Steal This Vote
I'm blogging this bit from Krugman's piece mostly because I want to make a note to read the book sometime. As Krugman hints elsewhere in the piece, simmering election scandals is merely one pot of many that's going to boil over once we see regime change in the US.
In his recent book "Steal This Vote" – a very judicious work, despite its title – Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."
[Paul Krugman, "What They Did Last Fall", New York Times, 19 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Splenetics
More on Terrorism Hysteria II
The story about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by London police just keeps getting worse. This from The Guardian [UK] ("New claims emerge over Menezes death "):
It has now emerged that Mr de Menezes:
- was never properly identified because a police officer was relieving himself at the very moment he was leaving his home;
- was unaware he was being followed;
- was not wearing a heavy padded jacket or belt as reports at the time suggested;
- never ran from the police;
- and did not jump the ticket barrier.
But the revelation that will prove most uncomfortable for Scotland Yard was that the 27-year-old electrician had already been restrained by a surveillance officer before being shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder.
Avedon Carol summarizes the situation like this:
So let's recap: A Caucasian man is minding his own business, leaves his home for work, catches a bus, uses his Oyster card to get to a train platform, gets on a train, and gets killed. Let's see what excuses the shoot-to-kill right-wingers have for that.
Back in the just-post-9/11 days, Isaac had occasion to talk with a stranger about recent anti-terrorism policies, extraordinary government powers, the Patriot Act, and the encroachment that the fear and hysteria lead to upon civil liberties — liberties that can take lifetimes to accomplish but only moments to see them taken away.
This man was a father of a small girl. His dismissive summary of any concerns over a reduction in his liberty was "if it helps make her safer, I'm all for it."
I have two objections. Even if it "makes her safer" I wouldn't want to rush to judgement that all these immediate, ill-considered responses in the name of fighting terrorism are going to help accomplish that.
The second objection, of course, is that very few of these reductions in civil liberties actually do make us any safer. For all those who would have Mr. Menezes not murdered in vain by hysterical London police, I'd like that to be the lesson we learn.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Splenetics
Pentagon Too Reality-Based?
The Bush administration is significantly lowering expectations of what can be achieved in Iraq, recognizing that the United States will have to settle for far less progress than originally envisioned during the transition due to end in four months, according to U.S. officials in Washington and Baghdad.
The United States no longer expects to see a model new democracy, a self-supporting oil industry or a society in which the majority of people are free from serious security or economic challenges, U.S. officials say.
"What we expected to achieve was never realistic given the timetable or what unfolded on the ground," said a senior official involved in policy since the 2003 invasion. "We are in a process of absorbing the factors of the situation we're in and shedding the unreality that dominated at the beginning."
[Robin Wright and Ellen Knickmeyer, "U.S. Lowers Sights On What Can Be Achieved in Iraq", Washington Post, 14 August 2005.]
Your basic problem here, obviously, is that the Pentagon is [still!] far too reality based to win this war. Now, we know that the Bush League believes that, since we are an "empire", we create our own reality, and they'd really prefer not to hear the whining from the small-minded liberals in the reality-based community — it's just so Englightenment.
Thus it comes as quite a surprise to hear a "senior official" talk about "shedding unreality", which by its nature suggests that there is a reality somewhere.*
Here in Washington, DC, I think we're all looking forward to Don's "We Support You" march on 11 September, wondering whether it's going to be more faith-based or more reality-based. Anyone want to start a pool on how many people show up — excluding, of course, those who are paid to do so.
———-
*However, that reality at the moment doesn't seem to be anywhere near Crawford, Texas. It seems that, for this president, being the top guy doesn't mean anything about responsibility, but instead means you get to eat all the chocolate you want and ride your bike and do all the cool stuff that you never get to do when you have a job and someone else is in charge.
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Splenetics
More on Terrorism Hysteria
As I continue to believe: it appears to have been a case of police terrorism-hysteria. This from ITN [Great Britain]:
Mistakes led to tube shooting
8.25PM, Tue Aug 16 2005ITV News has obtained secret documents and photographs that detail why police shot Jean Charles De Menezes dead on the tube.
The Brazilian electrician was killed on 22 July, the day after the series of failed bombings on the tube and bus network.
The crucial mistake that ultimately led to his death was made at 9.30am when Jean Charles left his flat in Scotia Road, South London.
