The Spelling Bee.

Of course, I'm watching the Spelling Bee, and of course, I'm for Isabel Jacobson, the speller from Madison, Wisconsin. So many great spellers have gone down in this first prime time round, and suddenly we see that there is only one young woman left. It's our Isabel! She has three favorite words, we see in the bioclip, and one is "kakistocracy, which means government by the worst people possible." That's so Madison! She's written the word on a little slate, and she tosses it over her shoulder and gives a funny-disgusted look. She wears all the bracelets she own on one arm for good luck. There are 25 of them. She gets a crazy, Greek origin word that means wet and spongy. Helodes. And she gets it right!

UPDATE: Epaulement. She gets it! A barricade of earth. Go, Isabel!

UPDATE 2: Cyanophycean. A blue-green alga. Cyano- is easy, but -phycean? No! She's out. And it's down to two boys. One is Canadian. The other is an incredibly cool kid who loves math and music and math just enough more than music that he sees music as numbers.

UPDATE 3: The American kid is Evan O'Dorney. He gets pappardelle. Hey, that's easy! And Canadian boy, Nate Gartke, gets an easy word too. Now, Evan gets another food word, yosenabe. Too easy! How can kids at this level get the Japanese words wrong? Nate gets coryza wrong, so Evan needs to get one word right. Serrefine. "A small forceps for clamping a blood vessel." He spells it right away! He wins! Yay, Evan!

UPDATE 4: In the interview, Evan tells us why he likes math and music more than spelling. Math and music "fit together" -- they make sense! -- and spelling is "just memorization." The interviewer goads him: Don't you like spelling more now? He pauses a long time -- is he thinking of numbers or notes or is he getting the message he ought to make himself appealing to the spelling bee fans? -- and finally, he forces himself to say "a little." I love it! He's the reluctant speller. He does it well, but he doesn't love it, because he loves two other things so much, and those things really are so much better.

What feast did your kitty cat leave for the ant today?

Mmmm... Ant says: yummy.



But what is it? Hints lie elsewhere in antdom. Over here:



And here:



The ant has his bliss, and you too have yours, smooching with your kitty cat this evening.

UPDATE: Elsewhere, "I ate three lumps of it. But I spat two of them out, so I really ate one and a half of them."

Beyond the Sanjaya video.

I must confess that I've watched three other videos today that I thought were pretty cool. First is this Will Ferrell thing from the same website as "The Sanjaya Installation." [ADDED: Was it wrong to make the girl say those things? It will be funnier to you if you -- unlike me -- think it's just fine.]



Then there's this nice, morphing image of the history of women's faces in art (which someone emailed me after seeing it on BoingBoing). [ADDED: The first time I watched this video, I was struck by how similar all the women looked, but the second time, I had the opposite impression. How different they are.]



Then there's this long, but totally worth it video of an elaborate encounter of lions, water buffalo, and crocodiles, which Andrew Sullivan featured. [ADDED: How pathetic the lions and crocodiles are as they try in their way -- the only way they have -- to get some food. The human beings, heard on the audio track, are rather lame too. Now, the buffalo... the buffalo rule.]



These videos have absolutely nothing to do with each other. At least one is sure to be to your taste. I loved all three.

Purplosity...

... or is it purplitude? Or is it simply mauvelous?

Cross-examination reveals the defendant was that anonymous blogger who's been writing about the trial.

Boston Globe reports:

As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.

Was Lindeman Flea?

Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.

In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.

With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.

The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.

Oh, there's always one more way that blogging can get you in trouble. Here's a tip. Don't blog anonymously unless you're ready to accept all the consequences that would come if everyone suddenly knew it was you. Congratulations to the lawyer who figured out that she should ask that question on cross. You know, I love to support bloggers, but this doctor totally deserved what he got.

In April, before the trial began, he wrote about meeting with an expert on juries who advised him how to act when he was cross- examined. Flea was instructed to angle his chair slightly toward the jury, keep his hands folded in his lap, and face the jury when answering questions, slowly. "Answers should be kept to no more than three sentences," he wrote.

The consultant told him juries in medical malpractice cases base verdicts almost entirely on their view of a doctor's character.

So when they hear you're a blogger...

"We've said it before, and we'll say it again: If the basis of this case is that Flea is an arrogant, uncaring jerk who maliciously neglected a patient, resulting in his death, the plaintiff will not win, period," he wrote. "As much of a cocky bastard that Flea may appear in the blogosphere, the readers who have a personal acquaintance with the real 3-D doctor understand how such an approach cannot succeed."

And all that cocky bastard Flea writing comes into the trial as evidence. Now, you might say, but can't a blogger adopt a persona and use a pseudonym to signify the disconnect between the writer taking a pose for literary effect and the real-world person?

I have a colleague who explains his use of a pseudonym this way:

I make no secret that I'm a law professor. It's right there in my profile. This means I have students, and a professor image to live up to with my students. Maybe maintaining my image as a law professor isn't as onerous as the image-burden borne by, say, a Supreme Court justice, or the pope. But it's not nothing. In front of my students, I have to be reasonably fair, dignified and mature. This doesn't mean being a phony; it's more a question of emphasizing certain aspects of one's personality and putting others in a closet for the day.

If you read my blog, you know that I use somewhat crude language from time to time. I say "f***" in several posts. Just the other day, in a single post, I used the terms "big butt" and "ass." Indeed, "big butt" was in the title of the post. I have (in my opinion) a somewhat wide-ranging sense of humor that isn't above occasional dips into puerility...

I don't tell my students that I'm always "the dignified professor" or that I never use crude language. That would be pompous and false, not to mention irrelevant. But I don't use crude language around students.... Maintaining an image means drawing a line between your professional persona and your personal life.

Most law-prof bloggers seem content to put their blogs largely or mostly on the professional side of that line. While they don't always blog about law, they seem to refrain from saying stuff that would be inappropriate in a conversation with a student in their offices. Folks like Professor Bainbridge, or the Volokh Conspiracy, or Althouse, or Conglomerate maintain an informal, yet not-unprofessional tone. To varying degrees they trade on their academic affiliations, and would have relatively little ground for complaint if, for example, their law schools posted something about their blogs on the law school web sites. And you don't catch them saying "big butt." Indeed, a Google search "'big butt' professor bainbridge" yields only a few hits, none of them from his blog.

Hmmm... I'm not so sure I belong in that Bainbridge, Volokh, Conglomerate set. I think I cross the professional line all the time. I'm always getting the "you, a law professor" chiding. I write things all the time that I wouldn't say to a student. But still, I understand Oscar's idea of using the persona to indicate: Now, I'm speaking in this other mode.

So, fine, maybe Dr. Flea was doing something like that. But that doesn't make the evidence inadmissible. It just means he'll be able to explain that in his testimony if the material comes in. It's not hearsay, because these are statements of an opposing party. If it's relevant to an issue in the case, and the judge doesn't think it's too unfair, it can come in. You should have thought of that before you laid your arrogance out on the web. I'm sure it's a great relief to a professional who has to hide a lot of his feelings to let out all his cocky bastardliness on the web, but others have their interests too -- the plaintiffs lost their 12-year-old child -- and a pseudonym is not immunity.

Is Justice Ginsburg reading dissents from the bench because she's passionate or because she's political?

Linda Greenhouse is highlighting Justice Ginsburg's decision to read two of her dissenting opinions from the bench this year. In both, Ginsburg spoke for herself and the other three liberal Justices (Stephens, Souter, and Breyer), and both dealt with issues of concern to women (Carhart, the "partial-birth" abortion case, and Ledbetter, this week's employment discrimination case).

Greenhouse portrays Ginsburg's actions on the emotional level. Not only were the dissents "forceful" -- aren't they all? -- but Ginsburg herself was "passionate and pointed."

To read a dissent aloud is an act of theater that justices use to convey their view that the majority is not only mistaken, but profoundly wrong. It happens just a handful of times a year. Justice Antonin Scalia has used the technique to powerful effect, as has Justice Stevens, in a decidedly more low-key manner.

