I’ve got some extremely subtle advertising slogans that should gett the public behind us.  Things like ‘vote for EL Wisty and lovely nude ladies will come and dance with you.’  It’s a complete lie, of course, but you can’t afford to be too scrupulous if you’re going to dominate the world.  Then there’s another good one, which says ‘if you don’t vote for EL Wisty, horrible black spiders with hairy legs will creep into your room in the middle of the night and bite your ears off.’  That should get the women’s vote.  If there is one thing they can’t bear it’s black spiders grabbing hold of them in the night.

Another way I’m going to get people’s votes is to start shouting off about all the filth on television.  As far as I’m concerned I could to with a great deal more of it.  All the samie I formed an EL Wisty Clean Up TV campaign, pointing out some of the suggestive things that get on the air.  The first thing I say they should ban is that Invisible Man show.  Have you seen it?  It’s absolutely disgusting.  It’s all about this man who’s turned invisible because he fell into a vat of HBLO₅.  That was an experimental magic ingredient in a detergent.  Anyway, poor devil falls in this rubbish and he turns invisible, and the programme is all about his amazing adventures.  As he’s invisible, the only way you can tell where he is is if he’s smoking.  You can see his cigarette moving about in the air.  Or else you can see a telephone waving about the place.  It’s all very ingenious, but the thing that amazes me is that he does it all in the nude.  You don’t actually see him of course because he’s invisible but you can easily tell he’s got nothing on because otherwise you’d see his clothes.  Sometimes he dresses up in bandages, poor devil, and dark glasses, and you can see his outline, but you never see any trousers or jackets moving about the place, so it stands to reason he’s wandering about the place with nothing on.  A ghastly invisible nudist, there for everyone to see — or, rather, not to see.  And, for all we know, there may be millions of other invisible nudists in the other programmes.  I might be able to use them in the World Domination League.  It’d be a very good slogan.  ’Vote for EL Wisty or else invisible nudists will come along and smash you round the face.’

A week later, the little white pills arrived in the post. I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. It didn’t seem odd: for years, I took an anti-depressant. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I’m thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn’t noticed anything, except the words I was reading, and they came in cool, clear passages; I didn’t stop or stumble once.

Perplexed, I got up, made a sandwich – and I was overcome with the urge to write an article that had been kicking around my subconscious for months. It rushed out of me in a few hours, and it was better than usual. My mood wasn’t any different; I wasn’t high. My heart wasn’t beating any faster. I was just able to glide into a state of concentration – deep, cool, effortless concentration. It was like I had opened a window in my brain and all the stuffy air had seeped out, to be replaced by a calm breeze.

A similar fragmentation is at work in the production of language. Lise Abrams, a psychologist at the University of Florida, has demonstrated that, in many cases, the key to remembering a word that has been on the tip of the tongue is to encounter another word that shares a first syllable with the one we are trying to remember. For instance, when subjects are trying to recall “bandanna,” they are much more likely to come up with the solution if they are given “banish” as a hint. “Banish” and “bandanna” mean very different things, but they activate the same network of brain cells devoted to the sound of the words.

The connections can be even more indirect. Abrams has shown that showing people a picture of a motorcycle can help them remember the word “biopsy.” Because the idea of a motorcycle is connected in the brain to the concept of “bike,” which shares a first syllable with “biopsy,” the seemingly irrelevant cue becomes an effective hint.

But among the DNA of the bdelloid Adineta vaga, he unexpectedly found traces of bacterial, fungal and even plant genes, many of which are incredibly rare. About half have no counterparts in animals and one gene is found in only 10 species of bacteria. Some genes appear to have been smuggled into the rotifer genome as a set, for they appear in the same order and orientation that they do in fungi or bacteria.

The genes are not passive hitchhikers either. Many appear to be fully functional; in their native species, they are involved in breaking down sugars and carbohydrates, or producing useful molecules like antibiotics and toxins. The chances are that the rotifers are putting them to similar uses.

And later:

It’s not clear why the bdelloids are so good at incorporating new genes, but their lifestyle may hold the answer. The freshwater ponds they call home frequently dry out and they cope with this by entering into a dry, dormant and extremely tough state. This drying process breaks their cell membranes and shatters their DNA. The bdelloids are very good at repairing these injuries, but it provides a temporary entrypoint for chunks of foreign DNA from species in the surrounding environment that have also succumbed to similar damage.

This newly discovered ability may help to explain the success of the bdelloids despite their rejection of sex. Compared to sex, asexual reproduction is often seen as a poor long-term strategy, for it lacks the chromosomal shuffling that brings about genetic diversity and is thought to gives species an adaptive edge in the face of new challenges. But bdelloids have contradicted this theory by being very successful; there are over 360 species alive today.

Gladyshev suggests that this success may be due to their ability to pick up new genes from their environment. If the main advantage of sex is that it promotes genetic diversity, why worry about it when you have the gene pools of entire kingdoms available to you?