Surveillance officers wrongly believed he could have been Hussain Osman, one of the prime suspects, or another terrorist suspect.
By 10am that morning, elite firearms officers were provided with what they describe as "positive identification" and shot De Menezes eight times in the head and upper body.
The documents and photographs confirm that Jean Charles was not carrying any bags, and was wearing a denim jacket, not a bulky winter coat, as had previously been claimed.
He was behaving normally, and did not vault the barriers, even stopping to pick up a free newspaper.
He started running when we saw a tube at the platform. Police had agreed they would shoot a suspect if he ran.
A document describes CCTV footage, which shows Mr de Menezes entered Stockwell station at a "normal walking pace" and descended slowly on an escalator. [continues…]
In: All, Plus Ca Change..., Quartos
The Evolutionary Epic
The biologist E. O. Wilson wrote (in On Human Nature): "The core of scientific materialism is the evolutionary epic. Let me repeat its minimum claims: that the laws of the physical sciences are consistent with those of the biological and social sciences and can be linked in chains of causal explanation; that life and mind have a physical basis; that the world as we know it has evolved from earlier worlds obedient to the same laws; and that the visible universe today is everywhere subject to these materialist explanations."
[Chet Raymo, "A Concise Statement of Faith", ScienceMusings Blog, 3 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Vote Walken in 2008
The little bandwagon rolled quietly by in front of my house today and I decided to jump on. I may turn out to be fickle, but right now I'm firmly behind the Christopher Walken 2008 campaign for president.
The press release from Walken's campaign, dated 9 Augsut 2005 (see the website), said
The campaign website is patriotic-themed, with the tag-line "To Get America Back on Track." Hansee stated that the campaign is hoping to drum up early support through their online presence, much like Howard Dean did in the 2004 race.
So, consider this part of the early support. Yee haw!
He has no party affiliation, which seems — at this point — like a vote in his favor. It's early days, but he's working on his platform (writing it himself), which is heading in the right direction, I'd say. Rather than wildly liberal or conservative, I'd say his politics look sensible.
Besides, he looks incredibly presidential, and that seems to figure heavily in the media's analysis of presidential campaigns: does he look presidential, is he electable? I always thought candidates who could get the most votes were the electable ones, but I'm not really a fully qualified pundit.
Besides again, didn't Walken play important political figures in movies? I loved him as Lieutenant McDuff in "Scotland, PA". That makes him at least as qualified as Reagan, who only played war and football heroes and such, and is considered by some to be the greatest presidential gipper ever. In my reality-based world, Reagan wasn't even a very good actor, which suggests that a Walken presidency could be absolutely fabulous.
Seriously, I don't have anything a priori against the idea of electing actors to political offices: there's no reason to think they're any less qualified, or any less trustworthy, or any less committed, than any other candidate. At the start, I find it easy to take Walken seriously and read what he has to say.
Keep your eye on Walken's campaign.
Not For Our Kind of People
Staff Sgt. Jason Rivera, 26, a Marine recruiter in Pittsburgh, went to the home of a high school student who had expressed interest in joining the Marine Reserve to talk to his parents.
It was a large home in a well-to-do suburb north of the city. Two American flags adorned the yard. The prospect's mom greeted him wearing an American flag T-shirt.
"I want you to know we support you," she gushed.
Rivera soon reached the limits of her support.
"Military service isn't for our son. It isn't for our kind of people," she told him.
[Jack Kelly, "Parent-trap snares recruiters: The tune changes at some homes when they hear 'sign here' ", The Post-Gazette [Pittsburg, PA], 11 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Gosh, They Had No Idea!
In the matter of Supreme-Court nominee Roberts, I read someone quoting someone about the tens of thousands of pages of documents that the White House was refusing to release about Roberts' legal career, his opinions and ideas, his writings on the law, and such things.
The thought that lept into my mind was: what is the nature of these documents that gives the White House leave to control their release? I went to the article quoted on the matter* and discovered that these were papers generated when Roberts was doing legal advising in the Regan administration; hence, they were among the Regan presidential papers. As we may remember, Bush made an executive order in 2001 giving him extended powers to control papers from previous administrations. Culture of secrecy, and all that.
