Two guys are playing correspondence chess. One lives at the South Pole and the other at the North Pole. Ordinarily, it takes weeks just to get one reply and the games drag out for years. One of the players is growing very impatient because he hasn’t received a move from his opponent in months. Finally, he spots the postman driving his team of Malamutes through a blizzard. He opens his door and gets the postcard he has been waiting for. Here is what it says:

J’adoube.

Reprinted from today’s http://watchingpolitics.com/?p=7328

Major articles in this week’s ECONOMIST. The question of the day is this: How many of the Republican candidates for President know more about these matters than does a high school senior taking a civics course?

Highlights from The Economist online’s Politics this week

» Lexington: The union’s state is dire
» The Republican nomination: Not so fast, Newt
» Yemen’s president: Another one bites the dust
» Nigeria’s northern capital: The terror they dare not name
» Croatia and the European Union: A cautious yes
» Turkish foreign policy: Problems with the neighbours
» French politics: Sauce Hollandaise
» Italy’s reforms: The Iron Monti

Is this the kind of person you want to be running the planet?

All statistics are drawn for the Offender Management Statistics Quarterly Bulletin. A British publication.

1. 87,749 people hang out in English and Welsh prisons. This is considered to be 1,650 places less than usable capacity. The hang-out number is a steep rise from 10,000 in 1940 and 40,000 in 1990.

2. 71% are white males; non-criminals are 1%; 4% are females; the rest is a motley crew.

3. Violence – 20,000; drug offences – 11,000; sexual offences – 9,000; motor offences – about 1,000. Robbery – 8.000;
burglary – 7,500; theft, fraud, other offences and “offences not recorded” make up the rest.

4. The fair sex – Total population =4300. In 1967, it was about 700. The ladies started slowly but are doing well, now. In the good old days, (1900), they were well-represented with 3500 inmates, but chivalry crushed them and they were down to 500 by 1935.

5. The races – Criminality is a white man’s game. 89% of inmates are white. 5.5% are Asian. 2.7% are Black. 2.7% are others.

6. Christians are causing the trouble – 50%; Muslims – 12.6%; Buddhists – 2.3%; Hini – 0.5%; The Good Guys (Jews) – 0.3%; whacked-out atheists – 32.5%. Weirdoes – the remainder.

In SCOTLAND – The vicious number 8,222. [Male Scots don't deserve to live because of their lewd, lascivious and dangerously tempting short pants.] In 1920, 0nly 1000 of these mates were in prison; now they’ve gone WILD! 61% are adult males (who have something they need to hide). 4% are adult females. The rest are the usual riff raff.

**********************************
Naturally, as the “greatest country on Earth,” the USA leads the way. The U.K. has a shamefully low 151 prisonersper 100,000 population and the USA, always biggest and best in everything, counts 748. Puny Iceland has 55 per 100,000 and puny as it is, had to be bullied into giving out statistics. Russia has a respectiable 620 or so per 100,000. 45 countries provided information. Quisling-led Norway and its cowardly friends in Denmark don’t go out in the dark nights and are close rivals to Iceland. Yellow-bellied, slanty-eyed Nips, now retired from throwing babies into the air and catching them on bayonet points (a la the good old Nanking rape days) are about 56 per 100,000. [But go see the movieIN THE REALM OF THE SENSES for what these low-grade freaks really like to do.]

Excuses, Mitigation, Forgiveness and ALL-ROUND BULLSHIT – 47% of male sentenced prisoners and 50% of female sentenced prisoners had run away from home as a child. This compares to 10% of the general population. Ahhhh, the poor little sweethearts. Daddy has a lollypop for you when you come home from your hard round of daily raping.

Now for real garbage – Two-thirds of prisoners have numeracy skills at or below the level expected of an 11 year old. One-half have a reading ability and 82% have writing ability at or below this level. HEY, HEY, HEY! It hasn’t done me that much harm.

I may not know much criminology (although I may boast of studying it for three years as a graduate student) but I remember a sign up in Katz’s poolroom in Brownsville, that read, IT’S NICE TO BE NICE. TRY IT. Honestly, you little gangsters and whores, is there more to it than that?

Your assignment, whether you want it or not, is to rank these stories: 0 to 10 on the “funny” scale – 10 being highest. You do not have to stick to whole numbers. Scores like 6.3309 are acceptable. Rank them from A to D as examples of criminal stupidity, with A standing for the highest degree of stupidity. The absolute winner gets a piece of a chewed-upon hotdog. The person with the worst score gets a thrashing in my dungeon. If you do not submit a ranking, I will do something too terrible to you to describe.

The stories are listed in the order I received them in an e-mail letter.

