Yesterday Uzbek photographer Umida Akhnedova was convicted of slandering and insulting her people. Her crime consisted of taking pictures, such as the one on the right, that government officials thought made Uzbekistan look bad. Among other things, The New York Times reports, Akhnedova was accused of “showing people with sour expressions or bowed heads, children in ragged clothing, old people begging for change or other images so dreary that, according to a panel of experts convened by the prosecutors, ‘a foreigner unfamiliar with Uzbekistan will conclude that this is a country where people live in the Middle Ages'” (a misleading impression, since the Spanish Inquisition never persecuted people for taking photographs). The government also charged that Akhnedova’s 2008 documentary about the Uzbek custom of verifying a bride’s virginity is “not in line with the requirements of ideology” and “promotes serious perversion in the young generation’s acceptance of cultural values.” Although her crime is punishable by up to three years in prison, the judge let her go, officially to celebrate the 18th anniversary of Uzbek independence but possibly also because the publicity surrounding the case was tarnishing Uzbekistan’s reputation (no mean feat).
Jacob Sullum, “One Frown Over the Line”, Hit and Run, 2010-02-11
February 11, 2010
QotD: Slandering and insulting Uzbekistan
February 10, 2010
QotD: The shop vac . . . of doom
Now that I have a manly garage, with a manly workbench, I was delighted to receive for Christmas a Shop Vac. It’s a magical device that sucks up all sorts of debris, even liquid. It has attachments for everything. I think one attachment is for haircuts, but I haven’t tried it yet. The Shop Vac is gray and black and reminds me of R2D2 so much that I expect it to jack into my breaker panels and reprogram my DVR.
My point is that my Shop Vac is totally awesome. That is, unless I try to move it. It has wheels, but at the first sign of movement, the Shop Vac starts squirming and tossing off attachments like a balloonist heading into a volcano. The hose becomes like a spastic elephant trunk. It will find all of the loose objects in your garage and fling them one-by-one into oil spills and darkened spider nests. If you focus your attention on the flailing vacuum hose, the power cord will wrap itself around your legs and try to trip you into the pyramid of old paint cans. And the screaming. Good lord, the little wheels scream on the concrete floor. It’s Shop Vac language for “LEAVE ME ALONE! DO NOT MOVE ME! I WILL KILL YOU WITH MY TENTACLE!”
The worst of it, if I can pick just one thing, is that the situation totally ruins my manly vibe. I live in fear that Shelly will come into the garage and see me losing a cage match to R2D2.
Scott Adams, “My Shop Vac”, Dilbert.com, 2010-02-10
February 9, 2010
QotD: “Environmentalism [is] like an intrusive state religion”
I’d heard some of this from my daughter before and had gotten used to the idea that she needed a little deprogramming from time to time. But as I listened to the rote repetition of a political agenda from children not old enough to read, I decided it was time for a word with the teacher. She wanted to know which specific points in the catechism I found objectionable. I declined to answer. As environmentalism becomes increasingly like an intrusive state religion, we dissenters become increasingly prickly about suggestions that we suffer from some kind of aberration.
The naive environmentalism of my daughter’s preschool is a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics.
Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. A proposal to pave a wilderness and put up a parking lot is an occasion for conflict between those who prefer wilderness and those who prefer convenient parking. In the ensuing struggle, each side attempts to impose its preferences by manipulating the political and economic systems. Because one side must win and one side must lose, the battle is hard-fought and sometimes bitter. All of this is to be expected.
But in the 25 years since the first Earth Day, a new and ugly element has emerged in the form of one side’s conviction that its preferences are Right and the other side’s are Wrong. The science of economics shuns such moral posturing; the religion of environmentalism embraces it.
Steven E. Landsburg, “Why I Am Not An Environmentalist: The Science of Economics Versus the Religion of Ecology”, excerpt from The Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life.
February 2, 2010
QotD: Who’s on for halftime? And what does it actually mean?
