REDUX

"If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."

Must-read: Belmont Club.

Asshole of the Week...

This week's winner of the Asshole of the Week award is... Jacques Chriac!

And an honorable mention goes to the editors of cnn.com/world!

Why, you ask?

Because cnn.com reported that Jacques Chirac implored at a televised town-hall meeting that:

The two-hour town hall-style meeting on Thursday evening marked the start of his push to promote the constitution, which is intended to reform EU decision-making after the admission of 10 new members last May.

However, the "no" campaign is leading in the opinion polls, and analysts suggested Chirac's debate with 83 carefully selected young people would not reverse the trend.

"In front of an audience in which those favoring the 'No' seemed to be in the majority, the head of state often struggled to make heard his pro-European plea during a muddled broadcast," the conservative Le Figaro wrote on its front page.

"Chirac: difficulty reassuring," LCI television said, while the left-leaning Liberation newspapers said Chirac appeared "strained, almost clenched-up" in the meeting.

Laurent Fabius, a former Socialist prime minister and leading "no" campaigner accused Chirac of trying to scare voters into backing the charter.

"I found Mr. Chirac, like the constitution, long and not very convincing," he told RTL radio.

"I was very struck to see Mr. Chirac saying on the one hand, 'don't be afraid', but his main argument was to try to create fear."

Chirac said the treaty could not be renegotiated if voters reject it but he would not resign over the charter, on which he has staked his personal prestige.

However, many analysts say a rejection, or even a narrow win, would deal a blow to his hopes of running for a third presidential term in 2007.

Opinion polls show the "no" campaign is ahead just six weeks before the referendum. The surveys point to discontent with high unemployment and with France's declining influence in Europe.

Meanwhile, a UPI report actually tells us what Mr. Chirac was saying:

A "no" vote to the European Constitution would weaken the EU and benefit the United States, warned French President Jacques Chirac, Thursday.

Appearing on a live televised debate with a group of 83 young French citizens aged 18-30, Chirac replied during two full hours to questions from the public, trying to promote a "yes" vote.

Chirac said a European constitution is important to help build a stronger Europe in the face of other powers.

"Europe must be strong, it must have the power to survive in tomorrow's world," said the French president.

Spinning a story gets you an honorable mention, being the asshole at the center of it, makes you, well, an asshole.

Great Moments in Journalism: washingtonpost.com

Today brought this insult to reader intelligence the cutesy-titled "Bolton's Hair: No Brush With Greatness". In it, a Fashion Section staff writer pens the following:

John Bolton, President Bush's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, desperately needs a haircut. It does not have to be a $600 Sally Hershberger cut. Bolton simply needs the basics. Tidy the curling, unruly locks at the nape of his neck, tame the volume at the crown, reel in the wings flapping above his ears, and broker a compromise between his sand-colored mop and his snow-colored mustache.

He needs to do this, not because he should be minding the recommendations of men's fashion magazines or grooming experts but because when he settled in before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week to answer questions about his record, his philosophy and his intentions at the U.N., he looked as though he did not even have enough respect for the proceedings to bother combing his hair -- or, for that matter, straightening his tie, or wearing a shirt that did not put his neck in a chokehold. Bolton was one wrinkled suit away from being an insolent mess.

So, uh, let me get this straight, she's saying that "Clothes Make the Man"?

Wow, that's some hard-hitting investigative journalism right there. But it's the conclusion which kills me:

A Hollywood costumer could not have ordered a more perfectly stern Washington insider. Bolton embraces with a flourish all of the cliches that afflict so many men in Washington. During this testimony, his hand was constantly reaching up to adjust his no-frills glasses. His attire was not merely bland but careless. His hair was so poorly cut, it bordered on rude. Bolton might well argue that appearance has nothing to do with capabilities. But it certainly can be a measure of one's respect for the job.

Wow, if that's not a more perfectly vapid cliche of "fashion" reporting, I don't know what is. I mean, a haircut that borders on rude? This is news? This is the Washington Post?!? Who does she think is reading this stuff? One might very well argue that writing cutesy prose about vaporous trends in superficiality in an all-too disposable media is at best an absurd and ridiculous waste of time and energy, having nothing to do with substance. But it certainly can be used as a measure of one's respect for the audience.

Thoughts of the Day

A man's maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.

Madness is rare in individuals -- but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.

F. Nietzsche

A Spectre Still Haunts Us

Stumbling onto this collective declaration of spite by one the blue state's lumpen proletariat (by way of Megan McArdle's excellent site), I fell into a brief melancholy after finding out that today, in the 21st century, communism does in fact exist. The same hatred of wealthy, the nihilist drive to debase all human life in service of Big Ideas, the insanely violent will-to-power -- it's all there. Unfuckingbelievable.

Thankfully, I was pulled out of my melancholy by Rob Leder, who, commenting on Ms. McCardle's website hits upon a perfect analogy to illustrate the absurdity of communism:

I see that Matthew also yearns for a "serious program to combat inequality". Hear, hear! But before implementing our social engineering in the U.S. economy, why not use professional sports as a test case?

Baseball, for example, is rife with inequality. Greedy players like Barry Bonds are hitting more than their fair share of home runs. Clearly it's bad for the game when a small number of players selfishly grab up so many of the available home runs, because it leaves less for all of the other players to hit. The best thing for the game is to have everyone hitting at least a couple of the homers, and nobody hitting too many of them: a large "middle class" of mediocre power hitters is what should dominate baseball. But how to best achieve a more equitable distribution of home runs? Heavier bats for better hitters? Movable fences in the outfield? Discounting every marginal home run over 30 by 80%, and distributing the "savings" among those disenfranchised players who can't even reach the warning track? I'm sure it will take a lot of tinkering to get our system just right, but in making the game more fair, we'll doubtless gain some valuable insights on how to remake society as a whole. Then we can move on to the gulags and 5-year plans...

