Mysteries of the Althouse house.

You know, there are some strange corners to the Althouse house. But I'm about to put the place on the market, so I've got to eradicate the strange. I've made the studio and the room we call outer space into normal house-parts. Now to the basement, where a lot of music has been played over the years. The bands have left so many signs:











I've got so much work to do here, and there's another, messier half of the basement that I'm not even showing you. It's over there by the garage. Oh, let's take a look at the garage, because seeing it makes me feel good. I got it nearly completely cleared out last Wednesday. Here's the most interesting thing I found in there:



A relic of an old concert-party. And, no, I didn't paint that. This guy did. Well, it's a little spooky down here. Time to go upstairs and work on one of the closets for a while. There are piles of stuff and also stuff in boxes. Some of the boxes even have labels. But some of the labels are mysterious:

Losing my edge... getting it back.

I've taken maybe ten thousand photographs since I first got a digital camera in March 2004, but I had never printed a single one. Has anyone else ever gone so long without printing anything? (Once someone printed one for me.) I finally chose a few to have printed through Flickr. They arrived in the mail, I looked at them and was nauseated by how dead they looked. I was horrified. I finally accessed the rational part of my mind and could ask: Did they trim off the edges? I went to my Flickr page and looked at the originals. Yes, they'd trimmed off the edges -- not much, but enough to wreck the meaning of every picture for me. I am appalled by the insulting assumption that a photographer is just looking at the center of the picture and does not frame a composition and carefully place things at the corners and edges. What I have here is a despicable, insipid, disgusting stack of glossy paper.

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

Teaching kids to confront their teachers in the classroom:

Evangelist Ken Ham smiled at the 2,300 elementary students packed into pews, their faces rapt. With dinosaur puppets and silly cartoons, he was training them to reject much of geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology as a sinister tangle of lies.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

The children roared their assent.

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

"Who's the only one who knows everything?"

"God!"

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

Nothing like teaching critical thinking.

"You took my childhood."

Said Bruce Jackson to his adoptive mother Vanessa Jackson at her sentencing hearing, where Vanessa faced the four sons she had starved, including Bruce, who, when he was taken from her at age 19, had weighed only 45 pounds. In the last 27 months, he has gained 95 pounds and grown 15 inches. He is now 5'3" tall.

Olympics: The Opening Ceremonies.

Are you watching the opening ceremonies? The ladies in dresses shaped like the Alps, the disco music, the nations with only one or a few athletes who -- the voiceover tells us -- have no hope of winning... It's kind of sweet, isn't it?

"A column is not a 750 word transcription of your id."

TNR's Keelin McDonell just hates Sarah Vowell's NYT op-eds. (If you have a TNR subscription, you can read his piece here.) Excerpt:

Vowell has made her own politics perfectly clear--"I am a capital-D Democrat"--but her allegiance is to whimsy. Not humor, which might expose the ridiculous, but whimsy, which merely makes light of it. And she is a true partisan. Of deaths caused by AIDS and poverty in Africa, she indignantly notes that it's "literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard." Literally? Dumbest? Really? Even the most correct of sentiments cannot withstand expression in such juvenile terms. Other times, Vowell simply free associates her way to a theory. What does she think of the Supreme Court ruling that allowed the Texas State Capitol to display a Ten Commandments statue? Well, "[t]he other night I was flipping channels and..." I'll spare you the next two paragraphs and tell you that our intrepid columnist discovered that human nature is imperfect.

It sounds bloggy to me. Get used to it. This is the way people will write about politics in the future. The Times needs to appeal to younger readers, and that means the regular slots on the op-ed page when they open up are going to go to people like Vowell, and not to older writers who've built their reputations by following the established conventions of column writing. And this has to be what's really bugging McDonell so much. Hear his pain:

Vowell's qualifications for the job are limited. She has spent nearly ten years as a commentator on the radio show "This American Life," where she applies what the San Francisco Chronicle has called her "nasal and high-pitched, somewhere in the neighborhood of Bart Simpson's sister Lisa" voice to programs about popular culture and history. She has published four books of humorous essays. She is young and has appeared on "The Daily Show." She is popular. But in all these successes she has not, so far as I can detect, demonstrated a sophisticated or, for that matter, unique, grasp of current events. This did not prevent the Times from recruiting Vowell to fill the pages of, as she calls it, "the most uppity newspaper in the world."