The oral dissent has not been, until now, Justice Ginsburg’s style. She has gone years without delivering one, and never before in her 15 years on the court has she delivered two in one term. In her past dissents, both oral and written, she has been reluctant to breach the court’s collegial norms. “What she is saying is that this is not law, it’s politics,” Pamela S. Karlan, a Stanford law professor, said of Justice Ginsburg’s comment linking the outcome in the abortion case to the fact of the court’s changed membership. “She is accusing the other side of making political claims, not legal claims.”

The justice’s acquaintances have watched with great interest what some depict as a late-career transformation. “Her style has always been very ameliorative, very conscious of etiquette,” said Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, the sociologist and a longtime friend. “She has always been regarded as sort of a white-glove person, and she’s achieved a lot that way. Now she is seeing that basic issues she’s fought so hard for are in jeopardy, and she is less bound by what have been the conventions of the court.”

(White glove? Not "kid glove," meaning careful and gentle, but "white glove," which I think is generally used to refer to luxury services provided to the rich. Who wears the white gloves in a "white glove building"? The doorman, not the residents. [ADDED: There's a lot of discussion in the comments about the phrase "white glove."])

Some might say her dissents are an expression of sour grapes over being in the minority more often than not. But there may be strategic judgment, as well as frustration, behind Justice Ginsburg’s new style. She may have concluded that quiet collegiality has proved futile and that her new colleagues, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., are not open to persuasion on the issues that matter most to her.

In other words, it's not an expression of emotion, but a sophisticated political move, intended to get Americans excited and involved in the Court's work -- so they'll see what's at stake. Nothing wrong with that, and I don't mean to say it's not lofty and profound to care about who gets chosen to wield Supreme Court power. It is. Greenhouse's piece subtly conveys the impression that an extremely reserved woman has finally overcome her reticence and spoken up and that this means the majority has erred badly in its understanding of the law. That in itself is a political argument leading the readers to think that Ginsburg must be right and that the fact that she is in the minority on the Court is a problem that needs to be corrected.

ADDED: This post is getting a lot of action in the comments, and I feel as though I ought to spell out something maybe I'm being too subtle about. I think this piece unwittingly demeans Justice Ginsburg as a woman by portraying her as meek and emotional. The idea that she of all people would speak up is supposed to give dramatic weight to her opinion in the cases. The fact that her opinion supports the interests of women may -- for some people -- eclipse this other matter of concern to women, and I want to drag it back into the light.

Justice Ginsburg is a strong, accomplished jurist who is and has always been the equal of the other Justices. She's no purer or less political than the others and no more driven by emotion. If she chooses to read her dissenting opinions about women's issues aloud and provide material for Supreme Court journalists to stir up readers with bathetic pronouncements that she's "found her voice," what I see is a smart political move by an adept legal thinker who knows what the stakes are and wants to affect the game.

Here's Tom Smith who clerked on the D.C. Circuit when she was a judge there:

You had to admire Judge Ginsburg's obvious intelligence, and she seemed like a nice lady. But the idea that she was somehow less political than any other judge is just silly. She was very political. They all were. Some cared more about the law than others, and Ginsburg cared about the law. But there was no question that on a case involving sex discrimination or labor unions, you would be a fool to bet against a liberal outcome if she were the swing vote. She was a nice lady, but she also knew how to rip somebody a new one, if you will.... The idea that she is some kind of elegant, delicate flower who has been forced by the big, bad conservatives to descend into the hurly burly of the political rough and tumble is a complete fantasy of the New York Times and Linda Greenhouse. That is to say, utter rubbish.

Go over there and read the whole thing.

If you're seeking asylum, try to seek it in San Francisco.

Not Atlanta. Or at least New York. And avoid Detroit.

"The Sanjaya Installation."

"This is like an ad for Sundance. This is our dream. It's happening."

Exclaimed, not sarcastically, just now, by someone who works at Caffe 608 at the Sundance Cinemas in Madison, on seeing 5 of the 7 tables along the wall each occupied by one person working on a computer.

ADDED: So Robert Redford swooped in to check out his enterprise, but that was at 9 p.m. You can see from the time stamp here that I missed him by 6 hours. Various local media people were invited to meet him at the Bistro, but not Madison's most popular blogger, who keeps blogging about the place. Either they're not savvy about the power of blogging, or they are and know I might say just about anything about Redford if I got to see him close up.

MORE: Pics.

This flower is trying to tell you something...

But what? Lighten up. Enjoy life. Pay attention. Notice things. Yellow! Yellow! Have you thought enough about yellow in your short span of years? And...



Oh, no, it's the asteroid! We're doomed!

The last 2 episodes of "The Sopranos" are coming up.

How do you feel about it? Are you mostly thinking about which characters will meet death, or are you prematurely mourning the death of the great, great television series.

Ooh... better put two poofy flowers on top...

... to cover that up... though I know that even the flowers get you guys excited...

"You really have to use your breast power responsibly."

I've said it before (somewhere here): Women know what their breasts look like in their clothes. It doesn't just happen. "Breast power" is real. We can pretend we don't know, but we do. That doesn't mean we have great judgment about how to use it. So let's see an attempt at devising some rules:

What looks sexy for a night out on the town may not be appropriate in the workplace. In fact, [Elisabeth] Squires said cleavage should never make an appearance in the office.

Even in the summer at the law school when there's almost no one around?

"It's way too big of a distraction for men and women," she said. "If cleavage isn't in your job description, don't put it in."...

Squires suggested that women also keep things respectable at family events, like a kids' soccer game....

Night is prime time to bring out breasts, but Squires suggested women treat their cleavage as part of their outfit -- not a focal point.

"You can certainly be a bit more daring," she said. "This presumably is adult time, and cleavage is powerful. This is the time to use it. But they should be part of your whole look."

Okay, so night time is the "prime time." Clearly, there are other times. What are they? Hanging about cafés in the summertime? Catching a light lunch with a former President? We need to know.

I've already gotten Amanda Marcotte to show up once in the comments today. I'm trying to see if I can make her come back.

I found this article via Instapundit.

Poppies... poppies...

"Current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination."

Writes Justice Alito, in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, a 5-4 decision that makes it harder for employees to sue within the statutory time limit. Linda Greenhouse reports:

... Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the majority opinion “overlooks common characteristics of pay discrimination.” She said that given the secrecy in most workplaces about salaries, many employees would have no idea within 180 days that they had received a lower raise than others.

An initial disparity, even if known to the employee, might be small, Justice Ginsburg said, leading an employee, particularly a woman or a member of a minority group “trying to succeed in a nontraditional environment” to avoid “making waves.” Justice Ginsburg noted that even a small differential “will expand exponentially over an employee’s working life if raises are set as a percentage of prior pay.”...

As with an abortion ruling last month, this decision showed the impact of Justice Alito’s presence on the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he succeeded, would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.

The impact of the decision on women may be somewhat limited by the availability of another federal law against sex discrimination in the workplace, the Equal Pay Act, which does not contain the 180-day requirement. Ms. Ledbetter initially included an Equal Pay Act complaint, but did not pursue it. That law has additional procedural hurdles and a low damage cap that excludes punitive damages. It does not cover discrimination on the basis of race or Title VII’s other protected categories.

In her opinion, Justice Ginsburg invited Congress to overturn the decision, as it did 15 years ago with a series of Supreme Court rulings on civil rights. “Once again, the ball is in Congress’s court,” she said. Within hours, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who is seeking the Democratic nomination, announced her intention to submit such a bill.

So a key question is whether there is good reason for the various limitations in the Equal Pay Act. From Ginsburg's opinion:

Notably, the EPA provides no relief when the pay discrimination charged is based on race, religion, national origin, age, or disability. Thus,... the Court does not disarm female workers from achieving redress for unequal pay, but it does impede racial and other minorities from gaining similar relief.