Okay, that's all just everyday scandal for this adminstration. But wait! The article offered these entertaining paragraphs (among others):
Before Roberts's July 19 selection by President Bush, there was no comprehensive effort to examine the voluminous paper trail from his previous tours as an important legal and political hand under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, administration officials said.
Three weeks later, these officials say they recognize that Roberts's record is going to be central to Senate confirmation hearings scheduled to begin Sept. 6, and lawyers and political aides are urgently reviewing more than 50,000 pages — at the same time denying requests from Democrats for an immediate release.
Okay, to summarize: W decided to nominate Roberts to the Supreme Court — by some reports having made the decision long before 19 July while he pretended to seek advice on the choice — and the White House had no idea that people might be interested in what was evidently substantial legal work that Roberts did in the Regan Administation.
Is this just so Bush League, or what?
———-
*Jo Becker, "Roberts Papers Being Delayed: Bush Aides Screen Pages for Surprises", Washington Post, 10 August 2005.
In: All, Raised Eyebrows Dept., Splenetics
A Better Answer
To be sure, there are plenty of scientists who believe in God, and even Darwinists who call themselves Christians. But the acceptance of evolution diminishes religious belief in aggregate for a simple reason: It provides a better answer to the question of how we got here than religion does. Not a different answer, a better answer: more plausible, more logical, and supported by an enormous body of evidence.
[Jacob Weisberg, "Evolution vs. Religion: Quit pretending they're compatible." Slate, 10 August 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book
Mystery and Creationism
Someone pointed out this fascinating article in the DC Examiner, in which Robert Vanasse discusses the current ruckus between fundamentalism and (rational) science and points out that it hasn't always been that way ("old time religion" is not so "old time" as fundamentalists would like to imagine), but is instead a rather recent development. Read his article to see his point.
What interested me here was this small bit:
Fundamentalists cannot accept mankind as the product of natural selection because Scripture reveals that God created mankind in his image (Genesis 1:27). When science contradicts the Bible, they reject science. Pope John Paul [II] took a different view, observing that "Truth cannot contradict truth."
[Robert Vanasse, "Reason, faith at a crossroads", The Examiner [Washington, DC], 9 August 2005.]
This strikes me as the kernel of the resolution to the problem, to the extent that there is a problem, of course.
Christian theology has long accepted "mystery" as an integral part of its metaphysics, traceable to the idea that the Christian God is, ultimately, inscrutible and there are therefore aspects of His creation that will necessarily be beyond comprehension by mere humans.
There are long-recognized mysteries in Christian theology These, according to Isaac, are the biggies:
- The Trinity
- The Dual Natures in one Christ
- The Problem of Evil
Metaphysically, then, the late Pope has offered the perfect — and perhaps only — resolution to fundamentalists' concerns about Biblical creationism and its apparent conflict with rational, evolutionary biology: "truth cannot contradict truth". In their belief system, Biblical creationism is revealed by God as "truth"; in the rational scientific system, evolutionary biology is "truth". As JPII would have it, there can be no contradiction: believing Christians should accept the perceived contradiction as a mystery, rejoice in it and move on.
In fact, refusing to accept the "truth" of science on the part of fundamentalists second-guesses their God and His powers and will, since science is fully a part of His creation. One can't really blame heathen, athiestic science on Satan, either, since the concept of Satan is post-Biblical. (Whether it is a product of "evil" takes us back to the last mystery mentioned above.)
Going further, rejecting the truth of rational science is theologically untenable, since that stance rejects using the rational mind that is also their God's gift to mankind.
The only theologically consistent Christian viewpoint is to apply John Paul's dictum: the truth of science and the revealed truth of the Bible cannot be in contradiction. Any apparent contradiction is a mystery, an outcome of His inscrutible being. Rejoice!
In: All, Common-Place Book, Eureka!
The Coming Convergence
Isaac is reading a biography of Isaac Newton (while I sit at the computer) and, incredibly, laughing aloud while doing so. Here is one of the moments that inspired the guffaws, indicating that wacky fundamentalist types are not only a present-day scourge:
As it evolved into a new orthodoxy, Newtonianism became a target. … It inspired satires, some deliberate and some ingenuously respectful. One Newtonian convert, the vicar of Gillingham Major, wrote a treatise [c. 1720] called Theologiae Christinae Principia Mathematica[*], calculating that the probability of counter-evidence to the gospels dimished with time and would reach zero in the year 3144.