1. A man who shoveled snow for an hour to clear a space for his car during a blizzard in Chicago returned with his vehicle to find a woman had taken the space. Understandably, he shot her.

2. After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies.. The deception wasn’t discovered for 3 days.

3. An American teenager was in the hospital recovering from serious head wounds received from an oncoming train. When asked how he received the injuries, the lad told police that he was simply trying to see how close he could get his head to a moving train before he was hit.

4. A man walked into a Louisiana Circle-K, put a $20 bill on the counter, and asked for change. When the clerk opened the cash drawer, the man pulled a gun and asked for all the cash in the register, which the clerk promptly provided. The man took the cash from the clerk and fled, leaving the $20 bill on the counter. The total amount of cash he got from the drawer… $15.

5. Seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly.. He decided that he’d just throw a cinder block through a liquor store window, grab some booze, and run. So he lifted the cinder block and heaved it over his head at the window. The cinder block bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head, knocking him unconscious. The liquor store window was made of Plexiglas. The whole event was caught on videotape.

8. As a female shopper exited a New York convenience store, a man grabbed her purse and ran. The clerk called 911 immediately, and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the snatcher. Within minutes, the police apprehended the snatcher. They put him in the car and drove back to the store.. The thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID. To which he replied, “Yes, officer, that’s her. That’s the lady I stole the purse from.”

6. The Ann Arbor News crime column reported that a man walked into a Burger King in Ypsilanti , Michigan at 5 A.M., flashed a gun, and demanded cash. The clerk turned him down because he said he couldn’t open the cash register without a food order. When the man ordered onion rings, the clerk said they weren’t available for breakfast… The man, frustrated, walked away.

7. When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a motor home parked on a Seattle street, he got much more than he bargained for.. Police arrived at the scene to find a very sick man curled up next to a motor home near spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal gasoline, but he plugged his siphon hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had.

Elena Kagan, that paragon of thinking, that wonder of judicial discernment, that instance of genius par excellence, that gorgeous specimen of womanhood, has again excused herself from joining her confréres in a decision I don’t care enough about to remember. This refusal goes by the name of “recusal” in legal circles and is usually the excuse not to be bothered, on the lame grounds that these wizards of thought offer when they have already participated in the case in question while they were high-grade thinkers on a lower court.

Here is a good analogy: an umpire assigned to the World Series says he cannot participate because he already umpired in the playoff games leading up to the World Series. His view has already been aired publicly, namely he thinks [sic] that if a throw to the first baseman arrives before the runner does, the runner should be declared OUT. Overlooked by Madame Kagan and other profound addicts of the recusal method is that everybody’s views are already well known. Should Scalia ever participate in a case on abortion? Should Bill Douglas have announced that he sees nothing wrong with a physician telling his client (a.k.a. “patient”) how contraception works after he told the world for the umpteenth time that contraception is okay with him?

If any lawyers out there who read this blog think recusals make sense let him now speak up or write down his ideas or forever after hold his peace and his piece.

*********************
Please restrain yourself and do NOT correct the words in the title of this post or you will drive me to a rick santorum.

In the Nixonian tradition, let me make one thing perfectly clear. In an effort to ward off the hopelessly irrelevant criticism that two regular commentators are likely to make, I now declare that the definitions I will offer of “value” and “worth” are STIPULATIVE, hence neither correct nor incorrect.

I will use “Worth” to refer to market value, i.e. the money a thing can bring in to a seller. In a recent auction, Elizabeth Taylor’s jewelry brought in a record-breaking $110 million for the whole collection. Meanwhile, over in Beijing, astonishing sums of money are being forked over for paintings that are trash. They are being sold to persons burdened with too much cash for $50 and $60 million dollars.

A fine recording of a Beethoven symphony can set you back $20 but you can buy the original score in Beethoven’s hand for a few thousand dollars. You are likely to do that only if music itself has no appeal to you. Thus, the score is worth much more than the music but it is only the music that has value. Silly homes, lacking architectural interest, are being sold for $30 million. Probably, they will be used to house $60 million paintings.

You may wrongly think crazily high prices are a matter of foolish conspicuous consumption in the Veblen sense of those words but not so. Buyers of these atrocities disdain what others think and oft-times keep their purchases inconspicuous and even secret. Unless a purchaser has the skills of a George Lucas, he puts his trust in an architect who designs without any concern for what the dweller thinks of architectural forms. This is to the contentment of the soon-to-be occupier of the monstrosity who supposes he has put his faith in the hands of a genius.

