THE WORLD MEMORY CHAMPIONSHIP COMPETITION is going on now at Oxford University. The current champion is Ben Pridmore, 28, who can memorize a pack of cards in 32.13 seconds. I wonder if the people who actually have the best memories use their super power to do things like memorizing packs of cards. Shouldn’t they want to fill their heads with things that will be beautiful or useful to think about – volumes of great literature or the complete tax code and regulations, perhaps? But no. Competition is intrinsically rewarding. My question is like asking the fastest runner why he competes in the Olympics instead of running around looking at the trees and flowers or traveling back and forth to work.

“WE HAD NO IDEA CONDITIONS WERE GOING TO BE THIS GREAT,” First Lt. Taysha Deaton of the Louisiana National Guard said about life in Iraq.

She bought [a king-size] bed from a departing soldier to replace the twin-size metal frame that came with her air-conditioned trailer on this base in western Baghdad. She also acquired a refrigerator, television, cellphone, microwave oven, boom box and DVD player, and signed up for a high-speed Internet connection.

These quotes are from a front-page NYT article, interestingly enough. The golden-toned photograph on the front page of the paper NYT – the little click-to-enlarge square at the link – makes life in Iraq look like an idealized version of college dorm life. This contrasts with the many NYT articles on the difficulties of military recruitment. There is a mention of the dramatically different conditions when one leaves the base, but overall the article almost seems intended to encourage volunteers.

THE “POLITICALLY CORRECT CORPSE.” The proprieter of an eco-friendly cemetary: “Death goes in cycles… My best guess is we’re finished with the nihilistic ‘Let’s get it done quick and throw me into the sea thing.’ Now, it’s, ‘Return me to nature and help save the planet.’ ”

AUSTIN BAY, filling in for Glenn over at GlennReynolds.com, builds on what Christopher Hitchens told Washington Prism in a recent interview.

THE CARNIVAL THING: We’ve been remiss in posting links to the various carnivals this week. Sorry about that. Here’s a link to the first year anniversary of the Carnival of the Recipes. I’ve been looking for a good recipe for steak au poive. (The French really do have the best food.) Anybody have one?

EAVESDROPPING ON IRAQIS: Friends of Democracy publishes essays from the Iraqi Arabic language blogosphere translated into English. Iraqis who blog in English are aware that their audience is primarily Western. Iraqis who blog in Arabic are talking to each other in their own language. Reading Friends of Democracy is your chance to eavesdrop. (Disclosure: I’m the site editor.)

Here are some recent posts you may find interesting: Shirko declares Syria an enemy state and demands regime-change in Damascus. Ali Taha Al-Nobani thinks financial aid to Arab dictators must cease. Samir Hassan argues with Islamists by throwing his own Koranic verses back at them. Saad al Omari notes that Middle Eastern leaders and clerics condemned the bombing in London on 7/7 while cheerleading similar bombings in Baghdad.

FUNNY AS HELL, and funny enough to spend time in Purgatory for, says Stephen Bainbridge, so who am I not to link?

ACTOR CHRISTOPHER WALKEN is running for president in 2008.

UPDATE: Grassroots activists are already making posters for him.

HE KNOWS HIS SPINTOS AND HIS ARIOSOS: Timothy Noah in Slate reports that Tom DeLay is an opera buff. “I’m not making this up, I swear,” he says.

WHO NEEDS HOLLYWOOD DISTRIBUTORS? Kamal Aboukhater released his movie Blowing Smoke directly to the Internet on a blog. Check out the trailer at the link and, if it looks interesting, why not order a copy? Help him and other independent filmmakers stick it to Hollywood’s tired gatekeepers by proving we do not need them.

IT’S NOT ALL ABOUT US: My new Tech Central Station column is up:

Islamists have killed thousands of Westerners over the past couple of years — thousands in New York City alone. But they have killed far more of their own fellow Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, and too many other places to list. The Terror War, or whatever we ought to call it, is not about us. It’s a war waged by totalitarian Islamists against the rest of the world. We aren’t targets because of what we do or even because of who we are. We are targets because we are not them. They hate everybody and we’re part of “everybody.”

