After inspecting more than twenty million pairs of shoes, have the screeners found even one dangerous pair?

After seven years, why is random yelling still the way that TSA screeners communicate their superstitious rules to people in line? Will this still be true in twenty years?

Why don’t we spend some of the time and money we’re wasting on security theatre to do things like secure ports or make airport runways safer?

…

It used to be extremely dangerous to give people on planes a metal butter knife and a fork with their meal. Now, it’s apparently no longer dangerous. What happened? If this was an overreaction not based on data, should reexamine other possible overreactions?

Ann Bartow, Why Hollywood Does Not Require ‘Saving’ From the Recordkeeping Requirements Imposed by 18 U.S.C. Section 2257 (Feminist Law Profs Blog).

Ann Bartow, Why Hollywood Does Not Require ‘Saving’ From the Recordkeeping Requirements Imposed by 18 U.S.C. Section 2257, 118 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 43 (2008).

Is this parallel publishing the wave of the future? And which one becomes the canonical version?

I don’t know what it says about me, but I find Geuss’s work to be exceptionally clear; it’s in a voice that just works for me and its usually about stuff I care about. It sticks. Rorty’s voice has always been an effort for me, even when it’s about stuff I care about. And then I have to re-read it.

See A Gut Check Moment for SFWA for a classic example of the genre. And entertaining comments from a bevy of science fiction luminaries.

As far as I know, no one has tagged me with this blog meme, but I’m still going to participate as it looks fun.

Instructions:
1. Grab the nearest book (that is at least 123 pages long).
2. Open to p. 123.
3. Go down to the 5th sentence.
4. Type in the following 3 sentences.
5. Tag five people.

Of course it helps that her book is cool.

Nearest book as I sit at my coffee table at home: The Chocolate Connoisseur by Chloé Doutre-Roussel.

…

Since I wasn’t tagged for this meme, I guess I don’t have to tag anyone else either although I invite people to grab the nearest book and post the specified three sentences here or on their own blogs.

Mine is much less cute. The nearest book to hand as I read Eszter’s invitation was a collection called Rediscovering Fuller (Willem J. Witteveen and Wibren van der Burg, eds.). It is an impressive set of thoughtful essays by the likes of David Dyzenhaus, Frederick Schauer, David Luban, Joseph Vining and many others. I’m reading it because my Jurisprudence class is heavily influenced by Fuller’s work and has several of Fuller’s essays among the readings. So far, Rediscovering Fuller is impressively clear, which is never a given in jurisprudence.

Page 123 happens to fall on the concluding page of “Fuller’s Faith” by Paul Cliteur. The essay helps flesh out what Fuller was doing in The Morality of Law, characterizing it as a modest but persuasive attempt to deal with the difficulty (impossibility?) of describing a full theory of justice by instead describing what systemic features tend very strongly to injustice. Cliteur paraphrases Fuller as saying, “I do not know exactly what justice is, but I have a clear idea about what it is not. There are some values we have to incorporate in every legal system. If we fail in this respect, justice fails and the system crumbles down.” (p. 115) Some people find this sort of thing to be thin gruel. I find it to be true. (These are not necessarily inconsistent positions.)

The fifth-seventh sentences of page 123 take us within one sentence of the end, so I’ve included a bonus sentence too. But I have to say that because the ending is in no way a summary, but just a final thought, it fails to capture the spirit of the essay,

He [Bentham] believed that a legislature chosen by the broadest possible electorate was the institution most likely to produce laws that served the public welfare. This would leave judges and commentators little discretion in their interpretation and application.

So everybody has his own faith. I believe that faith as expounded in Fuller’s work is certainly neither the most naive nor the least promising as far as the search for the principles of good government is concerned.

Feel free to post yours in the comments, or elsewhere. But don’t ‘tag’ anyone, please.

It begins as follows:

Nearly everything is wrong with this book, and every one of us should read it.