As for painting, I know hardly a single person who would not feel cheated if he paid $20,000 for a Vermeer miniature only to discover later that microscopic analysis proved it was counterfeit. Paintings, of all objets d’art, should have value residing entirely in their visual presentation. That does not mean their worth should be confined to their aesthetic value. I would not dream of paying $20,000 for a Vermeer miniature even if I had the money and could afford to buy one at that price. If I did buy one, I would feel sorely put upon if I discovered it was not the genuine article, and that does not have much to do with the fact that others were buying exact duplicates in Brentano-like bookstores for $30. In other words, it is not because I WUZ ROBBED. It is hard to say exactly what would be bothering me but I guess it has something to do with my wanting my possession to be a true piece of the history of Vermeer. It is at least partly its place in history that confers value on a painting hundreds of years old. A few decades ago, the works of the Dutch painter Han Van Meegeren were found to to be “forgeries” of Vermeer. The art world was shocked but the truth is that van Meegeren never intended them to be considered lost works of the great master. They were original van Meegerens and that others mistakenly thought they were by Vermeer was not his fault. Of course, he made a fortune and did not attempt to say, “Wait, you are making a mistake.” Why should he have said that since he was not in the business of defrauding people? He never said, “Guess what I found in Joe’s attic.” Because van Meegeren’s work is thought (I suppose, properly so) not to make any lasting contribution to art, these paintings have little value nowadays but still retain a fair amount of worth. I’d buy one myself for 50 bucks if I could figure out where to hang it without bothering my much beset upon wife.

The art world is mainly a collection of those critics who “appraise” works of art, and appraising is a matter of arriving at a thing’s worth. It would be absurd if at this point in history some critic said, “I have rethought the Venus de Milo and now regard its value as a buck and a half in the light of the fact that she has a broken-off arm.” Aesthetic value cannot be priced, and high or low, prices are unintelligible. Coin collectors – dullards that they are – do weigh the condition and shininess of coins to determine their value, but what they really are doing is determining their worth. Who wants a 1913 nickel, slightly chipped and encased in unremovable grime? You can’t sell it for a 2011 nickel.

Anyone out there want to buy a certain bridge in Brooklyn? I can let you have it for the bargain basement price of 50 grand without ownership authentication but you know you can trust me. Or I’ll trade you my bridge for a one cent British Guiana postage stamp from 1856. Either way, you win. Prices, remember, are all about what an object is worth to a buyer.

Last month, at the Detroit Airport, some guy just in front of me said, while taking off his shoes, “I don’t mind this sort of thing. Better safe than sorry. Anybody might be carrying a shoe bomb.” This patriotic imbecile was immediately pulled off the line and grilled by a couple of TSA agents. He triggered inquiry by mentioning taboo words. He failed his casting audition for the part of John Stuart Mill in the upcoming sizzling thriller, “Hey, Buddy, Got A Shoe Bomb?” I hope he gets ten years in a chain gang prison.

Fourteen dopes were arrested on the steps of the Supreme Court for protesting the death penalty. Those steps may well have been the very steps on which Clarence Thomas places his size EEE shoes every day. Instead of protesting, they should have worshipped and kissed the ground that the man who possesses a Long John Silver schlong walks upon. They are the living proof that the death penalty is justified —without trial.

A former CIA officer was charged with leaking classified material to the press. What was in that material? As the saying goes, the CIA could tell you but then you would have to be killed. Can you, Gendin, tell me why the CIA feels it has to kill people who know why people have to be killed? Yes, I can do that but then YOU, too, would have to be killed, to say nothing of me. Can you, Gendin, before you enter prison, at least tell me why the CIA feels that it feels it has to kill people? This question reminds me of the guy who stands in front of a mirror that has a mirror directly behind him and begins to count mirrors.

Vis-a-vis that dirty rat of a CIA officer and, according to The LegalTimes, Attorney General-Schmuck Eric Holder Jr. said in a prepared statement. “Today’s charges reinforce the Justice Department’s commitment to hold accountable anyone who would violate the solemn duty not to disclose such sensitive information.” Hey, Readers, what other kind of statement than “prepared” would this black schmuck ever release? Holder continues to prove that the black schmuck who appointed him is himself King of Schmucks. Did you know that CIA agents are required to take secret oaths because even what they solemnly swear to is a state secret?

[Gendin! You are a racist, a bigot, a xenophobe, a muhfuh, an insensitive lout, the kind of guy who calls a schvoon a schvoon for no better reason than that a schvoon is a schvoon, and, heaven's to betsy, a man given to parti pris. You are a Jew bastard with too much money. We pray that your ancestors were victims of Torquemada.] To tell the truth, and I swear to this on the filthy remains of my mother’s bones, I wish the family line had gone extinct hundreds of years ago.

