting people alarmed about global warming, note the word "plateau." It dismisses the unpleasant -- to some people -- fact that global warming is maddeningly (to the same people) slow to vindicate their apocalyptic warnings about it.
The "difficulty" -- the "intricate challenge," the Times says -- is "building momentum" for carbon reduction "when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years." That was in the Times's first paragraph.
In the fifth paragraph, a "few years" became "the next decade or so," according to Mojib Latif, a German "prize-winning climate and ocean scientist" who campaigns constantly to promote policies combating global warming. Actually, Latif has said he anticipates "maybe even two" decades in which temperatures cool. But stay with the Times's "decade or so." By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere "plateau," not warming's apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

NZ poll shows people suffering global warming fatigue. Brits are not much concerned about climate change, according to a poll. The care factor is falling in Oz as well. (But if one does care, it makes one even more a member of the moral elite.)

About the “evil” of cheap fixes:

Part of the genius of Marxism, and a reason for its enduring appeal, is that it fed man's neurotic fear of social catastrophe while providing an avenue for moral transcendence.

Is making kindergarten kids fearful about the future child abuse?

The late Aaron Wildavsky once noted that if you are “Minister for the Environment” pretty soon you are “Minister for Everything”. Climate change pushes that along nicely:

Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? …
“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.

Whatever the cause, left-progressivism always seems to end up the in same place: trying to control ever more aspects of people’s lives. Controlling what you can say, what you are allowed to believe, preferring public to private transport, controlling land use, use of property, preferring rationing water (with its “approved” and “unapproved” uses, good people versus bad people structure) to pricing it properly, etc. Of course, if it is not for people’s good, but for the planet’s good, then the level of “justified” control is even greater.

Calling an Observer columnist on his climate-change human hatred.

Clive James on the virtue of scepticism:

Since then, a sceptical attitude has been less likely to get you burned at the stake, but it's notable how the issue of man-made global warming has lately been giving rise to a use of language hard to distinguish from heresy-hunting in the fine old style by which the cost of voicing a doubt was to fry in your own fat.
Whether or not you believe that the earth might have been getting warmer lately, if you are sceptical about whether mankind is the cause of it, the scepticism can be enough to get you called a denialist.
It's a nasty word to be called, denialist, because it calls up the spectacle of a fanatic denying the Holocaust. In my homeland, Australia, there are some prominent intellectuals who are quite ready to say that any sceptic about man-made global warming is doing even worse than denying the Holocaust, because this time the whole of the human race stands to be obliterated.
Really they should know better, because the two events are not remotely comparable. The Holocaust actually happened. The destruction of the earth by man-made global warming hasn't happened yet, ….
Sceptics, say the believers, don't care about the future of the human race. But being sceptical has always been one of the best ways of caring about the future of the human race. For example, it was from scepticism that modern medicine emerged, questioning the common belief that diseases were caused by magic, or could be cured by it.

George Monbiot is outraged.

Al Gore is going for the spiritual angle in his Inconvenient Truth sequel. Since we now have a legal ruling: environmentalism (climate change specifically) is akin to a religion, Al may be on a winner.

Disturbing aspects of the Arendt-Heidegger connection:

I would perhaps modify this to say she internalized the purported universalism of Germanic high culture with its disdain for parochialism. A parochialism she identified with, in her own case, her Jewishness, something she felt ashamed of on intellectual grounds, so primitive, this tribal allegiance in the presence of intellects who supposedly transcended tribalism (or at least all tribes except the Teutonic).
One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

About Ayn Rand:

Stated premises, however, rarely get us all the way down to the bottom of a philosophy. Even when we think we’ve reached bedrock, there’s almost always a secret subbasement blasted out somewhere underneath. William James once argued that every philosophic system sets out to conceal, first of all, the philosopher’s own temperament: that pre-rational bundle of preferences that urges him to hop on whatever logic-train seems to be already heading in his general direction. This creates, as James put it, “a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned … What the system pretends to be is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is—and oh so flagrantly!—is the revelation of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is.”
No one would have been angrier about this claim, and no one confirms its truth more profoundly, than Ayn Rand.

Debating whether libertarians should care about cultural restrictions on libety:

But if the constraints on freedom of association suddenly become social rather than bureaucratic—if the neighborhood decides it does not want black residents, or the extended family decides it cannot tolerate gay sons—we do not experience a net expansion of freedom. If a black man who cannot hold employment by law is unfree, so too is a black man who cannot hold employment because social custom decrees that no one will hire him. If a gay couple that cannot legally marry is being wronged, so too is a couple that must stay closeted to avoid social ostracism. A woman who has to choose between purdah and exile from her village is not living a free life, even if no one has bothered to codify the rules in an Important Book and call them “laws.” …
Property rights are more than the conclusion of an academic argument; they are themselves a matter of culture. … A drop-dead argument for the authority of these constraints may exist in pure reason, but they are meaningless without a broadly shared sense of their legitimacy. Absent friendly social forces, property rights are an impotent abstraction. …
Some of the most effective centers of resistance to state power over the centuries, after all, have been nonindividualistic institutions such as labor unions, churches, guilds, and extended families. Conversely, when libertarians attack these organs of civil society in the name of freedom, they may only succeed in empowering the state—not always, but sometimes. …
Our moral imperfections are our last guarantee of liberty against the benevolent system builders who would have all men and women speak with one voice and assent to one idea. Cultures of liberty tend to be bric-a-brac, full of unresolved tensions between competing ideas. Freedom does not depend upon universalizing the “right”—or left—values. It’s the other way around: A clash of values is what makes even mental liberty possible. …
human beings acquire a respect for individual rights and a consciousness of their individuality. We aren’t born knowing that prosperity flows from property rights; indeed, it’s somewhat counterintuitive. And we aren’t born knowing that it’s dangerous to defer unthinkingly to your peers.
… They tried to convince the locals that they had been Catholics in spirit all along. Every evangelist on earth knows his task is to find connections between old, entrenched beliefs and whatever newfangled doctrine he is looking to sell.

About Darwinian natural law reasoning and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Despite radical differences in ethical judgments, Westermarck concludes, "the general uniformity of human nature accounts for the great similarities which characterize the moral ideas of mankind." Such uniformity must exist, he argues, because despite individual and social variation, human beings belong to the same animal species and therefore display similarities in their mental constitution. Thus, Westermarck's ethical theory does not promote nihilism or irrationalism, for he sees the moral emotions that constitute the basis for his ethics as manifesting the natural propensities of a universal human nature. This appeal to the natural human inclinations makes his account of ethics a restatement of natural law reasoning, but one rooted in an empirical Darwinian science of human nature.
… Morsink interprets human rights as corresponding to the "transcultural species-wide capabilities normally inherent in human beings" (IHR, 38). He relies on Martha Nussbaum's "capabilities approach" to justice. She identifies ten "central human capabilities" of which the fulfillment constitute full human flourishing: 1. life, 2. bodily health, 3. bodily integrity, 4. senses, imagination, thought, 5. emotions, 6. practical reason, 7. affiliation, 8. other species, 9. play, 10. control over one's environment. Morsink shows how the articles of the Universal Declaration correlate to Nussbaum's ten capabilities and argues that we should read the Universal Declaration as saying that all human beings have equal rights to develop the ten human functional capabilities. …
One common way in which the moral sense is blunted or blinded is through xenophobia--the natural human disposition to care more for those close to us than for strangers, to distinguish friends and enemies, those in our group and those outside. In extreme cases--as with Nazi Germany--some human beings are dehumanized and thus treated as outside the circle of human sympathy.

