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mousey musings
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Open CRS Network - CRS Reports for the People This service needs your help as a citizen. They don't need money, but they do need you to call your representative. CRS Reports are fantastic sources of information, chock full of history and detail. I've used quite a few to get information for my classes, and thousands more remain to be released. Check it out!
Sunday, June 26, 2005
I did eight years in Minot, North Dakota. This is a place so boring in a state so ugly that a pissant rock garden becomes major news.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Old South racism lives in Texas town -- Did I mention I'm moving back to Texas? The BBQ is great, but the people are another story...
The Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog has a fascinating discussion about the ten worst books, a response to a list by the right-wing wackjobs at Human Events. The rules are simple: The 10 books that have had the worst effect on (Western) civilization in the past 200 years. Here's my list:
1. Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf. Duh.
2. Russian Secret Police: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. This provided the inspiration for people like Hitler and continues to inspire anti-Semitic violence around the world.
the rest are in no particular order:
3. Sayyid Qutb: Milestones. The inspiration for Islamofascism.
4. Mao Tse Tung: Quotations from Chairman Mao. The symbol of the Cultural Revolution and the deaths of millions.
5. The Communist Manifesto. I had trouble picking between this and Lenin's What Is to Be Done. Communism killed millions and caused massive suffering in omst places it was tried. So has capitalism, of course, but capitalism also has plenty of success stories.
6. Scofield Reference Bible. This now-obscure volume helped jumpstart the literalist interpretation of the Bible, the war against science, and Christian millenarianism in the 20th century.
7. Herbert Spencer: Social Statics. We can pin a century of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and racism on Spencer's approach.
8. Sigmund Freud: A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Actually, I had a hard time picking which Freud to select. The problem with Freud was that he cloaked an essentially anti-rational philosophy in scientific garb. His misguided principles continue to be used by armchair psychiatrists, social philosophers, and media pundits to impose various forms of social control and impute ill will and ill health to their opponents. Scientific hypothesis-testing has had to work hard to overcome so many of the misguided notions that Freud bequeathed the world.
9. AT Mahan: The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. This wrong-headed look at geopolitics helped rationalize and justify the naval arms race that preceded World War I. I'd add in books by Herman Kahn and Giulio Douhet if I could. Wrongheaded militaristic thinking has played a major role in crisis escalation.
10. Samuel Huntington: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. I decided to end with a very recent book that I fear may become influential. I find that many of my students, even otherwise brilliant ones, are seduced by Huntington's argument. A few days of looking at its details usually cures them of this fascination, but I do think that this book may be used in terrible ways over the next few decades. Already, Huntington himself is using it to denounce Latino immigration. The book is the new social-scientific face of racism.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Odds of Dying -- Now you can figure out the difference between the odds that you'll be stabbed to death and the odds that you'll be shot to death. FYI: There's a 1 in 55,597 chance you'll be executed by the government. Happy reading.
There's a fascinating Flash application about class on the NYT web site. You can see where you fall relative to other Americans on the dimensions of income, education, prestige, and wealth.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Rising doctors' premiums not due to lawsuit awards -- This time, it sounds like a sensible, properly-controlled study instead of ATLA propaganda. I suspect the study is right, but I'd like to see independent confirmation by other research teams.
PrawfsBlawg has a great article on the practice of logrolling in Wisconsin. I teach my political science students that there are two basic behavior patterns in Congress: logrolling and partisanship. It seems Wisconsin has outlawed the primary mechanism for getting bills passed in a legislature. I look forward to further analysis of this bizarre, antidemocratic law.
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Without a trace, but strangely similar -- This article about a police officer who may have "disappeared" two suspects reminds me of what life was probably like in the Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s. The Feds should get involved in this one.
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