Furthermore, the difference between the EPA’s prohibition against paying unequal wages and Title VII’s ban on discrimination with regard to compensation is not as large as the Court’s opinion might suggest. The key distinction is that Title VII requires a showing of intent. In practical effect, “if the trier of fact is in equipoise about whether the wage differential is motivated by gender discrimination,” Title VII compels a verdict for the employer, while the EPA compels a verdict for the plaintiff. 2 C. Sullivan, M. Zimmer, & R. White, Employment Discrimination: Law and Practice §7.08[F][3], p. 532 (3d ed. 2002).

So, go ahead, Hillary. Fix it.

When Hillary books collide.

Greg Sargent detects a discrepancy:

[According to "Her Way," by Jeff Gerth and Tom Van Natta] after Bill's election in 1992, he and Hillary were already plotting two terms for her in the White House....

[Carl] Bernstein reports that according to [Hillary's best friend Diane] Blair, Hillary had repeatedly confided to her that aside from a brief flirtation with running for Governor of Arkansas in 1990, she had no interest whatsoever in running for elected office up until 1999, when she started eyeing a New York Senate run....

Of course, it's conceivable that Hillary was privately scheming to run for President while telling her best friend she had no interest in elected office. And as Hillary's best friend, Blair (who has since passed away) might have been expected to deliver an account that was partial to Hillary. But again, this account is a firsthand on-the-record one, while the Gerth-Van Natta one was second hand -- and disputed by the key firsthand witness.

Oh, my! Who to believe! I'm in a tizzy over this! Did Hillary have political ambitions all along or not? I am going to be racking my brain. Too bad Blair passed away and we can't probe her with follow up questions.

"The rest of the Republican Party is like Kate Winslet, desperately trying to pry the McCain campaign's frozen clammy hand from our own..."

Analogies from the mind of Hugh Hewitt, which is seething with hostility for John McCain... in a post that's illustrated with a picture of a DVD box that does not contain "Titanic," because the "Titanic" box doesn't have a picture of a big, smoking gun.

Conservatives are not happy with the immigration bill -- if we may judge from this poll of 51 right-wing bloggers.

CORRECTION: It's Dean Barnett, writing on a blog called Hugh Hewitt. (I thought once you named the blog after yourself, you'd missed the chance to bring in a co- or guest-blogger. I impetuously named my blog after myself, without giving any thought to the matter, but I do find it confusing when there is a name in big letters at the top, but someone else is writing.)

Over at Yglesias, they're talking about a Naomi Wolf article from 4 years ago.

I mean, Matt thought it was new, because some other blog wrote about it as if it were new. (I picked it up via Memeorandum.) He's all concerned about Naomi's tired old whine that pornography has wrecked man's capacity to appreciate real, in-the-flesh women, or, as Naomi puts it: "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women." (The onslaught of Naomi Wolf's prose is responsible for the deadening of this female's interest in reading in relation to third wave feminists.) Anyway, I'm so glad Matt fell for this one, because some of the comments over there are pretty funny.

"There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture."

From a big New Yorker article (about how badly the Republicans are doing):

[Karl] Rove thinks that more voters now are being influenced by technology and religion. “There are two or three societal trends that are driving us in an increasingly deep center-right posture,” he said. “One of them is the power of the computer chip. Do you know how many people’s principal source of income is eBay? Seven hundred thousand.” He went on, “So the power of the computer has made it possible for people to gain greater control over their lives. It’s given people a greater chance to run their own business, become a sole proprietor or an entrepreneur. As a result, it has made us more market-oriented, and that equals making you more center-right in your politics.” As for spirituality, Rove said, “As baby boomers age and as they’re succeeded by the post-baby-boom generation, within both of those generations there’s something going on spiritually—people saying it’s not all about materialism, it’s not all about the pursuit of material things. If you look at the traditional mainstream denominations, they’re flat, but what’s growing inside those denominations, and what’s growing outside those denominations, is churches that are filling this spiritual need, that are replacing sterility with something vibrant, something that speaks to the heart of the individual, that gives a sense of purpose.” Rove believes what he has always believed: that the Christian right and, to a lesser extent, tax- and regulation-averse businessmen will continue to assure Republican victories.

"I fired three warning shots and they kept coming at me."

So said David Kelly, according to the criminal complaint in the State Street murder case:

[Austin Bodahl, 23] and Kelly began arguing, according to a witnesses. Then Bodahl approached Kelly as Kelly was seated on a concrete flowerbed, and tried to punch him in the head, but missed.

Kelly, a familiar presence on State Street who wore a green kilt, got to his feet and walked backward as Bodahl pursued, throwing numerous punches. Witnesses reported hearing two popping noises, and Bodahl continued advancing on Kelly as Kelly walked backward onto State Street.

One witness said Bodahl delivered so many punches that he tired out, then gave up and walked to the curb. Kelly could have left at that point, witnesses said, but he walked toward Bodahl. They talked for a time in a casual tone of voice, then Bodahl threw several punches. Kelly fell on his back and Bodahl punched him several more times as Kelly tried to block the blows with his feet and arms.

Then came another shot. Bodahl walked to the curb, and he laid down.

Kelly -- who Assistant District Attorney Mike Verveer said is schizophrenic off his medication -- is charged with first-degree reckless homicide.

Forget "Vulcan Utopia," we want that Utopia where "Purple Rain"-era Prince...

... is as "omnipresent and heavily marketed" as t-shirt Che Guevara. Or "Labyrinth"-era David Bowie. That would be nice too.

Pinkness.

''He still didn't put the butter up... I was like, 'You're just asking for it, you know I'm giving a speech. Why don't you just put the butter up?''

What's the deal with Michelle Obama saying things like that to the crowd?

DePaul University marketing professor Bruce Newman, who has written several books on political marketing, sees the teasing as a strategy for Obama, through his wife, to appeal to professional women who might otherwise vote for one of his chief rivals for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

By joking about his domestic foibles, Michelle Obama is showing herself as a woman who doesn't kowtow to her husband, he said.

''It's a clever strategy. I think it's very wise,'' Newman said.

It might even earn him some points with men, said Harvard University's Thomas Patterson, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

''Men in a strange sort of way understand leaving butter out and socks laying around. It humanizes the guy,'' Patterson said.

So is this a good way to use the candidate's spouse? I think it depends on how good the delivery is. It could be tiresome and phony. We need some video:



Pretty good, I think. It could get old, but it's kind of charming for now.

IN THE COMMENTS: This is very smart, from Dan:

I think the unstated premise behind such playfulness, that is to say the implicit contrast it provides to the Clinton's something other than intimate and endearing relationship, allows it to work better than normal. A strong comparison is being drawn. I can't help but think in the back of her mind such a contrast is the conscious goal of what would otherwise be insignficant filler. If so, fairly subtle and thoughtful rhetoric, and perhaps part of the reason as to why the delivery was pretty good. These aren't throw-away comments by Mrs. Obama. Rather a great use of innuendo--i.e. the Clinton's are bad, not like us in this room. Laura Bush has also been very successful with this kind of humor directed at "George". John Kerry and Theresa Heinz Kerry being the latest and last foil. Anyway, Barack doesn't screw around, he's at home with me, but I still haven't gotten him to put away his socks.

Another take, from BJK:

I see the strategy: vote for the nagging spouse

-or-

vote for the candidate with the nagging spouse: Obama '08!

Very subtle...

From Susan:

I liked her body language. Very open. And when she put her hands on her hips, which can be an aggressive, dominant stance, it came across to me as just confident. I had never seen her speak before and I don't think I could ever vote for someone as liberal as Obama, but I was impressed with the way she came across.

Yes, she has a nice, natural, youthful manner. Quite unusual for a political wife, and I do think that modern women who believe in egalitarian relationships will get a much better vibe from the Obamas than from the Clintons. And I love the dress. [CORRECTION: It's not a dress, but a pants outfit. Looks like a dress when you don't see the full view.]

Game show: dying woman chooses who will get her kidneys.