The business has suffered from a drop in marketing efforts: October was very busy but November is relatively light, so income may be a bit tight over summer. Hence, I am available for summer work, if anyone has some.

Paul Keating thinks Canberra was a great mistake. (“A good sheep run ruined” in Rex Connor’s words.)

Sticking up for cities and suburbs.

About the postal voting system in Oz.

Polling at the time showed overwhelming public support (pdf) (61% to 23%) for the Howard Government’s NT intervention.

Current polling shows people are basically happy with the level of human rights protection in Oz (64% think it adequately or well protected, only 7% disagree). The push to take power from Parliaments and give to judges (aka for a Bill of Rights) does not have a lot to work with.

Online survey finds that economic liberals show more variety of opinion than self-identifying social democrats. About the left sensibility.

Sen. Brandeis on the liberal and conservative strains in the Liberal Party.

Screaming about how other people get things wrong is a bit undermined if accuracy turns out to be not your thing.

The Rudd Government is finding out about supply and demand the nasty way: reducing the strength of the border controls has increased the potential profitability of people smuggling leaving the government with all sorts of problems. This year’s death toll from this display of “compassion” currently stands at 54.

Arguing that Rudd is looking to be even worse than Whitlam as PM:

FOR more than 30 years the Whitlam government has been the -- unsurpassable -- benchmark for bad government in Australia.
With its uniquely disastrous blend of ideology, arrogance, poor administrative process and fiscal extravagance and simple ineptitude. …
Arguably Rudd has already seized from Fraser -- or Keating as prime minister -- the claim to be the "worst since Whitlam", but there's a case to be made that he's on the way to, or has already become, the first to be "worse than".
That's a big, big call.
So what's the basis of my call? …
The $43billion National Broadband Network and the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
That is, of course, $43bn give or take the odd $10bn or $20bn. …
So why is this worse than everything that Whitlam threw at us? From disastrously inept ministerial governance and -- the real -- Connor and Khemlani, and on to the numbing 46 per cent increase in spending in the 1974 budget?
Well, the approach to the NBN makes everything in the Whitlam period look almost like a model of good governance.
Here we have a government prepared to spend $43bn on the 21st century national infrastructure project without having embarked on the most basic cost-benefit assessment.
And without having the slightest idea of what the most basic metrics could be or would have to be to make any sense of it. The very uncertainty of the figure is most damning of all.
Or perhaps the failure to ask even the most basic question of all -- is there any need for it? Beyond either the childish tantrum: Kevin wants, wants, wants an NBN now. Or the adolescent indulgence: well, everyone just has to have an NBN.
That's the big-picture absurdity, before you even begin to start on the process. Process?
What process?
Exactly.
The evidence extracted from Connor II -- sorry, Con-roy -- is that there was no formal departmental and cabinet process. Indeed it was an eerily similar "good idea at the time" between minister and prime minister replay of some of the original Connor and Whitlam extravaganzas. Further, it wasn't just process failure at the "good idea" level.
We embarked on a year-long exercise to tender for a $12bn FTTN -- fibre-to-the-node -- network; only to suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, announce we would instead build a $43bn (sic) FTTH -- fibre-to-the-home -- one. And launch an assault on a company, Telstra, which however well intentioned and even arguably necessary in the "national interest", was extraordinary and unprecedented. All without any discussion, far less assessment.
The best you could say about all this is that it was truly Whitlamistic. Both the Business Council and, even more tellingly, the Productivity Commission have utterly eviscerated the government's failure to do any assessment.

.

Saturday morning, montjoye and I drove to Canberra, the first long run with the new Lrenzo-mobile. The long trip seemed to do it some good, though the transmission sticks a little.

montjoye stayed with A&P while I stayed with politas. The R&J cocktail party was lots of fun. Amongst many good things, saw Amber there, who I had not seen for quite some time.

Did not leave the cocktail party, having arrived at 8pm, until about 2.15am (partly because I had been parked in).

Sunday morning, went to the 11am yum cha organised by kirieldp. Torg, TonyP, RichardL, sui001, vikingrose, Maria and I were on the same table. So, very geeky and heaps of fun.

Sunday afternoon, went from yum cha to drinks with a mate at All Bar Nun at O'Connor shops. The two of us having solved various problems of the universe, I went from there to miladyred's apartment, who cooked me a lovely pea&ham soup (variant) and scone dinner and brought me up to date on various things, in her very nice-to-people way.

I was thinking of then visiting vonne & padrin, but I was just too tired, so went straight back to politas's place. He was actually in, so we got to talk to each other, mostly while watching Earthsea. (Full of bad acting and unnecessary changes from the original story, but I like Danny Glover's portrayal of Ogion the Silent.)

Then to bed, where I was bad and finished the copy of Seduction in Death miladyred had kindly given me (she had two copies) before going to sleep.

Monday morning, montjoye and I drove back to Melbourne.

A great trip, which left both montjoye and I in very good moods.

Jon Stewart gives CNN a much deserved what-for.

Suggesting that Michael Moore is in fact a right-wing double agent.

On coming to hate the word ‘but’:

I know man does not live by declarative sentences alone, although you can certainly do a lot worse than Hemingway. Purely and simply, there are certain times in life that you have to pull up short of the logic abyss that is the word "but" and pitch camp on the near side of it. This is one of those times.

Vanessa Redgrave and two co-signers being sensible about Israel, Tel Aviv and Israeli films. (Though it is not true that Tel Aviv was built on destroyed Palestinian villages.)

Noticing that TV celebrities, even in the UK, tend to have drug and sex problems. So, naturally, a bereaved mother thinks it her daughter employer’s fault (the BBC) for not random drug testing.

Racism is such a useful smear one does not even have to bother getting facts right to use it. Pointing out that, if he was a racist, one would not need made-up quotes to prove it. Then creating an outrageous burden of proof on the person accused. About what the hoax says about those who fell for it.

Making a point about green ads exploiting kids and destroying hope.

About the new US FTC rules about bloggers. More, with great simple picture of the madness of regulation.

A veteran journalist thinks mainstream journalism should openly accept its own (US) liberalism. More.

