And... "definitive definition" — isn't that a funny term? It should be a redundancy. If it's a definition at all, it should necessarily be definitive. If he can't give a definitive definition, he's not giving a definition at all, one would think. He's eschewing definition. He wants people to give diverse and contradictory meanings to the term used to name the show at his museum.
This is either the getting of wisdom — or the gradual shutting down of (what to call it?) one's social and engagement functions as one gets closer to in-turnedness of dying, the inability of the aging to take in new stuff because we are too occupied trying to process the accumulation of the previous decades.
On August 19th, Justice Kennedy gave an address that included an interesting passing remark about the role of blogs. Justice Kennedy was talking about how law review case comments generally come out too late to be of use to the Court (especially in the context of deciding whether to grant certiorari in a case). As a result, when Justice Kennedy asks his clerks to look to see what the law reviews have said about a particular case, there isn't any commentary yet. Justice Kennedy adds: "I've found, what my clerks do now, when they have interesting cases — They read blogs."
This means that the lawprofs who keep up high-profile blogs have disproportionate influence. You have traditional lawprofs laboring over law review articles, but these articles come of too late to discuss a case that's pending in the Supreme Court. One answer — I'm not the first to say this* — is that law review articles should properly be about something other than the latest pending or just-decided cases, something more timeless and profound. But I think that most law professors would like to be involved in the legal developments of the day. It must be irritating to see that the lawprof bloggers have a special line to the Court.
This may stir up an old question that I know nags at some law professors: Will I be required to blog? Very soon after I started blogging, I heard the question Is it acceptable for lawprofs to blog? and then, right after that, the question Will I be required to blog? jumped up. In the minds of some non-blogging lawprofs, it preceded the question Is it good for lawprofs to blog? — which seemed like a more appropriate question to me. But I can see why someone with a legal mind would ask Will I be required to blog? before Is it good for lawprofs to blog? It's the same reason lawyers think What do I want the answer to be? before they try to figure out what the answer is.
Anyway, Justice Kennedy's remark shows why it's good for lawprofs to blog, but it would be ridiculous to require lawprofs to blog. Wouldn't it? Or is it ridiculous to require lawprofs to write law review articles?
... but that was a weird experience. The music is the most heavy-handed kind of movie music, the stuff you hear in trailers for very big-budget sci-fi. Perhaps Hillary is a big-budget sci-fi project. Ever thought of it/her that way?
In any case, it's not Hillary presenting herself as a candidate, of course. Not overtly anyway. But she is a 2012 candidate, isn't she?
Nice — evil? — viral video for getting people to promote the cause of "Do Not Track Me" legislation. Via Wired:
It's not the first anti-Google antic from the group, which is largely funded by legal fees, the Rose Foundation, Streisand Foundation, Tides Foundation and others. Last month the group announced it had parked outside lawmakers' Washington-area residences to determine whether they had unsecured Wi-Fi networks that might have been sniffed by Google as part of the internet giant's Street View and Google Maps program.
What will it take for the media to notice how pathetically laughable it is to say the bad news is better than what was expected? How long will this go on? It's getting surreal!
"This morning, new figures show the economy produced 67,000 private sector jobs in August, the eighth consecutive month of private job growth. Additionally, the numbers for July were revised upward to 107,000. Now that's positive news, and it reflects the steps we've already taken to break the back of this recession."
Do you live there Ann? No. So its actually none of your business. So you should just shut up about it.
I however, DO vote in that district. I own property in that district. That is MY community board. And I wholeheartedly support that mosque. The vast majority of those in that district support the mosque. And there is another mosque just one block away.
And it is not the Ground Zero Mosque. You can't even see the mosque from Ground Zero.
There was zero controversy about this mosque until the bigots made a stink about this. And yes, you're siding with the bigots now.
Obviously you no zilch about New York City. You have no connections to New York City. You are not a voter in New York City.
This mosque is trying to build bridges with the community. That means community board #1, who support this.
It certain does not mean YOU or Sarah Palin's "fake America".
So the bigots should just mind their own business.
Muslims in Community Board #1 have the right to pray in their neighborhood.
On the other hand, this commenter (downtownlad) can say the poll supports his position. If you break out Manhattan, 51% support the mosque and 41% oppose it.
***
And while we're on the subject of the mosque, did you hear Mark Steyn on the subject (as he was guest-hosting on the Rush Limbaugh show yesterday)? I can't find a transcript or long enough audio clip. He doesn't so much care about building the mosque. He's more concerned with the failure to rebuild on the WTC site and where Imam Rauf gets his money. Perhaps opposition to the mosque is displaced disappointment with America's failure to demonstrate its strength and its values with a dramatic, finished, brilliant architectural achievement that dominates lower Manhattan. It's been 10 years."RUSS FEINGOLD IS dodging Obama in Wisconsin." Instapundit interprets the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's bland report: "A Labor Day schedule released by the staff of U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) indicates that while Feingold will be in Milwaukee for a Laborfest pre-parade on Monday morning, he will not be in town when Obama is expected to arrive."In the Purple Garden...
... you can exaggerate all you want."[C]ovetousness, schadenfreude, anxiety, dread, and on and on." "It's the frequent fruitlessness of such feelings that the Buddha is said to have pondered after he unplugged from the social grid of his day — that is, the people he lived around — and wandered off to reckon with the human predicament. Maybe his time off the grid gave him enough critical distance from these emotions to discover his formula for liberation from them. In any event, it's because the underlying emotions haven't changed, and because the grid conveys and elicits them with such power, that his formula holds appeal for many people even, and perhaps especially, today."
A New Jersey woman is devastated that her precious sports car -- just repaired and fully gassed up -- was wrecked by a suicidal man's 40-story attempted death leap on the Upper West Side.
