Posted January 20
Here's something a bit silly; the British government appears to be considering banning giant candy bars. (I guess you'll still be allowed to buy two of the regular size, though). I've certainly often argued that the nutritional information on the back of those things (ditto the "Big Grab" of doritoes, the 1 liter Coke, etc.) should treat the whole thing as one serving on the empirical grounds that not once has anyone ever shared a "Big Grab" with 2.3 friends. We all know that they hire gnomes to determine serving sizes. "Well Binky, you've had half a can of Coke and about 11 chips. How do you feel?" "Binky too full now." "Super!" (Scientist writes on clipboard, 1 serving = 4 oz, 11 chips.) Does it make sense for it to be illegal to manufacture and sell large candy bars, though? I'm inclined to say it's obviously ridiculous, invasive, and treats people like morons with a terminal free will deficit. And of course, you can just get two candy bars, as I noted. I wonder though, as a practical matter, would total candy, etc. consumption actually go down? People do just tend to eat whatever the package contains and be satisfied; I know I do. If so, banning supersizing would be a cheap and effective, if evil and nanny state-ish, intervention. And although Cadbury's freedom to sell whatever products it wanted would be impinged, candy-eaters could go on eating just that same amount of candy, if they wished, by buying two small candy bars and eating only part of the second one. Hmm, it would cost more, though. Maybe I should abandon my devil's advocacy and return to the position that it's a ridiculous idea. And it does make you kind of worry that next it will be illegal to sell candy bars, period.


Posted January 20
Well, I couldn't agree more about the "conservative" thing (see below). Who is more accurately described as standing athwart history and shouting "Stop" than someone who is all athwart and shouting "Turn Back", i.e., actually wants to return to the society of the 8th century? And didn't there used to be a group of ultra-conservative House Republicans who called themselves the taliban or mujihadeen or something, back in those bygone Gingrich days? I know, it was Shiites. Guess they've let that drop quietly...hmm, now I can't find any "Shiite" references on-line that aren't insulting, i.e. applied by others to the Republicans, as here (scroll down) discussing Newsweek's Feb 6 1995 cover article ("Shiites of the House"). But I'm positive some of them adopted it in a transvaluing values way. If I were Jonah Goldberg, and/or had any readers, I'd get someone to find it for me. Damn..


Posted January 20
Instapundit links to a Justin Katz blog-essay, 'the depth of conservatism' in the Middle East. The thesis - I think - is that it is rather silly for news articles, et. al., to identify Saudi (also Pakistani) fundamentalist religious-types as 'conservative'. The problem - I think - is supposed to be that none of these people are going to vote GOP this decade; ergo, they can't REALLY be 'conservative'.

A rather silly piece of failed media-criticism, this.

Unreconstructed liberal apologist Roger Scruton exposes the fallacy a full month and a half in advance, on the pages of that liberal rag, the Wall Street Journal. And I quote:

It is a tautology to say that a conservative is a person who wants to conserve things; the question is what things? To this I think we can give a simple one-word answer, namely: us. At the heart of every conservative endeavor is the effort to conserve a historically given community. In any conflict the conservative is the one who sides with "us" against "them"--not knowing, but trusting. He is the one who looks for the good in the institutions, customs and habits that he has inherited. He is the one who seeks to defend and perpetuate an instinctive sense of loyalty, and who is therefore suspicious of experiments and innovations that put loyalty at risk.

So defined, conservatism is less a philosophy than a temperament; but it is, I believe, a temperament that emerges naturally from the experience of society, and which is indeed necessary if societies are to endure. The conservative strives to diminish social entropy. The second law of thermodynamics implies that, in the long run, all conservatism must fail. But the same is true of life itself, and conservatism might equally be defined as the social organism's will to live.

One is almost embarrassed to pull the thread through and tie it back, but - well, pixels are cheap. In any war of 'us' versus 'them', there are - what with the perspectival nature of the business - two 'us'es and two 'them's. Ergo, there is nothing even mildly eyebrow-raising about the prospect of conservatives being at odds or at war. (One perennial conservative strategy, in the face of pressure to change, is to export the sources of pressure. Cf. Many chapters from the history of European colonization, imperialism, and related topics. The Saudi strategy fits in here nicely. Unrest at home? Make it someone else's problem by directing attention outwards.)

Even if one wishes to articulate a sense of 'conservative' on which it designates, give or take, the electoral base of the Republican party, it ought to be apparent Scruton's sense of the term is serviceable, intuitive, indeed nose-bleedingly obvious on a moment's reflection, and - this is really the point - no sort of below-the-belt blow to Dubya and co.

I think Katz is mostly irked by what he perceives as a not-so-subtle attempt to draw an illegitimate moral equivalence between the forces of Dubya and the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. And maybe the authors of the pieces he quotes actually intend for that cheeky, illegitimate equivalence to be drawn. But Scruton's point - surely a good one - is that the fallacy does not come with the step at which the Saudi's are labeled 'conservative'. The fallacy derives from supposing the conservative temperament is, per se, an infallible ethical compass: pointing ever and only to good or else to evil.