The Obama Administration apparently regards FoxNews as the enemy while Fox’s ratings soar to record heights. Polling finds that the American public view FoxNews as the most ideological of the tv networks. Given that declared conservatives outnumber declared liberals by about two-to-one in the US, and given that all the other networks skew (US) liberal, the result would seem to follow from simple responsiveness to the demographics. More on the public assault. Being a little startled by the lack of journalistic solidarity:

First of all, you know, my Democratic friends in marginal districts, my Democratic friends in Virginia and New Jersey, with elections coming up, they need the votes of people who watch Fox News. So you know, this attack on Fox News is great for Sean's ratings and Glenn's ratings and Bill's ratings. But I don't know that it's going to help Democrats in marginal districts who need independent voters, need swing voters, need people who watch you.
The other thing I don't get is why the mainstream media, which, frankly, would go absolutely nuts if George Bush had singled out MSNBC and said, you know, Nobody follow them, they're not really a news organization, and we're going to boycott -- I mean, all my friends in the 1st Amendment crowd would be up in arms, saying, you know, the government shouldn't be dictating to news organizations. And I've been a little stunned, frankly, by the silence from the press.

Obama official happy to call FoxNew biased, MSNBC not so much.

Global warming gets a lot more media coverage in Oz than the US, apparently due to its connections to Liberal leadership issues. About the ignorant and one-sided nature of the media coverage of the ETS. The Canberra press gallery is often fairly awful at covering policy issues as that would require doing work getting across the issues: turning everything into “leadership struggle” is much easier. It is made worse on the ETS since the metric is “good people” are in favour of it and “bad people” are against it. The way CAGW turns the weather in to a story with a coherent narrative of goodies and baddies is central to its media appeal. (As an aside, a friend mentioned to me today that the midday ABC news has, for months, run a “the economy is doing well” and “climate change is bad” story in each bulletin: that the ABC is ideologically biased has been obvious for years, but it has generally not descended to such blatant partisanship—though this is something of case of the two conjoining.)

The Oz ABC has a nice, juicy “you sacked me because I am male” scandal.

NYT is looking at big staff cuts.

Hypocritical and cowardly all at once:

For his latest disaster movie, 2012, the 53-year-old director had wanted to demolish the Kaaba, the iconic cube-shaped structure in the Grand Mosque in Mecca that Muslims the world over turn towards every day when they pray and which they circle seven times during the hajj pilgrimage.
But after some consideration, he decided it might not be such a smart idea, after all.
"I wanted to do that, I have to admit," Emmerich told scifiwire.com. "But my co-writer Harald [Kloser] said I will not have a fatwa on my head because of a movie. And he was right.
"We have to all, in the western world, think about this. You can actually let Christian symbols fall apart, but if you would do this with [an] Arab symbol, you would have ... a fatwa, and that sounds a little bit like what the state of this world is.
"So it's just something which I kind of didn't [think] was [an] important element, anyway, in the film, so I kind of left it out."
But Emmerich acolytes need not fear that the film-maker is pulling his punches on 2012, which arrives in UK cinemas on 13 November. The movie depicts a global doomsday event supposedly predicted by the Mayans more than a thousand years ago – in order to highlight his opposition to organised religion, the director decided to use CGI to destroy the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro instead. For good measure, he also blew up the Sistine chapel and St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, plus, on a secular note, the White House (again).

Muslim activists engage in intimidation because it works.

This is funnier than it should be:

Democrats run everything—the presidency, the House, the Senate, the media, the movies, the lot. Yet, “George W. Bush” remains the only answer on the liberal Rorschach test: whatever ink blot you lay before them, it’s Bush’s fault.

The Guardian reaches for the truly pathetic to look at everything about the Fort Hood shooter (who, amongst other things, shot a teenager in the back) than his religion:

Hasan did not fit the classic pattern of a stressed soldier. But someone listening day after day to troops describing the tension and carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan could end up as damaged as those facing combat at first hand.

It is always Dubya’s fault. Noting that there is a fair bit of media evasiveness going on.

JFK’s 1961 “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech. Ronald Reagan’s 1987 “Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall” speech.

About the difficulties of immigration in Europe:

One of the most amazing statistics in the history of European immigration is that the number of foreign residents in Germany rose steadily between 1971 and 2000 - from three million to about 7.5million - but the number of employed foreigners did not budge. It stayed rock-steady at around two million.

Arguing over Muslim demographics in Europe. The Islamization of a neighbourhood in Denmark has provoked headlines.

About the prospects for social democracy.

In Norway, “transparency” means publishing lots of stuff on private citizens.

About Russia’s Muslim strategy:

… it could be said that Russia’s historical misfortune (and fate) are its obsession with imaginary dangers and neglect of real ones. …
Greater Moscow is reportedly now the home of close to two million Muslims (many of them illegal residents); it is certainly the European city with the largest Muslim population.
… Moscow insists on absolute loyalty on the part of its Muslim citizens, but cannot and does not want to fulfill many of the demands of even the more moderate elements among the Muslims. …
To what extent the new Chechen leadership believes in fundamentalist Islam is by no means clear; more likely they feel the need for an official ideology that could serve as a uniting force, and at the same time counteract the accusations of the rebels that the members of the ruling pro-Putin clique are apostates, hostile to Islam.
… Moscow is quite aware that their local representatives will press for more and more independence (and money), are difficult to control and, in the final analysis, cannot be trusted.
… There is the constant contradiction between a feeling of worthlessness and the sentiment of superiority, of having a mission to fulfill. Worthlessness found its classical formulation in Chaadayev’s Philosophical Letters (1836): we had neither a Renaissance nor an Enlightenment, we have contributed nothing to world culture, we have not added a single idea, but we disfigured everything we touched. We belong neither to West nor to East. Chaadayev was declared a madman by the Tsar who sent him his doctor several times a week. But Chaadayev’s diagnosis has influenced Russian thinking to this day and is frequently quoted.
On the other hand, there is the feeling of superiority, the view of Russia as the Third Rome possessed of a unique mission in the world.
… Other observers take a less sanguine view, often drawing attention to the ethnic background of the recruits to the Russian army, which is increasingly of Muslim origin.

About socialism and the revolutions of 1989:

… Socialism has a long history, but it has not been able to escape the crushing burden of its recent Leninist incarnation. …
To paraphrase that master of revolution Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary situation exists when society is no longer willing to be ruled in the old way and the ruling elites are no longer able to rule in the old way. While not all such situations end in successful revolution, the outcomes in Eastern Europe were for the most part positive.
… "Uncivil society" constituted a world of structural incompetence. The Soviet system itself, its practices of secrecy and coercion, its culture of suspicion, promoted the loyal rather than the capable, the submissive rather than the innovative, the risk-averse rather than the creative. … When the "uncivil society" of an illiberal state was no longer able to manipulate or even gauge the mood of its own people, it found itself bereft of the most basic instruments of government.
… Both organized popular resistance in Poland and more spontaneous mass mobilization in most of the other socialist states, as Pleshakov and Sebestyen extensively and persuasively demonstrate, contributed to the crises that made the communist regimes unsustainable.
… Stripped of the hopes and illusions of earlier years, by 1989 many on the streets agreed with the Polish opposition figure Adam Michnik: "There is no socialism with a human face, only totalitarianism with its teeth knocked out."