No, it's not some dystopian film. It's a real show -- "The Big Donor Show" -- in that brilliantly enlightened place, the Netherlands. Don't freak out yet. Go through the thought experiment: What if you had to argue that this is a very good thing?

The 37-year-old donor, identified only as Lisa, will make her choice based on the contestants' history, profile and conversation with their family and friends.

Viewers will also be able to send in their advice by text message during the 80-minute show....

The former director of TV station BNN, Bart de Graaff, died from kidney failure aged 35 after spending years on a transplant waiting list.

"The chance for a kidney for the contestants is 33%," said the station's current chairman, Laurens Drillich. "This is much higher than that for people on a waiting list."

"We think that is disastrous, so we are acting in a shocking way to bring attention to this problem."

So the positive side of it is that it's drawing attention to the problem of the need for more donations. One might also say that decisions are currently made according to the priorities developed by health care experts and ethicists, but if there is a TV show, ordinary people become immersed in the process of decisionmaking. The viewers are drawn into thinking deeply about the difficult decision that they are normally content to leave to experts. I don't think we should picture the audience as idiotically gaping at a morbid spectacle. The show may develop their moral thinking and make them more compassionate... and more likely to respond to the need that the show is informing them about.

I acknowledge, as I must, that making a game show out of this seems so wrong, for so many reasons, but nowhere near as wrong as the fact that Bart de Graaff, died from kidney failure aged 35 after spending years on a transplant waiting list.

UPDATE: This turned out to be a hoax -- intended to draw attention to the shortage of donors. ADDED: That is, there really was a show, but the donor, in the end, was revealed to be an actress. The contestants were really individuals who needed organs, and the show was not meant to trick people but to care about the problem and to feel moved to become donors.

A Madison Memorial Day confrontation.

Here's how the Wisconsin State Journal puts it:

[A]t an anti-war rally at James Madison Park, Elliott Adams, national president of Veterans for Peace, described a similar "Norman Rockwell" scene from a previous Memorial Day parade and suggested the culture that allowed the Iraq war to happen is instilled in Americans at a young age.

Like the crowd of more than 300, many of them carrying signs with messages like "Bring the troops home now," Adams commemorated Memorial Day with a message of peace.

"It's a great day to end war," Adams said.

"It's a great day to honor the dead," Jim Hanson muttered audibly during the speech, adjusting his video camera.

Hanson writes for a right-wing military blog and planned to post the video of the rally online with commentary about how Memorial Day is not about war protests. His presence, however, -- and side comments -- began to attract the attention of members of the audience, some of whom intentionally stood in front of Hanson's camera and accused him of being a National Security Agency operative.

Joshua Gaines, an Iraq veteran, finally confronted Hanson. They exchanged heated words; both sides implied the other was trampling the Bill of Rights; then, as quickly as it started, the conflict cooled down as both sides backed off.

"He can be here," Gaines said later. "But don't interrupt an honorable speaker like this."

And here's how Uncle Jimbo puts it in a blogpost he calls "Moonbat Memorial Day":

They had anti-war BS and every flavor of agit-prop, but not a single solitary moment in 2 1/2 hours mentioned the sacrifices of all the men and women since 1776 who made it possible for them to whine, and whine they did. I filmed most of it and it was drivel. If anyone has a single moment where our war dead were honored in this I will recant, 'cuz I didn't hear any, and that chafed my cones.

More at the link, but here's Jim's video:



Comments?

Scratching the phantom itch.

From an article on neuroplasticity:

An amputee has a bizarre itch in his missing hand: unscratchable, it torments him. A neuroscientist finds that the brain cells that once received input from the hand are now devoted to the man’s face; a good scratch on the cheek relieves the itch. Another amputee has 10 years of excruciating “phantom” pain in his missing elbow. When he puts his good arm into a box lined with mirrors he seems to recognize his missing arm, and he can finally stretch the cramped elbow out. Within a month his brain reorganizes its damaged circuits, and the illusion of the arm and its pain vanish.

Gore "envisions a sort of Vulcan Utopia, in which dispassionate individuals exchange facts and arrive at logical conclusions."

What's with Al Gore and his book called "Assault on Reason"? David Brooks thinks he has "a bizarre view of human nature." (TimesSelect link.)

Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.

The reality, of course, is that there is no neat distinction between the “higher” and “lower” parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the “rational” mind and the “visceral” body. The mind is a much more complex network of feedback loops than accounted for in Gore’s simplistic pseudoscience.

Without emotions like fear, the “logical” mind can’t reach conclusions. On the other hand, many of the most vicious, genocidal acts are committed by people who are emotionally numb, not passionately out of control.

So, ironically, it is Gore himself who is being irrational -- according to Brooks.

But wait. Does Gore actually believe in this unscientific view of the human mind? Is the point of this book to wake us up and make us see that we've been manipulated by the media?

The other way of looking at the problem Brooks points out is that Gore is being quite rational, he understands very well that emotion and reason are intertwined, and he is using talk about rationality to manipulate our emotions. I think the use of that scary word "assault" in the title gives it away.

Be very afraid. Evil people want to control you -- assault you! --with invisible forces that play upon parts of your body that are beyond your conscious thought. I will protect you with this magical substance I have called Reason. Come to me. I will save you.

ADDED: There's some talk in the comments about how annoyingly condescending Gore sounded in his recent NPR interview. You can listen to it here.

Insect happiness today.

"Waitress."

Oscar writes about it, so I don't have to. You know, you cannot trust movie reviews that were written after the director was murdered.

I saw this movie a couple weeks ago, and though I almost never go to the movies, and I like to use what raw material I can, I have not blogged about this movie. Let me just try to reconstruct the dialogue I remember as we left the theater:

Well?

That was one steaming pile of man-hating.

Oh, I thought maybe you liked it.

Those ladies in front of us loved it. I hated it. I mean I liked the close-ups of the pies and the way the pies were all named after her emotions, but everything else... Hey, look, those two guys saw the movie together. I don't see how any self-respecting male could go to see this movie unless a woman made him see it.

Yeah, really.

"There were far too many variables to consider..."

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:

"The death penalty is touchy enough without having to worry about how it relates to the mentally ill. This really seems like one of those things that should be decided on a case by case basis by the people involved, not by us."

The opinion further stated that the court was "intimidated" by the extreme pressure brought on by its eminent position, arguing that it would have been much easier for the justices to deliver a firm, definitive ruling had they not been "hyper-aware" that constitutional scholars, trial lawyers, and lower-court judges would study and discuss their decision for generations to come....

The oral arguments by opposing attorneys Keith S. Hampton and Gena B. Bunn, though impressive, reportedly only made matters worse.

"Both attorneys were super smart and well prepared and made a lot of really good points," Justice Samuel Alito said. "When Mr. Hampton was presenting his case, I was thinking, 'Yeah, this is totally right,' and I was prepared to side with him. But then Ms. Bunn got up and sounded just as convincing, but argued the exact opposite point. It's like, who do you believe?"...

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the lone dissenting opinion, in which she stated that she knew the correct decision was either yes or no, but couldn't say which one it should be.

Enjoy the day.

"Find your candidate a nasty enemy. Tell people they are threatened in some way. . . . It's a cheap trick, but the simplest."

Politics professor John J. Pitney Jr. writes about the way Jerry Falwell served the interests of liberals:

Many Republicans and conservative leaders regarded Falwell as a liability. During the 1984 race, a Democratic campaign aide told Time: "Jerry Falwell is a no-risk whipping boy." Ed Rollins, who ran President Reagan's re-election campaign, later agreed: "Jerry Falwell, no question, is a very high negative." Politicians also noticed that Moral Majority was mainly a direct-mail operation and had never built much of a grassroots organization. With ebbing support from the political world, Falwell quit as president of the group in 1987. It folded two years later.

Since then, the religious right has had a complex political history. For a time, the Christian Coalition loomed as a powerful successor; and it eventually crumbled. Although conservative Christians took up a key role in Republican politics, they were far from monolithic, having a variety of leaders and viewpoints. Their activists came to see Falwell as a small part of their heritage, if they thought of him at all.