Read the rest…

KEVIN DRUM thinks that he can make the NARAL anti-Roberts ad better:

when you cut through the thousands of words of chaff written about it, there appear to be two main complaints. First, that the ad doesn’t make clear that Roberts’ brief was filed seven years before the Birmingham bombing, and second, that it’s outrageous to say that Roberts was “supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber.”

Well, is that outrageous? Sure. Roberts was defending a legal principle, and the beneficiaries of legal principles are frequently pretty odious characters. Defending the principle doesn’t mean you’re defending a particular person or group, a distinction the ACLU makes all the time.

However, on the overall scale of outrageousness, I have to say that this ad ranks pretty low compared to conservative benchmarks like Willie Horton and the Swift Boat lunatics. In fact, here’s what I think is weird: NARAL could have addressed both these complaints and made the ad better in the process.

Take the timeline issue first. Wouldn’t it actually be more effective to put this front and center so that the 1998 bombing appears to be the inevitable result of Roberts’ winning 1991 argument to the Supreme Court? Sure it would.

As for “supporting violent fringe groups,” why say it that way in the first place? Why not take the high road and acknowledge that Roberts was defending an abstract principle, but then condemn the ivory tower ideology that they believe produced such appalling real world results?

But this makes no more sense than the original ad. The 1998 clinic bombing didn’t happen because John Roberts argued against prosecuting Operation Rescue, a group which as far as I know isn’t even rhetorically in favour of clinic bombings, and which definitely didn’t set this particular bomb, under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. Clinic bombers are already liable for prosecution under a host of statutes much more fearsome than the KKK Act, notably those against murder. Implying such an implausible causal link is only marginally less mendacious than the original ad.

Similarly, Mark Kleiman’s attempt to excuse NARAL’s ad by calling Operation Rescue a terrorist group is an abuse of the word. Is Operation Rescue attempting to keep women from having abortions by making them feel shame and public humiliation at an extraordinarily vulnerable time? Undoubtedly. Have they attempted to physically block women from entering clinics? Indeed they have. But speaking as one who used to form a human chain in front of clinics to help women through the protesters, I’ve never seen anything from Operation Rescue that even remotely qualifies as terrorism, nor seen anyone physically threaten a woman (shoving a picture of a fetus in her face does not count). There may have been isolated incidents (as, to be honest, there were isolated cases of overzealous young men on our side itching to get busy with the opposition). But instilling fear for a woman’s physical safety–the definition of terrorism–did not seem to me to be one of the organization’s goals, and indeed, at clinics where OR is protesting there are so many police, barricades, and counterprotesters that it would not be a very effective organisation if that were the goal. I disagree with Operation Rescue about nearly everything, but comparing it to the Ku Klux Klan’s campaign of lynching free blacks is grotesque.

Such ads are undoubtedly effective, but each one contributes to a political culture in which scoring one for the team is the only important consideration. Honest pro-choicers who feel that it’s all right because this is important should have a good long think about what kind of country they want to live in.

RECORD INFLATION Steve Verdon points out that current “record” oil prices are only records because inflation has raised prices across the board. In real terms, oil’s record price was reached shortly after Iran took hostages in the US embassy, way back in 1979, when a barrel of oil cost roughly $90 of today’s dollars.

You see these sorts of “records” everywhere. The highest grossing movie of all time in real terms was, I’m told, Gone With the Wind; it’s only the eroding value of our money that lets Hollywood set new records every few years. Something to keep in mind when you read those headlines.

Update Yup, Gone With the Wind.

Quote of the Day comes from James Joyner:

Airborne school is basically a couple hours of training interspersed with two weeks of harassment and then five hours of proving that gravity still operates over eastern Alabama interspersed with forty hours of sitting around in heavy equipment.

TIMOTHY BURKE REPORTS THAT at least one South African politician thinks that South Africa should look to Zimbabwe for lessons on how to give their land reform “oomph”. Oomph is certainly one way of putting it:

The government’s land redistribution policy, which led to the invasion of the country’s white-owned farms in the past few years, has contributed to the economic catastrophe that now grips Zimbabwe. On top of a drought and the devastation of HIV/AIDS, the land grab has made food production plummet. The UN’s World Food Programme reckons that 3m-4m people will need food aid this year. Cooking oil, sugar and Zimbabweans’ staple maize porridge have become very hard to come by in Harare, harder still in the countryside. Unemployment is probably over 70%; inflation, at last count, was 129%. There is not enough foreign exchange to cover basic imports. Long lines of cars wait in front of petrol stations rumoured to be expecting a delivery.