This passage about how to write the chorus of a hit song is perceptive:

The lyrics for the chorus must never deal with anything but the most basic of human emotions. This is not us trying to be cynical in a clever sort of way when we say “stick to the cliches”. The cliches are the cliches because they deal with the emotional topics we all feel. No records are bought in vast quantities because the lyrics are intellectually clever or deal in strange and new ideas. In fact, the lyrics can be quite meaningless in a literal sense but still have a great emotional pull. An obvious example of this was the chorus of our own record:

“Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, in the Tardis Doctor Who, hey Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who Doctor Who, Doc, Doctor Who”

Gibberish of course, but every lad in the country under a certain age related instinctively to what it was about. The ones slightly older needed a couple of pints inside them to clear away the mind debris left by the passing years before it made sense. As for girls and our chorus, we think they must have seen it as pure crap. A fact that must have limited to zero our chances of staying at The Top for more than one week.

Stock, Aitkin and Waterman, however, are kings of writing chorus lyrics that go straight to the emotional heart of the 7″ single buying girls in this country. Their most successful records will kick into the chorus with a line which encapsulates the entire emotional meaning of the song. This will obviously be used as the title. As soon as Rick Astley hit the first line of the chorus on his debut single it was all over – the Number One position was guaranteed:

“I’m never going to give you up”

It says it all. It’s what every girl in the land whatever her age wants to hear her dream man tell her. Then to follow that line with:

“I’m never gonna let you down I’m never going to fool around or upset you”

GENIUS.

As soon as they had those lyrics written they must have known they could have taken out a block booking on the Number One slot. Then within the next twelve months to have written the chorus:

“I should be so lucky Luck, lucky, lucky I should be so lucky in love”

Out of context, as meaningless to lads as our own Doctor Who chorus was to girls but in those three lines there are for many more meaning than in the complete collected works of Morrisey. Stock Aitkin and Waterman are able to spot a phrase, not actually a catchphrase, but a line that the nation will know exactly what is been talked about and then use it perfectly:

“Fun Love and Money” “Showing Out” “Got To Be Certain” “Respectable” “Toy Boy” “Cross My Broken Heart”

They are ridiculed by much of the media and only have their royalty statements for comfort. History will put them up there with Spectre and the boys. Waterman might be a loud mouthed, arrogant, narrow minded, self publicist, but the man has never outgrown his true, deep and genuine love of “Now” pop music.

The year that the pair of us spent working with Stock Aitkin and Waterman pulled into focus what we had learned about pop music throughout the rest of our lives.

Michael Jackson may be the biggest singing star in the world. Sold more L.P.s than any other artist at any time in the history of pop but he has had very few U.K. Number Ones. If he would like to make amends on this front he should start co-writing with the SAW team or read this manual. He has quite a bit to learn about the opening line of a chorus.

We have just taken a coffee break from writing this lot and while in the cafe have come up with the ultimate Stock Aitkin and Waterman chorus never written. It’s called “Live In Lover”, either performed by Sinitta or ideally by a Dagenham blonde called Sharon:

“Live in lover I want you to be My live in lover for eternity”

Either use it for yourselves or we will go and blow what last vestiges of credibility we have and do it ourselves. We can see it now: we’d call the act “Sharon Meets the KLF” and of course the b-side would have to be “Sharon Joins The JAMS”. If there are any good looking Sharons out there that want to be pop stars please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We are afraid you can’t just go down to the local supermarket and listen to the check-out girls’ talk and hope you can pick up the right line before Waterman gets to it. The line has to come to you and when it does you’ve got to grab it. Mindlessly singing along to the 12″ groove track you have is the best way.

Morrisey has undoubtedly come up with some of the wittiest titles of the decade. “Shakespeare’s Sister”, “Girlfriend In A Coma” or “William It Was Really Nothing” are classic. However, with titles like these he will always be guaranteed a non Top Five placing.

Police officials said the albino killings were worst in rural areas, where people tend to be less educated and more superstitious. They said that some fishermen even wove albino hairs in their nets because they believed they would catch more fish.

On the shores of Lake Victoria, in northern Tanzania, albinos are a touchy subject. When asked if they used albino hairs in their nets, a group of fishermen just stared at the sand.

One traditional healer, a young man in a striped shirt who looked more like a college student than a witch doctor, said: “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But that’s not real witchcraft. It’s the work of con men.”

…

But the killings go on. They have even spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late May, with her eyes, tongue and breasts gouged out. Advocates for albinos have also said that witch doctors are selling albino skin in Congo.

The young are often the targets. In early May, Vumilia Makoye, 17, was eating dinner with her family in their hut in western Tanzania when two men showed up with long knives.

Vumilia was like many other Africans with albinism. She had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem for albinos, whose eyes develop abnormally and who often have to hold things like books or cellphones two inches away to see them. She could not find a job because no one would hire her. She sold peanuts in the market, making $2 a week while her delicate skin was seared by the sun.

When Vumilia’s mother, Jeme, saw the men with knives, she tried to barricade the door of their hut. But the men overpowered her and burst in.