Liberals, however, did not forget Falwell. As a political consultant once advised his fellow Democrats: "Find your candidate a nasty enemy. Tell people they are threatened in some way. . . . It's a cheap trick, but the simplest."

Yeah, we should all be onto that trick by now.

"An aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind."

Noemie Emery -- in The Weekly Standard -- tells the story of Bill and Hillary as a long-running TV soap opera. What do the script writers have in store for us next season?

Can the couple bring it off once again? If they can't, it won't be the first time a show failed when main characters tried to spin off into separate series, losing much of the magic that made the act compelling. From the start, the thing that made The Clintons work was the unlikely union of opposites, held together in an attraction-revulsion dynamic, with the whole adding up to more than the sum of its parts. As a sum, they are, and remain, an incredible story. As parts, however, they are merely stock players: an aging roué, who is almost too facile, and a grimly ambitious feminist lawyer, with a tough but conventional mind. In 1992, they seemed fresh and exciting; now they are part of the system and the problem; they were young; now they're not far from the age that the elder George Bush was when they ran against him. And if her job was tough, Bill's is still tougher: It is easier to discipline a huge and unruly political talent than to try to breathe talent into a humorless disciplinarian....

Whether this pol will achieve her lifelong ambition is a whole other story, and one that is yet to be seen. Writers are working on three different endings: In the first, she loses and goes back to the Senate, where she makes peace with her limits and destiny; in the second, she loses, makes Bill's life hell, and rages on at him and the world for the rest of eternity; in the third, she wins, Bill pulls her over the finish line, and they go back to the White House for four or eight years of the same old dynamic, but this time with her owing him. However it ends, it will be quite a story. It will be must-see TV.

Ending 1 is way too boring. Ending 2 makes the best TV show -- for my taste, at least. But I'm not watching it on TV, I'm watching it in the news and trying to blog, and from that perspective, I've got to say that Ending 3 looks juicier than Emery makes it sound. Nevertheless, I'm not hoping for the news that makes the best raw material for blogging. That would be evil.

"They will be snuffling in the dust, squeaking with metaphysical neediness and kissing the lovely pink feet..."

Here's a comment on the new Bloggingheads, by mnbr:

This has to be the all time best Bloggingheads.tv diavlog, no?

It's part of Bob Wright's ordinary cleverness to find smart interlocutors who dig talking to each other ... and then to let them have a ball! Having tried Ann and Annie out once before, Bob must have smacked his head, realizing what a gold mine he'd found, having these two beautiful, smart, quirky, ultra-independent, totally charming women go at it ... WOW!

Can I please just prostrate and grovel in awe at this splendid display of the female mind? Please? Surely one could hand over most of one's net worth to secure Ann and (possibly) Annie as second and third Islamic wives?

The rolling riffs here are amazing - trial by blow job, GOP slime moulds, Dems as amoeba, Western varmints, Fatboy Gore, "nature is trying to kill us ... We ovulate more often now... more bumps here and lumps there", comments on the Sopranos twisating [sic] rapidly into thoughts about whether the human soul is constructed artifice or "merely" a chemical imbalance - can you imagine any two men coming up up with this brilliant, fast-moving, intensly [sic] pointed stuff? Noooo ... we smelly, dull buffoons? .. not even close!

Sure, we're the only ones who're going to figure out some obscure outer reaches of the Reimann Hypothesis ... but, who cares? ... all the mathematicians who could do that stuff will have put away their sticks of chalk, they will be snuffling in the dust, squeaking with metaphysical neediness and kissing the lovely pink feet of these mercurial goddesses ... yes, no?

This amused me -- partly because praise is cool, but also because it's a little weird and because it stirs up memories of the old Larry Summers controversy that seized the national imagination back in 2005:

Larry Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested the other day that innate differences between the sexes might help explain why relatively few women become professional scientists or engineers....

By some accounts, Summers referred to "innate ability" or "natural ability" as a possible explanation for the sex difference in high-school test scores....

What's the evidence on Summers' side? Start with the symptom: the gender gap in test scores. Next, consider biology. Sex is easily the biggest physical difference within a species. Men and women, unlike blacks and whites, have different organs and body designs. The inferable difference in genomes between two people of visibly different races is one-hundredth of 1 percent. The gap between the sexes vastly exceeds that. A year and a half ago, after completing a study of the Y chromosome, MIT biologist David Page calculated that male and female human genomes differed by 1 percent to 2 percent—"the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee," according to a paraphrase in the New York Times. "We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it," Page said. "But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome." Another geneticist pointed out that in some species 15 percent of genes were more active in one sex than in the other.

You'd expect some of these differences to show up in the brain, and they do. A study of mice published a year ago in Molecular Brain Research found that just 10 days after conception, at least 50 genes were more active in the developing brain of one sex than in the other. Comparing the findings to research on humans, the Los Angeles Times observed that "the corpus callosum, which carries communications between the two brain hemispheres, is generally larger in women's brains [than in men's]. Female brains also tend to be more symmetrical. … Men and women, on average, also possess documented differences in certain thinking tasks and in behaviors such as aggression."...

Already Summers is being forced to apologize, in the style of a Communist show trial, for sending "an unintended signal of discouragement to talented girls and women." But the best signal to send to talented girls and boys is that science isn't about respecting sensitivities. It's about respecting facts....

So, men are also overrepresented among political policy geeks. But political policy commentary, more so than the physical sciences, can be done different ways....

Preserve the historical landmarks of American popular culture.

I didn't know it was called Trimper's Rides. [CORRECTION: I'm mixing up Ocean City, Maryland and Ocean City, New Jersey.] We just called it "the Boardwalk," all those summers when it was the highlight of our week-long stay at Aunt Isabel and Uncle Henry's cottage in Ocean City, New Jersey. I was young enough to find the Tilt-a-Whirl unbearably thrilling and to marvel at the kids who had the nerve to ride the merry-go-round and grab for the brass ring.

Now, I see it was called Trimper's Rides. Tthere's a news story: after 117 years, the place is closing. The property is too valuable, and the taxes go too far beyond what you can make with an old-fashioned place like that:

Trimper's is the oldest continuously owned amusement park in the United States, and its demise would reverberate beyond the mid-Atlantic shore, said Jim Futrell of the National Amusement Park Historical Association.

Closing Trimper's "will forever change Ocean City, and I don't think it will change it for the better," Futrell said. "It would rob the community of its soul."...

There are the arcade with rows of Skee-Ball lanes, the pipe-organ carousel with hand-painted horses, the haunted house and the mirror maze.

Granville and Doug Trimper have appealed the taxes with the state. They also have reached out to Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) and lawmakers for help. Options under consideration include a historic designation or legislation to change the way the park is assessed, Doug said.

The place is more than twice as old as the Coney Island amusement park. It is classic Americana. We are fools if we don't preserve these landmarks of American pop culture. This isn't even a question of designating the place a historical landmark to prevent its destruction. The owners want to preserve it. They just want tax relief to spare them from the spiraling property assessments. And doesn't the value of the surrounding property come, in part, front the classic amusement park that gives Ocean City character? I can't believe the city doesn't do everything it can not just to preserve but to restore something so distinctive and so profoundly and historically American.

Memorial Day.

Picture source explained. More here. Memorial Day always makes me think of my parents, who are both dead, not that they died in a war, but they did meet in the Army, during WWII.

My first Memorial Day post:

My mother was a WWII veteran. She joined the Women's Army Corps for reasons she would never put in personal terms. I used to ask her, "Why did you join the Army?" I wanted to hear the details of a teenager who cared for her infant sister, named Hope, who was doomed by spina bifida, incapacitating the poor baby's mother with grief, and who went to college, at the University of Michigan, when she was only 16. I wanted to hear about how she had a great passion to leave Ann Arbor, where she had lived all her life, to have new adventures. But her answer was always devoid of a personal story. It was always: "You have to understand how it was for everyone at the time. There was a war."