This year’s Super Bowl halftime act is The Who, a band that would be eligible for Medicare if its members were American — Roger Daltrey is 65, Pete Townshend is about to turn 65. Now, I like senior citizens who scream into microphones as much as the next guy, but isn’t the Super Bowl halftime format getting a bit geriatric? Last year we got Bruce Springsteen, age 60. The year before — Tom Petty, age 59. Yes, recent halftime shows have been more up-tempo than the 1970 Super Bowl halftime act: Carol Channing. But there have got to be some younger groups out there that merit the Super Bowl stage, and could broaden the appeal to those younger than the Baby Boomer demographic.
Surely The Who will sing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” When rock anthems are heard on television or in advertising, often they are electronically edited to emphasize well-known lines and downplay or delete anything that might make audiences uncomfortable. When this song is heard, the refrain “We won’t get fooled again!” is amped up — it sounds bold and defiant. Done away with are other lines such as “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” or “We’ll be fighting in the streets/with our children at our feet/and the morals that they worship will be gone.” And the following lyrics — what, exactly, do they mean? “I’ll move myself and my family aside/if we happen to be left half alive/I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky/for I know that the hypnotized never lie.” What does any of the song mean?
Originally, the song was received as anti-war or an extremely vague call to revolution. Some thinkers maintain the song is conservative — a disillusioned revolutionary declaring that street-protest tactics are useless. Townshend, who wrote the song, maintains the lyrics are apolitical, and mean, “Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.” Huh? My guess is that, like a lot of what was received as “deep” in this field — Bob Dylan’s music, some of Springsteen’s — the lyrics don’t have any coherent meaning, they’re just a bunch of interesting individual lines cobbled together. I wince to think that a billion people watching the halftime show will nod happily as the line “We won’t get fooled again!” echoes around the world, when the majority of those watching will, most assuredly, get fooled again.
Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ: Colts vs. Saints a contrast in styles”, ESPN Page 2, 2010-02-02
January 26, 2010
January 19, 2010
QotD: Time to panic
Jonathan Cohn headlines his latest plea to ignore a Brown win and pass health care anyway “Pelosi Isn’t Panicking. Her Party Should Listen.” Umm, call me cynical, but maybe the reason Pelosi isn’t panicking is that Pelosi’s got one of the safest seats in the country? I mean, take this for what it’s worth but if Brown wins today, my advice to Blanche Lincoln, and Ben Nelson, and their counterparts in the house? You should panic. They’re coming for you next.
Hell, If I were Blanche Lincoln, anyone in the leadership who wanted to get me to the floor for a health care vote would have to pry me out of the darkened room where they’d find me huddled in the corner, rocking back and forth and crying. Maybe Cohn’s right and the thing’s too far gone to save, so you might as well vote for it anyway. But that’s not exactly soothing, is it?
Megan McArdle, “Time to Panic”, Asymmetrical Information, 2010-01-19
January 18, 2010
QotD: Haiti was already in trouble before the earthquake
For the past several days, I have found myself unable to look at the photographs from Haiti. I have also found that when I start reading an article datelined Port-au-Prince, I have to force myself to read to the end of it. I have donated money to Doctors Without Borders, on the grounds that it has been in Haiti a long time and will be able to use the cash quickly. However, I have no illusions about my tiny donation, or about the organization’s ability to help. I have no illusions about anyone’s ability to help, for this is not just a natural disaster: It is a man-made disaster first and foremost, and so it will remain.
Though the earthquake was a powerful one, its impact was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of rule of law in Haiti. As Roger Noriega has written, “You can literally see [the] dysfunction from space”: Satellite photos of Hispaniola, the island split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, show green forests on the Dominican side and bare, deforested hills on the Haitian side. Mudslides and collapsing houses were routine in Haiti, even before this disaster. Laws designed to prevent erosion, and building codes designed to prevent criminally shoddy construction, were ignored. The rickety slums of Port-au-Prince were constructed in ravines and on steep, unstable hills. When they collapsed, they collapsed completely.
So weak were Haiti’s public institutions, literally and figuratively, that nothing is left of them, either. Parliament, churches, hospitals, and government offices no longer exist. The archbishop is dead. The head of the U.N. mission is dead. There is a real possibility that violent gangs will emerge to take their place, to control food supplies, to loot what remains to be looted. There is a real possibility, within the coming days, of epidemics, mass starvation, and civil war.