Only problem is, by the time I’m done with the review I really don’t want to read the book…

Tokyo left me feeling like an illiterate Albanian shepherd teleported without warning to the UK, staring slack-jawed in wonder at the vast, gleaming, powerful public works of metropolitan Huddersfield, reeking of wealth and efficiency and a goat-free future. From the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper I looked out across the high rise skyline, red lights blinking fretfully in the grip of a typhoon as winds strong enough to blow sheets of rain up the glass of the window rumbled around me, and I realized: this future has no place for goats.

…

On our last day in Kyoto, Feorag and I left our hotel and headed for downtown Kyoto. As we descended the steps into Shichijo subway station, an elderly fellow rushed over. “Hello! Remember me?” He called. (Apparently we’d met him a couple of days earlier, in a haze of shrine-going that ended with us both getting templed out.) “Here, please can you help me?” His spoken English was heavily accented. He dug around in his belt pack and pulled out a a sheaf of papers which he thrust under my nose. “Can you proof-read?”

It took us a quarter of an hour to disentangle ourselves from his polite but insistent demands that we check the English vernacular in his papers, which turned out to be part of the second edition of a huge Japanese-English dictionary — which, as Professor of English at Kyoto University, he was editing. Self-effacing politeness is a fearsome weapon: between us we checked at least five pages before we realized escape was possible.

In self-defense I have to admit that I’m not used to being mugged on the subway by feral English professors and forced to proof-read Japanese-English dictionary entries: I have entirely the wrong reflexes for such social situations and so, as one is trained to do when confronted with a situation that promises embarrassment, one tends to go with the flow.

…

In the UK, with a few exceptions — the uniformed services of government, police and military and fire services — we respond poorly to being placed in a uniform; it’s a sign of depersonalization, stripping us of individuality. In Japan, however, uniforms are everywhere. Even people who don’t have to wear them seem to gravitate towards workwear that’s uniform in its appearance: taxi drivers in dark suits, peaked hats, and white gloves. Uniforms confer status — a uniform is a sign that you belong to some greater social context, to a corporation or a shop or a school or something important.

And so, we have an island safe for eccentric English professors: an island where outward conformity provides an ill-fitting disguise for social experimentation and strange subcultures. An island where people live like the crew of a generation starship in flight towards the future, nevertheless dragging the scars of ancient history behind them.

Lots more good stuff where that came from. (Spotted via Boingboing, Charlie Stross on Japan)

Here’s a bit from the first post:

I’m happy to announce that Monday, October 15 is the official publication date of my new book “American Inquisition:  The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II.”  It’s an account of the secret inner mechanisms of racism within the episode we call the Japanese American internment of World War II.

I ground the book in extensive new archival research in the records of the civilian and military agencies that passed judgment on the loyalties of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.  As historian Roger Daniels says, the book presents a new story of “bad news from the good war.”

I’ll be blogging about the book’s claims here over the next several days.  Today, I’ll start things off by offering a very brief account of how the federal government ended up in the business of passing judgment on the loyalty of more than 40,000 U.S. citizens of Japanese ancestry between 1943 and 1945.

Anyone familiar with Eric’s work or his blogging will know that this will be a painstakingly careful book — and a good read. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m linking to the story because it’s short and funny.

Bruce Kushnick, Nieman Watchdog, Corporate-funded research designed to influence public policy, It is clear that we are in the age of “stink tanks,” in which corporate-funded think tanks and well-paid, credentialed academics are hired to make corporate arguments and give the appearance of being independent experts.

…

The think tanks often describe themselves as non-partisan, independent, free-market, free-enterprise, limited-government, or market-oriented. Their expert witnesses often bear credentials such as “professor of” or “former” FCC, FTC, state commissioner, Congressman, staffer.

Some have good reputations for serious studies on economic, political and foreign policy issues, albeit perhaps with an ideological slant. But good reputation or no reputation, when it comes to the telecoms and such issues as broadband, often these groups are nothing more than consulting firms that pursue the goals of the large corporations that are their clients and financial supporters.