My father was drafted into the Army after the end date of the war, so he was not, technically, a veteran. They are both dead now and so are among the many of their generation who did not live to see the [WWII] memorial. They met in the Army. My father had one of those Army office jobs, and so did my mother, who was transferred from working on battle fatigue cases to an office job when it was learned that she could type. My father had made some coffee in his office, and my mother went into the office attracted by the smell of coffee. They were married two weeks later. Personally, I owe my own life to the Army and the smell of coffee, but to be more like my mother, I shouldn't tell it as a personal story: There was a war. People did what had to be done.

May flowers.

Poppy:



Peonies:



Peonies?

"I thought I was making a movie about a paralysed guy but I realised I was making a film about women."

Says Julian Schabel, accepting the directing award at Cannes, for his film "The Butterfly and the Diving Bell," which is based on a book that I was just recommending here. I had no idea there was a film.

The subject of the film, Jean-Dominque Bauby, was a fast-living playboy, the toast of the Paris fashion world, until he suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of 42.

Schnabel shows him waking up in a seaside hospital after weeks in a coma and suffering from what a neurologist calls "locked-in syndrome" -- he is unable to speak or move any part of his body apart from his left eyelid.

The title refers to Bauby's feeling of being trapped in his body, which has come to resemble the airtight chamber of a diving bell, and his still active mind, still agile as a butterfly.

He writes a beautiful memoir by way of that one eyelid and dies 10 days after it is published. How to make a movie out of that? Schnabel's quote hints.

ADDED: And the Palme d'Or goes to a Romanian film about abortion, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" by Cristian Mungiu:

"Pitch perfect and brilliantly acted, '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' is a stunning achievement, helmed with a purity and honesty that captures not just the illegal abortion story at its core but the constant, unremarked negotiations necessary for survival in the final days of the Soviet bloc," reviewer Jay Weissberg wrote....

Mungiu offers a shocking image of the aborted foetus, but it is the abortionist's graphic description of the process and his chilling exploitation of the women's dilemma that make for particularly excruciating viewing....

"Because of the pressure of the regime, women and families were so much concerned about not being caught for making an illegal abortion that they didn't give one minute of thought about the moral issue," he told reporters.

"It was either you or them getting you for what you did."

He put the foetus on screen to serve as a reminder to audiences. "It makes a point -- people should be aware of the consequences of their decisions," he said.

This sounds as though it will upset those who are both pro- and anti-abortion, which may be a good thing. I support abortion rights but think people should face up to "the consequences of their decisions."

A new Bloggingheads: "The Slime Mold Edition."

With me and Annie Gottlieb. Topics (and times):

Hillary and Bill's secret pact (08:50)

How the GOP is like a slime mold (11:38)

Is McCain too tough? Is Obama tough enough? (10:35)

The power of jokes to shape public opinion (11:49)

Al Gore, heavyweight contender (10:28)

Ann and Annie vs. Mother Nature (08:53)

The Sopranos: Shakespeare for our time (17:04)

ADDED: Speaking of slime mold -- so is it an animal or isn't it? -- remember that time I found some in my yard?



And remember that time I thought my yard should be wearing pants?

"Do voters have any idea what they are doing?"

Possibly not:

In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” [Bryan] Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Guess which way Americans are "systematically biased"?

...Scott L. Althaus, a University of Illinois political scientist, finds that if the public were better informed, it would overcome its ingrained biases and make different political decisions. According to his studies, such a public would be more progressive on social issues like abortion and gay rights, more ideologically conservative in preferring markets to government intervention and less isolationist but more dovish in foreign policy.

Love the name, Scott, but why am I not feeling confident that your own "ingrained biases" are not affecting your studies? I'm picking up a bit of the old: if only people thought clearly, they'd agree with me. I'm never surprised when a professor discovers that democracy is defective because Americans aren't more left-wing. But unlike Althaus, Caplan thinks voters are incompetent because they aren't libertarian enough.

To encourage greater economic literacy, [Caplan] suggests tests of voter competence, or “giving extra votes to individuals or groups with greater economic literacy."

Until 1949, he points out, Britain gave extra votes to some business owners and graduates of elite universities. (Since worse-educated citizens are less likely to vote, Caplan dislikes efforts to increase voter turnout.) Most provocatively, perhaps, in an online essay Caplan has suggested a curious twist on the tradition of judicial review: If the Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, why shouldn’t the Council of Economic Advisers be able to strike down laws as “uneconomical”?

But who designs the economic literacy test, and who appoints the Council of Economic Advisors? I assume Caplan doesn't think it would be Althaus and his ilk.

Ugly tourists.

It turns out Americans aren't the worst, but there's still a NYT article about it.

"... what distinguished Americans was that they could be loud and demanding, and then would invariably apologize and give them big tips."

"Tell people how much you weigh."

She tells: 224.

This is the "Fat Rant" video noted in the article linked in the previous post. I'd seen this before, but hadn't known about all the responses. I watched a few responses: they're not polished and funny like the original. But at least watch the original, especially if you're interested in the politics of fat in America or if you just want to be cheered up about your weight by the 224-pound Joy Nash.

The whole subject of the number itself is quite fascinating. There's a mystique about the 200 mark, and lately I've gotten the feeling that there are a lot of Americans who don't think a woman is particularly fat until she hits 200, and that there is a different group of people who think 125 is the point where fat begins.

There's substantial craziness about the number and yet something like a code of silence about the number. Nash thinks it would help to tell people what the number is. But I bet you're thinking, oh yeah, I'll say the number, in a month or so when I get through this diet -- you know, that diet that you'll either abandon or continue for the next year or so, at the end of which you either will or will not count as success that you stayed about at the number you really don't want to say now.

Hey, why didn't I say all that into my video camera and post it as a YouTube video response?

Time-lapse painting, parkour, blasphemy, and fat rants.

The video response phenomenon in YouTube.

"We believe bottled water has become less about the physical act of hydration and more about being a companion to people."

"They like to walk around with it and hold it."

Science for Americans.

Steven Pinker, reviewing Natalie Angier's "The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, notes the American aversion to scientific knowledge:

People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam.

But Angier's book is for the adult who missed the chance to go into science but might read a snazzy enough popular book on the subject:

Every author of a book on science faces the challenge of how to enliven material that is not part of people’s day-to-day concerns. The solutions include the detective story, the suspenseful race to a discovery, the profile of a colorful practitioner, the reportage of a raging controversy and the use of a hook from history, art or current affairs. The lure that Angier deploys is verbal ornamentation: her prose is a blooming, buzzing profusion of puns, rhymes, wordplay, wisecracks and Erma-Bombeckian quips about the indignities of everyday life. Angier’s language is always clever, and sometimes witty, but “The Canon” would have been better served if her Inner Editor had cut the verbal gimmickry by a factor of three. It’s not just the groaners, like “Einstein made the pi wider,” or the clutter, like “So now, at last, I come to the muscle of the matter, or is it the gristle, or the wishbone, the skin and pope’s nose?” The deeper problem is a misapplication of the power of the verbal analogy in scientific exposition.

A good analogy does not just invoke some chance resemblance between the thing being explained and the thing introduced to explain it. It capitalizes on a deep similarity between the principles that govern the two things....

But all too often in Angier’s writing, the similarity is sound-deep: the more you ponder the allusion, the worse you understand the phenomenon. For example, in explaining the atomic nucleus, she writes, “Many of the more familiar elements have pretty much the same number of protons and neutrons in their hub: carbon the egg carton, with six of one, half dozen of the other; nitrogen like a 1960s cocktail, Seven and Seven; oxygen an aria of paired octaves of protons and neutrons.” This is showing off at the expense of communication. Spatial arrangements (like eggs in a carton), mixed ingredients (like those of a cocktail) and harmonically related frequencies (like those of an octave) are all potentially relevant to the structure of matter (and indeed are relevant to closely related topics in physics and chemistry), so Angier forces readers to pause and determine that these images should be ignored here. Not only do readers have to work to clear away the verbal overgrowth, but a substantial proportion of them will be misled and will take the flourishes literally.