According to Peter Kagwanja, Southern Africa director of the International Crisis Group, which focuses on conflict prevention, pushing people out of the cities has several advantages from the government’s perspective. Reviving agriculture cannot be done without labour, and most of it left the countryside as commercial farming collapsed. So far, only a fraction of occupied land has been put to good use. Without more labour, even subsistence agriculture cannot pick up. The governor of the central bank, Gideon Gono, has suggested that “progressive-minded” white farmers should come back and work in selected sectors, such as horticulture and dairy farming. But as many were driven off their farms in the first place, that offer may have limited allure. The ruling party has recently talked of amending the constitution to end private land ownership altogether.

“MAKES YOU WONDER WHAT ELSE THEY TOSSED OUT.” Betsy Newmark on the 9/11 report, commenting on the news of omissions about Mohammed Atta. Here‘s the very harsh Investor’s Business Daily editorial:

[Curt Weldon, R-Pa. said] “They put stickies on the face of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed, and they said you can’t talk to Atta because he’s here on a green card.”

Lee Hamilton, co-chair of the 9-11 commission, said the commission “did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9-11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell . . . Had we learned of it, obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”

But they did learn of it. The New York Times reports that the 9-11 commission staff had the Able Danger data but decided not to share it with the panel members because the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.

Commission staffers plan a trip to the National Archives to retrieve their notes on Able Danger’s findings. Yes, the same National Archives where Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was caught stuffing classified documents about terrorist threats down his pants, presumably to remove them from public scrutiny.

And this is the same commission that included one Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department. She’s also architect of the policy that established a wall between intel and law enforcement, making “connecting the dots” before 9-11 a virtual impossibility.

THE MEANING OF AUTONOMY Great post from Catallarchy:

Consider two men: one a lone nomadic hunter on some primitive savanna thousands of years ago, and one an ordinary, downtrodden citizen of a modern totalitarian but non-genocidal dictatorship, say the Soviet Union of Brezhnev’s time. Who has more autonomy?

On Bill’s account, it’s gotta be the Soviet. He has a wider range of professions and life-paths available to him by far; he can travel much further and know much more; he can expect to live much longer. It is true that the Soviet is heavily constrained in the sense that there are numerous innocent things which, if he does them, will result in severe pain or violent death. But that’s true for the hunter too; the only difference is that for the hunter the pain/death will come at the hands of animals, diseases, and other natural forces, where for the Soviet it will come from the officials of the State.

But I think it quite obvious that this doesn’t accord well with most people’s intuitive notion of autonomy. The hunter’s life has a distinct romance to it, a sense of open-ended adventure; the Soviet’s does not. The hunter has a degree of dignity and self-possession which the Soviet is denied. The hunter, within the admittedly heavy but morally neutral and unchangeable constraints of physical reality, may do as he pleases without asking the leave of any man. The Soviet is a slave of other men who clearly are morally wrong to enslave him, and could have chosen not to. A notion of autonomy which does not capture these differences and declare the hunter the more autonomous one is a ridiculous notion.

On the other hand, consider what result you would get if you asked people whether they would rather live in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, or on the Savannah? Autonomy-loving libertarian that I am, I would find this a tough choice. Being eaten by a lion, dying of appendicitis, and slowly expiring from malnutrition after your teeth fall out are way no fun. So of the two competing notions of autonomy, which should we build a society on, if we had to choose?

That’s the magic of the market, actually; we don’t have to choose. For which I humbly thank God every day.

SYSTEMATIC SILLINESS Lynn Kiesling quotes one of my favourite passages from Adam Smith:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Click through for a very interesting discussion.

SLATE CHRONICLES the Israeli army’s preparations for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza.