"I miss it. It's my baby," moaned Maria McCormack, who regrets lending her husband the 2008 Dodge Charger Tuesday for work. "I want to meet [Tom Magill] and say, 'Why? Why my car out of all the cars in the city?' "
It's not that she thinks he has an answer, like he picked her car, she just wants to say "Why? Why?" at him.
"I wonder how he feels now that he made it. Does he feel like an idiot?" said Maria. "I hope he's OK. But I just want to know why."
Well, Magill is in the hospital after having rods inserted in his legs and some operation to "relieve the clotting" in his groin, so maybe you could go over there and interrogate him about whether he feels like an idiot.
If you think this sounds like an episode of "Seinfeld," it's "The Bris":
"Well, I just got the estimate. It's going to cost more to fix that roof than the car's worth... Someone's paying for that damage and it's not gonna be me.... swan dives from twenty floors, lands right on to it. What do I have a bulls eye on there? He couldn't move over two feet? Land on the sidewalk. That's city property. What are the chances, what are the odds? He couldn't do it again if his life depended on it..."
Seriously, what is wrong with this woman? That is scary.
(Via Memeorandum.)"Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn"... ... is a funny title for an article, written by the author of "Sex at Dawn," which book title he declines to put in italics or quotes in his article title. I thought it would be interesting to discuss sex at dawn, in the literal sense, but I find myself confronted with an author who's miffed at a blogger who's dissing his book:
Her comments begin strangely, with the admission that she's "in the middle" of the book. Note the urgency to condemn it publicly, even before reading the damned thing!
Oh, blah! I hate this criticism. McArdle is blogging, not doing the official book review for the Atlantic. A rule against criticizing books you haven't finished would overprotect authors, since you shouldn't finish a bad book, and it would also underprotect authors, since the critics wouldn't disclose that they hadn't read the whole thing.
But bloggers... bloggers can open a book to a random page, read one sentence, cogitate furiously, then open up their laptops — maybe right there at Borders, where they picked up the book they didn't buy — and tap out a free-association blog post saying anything that occurs to them and publish — using the WiFi they didn't pay for either. It's not the slightest bit strange. And it's not unfair either. It is what it is, and we know what it is. It's blogging.
And boy, does she lash out:
• "It reads like horsefeathers . . . like an undergraduate thesis,"
• "breathless rather than scientific"
• "cherry-picked evidence stretched far out of shape to support their theory,"
• "they don't even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory."
Ouch! And that's just the first paragraph.
Eh! There are only 4 paragraphs. By the way, "their theory" — if I can trust McArdle — is that "people are naturally polyamorous." The dispute continues with McArdle and the author (Christopher Ryan) throwing shit at each other in a fight about whether people are like bonobos. I'm just saying "throwing shit at each other" because that's how bonobos fight, and people are like bonobos, right? Not right? Advantage McArdle!!!!!
Anyway, as you've probably figured out by now, the book is not about sex at dawn — the practice of having sex upon first awakening in the morning — but sex and evolution — "dawn" in the sense of "the dawn of man."
So where am I going with this? It's a blog post. I'm a blogger. I'll go where I want, which is where I always go when this subject comes up, and I don't feel safe in this conversation no more...
When she and her colleagues [on the Council of Economic Advisers] began work, she acknowledged, they did not realize "how quickly and strongly the financial crisis would affect the economy." They "failed to anticipate just how violent the recession would be."
Even now, Romer said, mystery persists. "To this day, economists don't fully understand why firms cut production as much as they did or why they cut labor so much more than they normally would." Her defense was that "almost all analysts were surprised by the violent reaction."
Yes, we've noticed that every damned thing that happens is declared "unexpected."
That miscalculation, in turn...
What miscalculation?
... led to her miscalculation that the stimulus package would be enough to keep the unemployment rate from exceeding 8 percent. Without the policy, she had predicted, unemployment would soar to 9.5 percent. The plan passed, and unemployment went to 10 percent.
Unexpectedly and mystifyingly, it was quite a surprise.
No wonder most Americans think the effort failed. But Romer argued, a bit too defensively, against the majority perception. "As the Council of Economic Advisers has documented in a series of reports to Congress, there is widespread agreement that the act is broadly on track," she declared.
The act is broadly on track is a helpful thing to believe if you want to experience every bit of bad news as a surprise.
Further, she argued, "I will never regret trying to put analysis and quantitative estimates behind our policy recommendations."
What?! I guess Romer, writing her speech, didn't predict the embarrassing ways those words would could be read. Surprise! Among the negative interpretations available for those words are: 1. They started with the policy preferences, then rustled up the numbers to support it, and 2. They had to choose what to put first, policy choices or professional analysis, and they chose policy choices.
But the problem is not that Romer did a quantitative analysis; the problem is that the quantitative analysis was wrong.
Well, if you did the quantitative analysis in order to support the policy preference you put first, then it's not... surprising that that your quantitative analysis was second-rate."Red meat, white meat, blue meat, meat-o-f**king-rama. You will eat it. Because not eating meat is a decision." "Eating meat is an instinct! Yeah! And I know what it's about. 'I don't want to eat the meat because I love the animals. I love the animals.' Hey, I love the animals too. I love my doggy. He's so cute. My fluffy little dog... He's so cute — There's the problem. We only want to save the cute animals, don't we? Yeah. Why don't we just have animal auditions. Line 'em up one by one and interview them individually. 'What are you?' 'I'm an otter.' 'And what do you do?' 'I swim around on my back and do cute little human things with my hands.' 'You're free to go.' 'And what are you?' 'I'm a cow.' 'Get in the f**king truck, ok pal!' 'But I'm an animal.' 'You're a baseball glove! Get on that truck!'"