“They cut my daughter quickly,” she said, making hacking motions with her hands.

The men sawed off Vumilia’s legs above the knee and ran away with the stumps. Vumilia died.

Whether someone is serious about tackling the global-warming problem can be readily gauged by listening to what he or she says about the carbon price. Suppose you hear a public figure who speaks eloquently of the perils of global warming and proposes that the nation should move urgently to slow climate change. Suppose that person proposes regulating the fuel efficiency of cars, or requiring high-efficiency lightbulbs, or subsidizing ethanol, or providing research support for solar power—but nowhere does the proposal raise the price of carbon. You should conclude that the proposal is not really serious and does not recognize the central economic message about how to slow climate change. To a first approximation, raising the price of carbon is a necessary and sufficient step for tackling global warming. The rest is at best rhetoric and may actually be harmful in inducing economic inefficiencies.

It’s hard to see how anything else could work. And yet Labor is showing about as much leadership on the issue as the Libs did – even with control of both houses of parliament and a crippled Opposition. From Friday’s SMH:

The average floor area for houses was expected to increase by 145 per cent by 2020, driving up the amount of energy used for lighting and heating. People were also relying more on electricity to meet their energy needs instead of traditional methods, such as a wood fire for heating.

The report found one in four households buys a new television each year and that Australia has the highest per capita sales of power-hungry LCD and plasma screen televisions in the world.

Televisions now use more power than cooking, heating or air-conditioning and are fourth on the list of households’ greatest energy users, behind water heating, refrigerators and lighting.

LCD and plasma screens use more energy than old-style CRT’s of the same size; even worse, they tend to be bigger. It’s hard to see how the obvious response – to apply taxes to them – would make much of a difference: people are already ready to fork out thousands of dollars for their TV’s. Of course, the government isn’t even proposing anything that drastic:

To combat this, Mr Garrett announced the Government would phase in a 10-star rating system for electrical appliances over the next year. It will cover appliances such as refrigerators, clothes dryers, washing machines and dishwashers.

A separate, voluntary labelling system for televisions will be brought in over the next six months, with mandatory labelling and minimum efficiency standards introduced next year.

The energy rating system’s only going to affect the shopping habits of do-gooders (unless the price of energy increases steeply). And besides, encouraging people to buy the most energy-efficient plasma isn’t addressing the problem. As with 4WD’s, what we have here is an expensive luxury item that is harmful to the public good.

In the difficult task of fighting global warming, an easy place to start would seem to be to cut out the high-polluting inessentials: things which, if eliminated, would hardly affect quality of life. In other words, start banning or restricting the sale of products like plasma-screen TV’s and 4WD’s. We didn’t have two-metre TV screens a decade ago, and there’s no reason they should be treated as a right today.

It’ll never happen.

The solutions to global warming that rest on technological advances have huge problems. The physicist Freeman Dyson, in the New York Review of Books, puts faith in technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere:

Carbon-eating trees could convert most of the carbon that they absorb from the atmosphere into some chemically stable form and bury it underground. Or they could convert the carbon into liquid fuels and other useful chemicals. Biotechnology is enormously powerful, capable of burying or transforming any molecule of carbon dioxide that comes into its grasp. Keeling’s wiggles prove that a big fraction of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere comes within the grasp of biotechnology every decade. If one quarter of the world’s forests were replanted with carbon-eating varieties of the same species, the forests would be preserved as ecological resources and as habitats for wildlife, and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would be reduced by half in about fifty years.

It’s probably more realistic than clean coal, but there are some small problems:

- How on earth could you go about replacing a quarter of the world’s forests?

- How on earth could you do that without it being an ecological disaster?

- If the carbon dioxide is halved in fifty years, where does that leave us in one hundred years? With none? Or do we clear a quarter of the world’s forests again in fifty years?

What’s frustrating is that there is plenty of debate about ludicrously drastic technological approaches that won’t happen for decades, but curbing our present-day luxuries isn’t even on the table.

Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner’s e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a “theory of mind” caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon’s characters. An exemplary New Yorker theory of mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a police officer ticketing a caveman with a large wheel): “Yeah, yeah—and I invented the ticket.” The humor here requires inference about the caveman’s beliefs and intentions as he (presumably) explains to the cop that he invented the wheel. A non-theory-of-mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a bird wearing a thong), however, requires no such projection: “It’s a thongbird.” Theory of mind captions make for higher-order jokes easily distinguished from the simian puns and visual gags that litter the likes of MAD Magazine. To date, 136 out of the 145 caption contest winners (94 percent) fall into the “theory of mind” category.

Perry’s unit, the 849^th Engineer Aviation Battalion, had been dispatched to the Indo-Burmese wilderness to help build the ill-fated Ledo Road, named after the town near its mile zero. The road was designed to keep Nationalist China flush with supplies after the Japanese had severed access to the more southerly Burma Road in 1942.