Whatever the talents of an elephant, sadly enough, they are lacking in us. So I decided to go roller skating. My companion assured me that skating is like bike riding, one of those things one never forgets how to do. I asked, him,”Like chewing gum? I haven’t done that in 40 years.” “Exactly,” he replied, “Don’t worry.”

I suspected he was wrong and I soon proved it. I strapped on my skates and inched my way with fear and trembling, (and a touch of angst), over to the rails surrounding the skate rink. I moved like a staggering, drunken sailor in what also seemed to me to be the style of those awful Negro tap dancers who gracelessly make ridiculous windmilling movements that clowns might do on a tightrope two feet off the ground. [Fred Astaire never did them. Neither did the Nicholas brothers.]

I took short, chopping steps and did not dare let go of the rail as I stumbled stupidly around the rink. I knew gliding steps would help but didn’t have the courage to try them because I would have had to let go of the rails. After ten minutes, I had improved enough to take myself two feet from the rail, knowing I could reach out for them if I had to. Five minutes later, I tried a glide. I doubt anyone could tell I was gliding but I, at least, knew it. It all exhausted me and, somehow or other, I made my way over to a bench and removed my skates. I was no elephant.

The incident caused me to reflect on the meaning of “never forget how to…” and then I pounced, like an elephant who thanks God when someone finally removes his skates. In other words, I poured philosophy down on my poor companion. He deserved this maltreatment. ["Mistreatment," Al?]

SG: “In the first place, nobody every forgets how to skate because nobody who ever lived learned how to skate.”
Victim: “What are you talking about?”…………. SG: “Skating.”
Vic: “Don’t be a wise guy. Explain.”
SG: “Ability to skate is like ability to walk. When you are ten months old, you can’t do it but when you are eleven months old, you can. Developmental psychologists, lacking ability to speak English, as they all do, say things like ‘We learn to do this and that at six months of age, such and such when we are one year old, triple salkows with a toe loop at age…’ ………But this is all nonsense. Development is not the same as learning how. A five-seconds old spider cannot spin a web but later it can. It has not learned a thing.

Vic: “That sounds right.”
SG: “Of course. Everything I say is right. That is my essence.”
Vic: “God, you disgust me.” ………SG: Of course, again. That, too, is part of my essence.”
Vic: “Is there more to this?”
SG: “Much more but in the light of how little you are paying, you get only the short course. Consider: someone may be a great swim coach. He knows all about the proper and improper ways of stroking and can teach them but he, himself, cannot swim because he is paralyzed. Thus, he has plenty of know-how but just can’t swim. If he was born paralyzed, he never could swim even though he eventually had plenty of know-how. Or think about the fact that John has skill at ski jumping but broke his leg yesterday and now he is unable to jump. So, being skilled at jumping and being able to jump are not the same things. Then, too, a man may be able to chew gum but it seems odd to say he has great skill at it. Skills, you see, are like raising high a roofbeam. Those are the things more likely to be learned and mastered than raw abilities. Surely, merely leading a man to the skating rink and patiently waiting for him to improve is not the same as teaching him. “Learning” to skate is not like learning to tie shoe laces. So far as the latter is concerned, usually someone shows you how. At first, you fumble but then you get good at it. That’s what I call “learning how.” In general, even if not quite 89.0733% of the time, learning how is a matter of breaking down a task into its parts and working on those parts. Learning to tie your shoe laces is a good example. Got the idea now?”
Vic: “Almost. Not quite. At least allow me to say this: no great harm is done by saying babies learn different skills at different ages. We don’t have to be confined to the language of development all the time.”
SG: “No, I can’t allow that. Why, you may as well say Hitler and Stalin never did anybody any great harm. They authorized killings but never did any killing themselves. I just can’t allow dumb ideas if you want to skate with me again.”
Vic: “I don’t ever again want to skate with you.”
SG: Come, come. I only want to teach you to think, and notice, please, that is not the same thing as teaching you how to think. As for the latter, I am not sure anybody knows how to teach anyone else how to think. I’ll lead you to water and you can decide whether to drink.”
Vic: “Is it bottled?”…………….SG: “Who’s the wiseguy now?”