[James Gleick, Isaac Newton (Random House, New York, 2003) pp. 178–179.]
———-
*I.e., The Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Plus Ca Change...
By What Measure?
You'd think, given that his popularity in surveys would probably skyrocket as a result, that the President might wipe the sweat from his brow and set a spell with Cindy Sheehan at his Crawford ranch and talk some about her dead son, Casey. It might not be an easy conversation but — as the President has pointed out on numerous occasions — bein' President's hard work.
We'd all like know why stayin' the course and killing more young people like Casey Sheehan is somehow vital to honoring the memory of those who have already died. Why did they die? To help make Bush a "wartime president", his greatest wish to help cement his status in history.
I think perhaps enough have died now to guarantee that Bush will be recognized as the arrogant, uncaring, and fool-hardy president that he is, so we can stop now.
I know many people who say that it is bad strategy to say when we'll be withdrawing troops from Iraq. I can agree that we shouldn't do that. The President wants to keep them there until we succeed.
One thing we can do without strategic damage is to say what it means to succeed. When will we have won this war? By what measure shall we know victory? When will we know that it's "mission accomplished"?
Hard work. Bein' president. Think 'bout it a lot.
These are the questions Bush should be able to answer for Ms. Sheehan when he has that little chat with her. We'll be listening.
The Matthew Effect
A little while back ("Let's Play Internet!") I wrote about trying to track down an authoritative attribution for this quotation:
The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
It was fun but inconclusive, barely penetrating the surface of the murky waters of misattribution. It's a game I enjoy playing, although I only get to play in little installment (unless someone is willing to pay me to do it!).
At any rate, because of that piece, I now have a steady stream of visitors to my blog who google for the phrase and end up here, which is a nice thing, but it's made me think that I should push on and see whether we can penetrate to the next level in uncovering the correct attribution for the phrase.
A casual start with Google seemed to indicate two conflicting attributions, of which these were typical:
- "The plural of anecdote is not data. (Frank Kotsonis)" [Quotes About Data Processing]
- "The plural of anecdote is not data. (Roger Brinner)" [Fathom Resource Center: Quips & Quotes.]
Glancing through the results, it looked like Brinner was leading Kotsonis about 3 to 1, so I asked the Google for these keywords and got the indicated number of hits:
- "anecdote plural kotsonis": 61
- "anecdote plural brinner": 311
Overall, more people appeared to attribute the phrase to Mr. Brinner, although more careful checking showed that not all of those 311 results were independent of each other.
But here's a surprise during that last search: Google asked (in it's irritating fashion): "Did you mean: anecdote plural brenner?" So, what if I did? Those keywords resulted in 266 hits. However, that path ("anecdote plural brenner") quickly seemed to degenerate. Many of the hits simply happened to have those three words without any reference to the phrase in question. It also turned up more attributions however, further muddying the waters:
- "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." — K. S. Suslick ["Quotes on Education", illinoisloop.org]
- "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'evidence'." (Alan L. Leshner) ["Jonathan Borwein's Selected Excogitations and General Exegesis".]
- 'But George Stigler said that "the plural of anecdote is data" ' [Jonathan Day, in an online forum at EG Forums.]
The last one is interesting because we'll see the name "George Stigler" again; otherwise, this route didn't seem to be giving results that were going to converge on any useful information.
I thought maybe I should compare with what the MSN-search oracle might give. It served up about 250 results for "the plural of anecdote is not data" (as a phrase, i.e., with quotation marks in the search string — by comparison, Google turned up 4,900 hits for the phrase, but the first 100 didn't add much to what we'd already seen.1) Most just added their weight to the assertion that it was first uttered by Brinner, with a few supporting the Kotsonis assertion.
There were also some interesting outliers:
- "The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'." — Donald M. Berwick [JNC's Pick — Some Good Fun Lines]
- The plural of "anecdote" is not "data". — David Ramey [Brent Meeker, "Dogmatism of the Paranormalist", Freethinkers.]
- To quote some wag, the plural of "anecdote" is not data. [Gerald Davison, 10 March 2004, an online discussion: "On psychotherapy research".]
- "The plural of anecdote is not data". Ben Goldacre, Guardian Life supplement, June 19 2003. [lloydshep, Sayings for work meetings, No. 3356, Dadblog, 19 June 2003.]