About the end of the Cold War and the suicide of the East:

Although there had been some bloodshed in China and Romania, there had been no great war. Hundreds of millions of people now led new ways of life in new states with new borders. The world was rearranged as in a great postwar settlement -- but without a war. So profound were the changes that when Yugoslavia started to break apart and the outside actors -- conditioned by habit to play leading roles in the drama -- stumbled onto the stage, the players seemed bewildered and scriptless.
… With his work to liberalize capital markets and coordinate monetary strategies, George Shultz may actually have influenced the course of world history more in his two years as treasury secretary for Richard Nixon than he did in his six-plus years as secretary of state for Ronald Reagan.
… Sheehan's subject is less how Europe changed in 1989 and more "how the transformation of Europe after 1945 affected the timing and character of the Cold War's end." Sheehan thus stresses the way war became discredited in European politics and how European politicians subsequently constructed an appealing new European vision for functional modern societies. He shows how these successes created magnetic forces that, standing adjacent to the Soviet empire in Europe, slowly and surely pulled apart the decaying assumptions underlying communist rule. The European ideal of democracy and pluralism became a kind of lodestar for Mikhail Gorbachev himself -- as it did for Italian and Spanish Communists and Socialists. …
The choices of all the communist governments in Europe were made under the shadow of financial debt -- its scale a carefully guarded secret. In the 1970s, the Communist managers started borrowing the hard currency they needed to buy the goods that kept their populations happy. By the 1980s, these governments faced some hard choices. … "What Gorbachev did," Kotkin writes, "was to lay bare how socialism in the bloc had been crushed by competition with capitalism and by loans that could be repaid only by ever-new loans, Ponzi-scheme style." …
Beset at home, Gorbachev needed peace and support from the United States. Reagan provided it. As Melvyn Leffler argues in a recent book, For the Soul of Mankind, the conciliatory Reagan made a major contribution to ending the Cold War. So did Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, after he and his advisers took several months to judge whether Gorbachev was still Andropov's protégé or really was qualitatively different.
… a lack of attention to the military settlement codified in the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE), which addressed the unglamorous but vital balance of armies and air forces across the continent. Military imbalances had been the most costly and potentially destabilizing aspect of Europe's security environment for the previous 40 years -- and the 400 years before that. …
Sarotte makes a good argument that Russia was left resenting the outcome. Yet consider this passage from her book: "Gorbachev would complain to [U.S. Secretary of State James] Baker in 1991 that the money from Kohl had already vanished: 'Things disappear around here. We got a lot of money for German unification, and when I called our people, I was told they didn't know where it was. [Aleksandr] Yakovlev told me to call around, and the answer is no one knows.'" "Clearly," Sarotte goes on, "Moscow needed more than just credits to ease its transition to being a modern market economy, but (other than from Bonn) it got little. Western advisers would descend on Russia later en masse, of course. But they arrived after fatal resentments had already piled up." After rereading that passage a few times, it seems that devising a happier outcome would have indeed required the application of some rare form of genius.

The author of this review essay raises the possibility that there could have been an opportunity for re-writing international institutional order on the scale that FDR and Churchill did at the end of WWII: the scale of disaster and demolition in 1989-91 was nowhere near as great, so neither were the opportunities for such restructuring.

About the effect of the “Anything But Knowledge” doctrine in teacher education on teaching:

For over 80 years, teacher education in America has been in the grip of an immutable dogma, responsible for endless educational nonsense. That dogma may be summed up in the phrase: Anything But Knowledge. Schools are about many things, teacher educators say (depending on the decade)—self-actualization, following one’s joy, social adjustment, or multicultural sensitivity—but the one thing they are not about is knowledge. Oh sure, educators will occasionally allow the word to pass their lips, but it is always in a compromised position, as in "constructing one’s own knowledge," or "contextualized knowledge." Plain old knowledge, the kind passed down in books, the kind for which Faust sold his soul, that is out.
… The notion that one can teach "metacognitive" thinking in the abstract is senseless. Students need to learn something to learn how to learn at all. The claim that prior knowledge is superfluous because one can always look it up, preferably on the Internet, is equally senseless. Effective research depends on preexisting knowledge. Moreover, if you don't know in what century the atomic bomb was dropped without rushing to an encyclopedia, you cannot fully participate in society. Lastly, Kilpatrick's influential assertion that knowledge was changing too fast to be taught presupposes a blinkered definition of knowledge that excludes the great works and enterprises of the past. …
Once you dismiss real knowledge as the goal of education, you have to find something else to do.
… A former student of Tenney’s describes the difficulties of dissent from the party line on racism: "There’s nothing to be gained from challenging it. If you deny that the system inherently privileges whites, you’re ‘not taking responsibility for your position in racism.’ " Doubtless, it would never occur to Professor Tenney that the problem this student describes impedes community-building.
… It never occurs to these apostles of the Free Self that for many inner-city children, reaching a state of calm attention is a wonderful achievement.
… If any teachers in the state know anything about American history, English literature, or chemistry, it is a complete accident, for the state’s highest education authorities have not the slightest interest in finding out. …
In fact, the strict environment that Samantha plans is the best thing that could happen to her pupils. It is perhaps the only place they will meet order and civility. Samantha’s children are "surrounded by violence," she says. Many are not interested in learning, because at home, "everyone is dissing everybody, or staying up late to get high. My kids are so emotionally beat up, they don’t even know when they’re out of their seats." A structured classroom is their only hope to learn the rules that the rest of society lives by. To eliminate structure for kids who have none in their lives is to guarantee failure.

The point of government funding of schooling is to have literate and numerate citizens, from which we all benefit. The point of government provision of schooling—as with religious provision of schooling—is to inculcate beliefs (which cannot be ascertained directly) by controlling inputs (pdf). The “radical/progressive pedagogy” types are just following the logic of government provision. That it has the effect—along with teacher union interest in undermining accountability for outcomes (something which benefits bad teachers most)—of undermining the point of government funding, just shows how contradictory those genuinely concerned for schooling quality continuing to support government provision (with its inherent provider-as-regulator conflict of interest and notorious long-term falls in productivity [pdf]) is.

About what happens when you put the content back into education:

The “Massachusetts miracle,” in which Bay State students’ soaring test scores broke records, was the direct consequence of the state legislature’s passage of the 1993 Education Reform Act, which established knowledge-based standards for all grades and a rigorous testing system linked to the new standards.
… Hirsch conducted an experiment on reading comprehension, using two groups of college students. Members of the first group possessed broad background knowledge in subjects like history, geography, civics, the arts, and basic science; members of the second, often from disadvantaged homes, lacked such knowledge. The knowledgeable students, it turned out, could far more easily comprehend and analyze difficult college-level texts (both fiction and nonfiction) than their poorly informed brethren could. Hirsch had discovered “a way to measure the variations in reading skill attributable to variations in the relevant background knowledge of audiences.”
This finding, first published in a psychology journal, was consistent with Hirsch’s past scholarship, in which he had argued that the author takes for granted that his readers have crucial background knowledge. Hirsch was also convinced that the problem of inadequate background knowledge began in the early grades. Elementary school teachers thus had to be more explicit about imparting such knowledge to students—indeed, this was even more important than teaching the “skills” of reading and writing, Hirsch believed. Hirsch’s insight contravened the conventional wisdom in the nation’s education schools: that teaching facts was unimportant, and that students instead should learn “how to” skills. …
In fact, Hirsch is and always has been a liberal Democrat. Far from being elitist, he insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents. That children from poor and illiterate homes tend to remain poor and illiterate is an unacceptable failure of our schools, one which has occurred not because our teachers are inept but chiefly because they are compelled to teach a fragmented curriculum based on faulty educational theories.”
… “The Romantics were wonderful for poetry but wrong about life,” Hirsch tells me, “and they were particularly wrong about education.” European Romanticism, he argued in the book, “has been a post-Enlightenment aberration, a mistake we need to correct.”
… The scientific consensus showed that schools could not raise student achievement by letting students construct their own knowledge. The pedagogy that mainstream scientific research supported, Hirsch showed, was direct instruction by knowledgeable teachers who knew how to transmit their knowledge to students—the very opposite of what the progressives promoted.
… Last month, moreover, Klein unfurled the results of a study that compared ten city schools using the Core Knowledge reading program with schools using other curricula. The Core Knowledge kids achieved progress at a rate that was “more than five times greater,” Klein said, heaping praise on the program.

