Logographer

Some of the best writing seems to come from British obituaries. Take this obit of Count Gottfried von Bismarck from the Telegraph.

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age; many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs.

That’s just a sample. Read the whole thing for the literary value if you like. You can’t make this stuff up. (Via)

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Over at the Gypsy Scholar blog, Prof. H. J. Hodges has some thoughts on a recent fashion faux pas perpetrated by Cameron Diaz in Peru, and comes to the conclusion that ethics trumps aesthetics. It’s a sensible position, although seldom articulated. As a bonus, the famous San Francisco ferral parrots fittingly make another appearance on the web. (A mouthful, isn’t it?)

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To illustrate the effects of an immigrant points system, George Borjas took Canada’s self-assessment for skilled workers and came up short one point of the required 67 needed to immigrate. I scored 71 on the test myself, so I guess I can move if I want to.

My scores: Education 20 out of 25; language ability 17 of 24; work experience 21 of 21; age 8 of 10; arranged employment 0 of 10; adaptability 5 of 10.

Why does a Harvard professor fail to pass Canada’s immigration test where I succeed? The main difference seems to come from our ages. Borjas made no points in that category; I scored eight. If I would only finish my MA thesis, I could receive the same number of points for education as Borjas did. That’s almost hard to believe.

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Wow, is all I can say, about this story of a con-man who used his pillar-of-the-community reputation to swindle some expensive wine collections from Bay Area yokels.

Samuel Maslak told investigators he had been the chief investor in Bacchanal, a South San Francisco restaurant that went broke in 2000. Needing to store 756 cases of leftover wine — collateral in a bankruptcy proceeding — he found Mark Anderson.

The wine was trucked to a waterfront warehouse used by Sausalito Cellars in May 2001, where Maslak assumed it would be safe until he arranged to sell it through Christie’s. But when the auction house came to pick up the wine in December 2003, Fraass said, Anderson released just 166 cases. Only the cheapest wines remained.

“I called Mark and said, ‘There should be roughly 7,000 bottles of wine,’ ” Maslak said. “Mark’s answer was, ‘I was wondering when you were going to deliver (the rest of) those wines for storage.’ “

Via David at Cronaca.

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Although I don’t watch the show, two things strike me when reading this article about plans for the upcoming season of the reality TV show, “Survivor.”

Get ready for a segregated “Survivor.” Race will matter on the upcoming season of the CBS show as contestants will be divided into four tribes by ethnicity. That means blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians in separate groups.

First, it shows the crassness of the entertainment industry. (And I don’t mean to restrict my comment to just the American TV executives. After all, the “Big Brother” show originated in Europe.)

Second, it is always difficult to make sense out of the words “race” and “ethnicity” in modern American parlance. In this case, race and ethnicity are used in the same sentence. Are they synonyms here, or not? How does one divide a group of people into the categories “blacks, whites, Latinos and Asians”? Are there no black Latinos, white Latinos? Does Asian include people from India, Iran, or Israel, and will the producers consider their skin color in assigning “tribal” affiliation?

The show’s producers (ostensibly) are doing this in response to claims that the show “was not ethnically diverse enough” in past seasons. So now we will have the Orwellian situation where segregation is diversity. Maybe one of the tribes will be Eurasia and other will be Oceania. After all, they have always been at war with each other.

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I have normally avoided posting political comments on this blog, but I’m making an exception for this commentary by Martin Bright from the UK. I don’t know anything about Mr Bright or the publication, the New Statesman, for which he is the political editor, but I take it by his comments in the article that he is not a right-winger. This observation of his is enlightening, and damning:

While any attention is always welcome, these offers of solidarity [from the right] are also a challenge. . . . It is depressing that so few on the left have been prepared to engage with the issue of the Foreign Office appeasement of radical Islam except to minimise its significance. In contrast, the responses on the right have been largely measured.

He hopes that those on the left will not shy away from joining the right in calling fascism by its true name, and transcending political divisions in order to fight the threat to Western rationalism and liberalism posed by militant Islamists.

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Here’s a video of Steve Jobs appearing at the Cupertino City Council meeting a few days ago to announce his decision to build a second Apple campus in that town. It’s interesting to see and hear Citizen Jobs, and funny at times to hear the reactions from some of the council members.

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John Fund, writing for the Wall Street Journal, has been following the story of former Taliban spokesman Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, now a student at Yale. In his most recent article on the topic, Fund notes that “there appear to be a whole lot of dark corners in university admission offices that deserve illumination.” His report is worth reading, not only for the commentary on the “Taliban Man at Yale” incident, but also for some of its insight on American politics.

Not usually the type of reader who follows a story from a reporter on the political right? Consider what this young man said:

James Kirchick, a Yale senior, wrote last month in the Yale Daily News that he was disturbed by the refusal of liberals to be outraged over the religious fascism the Taliban represent. . . . He noted that “a friend of mine recently remarked that part of his and his peers’ nonchalance (and in some cases, support for) Hashemi has to do with the fact that the right has seized upon the issue. Our politics have become so polarized that many are willing to take positions based on the inverse of their opponents’. This abandonment of classical liberal values at the expense of political gamesmanship has consequences that reach far beyond Yale; it hurts our national discourse.”

Isn’t it difficult to disagree with Kirchick?

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The Euston Manifesto is an interesting read. Here’s an excerpt from the preamble:

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.

The manifesto has 353 signatories now, according to statistics on the site. I myself have only a few minor quibbles with the manifesto.

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Michael Waller thinks that the tone of the debate on immigration in this country could use a little more reason and a little less emotion and demagoguery. One way “to help push the immigration debate in a more sensible direction” is to look at the treatment of immigrants as defined in the Mexican constitution. His note titled “Mexico’s glass house” is a quick and interesting read, bringing to light some stark contrasts between the treatment of immigrants in the United States and Mexico.

Did you know, for example, that naturalized Mexican citizens don’t have all the rights of native-born citizens? You might be surprised to find that naturalized Mexican citizens can lose their citizenship if they return to their country of origin and live there for more than five years. Immigrants, whether naturalized citizens or not, are also barred from certain professions. Waller cites many articles from the Mexican constitution to create a list that will probably surprise many Americans.

Clearly something has to be done to reform US immigration laws. When laws are not enforced even by the government for a long period of time, something is wrong with the laws, the government, or both. There are also too few people asking why many Mexicans don’t want to live in Mexico, a country that has a long history of official corruption and a large and deeply impoverished underclass. When will Mexico be pressured to reform? Back in the US, it seems reasonable to assume that a population numbering in the many millions (some say 11 million) of non-citizens with no legal standing does not create a healthy environment for assimilation and participation in the greater society. Politicians on both sides of the aisle seem unable to deal with the problem rationally. It’s worth reading Waller’s note, if only to encourage a little more critical thinking.

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