Building the road was a far more arduous task than its planners had predicted. An aide to Chiang Kai-shek, China’s conniving dictator, initially estimated that the highway would take just three months to build. It instead took two and a half years and incurred thousands of casualties: The Americans nicknamed it “the Man-a-Mile Road” on account of its lethality. But President Roosevelt and the War Department never could bring themselves to curtail the road’s construction, even as its potential usefulness diminished with the increase of cargo flights between India and China. They were too afraid of losing face, no matter the human toll.

…

The vast majority of GIs who worked the road were, like Herman Perry, African-American. They were assigned to segregated labor battalions run by white officers. The military brass thought that men of African descent possessed smaller cranial capacities than their European counterparts, a deficiency said to be caused by irreversible “premature ossification of the skull.” As a result, most black draftees were deemed unsuitable for combat and were forced to toil as manual laborers behind the war’s front lines.

…

While the MPs combed the brothels of Calcutta, Perry ran deeper and deeper into the Patkais, the forested mountain range that lines the Indo-Burmese border. He eventually stumbled upon a village inhabited by Nagas, members of an ethnic group known for its zeal for headhunting. Against all odds, the charming Perry managed to befriend the tribesmen. He eventually married the chief’s 14-year-old daughter, who bore him a son, and started a small farm in the Patkais, raising rice and marijuana.

Perry was arguably the world’s first hippie.

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

The Nixon White House didn’t enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era. “Positive polarization” helped the Republicans win one election after another—and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.

Thanks, Lyn.

According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by half or more in the last five years. In Saudi Arabia, only 10 percent now have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to a December poll by Terror Free Tomorrow, a Washington-based think tank. Following a wave of suicide attacks in Pakistan in the past year, support for suicide operations amongst Pakistanis has dropped to 9 percent (it was 33 percent five years ago), while favorable views of bin Laden in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, around where he is believed to be hiding, have plummeted to 4 percent from 70 percent since August 2007.

Excerpt 2:

After September 11, there was considerable fear in the West that we were headed for a clash of civilizations with the Muslim world led by bin Laden, who would entice masses of young Muslims into his jihadist movement. But the religious leaders and former militants who are now critiquing Al Qaeda’s terrorist campaign–both in the Middle East and in Muslim enclaves in the West– make that less likely. The potential repercussions for Al Qaeda cannot be underestimated because, unlike most mainstream Muslim leaders, Al Qaeda’s new critics have the jihadist credentials to make their criticisms bite. “The starting point has to be that jihad is legitimate, otherwise no one will listen, ” says Benotman, who sees the Iraqi insurgency as a legitimate jihad. “The reaction [to my criticism of Al Qaeda] has been beyond imagination. It has made the radicals very angry. They are very shaky about it.”

Why have clerics and militants once considered allies by Al Qaeda’s leaders turned against them? To a large extent, it is because Al Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a “true” Muslim. Al Qaeda’s Muslim critics know what results from this takfiri view: First, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. It is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where Al Qaeda’s suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shia. Recently, Al Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its diktats, a fact not lost on the Islamic world’s Sunni majority.

Excerpt 3:

More doubt about Al Qaeda was planted in the Muslim world when Sayyid Imam Al Sharif, the ideological godfather of Al Qaeda, sensationally withdrew his support in a book written last year from his prison cell in Cairo. Al Sharif, generally known as “Dr. Fadl,” was an architect of the doctrine of takfir, arguing that Muslims who did not support armed jihad or who participated in elections were kuffar, unbelievers. Although Dr. Fadl never explicitly called for such individuals to be killed, his takfiri treatises from 1988 and 1993 gave theological cover to jihadists targeting civilians.

Dr. Fadl was also Zawahiri’s mentor. Like his protégé, he is a skilled surgeon and moved in militant circles when he was a member of Cairo University’s medical faculty in the ’70s. In 1981, when Anwar Sadat was assassinated and Zawahiri was jailed in connection with the plot, Dr. Fadl fled to Peshawar, Pakistan, where he operated on wounded mujahedin fighting the Soviets. After Zawahiri’s release from jail, he joined Dr. Fadl in Peshawar, where they established a new branch of the “Jihad group” that would later morph into Al Qaeda. Osama Rushdi, a former Egyptian jihadist then living in Peshawar, recalls that there was little doubt about Dr. Fadl’s importance: “He was like the big boss in the Mafia in Chicago.” And bin Laden also owed a deeply personal debt to Dr. Fadl; in Sudan in 1993, the doctor operated on Al Qaeda’s leader after he was hurt in an assassination attempt.

So it was an unwelcome surprise for Al Qaeda’s leaders when Dr. Fadl’s new book, Rationalization of Jihad, was serialized in an independent Egyptian newspaper in November. The incentive for writing the book, he explained, was that “jihad … was blemished with grave Sharia violations during recent years. … [N]ow there are those who kill hundreds, including women and children, Muslims and non Muslims in the name of Jihad!” Dr Fadl ruled that Al Qaeda’s bombings in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere were illegitimate and that terrorism against civilians in Western countries was wrong. He also took on Al Qaeda’s leaders directly in an interview with the Al Hayat newspaper. “Zawahiri and his Emir bin Laden [are] extremely immoral,” he said. “I have spoken about this in order to warn the youth against them, youth who are seduced by them, and don’t know them.”