- "The plural of anecdote is not data." — Marjory Blumenthal [a collection of quotations maintained by someone not indicated on the page, said to be "from the 5/01 Computer Science and Telecommunications Board meeting"]
- "The plural of anecdote is not data." –Howard Fienberg [Toren Smith , "NYT: incompetent, or just stupid?", The Safety Valve, 21 June 2002.]
- "The plural of anecdote is not data" – Dean Kamen (inventor of the Segway) [Lynn Conway, "An investigative report into the publication of J. Michael Bailey's book on transsexualism by the National Academies, Part II", 25 September 2003.]
These are all evidently spurious, one-off attributions; it might be interesting to know how they came to be, but I don't want to get sidetracked.2 In addition to "some wag", I've seen "some sociologists", "a learned professor", and "anonymous" for attributions. I find these untidy and lazy.
One blog entry, written by yet another person (Sam, at liberaldestert) trying to track down the origins of the phrase, offered this very authoritative sounding bit of information:
Lee Bolin (Tempe, AZ) emailed his comments about the origin of the phrase I asked about in a prior posting (Blogger link may not work; it's the posting for 11/18) that "the plural of 'anecdote' isn't 'facts'":
"I believe that the original aphorism is "The plural of anecdote is data." The negation, that the plural is NOT data, seems to be a recent reaction by academics to the original phrase. I do recall that I read the original quote from Senator Moynihan in Time, Newsweek, or U.S. News over a decade ago, but I do not now know the specific citation. I also do not if it was Senator Moynihan's original thought, or if he had borrowed it from someone else.
A variety of other people, notably Ben Wattenberg, have used that phrase over the years. Senator Moynihan's own use of it appears from time to time in the Congressional Record. The negation, "The plural of anecdote is not data", seems to have arisen fairly recently and is popular with persnickety social scientists.
The date on this entry is Tuesday, November 26, 2002, important in the context of the next quoted piece. From the evidence I've been through today, I'm ready to disagree with e-mail author Lee Bolin's two assertions: that the original phrase did not have "not" in it (I think it did), and that the phrase has anything at all to do with Senator Moynihan (it appears to owe nothing to him) except that he may have repeated it on some occasion. I fear that these may be fabrications, albeit well-intentioned, on Mr. Bolin's part.
Going back to Google, then, and asking about "anecdote plural stigler" gave 161 results, not as many as Mr. Brinner had, but number of hits can be a dangerous metric. The results for Stigler seemed to have a good variety of sources, which is suggestive that they were independent indications, and with dates that went back at least as early as 1995:
Most fundamentally, economists are mostly unmoved by industrial policy claims because, as George Stigler has quipped, “the plural of anecdote isn’t data.”
[Richard Beason and David Weinstein, "The MITI Myth", The American Enterprise Online, July/August 1995.]
Note that the "not" was part of the "quip" at this early date.
That search also turned up this very provocative nugget:
From: Difficult library reference questions list
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2004 2:08 PM
To: STUMPERS-L@LISTSERV.DOM.EDU
Subject: ? Quotation. "Plural of anecdote is data."We have been asked who first said or wrote: "The plural of anecdote is (not) data." The quotation is found both with and without the "not." We have searched standard quotation books (Bartlett, Oxford, Penguin, etc.) Lots of examples on the Web, the earliest being one from the economist George Stigler in 1991, but nothing to indicate he originated the phrase. Also one site which attributes it to Daniel P. Moynihan, but with no evidence. Any assistance in pinning down, if possible,the origin of the phrase will be appreciated. Sincerely
Stan Shiebert
Librarian
Arts, Recreation & Literature Department
Seattle Public Library
Don't you just love librarians! (And isn't it nice to know that there is a mailing-list for reference-librarian "stumpers"!) I'll have to write dozens of additional posts about libraries and my love for them and how I generally think of librarians as gods and goddesses, but anyway….
One wonders whether this reference to "one site which attributes it to Daniel P. Moynihan" is the site we'd just visited above, with the e-mail from Mr. Bolin.
This looks like a good place to pause in tracing the origins of the phrase, since we have an authoritative, trustworthy voice taking us back to 1991 with George Stigler as the originator. But one further (later) example might be amusing:
To paraphrase Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler, data are the plural of anecdote.
[Nathan S. Balke andMine K. Yucel, "Evaluating the Eleventh District's Beige Book – Brief Article", Economic & Financial Review, Oct, 2000.]