My earliest efforts in philosophy were in aesthetics. They were not much but at least one of them was footnoted. [Footnote 6,
Diálogos. LITERARY INTENTIONALISM AND THE IDENTITY THESIS: A FILÉ IN THE OINTMENT? by
Timothy Chambers The essay was, Sidney Gendin, “The Artist’s Intentions,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 23 (1964): 193-196. No comment was made but at least someone took notice of it, and I was pleased. Despite my professional neglect of myself and the topic, the subject has never been far from my heart. The essay was rediscovered by Daniel Nathan in 1992 in a paper he published in the British Journal of Aesthetics. Again, a thrill went up and down my spine. The frosting on the cake was added by John Kemp in that same journal. Amazingly, Kaye Mitchell actually mentions me, not in a footnote, but in the body of her text. I don’t know whether the mention is positive or negative because i am such a sucker for the flattery of a mention that, for me, positivity or negativity is besides the point. So I did not read what she said. (If Kaye is a woman.) Incredibly enough, the eminent philosopher Joe Margolis says something nice about my work but I didn’t bother to read it. A letter to The Atlantic Monthly (2004) is complimentary but I didn’t get far enough into the magazine to know what the writer said. I noticed very recently (as a result of a diligent search) that some organization called The International Society for Environmental Ethics included me in its 1995 program but I only found out about it this morning. Sorry I’m late, organizers. Hope all went well without me. Then, too, the JOURNAL FOR GENERAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE seems to have made room for me……I think……. but since the conference it sponsored is titled Der intentionale Fehlschluß‘ — ein Dogma? Systematischer Forschungsbericht zur Kontroverse um eine intentionalistische Konzeption in den Textwissenschaften your guess is as good as mine. Nor should we overlook Von daher ist es verstandlich, wenn Sidney Gendin beispiels ….. sowohl den ?artist’s intentions” als auch den perceptions of the able critic” … This could be a bunch of Nazis putting out a hit on me, for all I know and, believe it or not, for all I care, they can succeed. I’d love a glorious death. Don’t even ask me where it was published.

The upshot of all this is that I am doggone pleased as punch with myself. All this attention for one very lousy essay. I made a Sugar Ray-like combcak some years ago (2001?, 2002?, 2003?, or maybe more recently in a very prestigious journal, and that’s the truth although I don’t remember its exact name. My best guess for the title is “Was Stephen Crane (or anybody else) a literary naturalist? Maybe it appeared in Oxford Something or Other, maybe Cambridge This or That. It actually was very good but, for some reason or other, I dropped interest in the matter. If memory serves correct, it was actually a ghostwritten essay for some gorgeous graduate student I wanted to make time with. I didn’t get far with her but, thank heaven, she got an A for the paper or my ego would have been shattered. It is best not to track the events down too closely for, who knows?, Maybe my Ph.D. would be retracted. It is not nice, you know, to cheat or to enable cheating. And for such a flimsy reason!

What I am building up to, in my painfully tortuous and and torturous way, is that I AM BACK! Beware. Some of the most excruciatingly unreadable essays on aesthetics since Bunyan’s Pilgrims’ Progress may soon be appearing on this site. Forewarned is disarmed. Don’t try to resist. Give in.

************************
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kjQmgm0r4g

“Intellectual” is an honorific, not a descriptive word. It is rather like “great.” “Great athlete,” unlike “best baseball player,” does not pick out a set of qualities. “Great” is an accolade one chooses to bestow upon a person in virtue of how much one marvels at his accomplishments. I may say that X is the best baseball player in the world, and that is either a fact or it isn’t, depending upon plausibly selected criteria. Babe Ruth is certainly not the best because he is dead. Of course, the person who insists that Ruth is the best shifts to the so-called “eternal present tense,” as historians are fond of doing. [“George Patton IS a wonderful example of a soldier.” When they do that, they are obfuscating the difference between “best” and “greatest.” In the case of “intellectual,” I would remind readers that the word, like “great,” is nobody’s private property. Chomsky makes the lists of those who write of the “top 10 public intellectuals,” and they are free to do as they wish precisely because the word belongs to no one. He is on it because his fans admire the depth of his analysis or because they wish to call attention to the frequency with which other intellectuals cite him. Does he know much about music, literature, the arts, history? He may or may not. It seems not to matter. Moreover, the word is not intended to mark any high degree of intelligence. Some people are geniuses but not intellectuals. Bobby Fischer may well be an example. I prefer to use the word “intellectual” to refer to persons who spend an enormous amount of time on a wide range of interests requiring serious thought, on matters that millions of thoughtful people recognize as requiring serious thought – what is often referred to as erudition. I know this invites the charge of circularity, and lowbrows will pounce on that. For me, the expression, “public intellectual” is useful because it rightly suggests that tens of thousands of persons may be very intellectual but have not come out of the closet. Chomsky and Ronald Dworkin deserve the accolade “public intellectual” but I happen to know at least a dozen others who are fine intellectuals. I hate to admit this to the world but the mean-spirited Al Silver is an example.