Excerpt 4:

Hanif Qadir, now 42, revealed to us that he himself was recruited by Al Qaeda after the U.S. overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Jihadist recruiters in east London, no doubt noting wealth, sought out Qadir, who had earned enough money running a car repair shop to buy a Rolls-Royce and live in some style. “The guy who handled me was a Syrian called Abu Sufiyan. … I’m sure he was from Al Qaeda,” recalls Qadir. “He was good at telling you what you wanted to hear … he touched all my emotional buttons.” Qadir agreed to join. He drew up a will and, in December 2002, bought a first-class ticket to Pakistan. But, as the truck he was in crossed the dirt roads into Afghanistan, a chance occurrence changed his life: A truck, carrying wounded fighters, approached them from the other direction. Among them was a young Punjabi boy whose white robes were stained with blood. “These are evil people,” another of the wounded shouted. “[W]e came here to fight jihad, but they are just using us as cannon fodder.” Qadir’s truckload of wannabe jihadists made a u-turn. “That kid, he was like an angel. He kicked me back into reality,” recalls Qadir. “When I landed back in the U.K., I wanted to find [the Al Qaeda recruiters] and cut their heads off.”

Qadir never found them, but he became determined to stop others like him from being recruited. In 2004, he and his brother opened the gym and community center in the Walthamstow neighborhood of east London. Soon, hundreds of young Muslims were attending.

The scale of the challenge was quickly clear. Soon after the center opened, he got wind that pro-Al Qaeda militants were secretly booking rooms there for their meetings. Worse, in the summer of 2006, several of those arrested in connection with the Al Qaeda airlines plot, including alleged ringleader Abdulla Ahmed Ali, were found to have attended his gym. But, rather than shutting the radicals out, Qadir continued to allow them to meet. “Sometimes our youngsters get into debates with these people, for example on jihad, and make them look ridiculous in front of their followers,” he says. Qadir believes his approach is finally starting to pay off: “The extremists are burning out: The number of radicals in Walthamstow is diminishing, not growing.”

First, dignity is relative. One doesn’t have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, and beholder. In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking. We chuckle at the photographs of Victorians in starched collars and wool suits hiking in the woods on a sweltering day, or at the Brahmins and patriarchs of countless societies who consider it beneath their dignity to pick up a dish or play with a child. Thorstein Veblen wrote of a French king who considered it beneath his dignity to move his throne back from the fireplace, and one night roasted to death when his attendant failed to show up. Kass finds other people licking an ice-cream cone to be shamefully undignified; I have no problem with it.

Second, dignity is fungible. The Council and Vatican treat dignity as a sacred value, never to be compromised. In fact, every one of us voluntarily and repeatedly relinquishes dignity for other goods in life. Getting out of a small car is undignified. Having sex is undignified. Doffing your belt and spread- eagling to allow a security guard to slide a wand up your crotch is undignified. Most pointedly, modern medicine is a gantlet of indignities. Most readers of this article have undergone a pelvic or rectal examination, and many have had the pleasure of a colonoscopy as well. We repeatedly vote with our feet (and other body parts) that dignity is a trivial value, well worth trading off for life, health, and safety.

Third, dignity can be harmful. In her comments on the Dignity volume, Jean Bethke Elshtain rhetorically asked, “Has anything good ever come from denying or constricting human dignity?” The answer is an emphatic “yes.” Every sashed and be-medaled despot reviewing his troops from a lofty platform seeks to command respect through ostentatious displays of dignity. Political and religious repressions are often rationalized as a defense of the dignity of a state, leader, or creed: Just think of the Salman Rushdie fatwa, the Danish cartoon riots, or the British schoolteacher in Sudan who faced flogging and a lynch mob because her class named a teddy bear Mohammed. Indeed, totalitarianism is often the imposition of a leader’s conception of dignity on a population, such as the identical uniforms in Maoist China or the burqas of the Taliban.

A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their leaders, institutions, and social mores. And they abjure any mandate to define “some vision of ‘the good life’” or the “dignity of using [freedom] well” (two quotes from the Council’s volume). The price of freedom is tolerating behavior by others that may be undignified by our own lights. I would be happy if Britney Spears and “American Idol” would go away, but I put up with them in return for not having to worry about being arrested by the ice-cream police. This trade-off is very much in America’s DNA and is one of its great contributions to civilization: my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.

The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government limits the other’s power, emerged in England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. But by the 1670s, and likely before, pirates were developing democratic charters, establishing balance of power on their ships, and developing a nascent form of worker’s compensation: A lost limb entitled one to payment from the booty, more or less depending on whether it was a right arm, a left arm, or a leg.