This one brings out two important points:
- George Stigler is a Nobel Laureate, so he tends to win in the attribution game because of the "Matthew Effect"3
- As I pointed out in my first piece on this subject, maintaining the quotation marks (presuming that they were original, which I suspect they were since they make the aphorism much, much wittier — if they weren't they should have been!) is vital for the meaning; our authors should have written: "data" is the plural of "anecdote" (which would have been funnier, although economists are not generally known for their sense of humor).
The unanswered question that comes to mind is: why did they feel the need to paraphrase in the first place?
———-
1Although there were several entries that seemed to be undertaking a very serious, deconstructionist sort of analysis of the phrase, which strikes me as rather silly, since it was a witticism to start with, not a dissertation in poetic form.
2The most likely explanation from the snippets that I read was that the person writing had received a communication from another person who used the phrase without attribution, so the writer atributed it to the correspondant.
3In quite a different context, I came across a short piece by physicist N. David Mermin, "Could Feynman Have Said This?" (Physics Today 57, no. 5, 2004 — subscription may be required), in which he was trying to track down first-hand evidence that Richard Feynman had actually said something frequently attributed to him.
Anyway, Mermin described the "Matthew effect":
The Matthew effect was enunciated by the great sociologist of science, Robert Merton [R. K. Merton, Science 159, 56 (1968)]. Merton worked in those innocent days when sociologists were interested only in the behavior of scientists and not in the content of their science. (To be fair to contemporary sociologists of science, I should modify that last phrase to "and not in the manifestations of that behavior in the content of their science.") I first learned of the Matthew effect more than 20 years ago, on the occasion of my first and, perhaps until now, only, victimization at the hands of the New York Times.
I learned the name for what the Times had done to me when I received a very nice note from P. W. Anderson in which he expressed his regret that the newspaper had given him exclusive credit for a nomenclatural advance that was entirely due to me. "A depressingly typical example of the Matthew effect" was how he characterized the misattribution. (I reported the entire history of this contretemps in these pages back in those dark ages [April 1981, page 46] before there were Reference Frame columns.) When I wrote back asking him what the Matthew effect was, he referred me to Merton.
It was Merton who identified and named the tendency always to assign exclusive scientific credit to the most eminent among all the plausible candidates. At least I hope it was he, though I'm sure Merton, who invented many wonderful jokes himself, would have been delighted if the credit for it turned out to be misattributed to him. Merton named the effect after the Gospel According to Matthew, because there it is written,
For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
—Mattthew 25:29.
Don't Eat It!
Sometimes it irritates me when I can't remember who pointed out some blog to me that I end up wanting to point out but then, in a sort of anti-anal-retentive moment, can't point out the pointer out. There are other times when we might be better off, though.
It's very, very hard, I think, to write brilliantly about something so that's it's both digusting and humorous at the same time, the literary equivalent of laughing while cola comes out your nose.
Ta da: a whole series called "Steve, Don't Eat It!" in which the eponymous* Steve tastes various "food delicacies" and writes about the experience — with pictures! Watch as Steve samples — to name just a few — pickled pork rinds (not the crunchy kind), "potted meat food product", fermented soy beans, and Cuitlacoche (also known as "corn must"). These "foods" need to be seen to be believed, although one would really prefer not to have seen them.
I have never had to eat anything as "delicate" as any of these so far as I can remember — which might, of course, mean that the experience was so awful that I've repressed all memory of it, although there was that time I got sick from eating too much peppermint ice cream, so that now the scent of creamy peppermint slightly nauseates me.
But it does put me in mind of two favorite "foods" that I used to find slightly mystifying:
- "Imitation Peanut Butter", whose only ingredients are peanuts and salt.#
- "American Style Pasteurized Process Cheese Food Product", which has the longest name of any "food product" I've ever seen, which in itself I find suspicious.
———-
*One so rarely gets to use a word like "eponymous", although it seems to pop up more than one might expect, leading one to think that people go out of their way to contrive a reason to use it. Rather like "palimpsest", which is really not at all interesting enough for metaphorical use as people seem to think it is. To my mind "palimpsest" is not nearly so useful a word as, say, "pentimento" which means nearly enough the same idea for metaphorical use.