Is her voice even relevant or is McDonell just irritated? Actually, it is relevant, because there are already podcasts of the columns, and in the future, we'll want to hear the columnist and not just an actor doing the reading. Four books of humorous essays? That's a limited qualification for writing essays? Really, McDonell is quite ridiculous.

"Writing palindromes ... It's like the opposite of a guitar."

Says comedian and former NYU law student Demetri Martin. About quitting law school, he says:

The first week, I remember thinking: "OK, this cool. I get it: You analyze the case, find the issues, apply the rule, draw a conclusion. Cool, I get this." But that was week one. Then, at week two, I was like, "That's it?" And by week three I was like: "This sucks. I'm bored. This is so detail-oriented. I'm not a detail person."

Yikes. Me, I'm in decade three.

"Is the Second Amendment Still Embarrassing (and for Whom)?"

Reprinting an announcemnt:

The Undergraduate Legal Studies Program and
the Institute for Legal Studies at the Law School
announce the following Harris Lecture and panel discussion
open to faculty, students, and the public:

Is the Second Amendment Still Embarrassing (and for Whom)?

by
Sanford Levinson
Noted Second Amendment and Constitutional Scholar
University of Texas School of Law

Friday, February 17, 2006 at 4:00 p.m.
Godfrey and Kahn Hall (Room 2260)
University of Wisconsin Law School

This lecture is made possible through the generous support
of the Audrey J. Harris Legal Studies Endowment.

The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Donald Downs, Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism and Director of the Legal Studies Program and the Criminal Justice Certificate Program. Panelists include Ann Althouse, Robert W. and Irma Arthur-Bascom Professor of Law; John Sharpless, Professor of History; and Howard Schweber, Assistant Professor of Political Science.

Sanford Levinson (JD 1973, Stanford; PHD 1969, Harvard; AB 1962, Duke University) is the W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and Professor of Government at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law. He joined the University of Texas Law School in 1980. Previously a member of the Department of Politics at Princeton University, he is also a Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Texas. The author of over 200 articles in professional and more popular journals, Levinson is also book author of Constitutional Faith (1988, winner of the Scribes Award); Written in Stone: Public Monuments in Changing Societies (1998); and Wrestling With Diversity (2003). Most recently, he was the editor of Torture: A Collection (Oxford University Press, 2004), which includes reflections on the morality, law, and politics of torture from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. He has also edited Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (1995), and co-edited Reading Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader (1988, with Steven Mallioux); Constitutional Stupidities, Constitutional Tragedies (with William Eskridge, 1998); Legal Canons (with Jack Balkin, 2000), and a leading constitutional law casebook, Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking (4th ed. 2000, with Paul Brest, Jack Balkin, and Akhil Amar). He has visited at the Harvard, Yale, New York University, and Boston University law schools, as well as at the University of Paris II, Central European University in Budapest, and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. A member of the American Law Institute, Levinson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Playing computer solitaire on the job.

NY Mayor Bloomberg has a city worker fired after he sees a solitaire game on the man's computer:

Edward Greenwood IX ... 39, said he was dismissed with no notice, and no severance pay, after working there for six years. He earned about $27,000 a year for duties that included sending legislative bills to city agencies and copying and circulating office memos....

"I expect all city workers — including myself — to work hard," Mayor Bloomberg said during a news conference in Midtown Manhattan. "There's nothing wrong with taking a break but during the business day at your desk, that's not appropriate behavior."

Is this part of Bloomberg's new lefty politics?

UPDATE: What's with that name? The Ninth? The NYT examines the mystery. Great headline, by the way.

Peace symbol on the lake.

An artist made a big peace sign out of Christmas trees out on the ice on Lake Mendota:



MORE: A commenter asks "Where's Lake Mendota"? Hmmm.... Well, you can always get a good look at Lake Mendota, right now, here. There have been some art projects on the lake ice before, most famously, this one:



Anyway, the lake, here in Madison, Wisconsin, is not where Otis Redding died.

Blog post gets new life.