The idea of enlightened piracy is strange swill to swallow for those steeped in a pop culture version of the pirate – chaos on the high seas, drinking and pillaging, damsels forced onto the plank. Sure, there’s something about the independence of piracy that still speaks to people today. (Even the founders of International Talk Like a Pirate Day acknowledge that there is, in people who love to say “Aargh,” a yearning for a certain kind of freedom.) But it turns out that pirate life was more than just greedy rebellion. It offers insights into the nature of democracy and the reasons it might emerge – as a natural state of being, or a rational response to a much less pleasant way of life.

To Leeson, pirate democracy was an institution born of necessity. In one successful cruise, a pirate could take home what a merchant sailor earned in 50 years. Yet a business enterprise made up of the violent and lawless was clearly problematic: piracy required common action and mutual trust. And pirates couldn’t rely on a government to set the rules. Some think that “without government, where would we be?” Leeson says. “But what pirates really show is, no, it’s just common sense. You have an incentive to try to create rules to make society get along. And that’s just as important to pirates as it is to anybody else.”

But Marcus Rediker, the author of the pirate histories “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Villains of All Nations,” sees pirate democracy less as a means for order than as a political statement, a pointed reaction to the working sailor’s life. When pirates roamed the seas, Rediker says, it was the law-abiding merchant ships that were run like miniature tyrannies. Captains held absolute power. Floggings were routine and often deadly. When pirates recruited sailors from the ships they pillaged, they opened a window to a different kind of society – far from the one the working-class sailors would otherwise find on land or sea. Rediker argues that pirate democracy “is not about human nature at all. It’s about the specific experience of sailors and the way that they wanted to imagine a better world.”

Piracy, says Rediker, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was “a fascinating, almost utopian kind of experiment.” Indeed, he says, pirate democracy was purer than what was practiced in Athens: The Greeks didn’t give slaves the vote, but pirates offered the right to everyone, black or white. (It’s probably also safe to say that pirates didn’t have superdelegates.) Before each voyage, the crew elected a captain who could be deposed at any time, as well as a quartermaster whose main purpose was to make sure the captain didn’t have too much power. A written charter outlined ship rules, which tended to prohibit theft and violence aboard and set strict rules for the presence of women. (Contrary to popular myth, Leeson, says, pirates usually set limits on drinking. “A drunken pirate crew,” he points out, “would be less effective than a sober crew.”)

Pirates even conducted a version of a fair trial, Rediker says, when determining the fate of captured captains. If any pirate on board knew the man from his merchant ship days, he could testify about his treatment. A captain who turned out to be kind was sometimes spared his life. And in a precursor of our own democratic love of political satire, pirates wrote coarse, hilarious plays that mocked the upper classes’ criminal justice system.

From this gallery. Via Kottke.

See also: Compulsory reading about food and nutrition

Sunstein explains the appeal of libertarian paternalism: “For too long, the United States has been trapped in a debate between the laissez-faire types who believe markets will solve all our problems and the command-and-control types who believe that if there is a market failure then you need a mandate.” That debate has been exhausted, he says.

“The laissez-faire types are right that … government can blunder, so opt-outs are important,” he says. “The mandate types are right that people are fallible, and they make mistakes, and sometimes people who are specialists know better and can steer people in directions that will make their lives better.”

Sunstein argues that understanding human irrationality can improve how public and private institutions shape policy by increasing the likelihood that people will make decisions that are in their own self-interest. Most important, he and Thaler insist, such nudges can be executed while protecting freedom of choice.

Take two examples in their book. Studies show that placing fruit at eye level in school cafeterias enhances its popularity by as much as 25 percent. Or consider this stroke of creativity by an economist in Amsterdam charged with cleaning up the restrooms at the Schiphol Airport: He had a fly etched into the wells of urinals, giving male patrons something to aim at. Spillage was reduced by 80 percent. The problems of childhood obesity and foul restrooms are remedied with very little inconvenience to people — or cost. Children remain free to grab that piece of chocolate cake, and there is nothing preventing visitors to Schiphol’s restrooms from ignoring the fly and aiming elsewhere. It is merely less likely that either group will do so.

It’s the most popular of the Russian mp3 shops out there. Russian mp3 sites pay royalties at the rate set in Russia by the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems. That rate is lower than the rate in America. As a result, you get radically cheaper mp3′s there than on sites like the iTunes music store: ten cents a song, a dollar an album; a little bit more for a particularly long song or album. They’re also free of DRM.

And the range is huge. I joined two days ago; since then, I’ve spent less than $20 to buy:

• Black Sabbath, Paranoid
• Bob Mould, Workbook
• David Bowie, Station to Station
• Elvis Costello, Armed Forces
• Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, Streetcore
• Love, Four Sail
• My Bloody Valentine, Loveless
• Neutral Milk Hotel, In An Aeroplane Over the Sea
• Patti Smith, Horses
• Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted
• Prince, Sign o’ the Times
• Sly and the Family Stone, Fresh!
• Sonic Youth, Washing Machine
• The Byrds, Mr Tambourine Man and Younger than Yesterday
• The Notwist, Neon Golden
• The Replacements, Let It Be
• Todd Rundgren, Todd

What a haul!