Naturally, of course, those who suffer most from “progressive” education are precisely those from the most marginal sections of society. But, if one has not worked out how much of modern progressivism is all about middle class folk arranging things for their own convenience, and asserting their superior status over working class folk, you have not worked out much about it.

I have, ever since I first become aware of it, loathed the politics of Plato’s Republic with its all-controlling Guardians and everyone in their controlled place. It has always struck me as the ur-text of totalitarianism.

It was reading Etienne’ Gilson’s God and Philosophy which enabled to see how Plato’s loathsome politics flows from his metaphysics. Gilson summarises Plato on ideas as:

Truly to be means to be immaterial, immutable, necessary and intelligible. That is precisely what Plato calls Ideas. (p.24)

Naturally, if ideas are so wonderful, then they are more “real” than mere transitory people: to have a “true grasp” of such wonderful ideas gives on a status far beyond that of ordinary mortals. Platonic Guardians here we come.

Hence the politics of “my ideas are more important than people”. Not merely in the sense of ways of making people lives better, but in the sense of disregarding the actual consequences of one's ideas for people, of requiring people to conform to the ideas.

Add in an appropriate amount of Revelation, and we get the principle of the priestly “gatekeepers of righteousness” of I am important because I am conveyor of God’s ideas and God’s purposes, which are definitely more important than erring sinners. But, of course, a Nazi gauleiter or Leninist commissar is working off the same dialectic as any persecuting cleric, with a great deal more mechanisms of social control at their disposal.

Gilson is a delightfully clear writer, even in translation, and covers a lot of ground with great economy. Being a Catholic philosopher, he has a firm belief in truth and thus of the history of philosophy as “a handmaid to philosophy” (P.xx): having ascertained what philosophers have written leaves us with the question of whether they were correct.

Of course, working out what particular philosophers did hold can be a tricky business, and Gilson has a nice discussion of trying to work out what Thales meant when he said water was the first principle and all things are full of gods (Pp 1ff). Which allows Gilson to take us on a journey through Greek ideas of gods and divinity and how Greek philosophy, in its critical rationality, undermined belief in the Greek and Roman deities without leaving anything much in its place. Gilson holds that people can be brought to worship almost anything as long as they can see it in some sense as a somebody: what they cannot be brought to worship is a thing (p.37). Not entirely convinced of that, but it is surely true that classical philosophy did leave a belief-vacuum into which, of course, Christianity poured itself.
( reason and revelation )
Kant changes both the subject and language of philosophical enquiry. With the criticism of Kant and the positivism of Comte we no longer have a God who is an object of cognition. The metaphysical “why?” question goes away, to be left with the scientific “how?” (p.132).

Gilson notes that the scientific resistance to metaphysics has some justification:

Just as science can play havoc with metaphysics, metaphysics can play havoc with science. Coming before science in the past, it has often done so to the point of preventing its rise and blocking its development. For centuries final causes have been mistaken for scientific explanations by so many generations of philosophers that today many scientists still consider the fear of final causes as the beginning of scientific wisdom. Science is thus making metaphysics suffer for its centuries-long meddling in matters of physics and biology (Pp128-9).

But, as he points out, it does leave epistemology in a very unsatisfactory state (one which has hardly got less unsatisfactory since Gilson wrote God and Philosophy).

Gilson further observes:

A world which has lost the Christian God cannot but resemble a world which has not yet found him (p.136).

As we consider the patently religious impulse involved in much environmentalism, a sort of neo-animism, we can see a repeat of rational critique creating a vacuum into new forms of religiosity (environmentalism, Pentecostalism) or revised takes on old forms (fundamentalism) move. The meaning of things, the “why?” questions, clearly will not go away.

Gilson stands four square for the philosophical synthesis of Aquinas. Whether we want to join him there, God and Philosophy is an excellent short, but intellectually full, journey through Western philosophy from the Greeks to the C20th, without leaving a very large gap in the middle.

Chavez, Honduras and the spread of revolutionary anti-Semitism in Latin America.

The New Statesman sees increasingly little distance between Presidents Obama and Dubya.

The US manages to force President Zelayas back in Honduras. Arguing it is having bad knock-on effects.

In the US, rural and farm folk breed more than inner city folk.

Plotting who does not have health insurance, by county and demographic group.

The expansion of liberal paternalism.

Perhaps a case of “not listening to yourself”:

Congress wants another government regulator to cut through the red tape and protect your pocketbook.

Review of two books, one from the left, the other from the right, which take aim at American cheerfulness, sentimentality and positive thinking. Arguing that is mostly gone:

We are governed at all levels by America's luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they're not optimists—they're unimaginative. They don't have faith, they've just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don't mind it when people become disheartened. They don't even notice.

Ah, Camille, always worth reading. Suggesting it is time for President Obama to stop campaigning and start governing. He does, after all, have strong Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress.

A senior Obama advisor describes Mao Tse Tung and Mother Theresa as “two of her favourite political philosophers”.

The politics behind the EPA declaring carbon a dangerous pollutant:

Usually it takes an act of Congress to change an act of Congress, but Team Obama isn't about to let democratic—or even Democratic—consent interfere with its carbon extortion racket.

Creating a major potential conflict of interest:

By making representatives of ACORN and other consumer activist organizations eligible to serve on the Oversight Board, the amendment creates a potentially enormous government sanctioned conflict of interest. ACORN-type organizations will have an advisory role on regulating the very financial institutions from which they receive millions of dollars annually in direct corporate contributions and benefit from other financial partnerships and arrangements. These are the same organizations that pressured banks to make subprime mortgage loans and thus bear a major responsibility for the collapse of the housing market.

In housing policy in the US, there is apparently no end to the madness of “good intentions” policy.

For a failed VP candidate and ex-governor, Sarah Palin seems to still have a bit of an influence.

A radical black Muslim leader gets shot while resisting arrest. First religious leader killed by law enforcement officers in the US since David Koresh.