#I realize now, of course, that this all has to do with federal standards for the labelling of foods and how, to be called "Peanut Butter", a product has to have less than a certain percentage of fat, which explains the name of this product which happened to have more than the allowed amount of fat in it, or maybe the other way around.
In: All, Curious Stuff, The Art of Conversation
Notes from Waxman's Office
With some regularity I get these interesting little statements from U.S. Representative Henry Waxman's Government Reform Minority Office. Here are the two most recent ones.
Permanent Estate Tax Repeal Would Save President, Cabinet Millions of Dollars
Monday, July 25, 2005 — Rep. Waxman has released a new fact sheet showing that a permanent estate tax repeal would favor the President, Vice President, and 11 cabinet members, saving them as much as $344 million dollars total.
$1.5 Billion Giveaway Secretly Slipped into Energy Bill
Wednesday, July 27, 2005 — In a letter to Speaker Hastert, Rep. Waxman writes that after the energy legislation was closed to further amendment in the recently concluded conference, a $1.5 billion provision benefiting oil and gas companies, Halliburton, and Sugar Land, Texas, was mysteriously inserted in the text.
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Pink Lemons
The inimitable snopes.com, on their "Unanswerables" page, lists these two items one after the other:
- I just read a blurb that pre-packaged foods can cause people to turn gay because of too much estrogen. If I was only allowed one question for snopes, I would ask if this is true. Is it?
- Does the color pink really make a person feel weaker?
What they overlook here is the obvious answer: that pink light entering the eye causes the hypothalmus (or one of those glands) to put out estrogen, making a person gay, which in turn makes them feel weaker.
Duh. Now, this item came immediately before the two above, but I'm not yet clear on its connection to the other two:
- Does urinating on a lemon tree make it grow quicker/better?
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
"Struggle" vs. "War"
WASHINGTON, July 25 – The Bush administration is retooling its slogan for the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, pushing the idea that the long-term struggle is as much an ideological battle as a military mission, senior administration and military officials said Monday.
In recent speeches and news conferences, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the nation's senior military officer have spoken of "a global struggle against violent extremism" rather than "the global war on terror," which had been the catchphrase of choice. Administration officials say that phrase may have outlived its usefulness, because it focused attention solely, and incorrectly, on the military campaign.
Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the National Press Club on Monday that he had "objected to the use of the term 'war on terrorism' before, because if you call it a war, then you think of people in uniform as being the solution." He said the threat instead should be defined as violent extremists, with the recognition that "terror is the method they use."
[Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, "U.S. Officials Retool Slogan for Terror War" New York Times, 25 July 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Such a Safer World Today
Jean Charles de Menezes: an unarmed, brown-skinned man from Brazil, shot five times in the head by British policemen who thought his coat was too bulky and might, therefore, be hiding something.
Which truly makes us less safe: terrorists, or the "war on terror" itself?
For a chilling examination of what unthinking, bigoted hysteria can lead to, I highly recommend Arthur Miller's short novel Focus, in which an unassuming office worker, living in Brooklyn towards the end of World War II, faces creeping anti-semitism after he buys eyeglasses that "make him look Jewish". The movie, starring William H. Macy, was also good.
An "Uncle Bruce"
Meanwhile, Rick Santorum, perhaps the most intolerant member of the Senate, turns out to have a gay chief of staff/communications director. When asked how a gay man could speak for someone with Santorum's record of homophobia, Robert Traynham said "Senator Santorum is a man of principle, he is a man who sticks up for what he believes in." Hmm. There has to be word for a gay Uncle Tom. Uncle Bruce? Mr. Traynham wins the weekly Uncle Bruce award.
[Gene Stone, "Flying Below the Gaydar", The Huffington Post, 21 July 2005.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Understanding vs. Control
I was struck today by another distinction between liberals and authoritarians that seems to summarize quite a few observations for me.
Liberals want to understand other people's behavior;
Authoritarians want to control other people's behavior.
The goal for the liberals then, seems to be to figure out things to do that will accommodate and acknowledge other people's behavioral realities. They don't always manage to accomplish this, but the attempt is the important part.
Authoritarians, on the other hand, see control as an accomplishment in itself, so what they set out to do is less important than that it manages to bring more people under their control.
There are, of course, corollaries. For instance:
Liberals are mystified by people whose behavior they can't understand;
Authoritarians are frustrated by the behavior of those they can't control.