Anne Applebaum, “Haiti Is a Man-Made Disaster: Recovery will require a profound cultural and political change”, Slate, 2010-01-16
January 15, 2010
QotD: I am ANCHORMAN!
For the last 30 years, I’ve devoted the better part of my life to frightening you, trying my best to make you believe that you are weak, vulnerable, dependent and at risk. I know what’s good for you. You don’t. I’ve tried hard for three decades to defy the laws of nature and return you to infancy, cradled in your mommy’s arm, suckling at her breast, all warm and cozy, not a care in the world. I am the tip of the spear of the liberal nanny state. I am ANCHORMAN!
An Anonymous Anchorman, “Secrets of TV news: Confessions of an anchorman”, The Daily Call, 2010-01-15
January 9, 2010
QotD: The awfulness of airports
Over the weekend, an idiot walked the wrong way through a secure exit for arriving passengers at Newark airport. An entire terminal was shut down so that everybody on the “sterile” side of the security barriers could be herded back out and rescreened. The entire process took just under seven hours. The cascading delays disrupted air travel worldwide. They didn’t even catch the doofus who caused the ruckus. No doubt, if they’d announced his location over the paging system, he’d have been drawn and quartered by a mob of traveling salesmen from 3M and a gaggle of middle-school girls returning from a volleyball tournament.
Now, I should back up. When I referred to the “sterile” side of the security barrier, I was using the term narrowly, to refer to folks who’d been through the metal detectors. Because to use the word “sterile” in its usual context in a sentence with “airports” — those belching Petri dishes of bathroom effluence and unidentifiable noisome miasma — would be a grotesque abrogation of journalistic trust.
According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene. USA Today recently surveyed the health-inspection records of airport restaurants and found that serious code violations were as commonplace as rat and mouse droppings; 77 percent of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport had at least one major violation.
I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.
Jonah Goldberg, “A No-Fly List? Count Me In: Flying before 9/11 was already awful, and it has only become worse”, National Review, 2010-01-08
January 6, 2010
I didn’t think that was what “tolerance” was supposed to mean
Rondi Adamson posted an interesting Martin Amis quote:
I just transcribed and edited a speech Martin Amis gave in Toronto recently. The whole thing was wonderful, but this — about Islamic fascism — was the best line:
I have to take my hat off to the left in that they have found something to defend in a movement that is racist, misogynist, homophobic, totalitarian, inquisitorial, imperialist and genocidal. Perhaps it’s their view on usury that is attractive to the left — low interest rates or non-existent interest rates.
January 5, 2010
QotD: What will be the big inane fears of the Twenty-teens?
What will be the great hysterical fears of the coming decade? By definition, such worries need to be simultaneously undocumentable and just plausible enough to convince politicians, celebrities, civic do-gooders, captains of industry and media types that our very society hangs in the balance.
For a classic example, think back to the 1980s, when Tipper Gore, the wife of then-Sen. Al Gore, helped form the Parents Music Resource Center and addressed the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation regarding the pressing topic of sexual, violent and occult imagery in pop music. As Mrs. Gore wrote in her best-selling (and now hard-to-find) 1987 book “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society,” “By using satanic symbols on the concert stage, and album covers, such as those used by Ozzy Osbourne…certain heavy metal bands lure teenagers into what one expert has called ‘the cult of the eighties.’ Many kids experiment with the deadly satanic game, and get hooked.”
It is probably only thanks to the intervention of the Gores that we managed as a country to wrestle free both of Beelzebub’s and Ronnie James Dio’s bony grasp. Which, it’s worth adding, might have been preferable to that of Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner.