Apparently a cartwheel in New York station is disorderly conduct, while complaining to the metro cops gets you beaten up. Phoenix police responded to a homeowner reporting an armed intruder by shooting him six times in the back while he was on the phone making his 9/11 call. Another WTF case:

Christopher Lloyd, 38, has been incarcerated in Indiana on a $110,000 bond since last month. He faces 20 years in prison for the rape allegation.
His ex-wife has also filed a wrongful death suit against him and the Robbins Police Department for the killing of her new husband in February 2008.
Chicago police accepted his claims of self-defense even though he drove to the couple’s home while off-duty and got into an argument with Cornell McKinney, before shooting him 24 times.

Estimating the demographic cost of socialist policies in India:

These policies yielded economic growth of 3.5 percent per year, which was half that of export-oriented Asian countries, and yielded slow progress in social indicators, too. Growth per capita in India was even slower, at 1.49 percent per year. It accelerated after reforms started tentatively in 1981, and shot up to 6.78 percent per year after reforms deepened in the current decade. … with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line. The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither. …
For the first three decades after India embarked on socialist planning in 1950, such policies yielded annual GNP growth of 3.5 percent and per capita growth of 1.49 percent. In the 1960s and 1970s, the four East Asian tigers (Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong) achieved 7–8 percent annual GNP growth. Later, the mini-tigers of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia) also achieved 7–8 percent growth. So India’s socialism made it an economic laggard in Asia. India’s share of global exports fell from 2.2 percent at its independence in 1947 to 0.45 percent by 1985, but socialists viewed this as a success of self-sufficiency rather than a disastrous loss of the gains of trade. …
The fall of the Soviet Union that same year helped convince Indian politicians that more socialism could not be the way out of India’s crisis, and Deng Xiaoping’s successful market-oriented reforms in China showed that economic liberalization could yield major dividends. The Indian reform process was gradual and fitful, but its cumulative impact enabled India to become a miracle economy in 2003–2008, averaging almost 9 percent annual GNP growth, and more than 7 percent annual GNP growth per capita. This improved both incomes and social indicators. …
India’s infant mortality rate (IMR) dropped from 132 per thousand births in 1971 to 53 per thousand in 2008. Over this 37-year period, the elasticity of IMR reduction with respect to the growth of per capita GNP was -0.82. That is, for every 1 percent increase in GNP per capita, IMR declined 0.82 percent. …
The elasticity of literacy improvement with respect to per capita GNP growth from 1971 to 2008 was 0.56. That is, for every 1 percent increase in GNP per capita, literacy improved by 0.56 percent.
… the elasticity of the poverty head-count ratio with respect to per capita GNP growth was -0.68. That is, for every 1 percent growth of GNP per capita, poverty declined by 0.68 percent.
… My projected trends of both per capita GNP growth and IMR reduction in India are far lower than what South Korea actually achieved. So, the figure for “missing children” appears conservative. ..
I make no claims to great precision, but I do claim plausibility. Economists are familiar with the enormous power of compound interest, so they should not be surprised that faster GNP growth over 35 years would have yielded far better social outcomes than actually experienced.
… And yet these well-intentioned policies unwittingly killed millions of children. Verily, the way to hell is paved with good intentions.

About the economics of piracy:

Rosenberg and Birdzell (1986:92), for example, argue that “…policing the oceans proved largely impracticable until the nineteenth century, when rival maritime powers shifted their attention from fighting each other to the suppression of piracy and the slave trade. Until then, merchant ships had to be armed for their own security, and the fact that privately owned vessels were regularly armed made for a considerable degree of insecurity for other vessels.”
… In the language of club theory, a Letter of Marque and Reprisal meant that if a member of your club predates on a member of my club, I can seek vengeance against a member of your club.
… The state had ideological legitimacy while pirates did not. North defines a state as “an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents” (North 1981:21).
… Leeson further shows how pirates were responsive to market incentives and shows how they were pioneers of tolerance out of pure self-interest that helped them overcome their prejudices (pp. 156-57, 159, 164). The costs and benefits of enslaving people were such that it was unprofitable (pp. 166-67); further, conscription of captured sailors would undermine the crew’s unanimity and the legitimacy of the ship’s institutions.
… Piracy met its demise and acquired its romantic historical image during a period when a coalition of religious, political, and cultural leaders helped to fashion an image of the pirate as a bloodthirsty rogue rather than as a legitimate competitor in the market for violence (Rediker 2004:127). Puritan leader Cotton Mather, for example, urged the eradication of piracy and of pirates, whom he called the “common enemies of mankind” (Rediker 2004:127).

Examining the European trade boom 1500-1800 (pdf):