Final caveat: upon rereading, it would appear that somehow Mr. Katz wishes the accent to fall on the adverb, 'deeply'. It is wrong to describe the Saudi's, Pakistanis, et. al., as deeply conservative. But. . . well, I guess I don't get it. If it is perfectly in order to call them 'conservative', which it is; and if they are deeply so, which they are. . . well, whatever.

Love ya, honey.

Posted January 17
OK, just one final note on this token blogging day (don't want to give up before we even start, after all): Zen Buddists apologize for violent militarism of the past The money quote is about a disappointed Nebraskan beatnik convert who: "embraced Zen in 1961, partly because he believed its history was free of the violent conflicts that had marked Western religion." Man, I didn't know half this stuff.

Posted January 17
I was going to mock these people, and tell them to just turn the lights off in their nine-year-old's room if he keeps reading way past bedtime. But maybe my get-tough admonitions lack plausibility, given that I wake up to breastfeed my daughter about 6 times a night.

Posted January 17
What do some crazy people think about some other crazy people? Find out what UFOlogists, psychics, and a man who communicates regularly with the spirit of Nez Perce Chief Joseph think about Raelians.

Posted January 16
Speaking of being full of shit, how about that Segway inventor Dean Kamen! Yeah, I'm going to totally change the world and the architecture of modern cities and everything...with my super-secret invention, code-named Ginger. It's so secret I can't tell anyone, and I'm going to stir up mad speculation about anti-gravity and whatnot. That went on for months...and then it turned out to be...wait for it...a scooter. OK, I guess it's kind of a cool scooter. So cool that the United States Postal Service is getting its collective elephantine thighs on board to avoid having to talk those pesky routes, which are often ten blocks square. And how cool does something have to be for the USPS to get involved? Wow. Rock on, guy.

So, now everyone can relax. We found those 30 vials of plague.

White House: We Can't Balance the Budget This Decade. Pretty much says it all, right?

And, in further shocking news, it turns out Leona Helmsley is a total bitch. Go figure.

Finally, in a local interest story, durian grounds plane.


Posted later that same day...January 16
Happily, that cool project to give Laotians pedal-powered, internet-connected computers has reached its short-term goal of $10,000 in donations and can go forward. Hit and Run will tell you all about it. On the whole, they have a nice, amusing blog. But they are also smug libertarians, and thus they also think foolish things, as in this post, in which they scoff at the NYT's (perfectly true) contention that children would eat more vegetables in their school lunches if they were fresh, local and prepared with a modicum of skill. They do not even address the article's example, a school in Opelika, Alabama which uses local produce like butterbeans....mmmm...and turnip greens...[insert Homer drooling/gagging noise]. The school employees say kids eat up those veggies with abandon, while they used to turn up their noses at canned green beans or whatever. I mean, how unutterably vile are reheated canned peas? The Hit and Run commenters also falsely claim that the nutritional value of canned vegetables is equivalent to that of fresh. Then they just blame the parents for not providing lunches from home and relying on the tax-extorting nanny-state to feed their children lunch at school.. And what vegetables, exactly, can homemade lunches contain? Cold broccoli? Cold butterbeans, even? I think not. Nothing but raw carrots and celery, and the lettuce on your sandwich really make the trip all that well, and even these stalwarts incline to wilting. So, the libertarians full of shit, basically.

Posted January 16
Well, I don't want us to look like big retards at the beginning of our blog, so I'll clean up all this "testing, testing" stuff and start afresh. By linking to Lileks again just to reiterate how great he is. (Saying "testing, testing" just reminds me of how glad I am never to have heard those fateful words "brace, brace" while on a plane.)

But what should I link to next? Well, here is a nice article by one of the non-Eugene Volokhs about the maxim that n guilty men should go free rather than one innocent be punished. It is old but that wacky nonagenarian homophobe John Derbyshire brought it to my attention. And why was I reading the National Review's blog anyway? I feel so dirty.

And it's only right that I point out that Lileks has a column, too. Umm...umm...the Instapundit? No, wait, I can do better than this.

Have you ever wondered what it's like in the musty old stacks full of bound back issues of the Journal of Organic Chemistry? Probably quite a few times, right? Derek Lowe will tell you all about it.

OK, OK. The actual big news in the Blog-O-Sphere tm is that the Supreme Court has rejected Eldred 7-2 (!) and we are all stuck in Disney hell for an apparently infinite period of time. (Which, however, is stipulated to be a limited period of time. I guess the Supremes decided that even a thousand years would qualify, and who are they to argue with the ghost of Sonny Bono, anyway?) Here is a link to a cartoon version of the tragedy.

There is a bogus "free speech" controversy at Berkeley, which you can read about in the NYT or with comments here by Eugene Volokh. Help, I'm being repressed!

That's all for now, because the baby is here and wants to do nursing while watching movies. I love you, sole reader!