The consensus around the net is that these sites are legal to use, but likely to be shut down at some point in the future. The bigger question, of course, is whether these sites are moral to use, and I really haven’t decided yet.

Although 10 cents a song seems appallingly cheap at first, it may not be so ridiculous when you consider that buying digital music should be way cheaper than buying CD’s. Sites like the iTunes store are ridiculously overpriced*.  An album on iTunes costs about the same as a physical CD at the CD store, which is insane considering the cost of the CD has to cover manufacture, materials, transportation, storage, and the cost of leasing a shop and paying the staff.

One thing I can say for certain is that the record labels made more money from me yesterday than they would have if I had had to pay $20 per album – because there’s absolutely no way I would have bought even one at that price.

(And as a bonus, the lower price could make piracy less likely. If I paid 20 bucks for an album, of course I’d burn a copy for any friends that wanted it. But when it only costs a dollar, it’s hard to see why I should go to the effort: anyone who wants it could easily afford to buy their own copy.)

I’d be interested to know what folks think about this.

From the Brazil 70 compilation on Soul Jazz records.  A review in the Guardian describes the extraordinary circumstances this music was made in:

The psychedelic adventurers of other countries had to cope with acid casualties and police busts and grim shadow of prog rock, but Brazil’s Tropicálistas had a military junta and the Fifth Institutional Act to contend with. The latter, introduced in December 1968, outlawed all political opposition, suspended habeas corpus and censored all press and culture. It was not an environment in which the LSD-soaked musical anarchy of Tropicália was likely to thrive, and so it proved: two weeks after the Fifth Institutional Act was introduced, the movement’s leading lights, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were arrested without charge, imprisoned in solitary confinement for two months, released, placed under house arrest then expelled from the country. Suddenly, the activities of the Met’s drug squad and the News of the World giving the denizens of London’s “Hippy Vice Den” the UFO club a thin time of it seems terribly small beer.

Brasil 70 documents what happened next to Brazilian music – although it seems faintly miraculous that anything worth listening to did happen. Military dictatorships are notoriously good at some things – they’re fantastic at making people disappear – but they’re hardly famed for encouraging great art: by 1970, the songwriter and dramatist Chico Buarque estimated that only one in three of his songs was getting past the censors, a situation the censors remedied a few years later by automatically banning anything he wrote. But Brasil 70 unearths a fascinating refusenik musical world, hitherto overlooked in Britain, of artists gamely trying to bend inflexible rules, prepared to run the risk of prison and torture in the process. The latter was a real threat. Even former Os Mutantes vocalist Rita Lee ended up under house arrest, despite the fact that on the evidence of 1976′s Corista de Rock she had long abandoned acid-induced eccentricity in favour of distinctly unsubversive-sounding AOR.

2. “Didn’t I” by Darondo: Listen.

From Darondo’s collection Let My People Go.  This strange, perfect 70′s soul track was recorded by a genuine pimp who dabbled in music on the side.  From the release notes:

“You can hear a little bit of everything,” says Darondo about his music style. “There’s a little jazz and a little soul. They say if you Black you supposed to have soul. I got Latin flavor in me so there’s some Latin in it. Definitely got the Blues in it. I sound kinda’ country but I grew up in the Bay Area,” he adds.

But after the release of his three 45s Darondo stopped recording. “It was mostly me, just having a good time with a real good hobby,” he says. “It wasn’t about money but about having fun. Something I just liked to do. Maybe your dream is to be a James Brown or Frank Sinatra but those were just mostly dreams to me.” 

Outside of the music business Darondo was living life to the full, and it eventually caught up with him. “Folks would say ‘Daron got that dough…Daron Do…that’s how I got the name. I used to get my suits tailor made, one of a kind, like my rings. A player can’t have the same ring as someone else. Got my rings specially made with diamonds and stones. But in order to get yourself together you had to get away from all the fastness. I was driving around in a Rolls Royce, I was a fast young man,” adds Darondo. 

3. “Suzanne” by the Harley Allen-Mike Lilly Band: Listen.

From the Classic Bluegrass from Smithsonian Folkways compilation.  Bluegrass music is good for your health, I swear.

A pillar of the Church’s theology is the existence of “suppressive persons,” who must be avoided, or “handled,” in the Church’s euphemistic jargon. In 1967, Hubbard promulgated what he called the “fair game” policy, whereby anyone judged to be an antagonist “may be deprived of property or injured [and] tricked, sued or lied to, or destroyed.” (He later withdrew it, citing “bad PR.”)

…

In keeping with Hubbard’s fair game dictate, every time Scientology has been attacked, it has quickly struck back, which is what makes the current barrage against the Church so remarkable. Not long ago, anyone brave enough to publicly criticize the organization suffered dearly.