Section III asks whether the trade boom can be explained by declining trade barriers. If there was such a decline, then it should have left a trail marked by falling commodity price gaps between exporting and importing trading partners. There is no such evidence, suggesting that “discovery” and transport productivity improvements were offset by trading monopoly markups, tariffs, non-tariff restrictions, wars, and pirates, all of which served in combination to choke off trade. The trade boom would have been a lot bigger, it seems, without those man-made interventions.
… the growth of world trade was pretty much the same in the 19th and 20th centuries, roughly 3.5 percent per annum. This is a surprising fact, given that world GDP growth doubled from 1.5 to 3 percent per annum between 1820-1913 and 1913-1992 … Since the growth of world trade was almost identical in the two centuries, it follows that trade shares rose much faster in the 19th than the 20th century. So far, it looks like the 19th century is the canonical globalization epoch, not the 20th century … trade growth prior to 1800 was much slower, about 1.1 percent per annum.
… Indeed, long distance trade in the pre-18th century period was strictly limited to what might be called noncompeting goods: Europe imported spices, silk, sugar and gold, which were not found there at all, or were in very scarce supply; Asia imported silver, linens and woolens, which were not found there at all (with the important exception of Japanese silver before 1668).
… the price spread on pepper, cloves, coffee, tea and other non-competing goods was
not driven solely, or even mainly, by the costs of shipping, but rather, and most importantly, by monopoly, international conflict, and government tariff and non-tariff restrictions. But we are indifferent about the sources of commodity price convergence: anything that impedes price convergence suppresses trade, and there is no evidence of secular commodity price convergence before the 1820s. … suggests that pretty much all of the intercontinental trade at this time was by state-chartered monopolies. Like most monopolies, they raised prices paid by consumers (in Europe), lowered prices paid by suppliers (in Asia), restricted output and limited trade. This is hardly the stuff that globalization is made of!
… There is plenty of evidence of an inter-continental trade boom during the Age of Commerce, but there is very little evidence of commodity price convergence between the continents.
… Obviously, we take globalization to mean the integration of commodity markets between continents. The Voyages of Discovery also involved a transfer of technology, plants, animals and diseases on an enormous scale, never seen before or since; but this is not the focus of the present paper. Furthermore, the economic potential of the Voyages of Discovery could never have been fully realized without the peopling of these frontiers and the investment of European capital in them; thus, it also involved factor markets. More to the point of this paper, the inter-continental trade boom that followed the voyages of Columbus and da Gama must have had its source in some combination of three factors: a boom in European demand for tradables (the continent that was pulling away economically from the Rest), a boom in tradable supply from the Rest, and a decline in the barriers to trade. If a decline in trade barriers had accounted for the trade boom over the three centuries following 1492, then globalization would have been the driving force, as implied by the world history rhetoric.
… the relative price fell across the first half of the 19th century, and at the most dramatic per annum rate seen across the whole half millennium before 1850. To repeat our comment above, we view this evidence as consistent with powerful globalization forces at work after the French Wars.
… However, it was Asian goods whose relative price fell in European markets over the three centuries, not the relative price of goods from the Americas.
… they suggest the following: European surplus income fell in the 16th century, so it could not have contributed anything to the trade boom; surplus income grew fairly vigorously in the 17th and 18th centuries, when its contribution to the trade boom must have been much more important; and surplus income boomed in the 19th century, when it must have contributed very importantly to the trade boom.
… The four estimates produce remarkably similar results. European income growth explained none of the 16th century trade boom: income actually fell during this period, as did the domestic relative price of these imported goods. The 16th century trade boom can therefore be explained either by rising Asian supply, falling Asian demand, or by some combination of the two. … In contrast, the more modest 17th century trade boom can be explained entirely by European income growth, as evidenced by the rising relative prices of non-competing imports during the period. The 18th century trade boom must be explained by a mixture of demand and supply: between 59 and 75 percent of the trade boom can be explained by European income growth; it follows that between 25 and 41 percent of the trade boom can be explained by changing Asian supply. Over the three centuries as a whole, European income growth explained between 50 and 65 percent of the inter-continental trade boom.
… Thus, by the time of the European Voyages of Discovery, the official imperial policy of shutting China’s doors to external trade was already in place.
Three hundred and fifty or four hundred years is a long time to leave world trade in the hands of others. Is it possible that China’s de-globalization move “crowded in” European trade with the rest of Asia?
… These relative price facts and the sources-of-trade-boom accounting for 1500-1800 are also consistent with the view that China crowded in European trade with the rest of Asia over the three centuries following da Gama. Of course, these relative price and trade boom accounting facts are not proof of the Chinese-retreat-crowded-in-Europe speculation, but they are certainly consistent with it.
.. In the 16th and 17th centuries, total factor productivity growth was very slow in European agriculture (even in English agriculture …), so land rents must have been driven primarily by land/labor ratios – periods of rising population pressure on the land being periods of rapid increase in the ratio of land rents to the wages of landless laborers, as well as, more importantly, periods of rising land rents by themselves. … how tight the English correlation was between the wage rental ratio and the land-labor ratio … pressure on the land between 1600 and 1850 not only lowered the wage/rental ratio but also raised deflated land rents. Thus, European population pressure on the land must have contributed mightily to the trade boom after 1600, and the mechanism was from decreasing land-labor ratio, to increasing land rents, to increasing economic surplus, and to demand for “exotic”
imports from Asia and the Americas. …
Three conclusions are inescapable: a quantitative study of the international economy after the Voyages of Discovery does not support the use of world history globalization rhetoric for the three centuries before Waterloo; it does support the view that European import demand was an important part of the trade boom following Columbus and da Gama; and it also suggests that the history of Europe’s Age of Commerce cannot be written without China.

Ireland’s ludicrous land boom as driven by restricted supply and obsessive demand:

If the control of land is left out of the equation, the sheer scale of the Irish property bubble is impossible to fathom. … new house prices increased over four times faster than house-building costs, five times average industrial earnings and more than seven times faster than the consumer price index. … Before the boom, land made up about 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of a house. At the height of the boom, it made up a breathtaking 40 to 50 per cent. … “certain landowners had accumulated large landbanks at the outskirts of urban areas which they then released in dribs and drabs in order to manipulate the market and artificially to maintain high land prices”. Essentially, a small number of very wealthy land speculators were able to shape the market in such a way as to ensure that the cost of buying the land it stood on made up a larger and larger proportion of the cost of a house. … By 2007, Irish farm land values were the highest in Europe, at €66,000 per hectare – an incredible price in a country with plenty of arable land and a relatively sparse population. It was 10 times the value of similar land in Scotland and six times more than the same fields would be worth in England. In May 2008, €13.5 million was paid for a 450-acre farm in Warrenstown, Co Meath – one of the highest prices ever paid for agricultural land anywhere in the world. … In 2007, almost half of all British farm land sold to foreign buyers was bought by Irish purchasers. In a 21st-century, high-tech, globalised economy, the historic thrill of buying up England was more potent than any satisfaction to be gained from creating real and sustainable wealth.

The land planning laws do not get mentioned, but zoning makes it easier to manipulate prices by controlling supply. In Oz the “certain landowners” with “large landbanks at the outskirts of urban areas which they then released in dribs and drabs in order to manipulate the market and artificially to maintain high land prices” are called ‘State governments’.

About narrative learning and teaching economics and teaching economics using practical examples:

The narrative theory of learning now tells us that information gets into the brain a lot more easily in some forms than others. You can get information into the student’s brain in the form of equations and graphs, yes, but it’s a lot of work to do that. If you can wrap the same ideas around stories, around narratives, they seem to slide into the brain without any effort at all. After all, we evolved as storytellers; that’s what we’re good at. That’s how we always exchanged ideas and information. And if a narrative has an actor, a plot, if it makes sense, then the brain stores it quite easily; you can pull it up for further processing without any effort; you can repeat the story to others. Those seem to be the steps that really make for active learning in the brain. …
So you can say the students who’d never had any familiarity with the term "opportunity cost" more or less guessed and got about what you’d expect. The ones who thought they knew something about it knew just enough to steer themselves in the wrong direction.
… So I started assigning a term paper in my upper-level course, which I hadn’t done for the reason of being pressed for time to do other things, and I noticed that the students got way more engaged in the course as a result of that paper. And I started cutting it back from 20 pages to 10 pages when I lost the T.A. (the grant ran out). And then from 10 to 5 -- each time I cut it back in length, the papers seemed to get better. Right now the length of the paper is maximum 500 words. I can spot 500 words no matter what size font they use, so I tell them I won’t read past 500 words, but I stress that the best papers are often only one, two paragraphs. The Braille dots example you can do in 80 words without any trouble at all. …
The idea of taking a few core things, working on them until you get them, and then moving on and adding complexity only when the root stuff is firmly embedded, that just seemed like such an eye-opener to me. It really really worked. And why not in economics? So I’ve been trying it there, and I’m convinced that it works there as well as in language.

The "Braille dots" example referred to was the question: why do the keyboards of drive-by ATMs have Braille on them? (Answer in the link.)

From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, went to three films and a talk in the Buddhist Film Festival held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in their Fed. Square facilities.

Friday afternoon, started with the Festval's opening film, The Dhamma Brothers, a fascinating look at the introduction of Vipassana meditation into a maximum security prison in (of all places) Alabama. The head of psychology in the Alabama prison system was looking for ways to calm prison populations and came across a gaol in India that had achieved some success with Vipassana mediation. Since there is a worldwide movement (including in Oz) he was able to find two experienced practitioners to run the 10-day course for him for about 40 inmates.

The film takes us through the operation of the course, reactions by inmates (who tell their stories, being upfront about their crimes), prison officers, the gaol Warder, etc. There was a lot of scepticism beforehand and rather more support otherwise. Of particular interest, many of the participants wanted to continue to practice and met once a week to do so.