Nick Gillespie, “Don’t Fear The 2010s! Embrace the coming decade’s new distractions and overblown worries”, Reason, 2010-01-05
December 31, 2009
Gerard van der Leun was right
Back in 2005, I grabbed this as a quote of the day, and it’s on the verge of becoming true today:
On my first flight to Europe, everyone dressed for success. Now everyone dresses for Gold’s Gym. And I’m sure the next step in TOTAL SECURITY will be to require everyone who is not of Arab descent to arrive with a note from their doctor attesting that they had a high colonic an hour before the airport to make the body cavity searches a bit more pleasant for the staff. Then there’s the added coach thrill of a blood clot developing in the legs that stops your heart at 50,000 feet. Plus . . . no peanuts! After all, think of the allergic children! Add to that the new innovation, no pillows! I don’t see why the airlines don’t simply install hooks and, working in concert with government’s laughable security cops, require everyone to hang from said hooks naked. It will come to that. You know it will.
December 26, 2009
QotD: Soccer
Over the years I have argued that football is a stupid game in which 22 overpaid nancy boys with idiotic hair run around a field attempting to kick an inflated sheep’s pancreas into some netting while an audience of several thousand van drivers beat one another over the head with bottles and chairs.
Nor could I understand how someone from Tooting could possibly support, say, Manchester United, a team sponsored by those hateful bastards at AIG and made up of players from Portugal, France, Holland and, in the case of Wayne Rooney, Walt Disney. Where’s the connection? What’s the point?
I have also suggested that it’s preposterous to have football stadiums in the middle of cities. Why should anyone be delayed by match traffic just so a handful of thugs can watch a Brazilian man falling over?
And as for those people who can’t cope if their team loses. Give me strength. If you get all teary-eyed just because someone from Latvia, playing in a town you’ve never been to, for an Arab you’ve never met, against some Italians you hate for no reason, has missed a penalty, how are you going to manage when you are diagnosed with cancer?
Jeremy Clarkson, “You’re a bunch of overpaid nancies – and I love you: Why should anyone be held up by match traffic just so some thugs can watch a Brazilian man falling over?”, Times Online, 2009-03-22
December 23, 2009
QotD: College football and graduation rates
In college news, TMQ contends that football-factory coaches emphasize winning above all else because there is no reward for academic outcomes. Cory Scott of Ambler, Pa., notes this column by Jay Paterno, the quarterbacks coach at Penn State and Joe’s son, proposing that academic success be added as a factor in the BCS formula. If it were a factor, Jay Paterno finds, Alabama would still be in the title game next month — but facing TCU rather than Texas. Here, Lindsey Luebchow of Yale Law School takes a similar approach with her third annual Academic BCS rankings. Luebchow analyzes the top 25 football schools at season’s end and factors in both graduation numbers and the NCAA’s “academic progress rate.” Looked at this way, with more classroom emphasis than Paterno’s ranking, the BCS Championship Game would pit Penn State against Stanford — while Texas, with horrible academic stats for football, plummets all the way down from No. 2 to No. 25 and an appearance in TMQ’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback Bowl Presented by TMQ.
Paterno and Luebchow are on to something big. The BCS is all about elaborate computer formulas. Football-factory coaches and boosters often claim for the sake of show they care about academics. Make it official — add academic measures to the BCS computer formula! Do this, and within a single year there would be intense focus on classroom performance at every BCS-hopeful school. This isn’t a whimsical idea, it is a perfectly serious and practical idea — if the NCAA and the BCS want to prove they’re not just moving their mouths when they say they care about GPAs and graduation.
Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas'”, ESPN Page Two, 2009-12-22
December 22, 2009
QotD: Say goodbye to “global warming” and “climate change”
This new terminology is more clever, for it neatly avoids the shortcomings of its clumsy forebears. It requires neither warming, nor change. Just television.
When blizzards descend on scientists and world leaders from Copenhagen to East Anglia to Washington, the warmists can now claim ownership.
When hurricane forecasts fall short of the mark, the propagandists can cite their very failure to support their scheme.
Warm winters, cold winters, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, growing ice caps, melting ice caps — directions won’t matter. Every “new” temperature record, every seasonal flood, every California hot spell, every dusting of snow in the south of France — in other words, local weather, reported globally, will return full force as evidence of anthropogenic climate crime, as it did in a simpler time when the ice conditions of a canal in Ottawa led to nationwide panic.
So, get ready to welcome the new talking point on the block: “climate instability“.
Kate McMillan, “Y2Kyoto: Climate Instability Just Around The Corner”, Small Dead Animals 2009-12-20