Paulette Cooper, an investigative journalist whose 1971 exposé,The Scandal of Scientology, was the first mainstream book to criticize the Church, found herself subjected to what she described as a 15-year campaign of harassment. Scientologists covertly infiltrated her life, befriended her, and, an FBI agent later told her, framed her by using stationery with her fingerprints on it to send bomb threats to the Church.

Branded a lunatic, she became suicidal, lost her boyfriend, and was down to 83 pounds when a 1977 FBI raid on Scientology offices in L.A. and Washington, D.C., turned up documents indicating she had been the target of “Operation Freakout”—a coordinated campaign to get her “incarcerated in a mental institution or jail, or at least to hit her so hard that she drops her attacks.” 

The article has much more recent examples of intimidation and funny business, as well as some strange accounts of life inside the church.

Link [it works now] – you can preview it in the page that opens, but it’s better to download a higher quality version from the left-hand column.

Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project documents a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminates herself while inducing miscarriages over and over. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process. 

Ouch, something just punctured my bourgeois assumptions*!

In the general public, the most common complaint about contemporary art is probably the lack of technical skill apparently required: “My five year old daughter could do better than that!”  I think it’s a fair enough complaint. If you can ‘get’ an artwork just by reading a description of it, what’s the point of having the artwork?  

Lewis says the apparent preponderance of artists like Shvarts is a symptom of the insufficient technical training given at art schools.  Excerpt:

A traditional program in studio art typically begins with a course in drawing, where students are introduced to the basics of line, form and tone. Life drawing is fundamental to this process, not only because of the complexity of the human form (that limber scaffolding of struts and masses) but because it is the object for which we have the most familiarity — and sympathy. Students invariably bristle at the drawing requirement, wishing to vault ahead to the stage where they make “real art,” but in my experience, students who skip the drawing stages do not have the same visual acuity, and the ability to see where a good idea might be made better.

Following this introduction, students might specialize in painting, sculpture or such newer media as photography or video. A rigorous college art program provides a strong vertical structure, so that students take a sequence of ever more challenging courses in the same medium. Most undergraduate programs culminate in a senior show, a high-spirited and uneven romp in which students’ clever ideas race far ahead of their execution and workmanship.

…

It is often said that great achievement requires in one’s formative years two teachers: a stern taskmaster who teaches the rules and an inspirational guru who teaches one to break the rules. But they must come in that order. … One cannot be liberated from fetters one has never worn; all one can do is to make pastiches of the liberations of others.

…

Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it. What of the schools that teach them? Undergraduate programs in art aspire to the status of professional programs that award MFA degrees, and there is often a sense that they too should encourage the making of sophisticated and challenging art, and as soon as possible. 

Though his points about art teaching are spot on, it’s wrong to think poor training is the cause of poor art.  There is ample evidence that there is today an unprecedented number of technically gifted, creative artists: The internet is awash with amazing painters, graphic designers, graphic novelists, and photographers.  Look at my mum’s or my brother’s website.  Look at Kiln.

The question is not “Why aren’t there any good artists around?”.  The question is “Why are there so many lame artists getting funded and displayed?” 

The answer is: “Because of the criteria that institutions use for judging artwork.”

I recently saw the Year 12 Perspectives exhibition at the Gallery of Western Australia.  As with Queensland’s Minister’s Awards, the quality of much of the student art was outstanding, upstaging some of the professional art in the same gallery.  Of course, there was some complete and utter trash as well.

There was one thing the trash had in common with the other artworks: all the artworks had artist’s statements, and those statements usually attributed a social or political message to the artwork.  In some cases, the artist’s statement looked like an afterthought – a safe political message tacked on after the fact.  

I suspect that, without the political statements, these artworks would have been excluded from the competition as mere ‘pretty pictures’.

And there’s the problem: to get your work into a public gallery, you have to convince a committee that your artwork is significant.  Being able to argue in your written submission that an artwork is somehow innovative, or timely, or controversial is going to count for more than the subjective quality of the artwork.  This gives a big edge to gimmick artists, shock artists, and left-wing political artists**.

Furthermore, if an artwork is by an established artist, it gains significance simply by fitting into a body of work, even if there is no doubt that it is uninspired, unoriginal, uninteresting, unaccomplished crap. Having been widely noticed, Shvarts is now a noted artist; she will have no trouble getting her artwork exhibited from now on.

I got a forward last week about the Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas, aka Habacuc, who has managed to genuinely offend people too.  He supposedly chained up an emaciated dog in an art gallery and deprived it of food, letting it starve to death in front of patrons.  See the Google News frenzy here.  

Thankfully, it appears to have been a hoax.  The Guardian reports (in the bottom par of the story, naturally):

Juanita Bermúdez, director of the Códice Gallery, insisted Natividad escaped after just one day. She said: ‘It was untied all the time except for the three hours the exhibition lasted and it was fed regularly with dog food Habacuc himself brought in.’

Somehow, the fact that the dog wasn’t really starving makes the whole stunt seem kind of cool to me.

**  Modern political art in public galleries seems to be always stridently left-wing, presumably because curators see left-wing messages as inherently challenging, controversial, confronting, subversive, shocking, etc.