Pinker is writing about writing: What makes a science book great literature? Pinker holds up Richard Dawkins's "The Selfish Gene" as exemplary and gets very specific about what works on a deep level to explain scientific ideas. Angier, he says, uses superficial flourishes, while Dawkins finds an analogy that invites and deserves contemplation.

"I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose."

Andrew J. Bacevich contemplates the accusation -- "a staple of American political discourse" -- that his vocal opposition to the war caused his son's death. You might expect him to say the accusation is repulsive, and he was, in fact, trying to stop the war, which might have saved his son. But he goes beyond that:

After my son's death, my state's senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son's wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don't blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove -- namely, wealthy individuals and institutions....

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics....

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

That is, his anti-war activism couldn't have had any causal relationship to the death of his son because American politics are so beholden to the rich that it has no effect. These are dark, despairing thoughts by a man whose son has died. Is he finding some comfort in his own ineffectuality? But he still writes. It's not nothing, though it is powerful writing to say it's "nothing." That your arguments have not persuaded powerful individuals to abandon their deep commitments does not mean that they never listen and never respond.

"If the United States withdrew its forces from Baghdad’s streets this fall, the murder and mayhem would increase."

According to a NYT study:

The New York Times interviewed more than 40 Iraqi politicians and citizens and consulted recent surveys of public opinion in Iraq. The views of a broad range of senior military officials, American intelligence experts, politicians and independent analysts who have recently returned from Iraq were also solicited....

Sheik Ajmi al-Mutashar, an agricultural engineer and businessman from Salahuddin Province in central Iraq and a Sunni, said he worried that an American troop pullback would lead to the collapse of the Iraqi government. “If the government falls it will be impossible to form another one,” he said. “We will have small emirates or cantons divided on sectarian and ethnic lines.”

Several Shiites also agreed that an American pullback would severely weaken the already fragile Iraqi government and lead to an upsurge of fighting among armed factions. “Without a strong and visible American presence, the government would collapse,” said Abu Fayad, an aide to a leading Shiite member of Parliament. “Of course there will be many different wars. Basra, Diwaniya, Baghdad. Everyone will try to control Iraq’s fortune. The Americans failed, but they should stay.”

Salah Sultan al-Obeidi, 39, a government employee who lives in the Shiite stronghold of Sadr City but says he holds secular views, says he worries that moderate elements of Iraqi society would be even more vulnerable if the Americans were to leave. “In Baghdad there will be fierce fighting between Sunni and Shiite extremists. Sunni terrorists will kill all the Sunnis who took part in the political process.”...

“I think the Sadr tide will rule the country,” said Muhammad Qasim Ali, a suitcase salesman in the predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Karada. “They are the majority and they have a good background, and that gives them a chance to take control. Once we take power, we will be merciful with Sunnis. Our way is to kill somebody only when we suspect he has a link to insurgents.”

"Clinton, Giuliani in a strange way may be helping each other."

Writes Marc Humbert:

While the [New York] endorsements came as no real surprise, the Giuliani camp made it clear there was a multilayer agenda at work. Besides demonstrating to other GOP contenders that he probably had New York locked up and they should keep their distance, Giuliani was also sending a message to Republicans nationwide that he was the one GOP contender who could put New York and other states in the Northeast in play for the party.

"This time we are not giving up on New York. This time we are going to win New York, and we are going to win California, and New Jersey, and Connecticut and Pennsylvania," he said in Syracuse. "We are going to contest this election in every state and not give away half the states before the election even begins."...

Such numbers, according to a top Clinton ally, show not why Republicans should pick Giuliani, but why Democrats need to pick her.

"You cannot win the White House as a Democrat without New York. It would be like trying to win the White House as a Republican without Texas. It just can't happen," said David Pollak, co-chairman of New York's state Democratic Committee.

"I don't think you could make the case that the others are bad candidates, I just think Hillary is by far in the best shape right now against Giuliani if he is the nominee because he does put New York in play," Pollak added. "I'm not saying he wins New York, but he puts it in play."

I realize she's the Senator from New York, but that doesn't mean she's all that much stronger than the other Democratic candidates in New York. Clearly, Giuliani is the only Republican candidate that has a chance in those big blue states. This has been one of Giuliani's big arguments. The question is whether Hillary can take that argument -- which is a good one -- and leverage an argument of her own -- which is not so obvious.

[Clinton and Giuliani] were opponents in the 2000 Senate race in New York until Giuliani dropped out in the face of prostate cancer and a disintegrating marriage. Polls at the time showed the two running about even.

That was also, of course, the year that saw the disputed presidential election being decided by court rulings that gave the Electoral College victory to Republican George W. Bush after Democrat Al Gore won the popular vote.

"It would be a twisted version of 2000 if Barack Obama won the presidential vote by a million votes, but lost the Electoral College because he didn't win New York," said Pollak.

Thanks for reminding us of Al Gore, who would not have lost in 2000 if he had won his home state.

"We like the United States of America, but we do not like your Waschbaeren!"

Nazi raccoons.

Snowclones.

A timeline.

The term "snowclones" was coined 3 seconds before 10:57 p.m., January 15, 2004, in Northridge, California.

"In the future, it could get wrapped around a lamppost or a person's wrist, even worn as clothing. Perhaps it can be put up like wallpaper."

You want thin screens? Yes, we want the surface of everything to come alive with video.

"What is the single strangest thing I can do with ketchup?"

Well:

[A] teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.

Screwphemisms.

"When you say redploy, you mean withdraw." That's an interesting typo, by Andy McCarthy, over at National Review. "Redploy" ≈ communist plot.

The context:

Senator Obama says: "It is time to end this war so that we can redeploy our forces to focus on the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and all those who plan to do us harm."

Senator Obama, are you proposing that we move U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, where you guys keep saying the "real" War on Terror is?

There is also a very good chance that bin Laden and some al Qaeda hierarchy are in Pakistan. When you say "redeploy," are you suggesting that we invade Pakistan?

Folks, let's not let these guys get away with this. By "redeploy," they don't really mean move the troops to where they say al Qaeda is. They don't want to fight al Qaeda. If they wanted to fight al Qaeda, al Qaeda is in Iraq — that is indisputable. Bin Laden has said repeatedly that Iraq is the central battle. ...

If you really believe al Qaeda is not in Iraq — that the real al Qaeda is only in Afghanistan and its environs — then you're on drugs. But, sure, fine, "redeploy" our troops ... to Afghanistan. But can we please have five seconds of honesty? You guys don't have the slightest intention of doing that. You don't want to go to Afghanistan. You want to go home.

When you say redploy [sic], you mean withdraw.

Quite aside from the Freudian typo -- and isn't it funny that the communist plot reference comes from a guy named McCarthy? -- he's right about this. "Redeploy" is such an obvious euphemism -- like "ethnic cleansing" -- that it has -- or should already have -- lost its power to gloss over what is really being said.

There should be a term for this. Maybe there is, but since I don't know what it is, I'm going to call it a screwphemism. This is a euphemism gone bad. Not only do we see through it and know that you're saying the thing you were hoping to downplay, but we know you were trying to manipulate and deceive. So we know what you're really saying, and we mistrust you for not saying it straight.

"Yes!!! I LOVE MY JOB, it takes everything reckless and deviant and heathenistic and just overall bad about me..."

"... and hyper focuses these traits into my job of running around this horrid place doing nasty things to people that deserve it … and some that don't."

Those are words which may or may not have been written by Dr. Laura's son Deryk, who is in the Army and stationed in Afghanistan.

Matthew D. LaPlante, the Tribune reporter who broke the story about the Army investigation, had drawn a rebuke from Schlessinger for an earlier article in which he quoted her as saying Army wives should stop "whining."