But, this is Alabama. Various Christian chaplains complained that the course was “teaching Buddhism” and the meetings were banned. Then there was a change in administration and it was back on. While the personal stories were quite inspiring, I was intrigued by the public policy politics involved. Clearly, the director of psychology is both an open-minded and quietly persistent chap.
( films and talk )
I enjoyed the Festival. Having done a lot of reading and viewing, particularly just recently, on Islam, dealing with Buddhists and Buddhism is a considerable relief. It is not that Buddhism lacks a dark side, it certainly has that, it just that its central message is much more immediately useful and far less fraught. The tone is simply a lot lighter, one is dealing far more with happy people and open-handed compassion, rather than very patriarchal, very authoritarian, control with a whole lot of violence, and getting along with others, issues. Buddhist practitioners in prison seem inherently a lot more reassuring than Muslim outreach in prison.

At a more personal level, I found the Festival encouraged more self-examination about my own attachments and the problems thereof. A useful thing in itself.

Was woken up by a loud knock on the front door this morning and listened to my housemate talk to someone asking questions.

Turned out that the derelict Rising Sun hotel a little down the street had had yet another fire. Lot of fire engines and firefighters (and some police) around when I got up to go to breakfast, only a few still there when I came back.

The hotel does attract squatters, though noticeably less since the previous fire. Proposals to redevelop the site keep getting put up but then get knocked back by Maribyrnong Council, usually on grounds that it would add too much traffic and not enough parking. In the meantime, the hotel just sits there costing someone lots in land rates and lost income. The pattern of fires every so often is, surely, just a coincidence, of course.

Photo of his ID papers suggests the President of Iran may have been born Jewish. Or maybe not. Pity, it made such a great story.

About what is wrong with blasphemy laws.

The Catholic Church gameplaying the Anglican Church over women bishops. More. The Catholic Primate in England is keen. Suggesting that the Archbishop of Canterbury is too much like a secular politician and not enough like a religious leader. About Pope Benedict shifting the game:

Spurred by the optimism of the early 1960s, the major denominations of Western Christendom have spent half a century being exquisitely polite to one another, setting aside a history of strife in the name of greater Christian unity.
This ecumenical era has borne real theological fruit, especially on issues that divided Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation. But what began as a daring experiment has decayed into bureaucratized complacency — a dull round of interdenominational statements on global warming and Third World debt, only tenuously connected to the Gospel.
At the same time, the more ecumenically minded denominations have lost believers to more assertive faiths — Pentecostalism, Evangelicalism, Mormonism and even Islam — or seen them drift into agnosticism and apathy.
Nobody is more aware of this erosion than Benedict. So the pope is going back to basics — touting the particular witness of Catholicism even when he’s addressing universal subjects, and seeking converts more than common ground.

About the theology of Benedict:

And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism–at the clerical level–is totally dominated by gay men. Mostly repressed. What used to be called when I was in seminary, the pink mafia. And the thing that is the initial trigger for this decision is the upcoming very likely to happen decision to ordain women as bishops in the Church of England (there have already been women priests there for about 15 years or so). Which has a certain irony in this case. If these Anglo-Catholics join the Roman Communion they can join up with very conservative Roman Catholic groups like Regnum Christi and The Legionaries of Christ, also totally dominated by closeted gay fellows.

About that:

If you had based your life - and sacrificed much of your emotional health - on the "intrinsic disorder" theory, you aren't exactly happy to reverse yourself in your old age. It suggests you gave up your life for an intrinsic illogic. Part is also just mysterious. But the fact that gay men have a disproportionate talent for order and theater and detail seems pretty obvious to me. No surprise then that among the best liturgical organizers are gay men - from choirmasters to priests to altar assistants. There is something very gay about a High Mass - it's almost the religious equivalent of a Broadway musical. So Benedict's sisterly outreach to the closet case smells-and-bells brigade among the Anglicans makes total sense. It's partly about keeping all the queens under one roof - and surrounded by incense and lace.

The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks economic growth needs to be stopped to save the planet but somehow is also OK with poor people achieving economic liberation.

Charting where the world’s Muslims are: perhaps not quite where you think.

The author of Women and Madness on how being a young wife in Afghanistan helped make her a feminist.

Being sceptical that there is much liberal Islam to be found.

Interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about defending women against Islam.

Prominent Islamist preacher Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi, President of the European Council of Fatwa and Research praising Hitler as a divine punisher of the Jews. Being welcomed to London by the then Lord Mayor.

Aceh wants to stop women wearing tight pants. Sharia courts given the right to mediate on civil matters in the UK. A burning question for us all I know: what should be done to Buckingham Palace under Sharia law (the website does not appear to be a joke).

The rise of Creationism within Islam:

But there is another creationist movement whose influence is growing, and which is fueling challenges to science in countries where Christianity has little sway: Islamic creationism. … Unlike in the West, creationist beliefs are not associated in the Muslim world with religious fundamentalism, but instead are often espoused by members of the mainstream intellectual elite - liberals, by their own lights, who see the expansive, scientific-sounding claims of creationism as tracing a middle way between the guidance of religion and the promise of modern science. …
It’s hard to say exactly how much support the theory of evolution enjoys in the world’s Muslim countries, but it’s definitely not very much. In one 2006 study by American political scientists, people in 34 industrial nations were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the idea that human beings evolved from earlier life forms. Turkey, the only Muslim country in the survey, showed the lowest levels of support - barely a quarter of Turks said they agreed. By comparison, at least 80 percent of those surveyed in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, and France agreed. (The United States ranked second lowest, after Turkey, at 40 percent.) Turkey is widely seen as the most culturally liberal Muslim nation, and on attitudes about evolution, other polling has borne this out: A recent study of religious attitudes found that only 16 percent of Indonesians, 14 percent of Pakistanis, and 8 percent of Egyptians believed in evolution.
And as the Internet facilitates the spread of both evolutionary and anti-evolutionary ideas, the debate over evolution seems to be sharpening. Islamic creationism does have its own distinctive character: While Islamic creationists borrow from the literature of their Christian counterparts, their concerns are not always the same. Without a Book of Genesis to account for, for example, Muslim creationists have little interest in proving that the age of the Earth is measured in the thousands rather than the billions of years, nor do they show much interest in the problem of the dinosaurs. And the idea that animals might evolve into other animals also tends to be less controversial, in part because there are passages of the Koran that seem to support it.
But the issue of whether human beings are the product of evolution is just as fraught among Muslims, and, as in the United States, the argument has played out around the question of what will be taught in schools. Turkey, with its longer and deeper engagement with the West, has had the most vehement debates.
… Unlike in Sunni Islam, Shia Islam, Iran’s majority religion, has an established clerical hierarchy to interpret the Koran, making Shia’ism structurally similar to Catholicism. Iran’s clerics, like the Vatican, have decided that evolution needn’t conflict with Holy Scripture.
… “It’s modernizing Muslims, Muslims who want to say they have mastered the modern world and do well in the globalized technological economy and at the same time retain traditional values and so forth,” says Edis. “It’s this sort of audience that creationism appeals to.”