In the last day or so, I've gotten more traffic to this old post than to the front page of the blog. It started when RedState wrote this, calling attention to what I'd written over a year ago about how lefty and righty bloggers have treated me. RedState, who seems to have kept the old post in mind all this time as something to reflect upon periodically, writes an elaborate post. Excerpt:

With a Republican majority in both Houses of Congress, a majority of the electorate having voted for a Republican president, and a lot of libertarians and a fair number of centrists and even liberals supporting the war effort, we are working in a very big tent right now; the "RINO" population is booming. Of course, having people in our coalition who don't always support all of our goals - or who, in some cases, support only a few of our goals - can be intensely frustrating. Any one of us can tick off the names of elected officials who drive us up the wall - John McCain, Chuck Hagel, Lincoln Chaffee, Arlen Specter, etc. (And that's just the Senate). There are also plenty of pundits and bloggers who are on our side on the war, or the economy, or the culture, or the law, but not all of the above. In the blogosphere, there are centrists like Althouse and libertarians like Glenn Reynolds, Megan McArdle and Stephen Green. The pundit world even includes people like Christopher Hitchens and Nat Hentoff, arch-liberals on many issues who are nonetheless steadfast allies on some questions.

Anyway, from one issue controversy to the next, we may find ourselves on the opposite side from some of these folks. And therein lies the temptation to go the Kos path, and dissolve into spittle-spraying rage when people who are "supposed" to be on "our side" cross over and side against us. That's the situation where we need to think carefully about how harshly we go after people's motives, their intellectual integrity, etc. A ritual bridge-burning may be fun, but that's how you end up stranded on your own island.

Good point! Hardcore Democrats ought to do the same, and not just because I like people to be nice to me.

Anyway, yesterday, Best of the Web had a link to the old post (with no reference to Redstate), just a quote from me and some brief agreement. Then Instapundit linked to it.

Meanwhile, Sissy Willis and Steven Taylor were noticing all the action they are getting from the time I linked to them over a year ago, and both of them wrote to ask me what's going on. Here's Sissy's old post -- replete with photo of busted up Li'l Greenie. Here's Steven's. Now Sissy's got a new post about the revival of the "Right and left: my sad experience" conversation.

It's funny about blogging. You get so intent on putting the next post at the top, pushing all the old posts down. Blogging is a process of piling on and accepting the endless sinking of whatever isn't newest. But, watching the Site Meter page, you see where new visitors are arriving. Regular readers keep coming to the main page for that newest post. Extra readers tap in at individual new posts when other bloggers link to the posts you've put up recently: you see traffic at one of today's posts, maybe yesterday's. There are always a lot of visitors that come via search engines. Some of these arrive at posts that have had a steady, if low level popularity. (My classic post of this type is "The 'therefore' symbol.'" On any given day, somebody somewhere feels like reading about the therefore symbol and finds that post.) Others come to an old post that talked about a specific subject that has reappeared in the news. But it's quite unusual to experience a flood of interest to an old post like this one. This is just a case of one blogger remembering something we were talking about quite a while back and having something more to add to that old conversation. And then it seemed new again... and bloggable. That turns around the whole feeling of blogging, that sense that it is always the new that matters.

UPDATE: Vodkapundit joins the conversation ("Ann and I arrived at the same conclusion, even though we chew on different slices of the political pie.").

Whistleblowers and the whistleblower law.

CIA Director Porter Goss has a NYT op-ed:

As a member of Congress in 1998, I sponsored the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act to ensure that current or former employees could petition Congress, after raising concerns within their respective agency, consistent with the need to protect classified information.

Exercising one's rights under this act is an appropriate and responsible way to bring questionable practices to the attention of those in Congress charged with oversight of intelligence agencies. And it works. Government employees have used statutory procedures — including internal channels at their agencies — on countless occasions to correct abuses without risk of retribution and while protecting information critical to our national defense.

On the other hand, those who choose to bypass the law and go straight to the press are not noble, honorable or patriotic. Nor are they whistleblowers. Instead they are committing a criminal act that potentially places American lives at risk. It is unconscionable to compromise national security information and then seek protection as a whistleblower to forestall punishment.

We need to keep this distinction in mind.

Fighting extremism by ending rote learning.

Egypt is reforming education to shift away from rote memorization and toward critical thinking:

Young people who learn by rote, say some education experts, are more easily manipulated and indoctrinated. Under an improved education system, students will learn tolerance and open-mindedness, some say. But others argue that tempering religious extremism is more complicated.

"So much is involved in the problem of preventing extremism," says one foreign development agency expert, who was not authorized to speak on the record. "It's not just a question of stopping rote memorization in schools."

I understand this cynicism, but, surely, rote education is a key part of the problem of terrorism, and learning how to think is a benefit in itself. Yet do we Americans, who have shunned rote learning for so long, really have such a wonderful capacity for critical thinking? I think we do, much more than we tend to appreciate, because it is so normal. We're skeptical of anyone trying to sell us anything, and we can't stop criticizing anyone with any power who tries to accomplish anything.