She posted a reply on her website stating that her position was taken out of context. As a "military mom," she added, she whines to her husband about how scared she is for her son, but "I never whine to my son when he is able to call between missions" for fear of distracting him from his life-and-death duties.

Here's LaPlante's story about the whining wives:

Raging radio human relations guru Laura Schlessinger, in Salt Lake City on Friday to speak to Army families at Fort Douglas, said she was tired of hearing the complaints of lonely and overwhelmed military wives whose husbands are deployed.

"He could come back without arms, legs or eyeballs, and you're bitching?" Schlessinger asked before taking the stage at the base theater to host her daily program on ethics, morals and values. "You're not dodging bullets, so I don't want to hear any whining - that's my message to them."

Schlessinger boasted that she once talked a young woman out of marrying a soldier, noting that "warriors need warrior wives" and that she felt the girl was unprepared.

What a tangled mass of hostility.

ADDED: What did I mean by "What a tangled mass of hostility"? Well, Dr. Laura was hostile to the military wife, and LaPlante was hostile to Dr. Laura and her son. As for the son, there is an ongoing investigation, and it's unfair to say much about what was written at a website that may not be his. But the website expresses hostility, and if it really is Deryk's, then there are some deep things in that mother-son relationship. She has built a public persona around her grandiose vision of her excellent motherhood. This gives him awesome power to hurt her if he is so motivated.

Uh-oh, I made Eugene Volokh talk about ladies' periods and look what happened!

So he's all:

[C]oncerns about long-term health effects are quite sensible. But [after quoting one of my commenters] I don't see any justification for the feeling that it's not "right to sidestep" something that's "part of being a woman." I suppose it could be some esthetic judgment that argument won't much drive; but setting aside esthetics, why on earth should we want to accept natural but painful or unpleasant things?

Screetch. I have an aesthetic judgment. Please, use the spelling "aesthetic." Humor me on this one, Everyone in the World. Back to Eugene:

Disease is a part of being a human. Headaches are part of being a human. Excruciating pain in childbirth is part of being a woman. They are bad parts.

And to mention the most obvious: death.

A good part of being a human is being able to prevent disease and to ease pain. Why embrace the harmful, painful, or uncomfortable parts of human nature, and reject those parts of human nature — our species' intelligence and resulting scientific acumen — that diminish harm, pain, and discomfort?

Then, Eugene makes a post out of one of the comments, some doofus who conflates pregnancy and menstruation:

It's been amazing seeing my wife and other women deal with her first pregnancy. Immediately upon announcing to the world she's pregnant, my wife was part of the "in crowd." Every mother--whether she knew my wife well or not--could smile and talk about morning sickness, or finding out the baby's gender, or feeling bloated, etc.

So, it is not aesthetic. Humanity derives meaning from shared experiences, and deleting one of the most universal and central of all female experiences can subtract perceived meaning from people's lives. In that regard it is very important.

Oh, for the love of.... like it's a big, fun sorority. I'd rather be able to use my own body to write my name in the snow. You know, you can't do that with menstrual blood. Not too damned easily anyway. So Eugene responds to this Human Meaning expert with:

Humanity does derive meaning from some shared experiences — but not all. Shared experience that you bond over: pregnancy. Shared experiences that you don't bond over: hangnails, nearsightedness, tooth decay. Shared experiences that people sometimes seem to bond over, but that I'm sure they'd be much better off without: various illnesses or operations that some elderly people stereotypically discuss with each other, but which they'd be glad to avoid without any worry about lost "meaning."

My sense is that menstruation falls within the second (or, less likely, third) category of experiences rather than the first. To many women, pregnancy is a harbinger of their joy in becoming a mother, an affirmation of their fertility (something many women worry about before they become pregnant), a sign of a growing bond with their husbands, and more. Menstruation, it seems to me, is far removed from that...

But let's hear from some people who actually menstruate, and have been pregnant. When you menstruate, do you feel that you're part of the "in crowd"? If you chose to stop -- not because of menopause, which is a marker of age and of lost fertility, but voluntarily and reversibly -- would you feel "out"? Do you smile and talk to your friends about the cramps, the mood swings, and the like?

Aw, come on, that's typical smartest-guy-in-the-blogosphere Volokh getting it as right as any guy should even want to get it. But screw him, right? He's a guy.

Hey, all you law students writing the parody lyrics for next year's law revue shows, start here:



... and just let it... flow....

Anyway....

So, the women -- I mean the people who actually menstruate -- hear the call and go after our Eugene. I'm tracking this down via Robert J. Ambrogi, because he linked to me (though he did also go on to confuse me with another Ann). So over at Feminist Law Professors, Ann Bartow is being mean to Eugene:

I think Eugene needs to be educated gently and incrementally...

Yikes!

Somehow I picture him showing up for the first class wearing one of these...

Wow! What's with the violence? Eugene is the one who thinks it's okay not to have your period. Why aren't you PMSing after the pregnancy-jealous, out-crowd doofus?

Taking a more gentle approach is the -- inaptly named -- Christine Hurt:

[P]regnancy and childbirth make women part of a very large club whose members have something very important in common.... Menstruation is similar. When girls begin to menstruate, they do join sort of a club, but it's much more underground....

I do think that the natural end of menstruation usually comes with some sadness. It is an end of an era. Some women may be liberated by the end of that era....

I don't think this pill is really about discomfort, hygiene or convenience. I think it's about casual sex....

Oh, good lord. I think the pill is about liberation. If there's a health issue, it should be taken seriously. But if there is no health problem -- and consider whether all this excessive menstruation in the modern world is itself a health probem -- then go ahead and free yourself from all the pain and mess and inconvenience.

I have more to say, already recorded on video. Oh hell, I'll just give it to you, to be contextualized later:



ADDED: Eugene tries to understand why Bartow got so pissy:

What sort of feminism is it that faults people for asking actual women about their experiences, and for trying to start a public conversation in which women's opinions are actively solicited, on the grounds that the questioner should instead have gone to the library or taken up the time of his colleagues?

Dr. Helen thinks Bartow is violating her own research-before-blogging principle. And what a repressive principle that is!

UPDATE: To see the video clip in context, watch this segment of the new Bloggingheads.

"When painting there is a point u must step away from the canvas as the work is done."

That's Rosie O'Donnell's way of saying she's leaving "The View" before her contract expires. She just can't deal with that vicious harpy, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. If you've seen the video of their supposedly gigantic collision, that you know it all started when Rosie said: "655,000 Iraqi civilians have died. Who are the terrorists?" and then, when some right-wingers had the gall to read that as calling our troops the terrorists, Hasselbeck did not step forward and defend her.

"You said nothing and that's cowardly."

Eh. If Rosie's ready to light into dear sweet Elisabeth and tar her as "cowardly" for the mere failure to speak, that only makes it more likely that she'd slap the label "terrorists" onto our troops for the civilian deaths. She's wielding her big brush with Abstract Expressionist fervor. She steps back, admires her painting and declares it a masterpiece.

In case you missed the video:



Okay, let's go check Rosie's blog. Here's her own post about the original "Who are the terrorists?" dialogue with Elisabeth. She provides the transcript:

O’DONNELL: …… I just want to say something. 655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?

HASSELBECK: Who are the terrorists?

O’DONNELL: 655,000 Iraqis — I’m saying you have to look, we invaded –

HASSELBECK: Wait, who are you calling terrorists now? Americans?

O’DONNELL: I’m saying if you were in Iraq, and the other country, the United States, the richest in the world, invaded your country and killed 655,000 of your citizens, what would you call us?

HASSELBECK: Are we killing their citizens or are their people also killing their citizens?

O’DONNELL: We’re invading a sovereign nation, occupying a country against the U.N.

Oh, for the love of Baba. She's obviously calling the Americans terrorists. How mindcrushingly absurd it is for her to come back and bully Hasselbeck for holding her tongue. Hasselbeck should be credited with bending over backwards to be nice to Rosie.