Of course, why bother with test cases when we can look at a case study? If you're still smitten with any aspect of Communism, do yourself a favor, disabuse yourself of that folly, by checking out the Epoch Times' "Nine Commentaries on the Chinese Communist Party."

New Music

Check out Erik_Hz's latest mix,  Digicripsy 2.0.

If At First You Don't Succeed...

Lie, Cheat, and Steal. At least, that appears to be the motto of the Washington State Democratic Party. In addition to having a ssenator who publicly praised Osama bin Laden for his innovative third-world health care outreach initiatives -- our lack of which constitute the fundamental reason "why they hate us" -- the state's Dems have taken to electoral fraud. Republicans have challenged the election, and their day in court is scheduled for May 23rd. The substance:

Washington state has supplanted Florida as the leading example of the need for election reform. The Evergreen State's voting system is so sloppy that you can't tell where incompetence ends and actual fraud might begin. Three Washington counties just discovered 110 uncounted absentee ballots--including 93 from Seattle's King County--in a governor's race that occurred more than five months ago and was decided by only 129 votes. Officials in Seattle's King County admit they may find yet more ballots before a court hearing next month on whether a new election should be called. Last Friday, they reported finding a 111th ballot.

The infamous 2004 governor's race was finally decided seven weeks after the election, after King County officials found new unsecured ballots on nine separate occasions during two statewide recounts. After the new ballots were counted, Democrat Christine Gregoire won a 129-vote victory out of some three million ballots cast. Even as she was sworn in last January, King County election supervisor Dean Logan admitted it had been "a messy process."

He wasn't kidding. During the two recounts, Mr. Logan's office discovered 566 "erroneously rejected" absentee ballots, plus another 150 uncounted ones that turned up in a warehouse. Evidence surfaced that dead people had "exercised their right to vote"; documentation was presented that 900 felons in King County alone had illegally voted and that military ballots were sent out too late to be counted. A total of 700 provisional ballots had been fed into voting machines before officials had determined their validity. In the four previous November elections, King County workers had never mishandled more than nine provisional ballots in a single election.

Curious?

Trade = Evolution?

A new theory explaining the rise of homo sapiens and the fall of homo neanderthalensis is detailed in the Economist.com's Homo Economicus?

SINCE the days of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, advocates of free trade and the division of labour, including this newspaper, have lauded the advantages of those economic principles. Until now, though, no one has suggested that they might be responsible for the very existence of humanity. But that is the thesis propounded by Jason Shogren, of the University of Wyoming, and his colleagues. For Dr Shogren is suggesting that trade and specialisation are the reasons Homo sapiens displaced previous members of the genus, such as Homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal man), and emerged triumphant as the only species of humanity.

(snip)

One theory is that Homo sapiens had more sophisticated tools, which gave him an advantage in hunting or warfare. Another is that the modern human capacity for symbolic thinking (manifest at that time in the form of cave paintings and carved animal figurines) provided an edge. Symbolic thinking might have led to more sophisticated language and better co-operation. But according to Dr Shogren's paper in a forthcoming edition of the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organisation, it was neither cave paintings nor better spear points that led to Homo sapiens's dominance. It was a better economic system.

One thing Homo sapiens does that Homo neanderthalensis shows no sign of having done is trade. The evidence suggests that such trade was going on even 40,000 years ago. Stone tools made of non-local materials, and sea-shell jewellery found far from the coast, are witnesses to long-distance exchanges. That Homo sapiens also practised division of labour and specialisation is suggested not only by the skilled nature of his craft work, but also by the fact that his dwellings had spaces apparently set aside for different uses.

This theory hasn't come to be viewed as anthropological dogma knowledge and  it will have a hell of a time becoming accepted by anti-globalization anthropologists. This is unfortunate, given that the process which we are seeing currently on a global scale would seem to parallel what happened in pre-history.

But this misses the larger point. If economics (i.e., trade and specialization) is a fundamental part of the human evolutionary success, and not some kind of metastatizing growth particular to artificial civilization run amok, then an entire rethinking of human history and development is necessary.  Too-often, post-colonial anthroplogy begins and ends its efforts to understand economics -- a most human activity -- in terms of 15th to 18th century mercantilism or structure/superstructure marxism.

Consider the possibility that the fundamental human activity is trade, related, but not identical, to cultural pursuits, war, or governance.  This would seem to reflect the vast majority of our history and present circumstances.   It would also suggest that societies which arranges themselves upon the latter at the expense of the former are by definition nihilist, in that they, at best, do not seek to sustain themselves, and at worst, characterize a headlong plunge into orgiastic self-destruction.

If this new theory leads to a paradigm shift -- and my gut feeling is that it will -- it will revolutionize the manner in which we view our own species and its activities.  It will destroy the contemporary anthropology, which, resting on its post-feminist methodology of kinship and folklore study, has come to favor -- and defend -- arbitrary statical representation of human cultures, as opposed to the dynamic give-and-take which we witness in our day-to-day affairs.   The only obstacle to this would be the nature of anthropology curricula -- the social scientists would need to learn calculus and macro-economics, not basket-weaving and mythology.

This Just In!

The Onion is funny!

Communism is bad...

for the market, and

for the soul.