“LOOKED LIKE IT WAS INTENTIONAL. Inform all units coming in from the back it could be a terror attack.” The 9/11 recordings. Listen here.

THERE’S A GOOD ARTICLE in the Wall Street Journal (subscription, alas, required) on how refinery problems are contributing to the recent spike in oil prices. People in America don’t like having refineries near them, or indeed, anyone else; the last time America built a new refinery was in 1976. Refiners have done amazing work increasing throughput with technology, but there are limits. Especially because they are hamstrung by the patchwork of local regulations, which mean that gasoline destined for Dubuque can’t be sold in Chicago. Oil must be processed in smaller batches, limiting efficiency, and worse, making the system vulnerable to bottlenecks: if something happens to a Chicago refiner, gas stations can’t buy “foriegn” gas to fill the gap, so consumers get sudden price spikes at the pump. Next time you wince at the cost of a gallon of regular unleaded, don’t just curse OPEC; curse the environmental regulators (and special-interests lobbying local officials for their particular brand of fuel additives) for making the market less efficient.

MARRIAGEE MINDED Two men are planning to get married in Canada. I know, yawn. The twist: they’re straight.

In response, a gay rights spokesman sounds downright old-fashioned:

Words of warning came from Toronto lawyer Bruce Walker, a gay and lesbian rights activist.

“Generally speaking, marriage should be for love,” he said. “People who don’t marry for love will find themselves in trouble.”

Meanie! Trying to restrict marriage to his tired, outworn definition!

Seriously, I find it difficult to phrase an objection to this that does not basically hew to the anti-gay-marriage line: i.e. marriage in the west has traditionally been between two people who want to have sex with each other. The objection to this argument is the same one that pro-gay-marriage forces employed against those who claimed that marriage was for child-rearing: we allow all sorts of people who cannot have sex with each other (certain classes of parapalegics, for example) to wed, so how can you exclude these people on this grounds? I think it’s funny, but if this sort of practice becomes more than a stunt, it seems very likely to me to weaken an already ailing institution.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem very likely to become widespread. Most people who get married will continue to do so for the good, old fashioned purpose of having frequent sexual intercourse. God bless ’em.

BORED IN FALLUJAH:

“Don’t you get attacked all the time?”

“Eh.”

“So what’s changed?”

“Well… there’s nothing left to watch. I’ve seen all the DVDs out there and there’s nothing left to do.”

I started naming off movies followed by all sorts of TV series on DVD that I could think of, and, sure enough, he had watched them all.

“Frank, there’s nothing left to watch! I wanna go home now.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. There seemed to be only one appropriate response. “Chickenhawk!”

THE PERFECT FAMILY VACATION BY THE LAKE… but doesn’t this campfire have WiFi?

A NEWLY DISCOVERED 400-FOOT WATERFALL in a Californian national park. “It wasn’t on a map, no one on the trail crew knew about it. People who been here 27 years had never seen it.” Amazing. We forget how big and wild this country is.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Regarding that “undiscovered” waterfall in California, it’s important to take such news with a dose of salt. A few years ago there was a lot of hoopla over the supposed discovery of new waterfalls in a little-visited corner of Yellowstone. What really happened was that someone decided to publish their location, which had been a sort of insider’s secret, in a guidebook. The authors defined the waterfalls as undiscovered purely because information on them hadn’t appeared in print. (Basically, nothing’s real until it’s available on Amazon.com.) Local reaction ran from amusement to outrage.

I’m sure the California falls were less widely known than the Yellowstone ones, but they weren’t really undiscovered. Here’s a passage from that CNN story you linked to:

“A small band of loggers that harvested Douglas firs in the early 1950s left behind a choker cable and part of a bulldozer. A knife blade stuck in a nearby tree indicates that others have also made the trek.

But for park officials, the falls were merely a rumor for many years, said Russ Weatherbee, the wildlife biologist credited with the find.

A couple years ago, Weatherbee was cleaning out a cabinet of old maps when he stumbled across one from the 1960s marked with a note reading “Whiskeytown falls” near Crystal Creek.”

Now, officials are planning to build a trail to the falls and put them on the map. A perfectly valid response, but probably bitter news to whatever backpackers, etc., really did know about the area.