Go ahead and prove my point by telling me what bullshit this is.

The new Ken doll.

He's into Buddhism, we're told. Shouldn't Buddhists be freaking out about the use of their religion as a fashion accessory?

UPDATE: I have one of the original Ken dolls -- complete with flocked hair. But I never got any outfits for him, so he only ever had his red bathing trunks. Because my Barbie was "Negligée Barbie," she did not have that classic swimsuit, and I never bought her one. Thus, my version of the famous couple had a doomed relationship.

Ending the hunger strike.

Forcefeeding Guantanamo hunger strikers:

In recent weeks, the officials said, guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into "restraint chairs," sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.

The measures appear to have had drastic effects. The chief military spokesman at Guantánamo, Lt. Col. Jeremy M. Martin, said yesterday that the number of detainees on hunger strike had dropped to 4 from 84 at the end of December.

Some officials said the new actions reflected concern at Guantánamo and the Pentagon that the protests were becoming difficult to control and that the death of one or more prisoners could intensify international criticism of the detention center. Colonel Martin said force-feeding was carried out "in a humane and compassionate manner" and only when necessary to keep the prisoners alive. He said in a statement that "a restraint system to aid detainee feeding" was being used but refused to answer questions about the restraint chairs.

Lawyers who have visited clients in recent weeks criticized the latest measures, particularly the use of the restraint chair, as abusive.

"It is clear that the government has ended the hunger strike through the use of force and through the most brutal and inhumane types of treatment," said Thomas B. Wilner, a lawyer at Shearman & Sterling in Washington, who last week visited the six Kuwaiti detainees he represents. "It is a disgrace."

Is it? It seems to me they quickly and effectively ended the hunger strike. What would have worked better? The alternative would have been death for these men. I don't see the argument that detainees are free to commit suicide.

Declining applications to law school.

There's been a 9.5 percent decline in applications to law school this year, after a 4.6 decline last year. What's going on? Is it some difference in what's on TV? The end of the refugees from the dot-com bust? An upswelling of interest in medical school? A new fear of debt? Something we lawprof bloggers have done?

CORRECTION: John points out that "dot.com"is incorrect, as trying to pronounce it makes obvious. Discussed here. The NYT had "dot-com," as I see on closer inspection.

About those anti-cartoonists.

A summit in Mecca:

As leaders of the world's 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

The closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed "concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries" as well as over "using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions."

Could anything be more obtuse? You see your own people overreacting in the extreme to some drawings, and your response is all about how bad the drawings are? And your goal is to reverse the antagonism directed at you? I've been, I think, more sympathetic than most bloggers in trying to understand the depth of the offense felt, but at this point, I am left gaping at the insane disproportion and lack of self-awareness among the anti-cartoonists. Are there any bigger clowns in the history of free expression?

ADDED: As a commenter points out, my criticism of the communiqué isn't quite apt since it predates the really over-the-top reaction.

"It is like Germany after the war. In two or three generations people really start thinking about what happened in their country."

Russians are absorbed in a 10-part televised series of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's "The First Circle."

82% of Americans approve of Bush.

Laura Bush. She's really popular.

"Project Runway."

Spoiler alert. Of course!

Oh, that was painful. I hated seeing Nick leave. He was one of my favorites all along.

But what an interesting challenge! They had to design for each other, but they are in competition with each other. How could the hostilities not pop out all over -- bursting and puckering the seams? And the men! They need to design for women, but they have all that horrid hostility toward the women. Meanwhile, the women showed generosity and good feeling toward the men through their styles. Chloe and Kara came out on top. What Santino did to Kara! Unforgivable! I wouldn't want one person to see me sausaged into a jumpsuit like that. Even the color was putrid. Pudenda -- isn't that the name of that color? Oh, the shame swirled around the men tonight!

Nick, who got the kiss off, was the one person who designed for a member of his own sex. And then what did he do? He picked a feminine fabric, a feminine color, a feminine design. A "Golden Girls" jacket, that belonged with leggings, the judges said. Oh, the abject humiliation of it all!

But I was glad Santino didn't get cut. He is more entertaining than Nick. Of all the designers, he's the one whose Fashion Week line I'd most like to see. He's cramped and constrained by the assignments. So let the man loose. Let him fall on his face... or be brilliant.