The project is the brainchild of Mr Monderman, and the town has seen some remarkable results. There used to be a road death every three years but there have been none since the traffic light removal started seven years ago.

There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. “We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt,” he said yesterday.

“It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

The idea is that people who have to decide for themselves when to go or stop will take more care in doing so; also, they won’t hinder traffic by waiting for lights when there is no need to.

As someone who’s driven thousands of miles around Europe in some of the wildest driving conditions (Italy and Russia), I think a good way to explain the difference is between “free market” and “socialistic” driving systems, roughly speaking. The United States has an authoritarian, “socialistic” traffic system. With a few notable exceptions such as the drivers here in Boston, most people adhere to a strict, top-down system of traffic management.

Italians for example, especially those around Naples, have more of a “free market” system of driving. Not by design, as in the Netherlands test, but because Italians just ignore traffic laws. The result seems to work well; everyone gets around without a noticeably greater accident rate. In fact, studies I’ve read indicate that it’s Germany–with strict traffic regulations similar to those in the U.S.–that has one of the highest serious accident rates.

Think of it as the invisible hand applied to traffic flow. Besides, there’s something a lot of fun about roundabouts. So here’s my vote to use them in place of the dangerous and traffic-hindering traffic lights.

I did my taxes this weekend using an online tax program, but I discovered this set of instructions on page 13 of the Massachusetts income tax return instructions.

That’s right. In the state known as “Tax-a-chusetts,” living in the American city with the highest cost of living, I’m being asked if I want to opt in to pay more taxes, at what would mean a surprising increase of money even for this graduate student.

With the recent advent of the five-bladed “Fusion” razor, the Economist predicts that the fourteen-bladed razor should appear no later than 2100. Their analysis would benefit from that of Dave Barry’s several years ago, which explained the intricacies of the razor industry’s R&D:

Mine was a lonely adolescence.

The razors of that era had one blade, and they worked fine; ask any older person who is not actively drooling. But then, in 1971, a very bad thing happened: Gillette, looking for a way to enhance the shaving experience (by which I mean “charge more”) came out with a razor that had TWO blades. This touched off a nuclear arms race among razor companies, vying to outdo one another by adding “high-tech” features that made the product more expensive, but not necessarily better. This tactic is called “sneakerization,” in honor of the sneaker industry, which now has people paying upwards of $200 a pair for increasingly weird-looking footwear boasting the durability of thinly sliced Velveeta.

Soon everybody was selling two-blade razors. So the marketing people put on their thinking caps, and, in an astounding burst of creativity, came up with the breakthrough concept of: THREE BLADES. Gillette, which is on the cutting edge (har!) of razor sneakerization, currently has a top-of-the-line three-blade razor — excuse me, I mean “shaving system” — called the “Mach3Turbo,” which, according to the Gillette Web site (www.gillette.com) has more technology than a nuclear submarine, including “open cartridge architecture” and an “ergonomic handle” featuring “knurled elastomeric crescents.” That’s right: It has elastomeric crescents, and they have been knurled! By knurlers! No, I don’t know what this means. But it sure sounds technological.

Which brings us to today’s exciting news, which was brought to my attention by alert reader Jake Hamer. Gillette’s arch-rival, Schick (maker of the Xtreme 3 shaving system) has announced that it’s coming out with a new razor that has — prepare to be floored by innovativeness — FOUR BLADES. Yes! It will be called the “Quattro,” which is Italian for “more expensive.”

Of course it will not end there. I bet an urgent memo has already gone out in Gillette’s marketing department. “Hold some focus groups immediately!” it says. “Find out what number comes after four!”

Yes, the razor-technology race shows no signs of slowing. And who knows what lies ahead? Razors with 10 blades? Twenty blades? A thousand blades? Razors that go backward in time and shave your ancestors? Exciting times lie ahead, shaving consumers!

There’s a scene at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey where powerful space aliens place astronaut David Bowman in a zoo designed just for him. They’ve constructed it from his memories, so it looks mostly like an Earth hotel room, but it’s not exactly right. In the book version of the film Bowman looks at the telephone directory and sees only a blur, not specific names and numbers.

That was 1968.
In 2006 those aliens are back, but instead of abducting baby-boomers themselves the aliens just want their money. Today I came across their ploy on the wall of the subway, where they pretend to offer “financial services” through “Ameriprise.”

See that kid with the old-style baseball cap who is not Beaver Cleaver? And there’s that guy with thick-framed glasses who isn’t Buddy Holly. And that’s not Andy Warhol’s Jackie Kennedy, is it? (No.) Hey! That’s that guy from Saturday Night Fever! (John Travolta? Nope.) But I’m sure I’ve seen that long-haired hippie guy before. (Yes, he’s your Uncle Fred.)

No doubt all you boomers out there get a warm and fuzzy feeling just seeing anything that vaguely resembles pop culture iconography, but I urge you to resist. Just remember the fate of the characters in 2001 (Murderous monkeys, HAL-9000, Models of the U.N. building popping up everywhere, Earth-size space embryos).

Nevertheless, a number of voters did sign the petition, including BU School of Management Dean Louis Lataif, as BU’s student newspaper, The Daily Free Press, reports. Lataif had no comment, but the paper’s reporter had no trouble finding students willing to describe the current state of campus free speech:

“I’m surprised,” SMG sophomore Natalya Kamenetsky said. “You wouldn’t expect that from a dean from any school because BU is so diverse.”

Who would ever expect diversity of thought at a “diverse” university?

Now, you might think that only a reactionary conservative would oppose making website lists of one’s political opponents. Consider this: recently the conservative “Bruin Alumni Association” of UCLA published website lists of UCLA professors it considers liberal proselytizers. What do liberal academics think of that?

Adrienne Lavine, chairwoman of UCLA’s academic senate, agreed that the university could do little more at this point. She said she found the profiles on the alumni group’s website “inflammatory” and “not a positive way to address the concerns that Mr. Jones has expressed.”

. . .

On one of its websites, the Bruin Alumni Group names education professor Peter McLaren as No. 1 on its “The Dirty Thirty: Ranking the Worst of the Worst.” It says “this Canadian native teaches the next generation of teachers and professors how to properly indoctrinate students.”

McLaren, in a telephone interview, called the alumni group’s tactics “beneath contempt.”

“Any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism. Any decent American is going to see through this kind of right-wing propaganda. I just find it has no credibility,” he said.

The website also lists history professor Ellen DuBois, saying she “is in every way the modern female academic: militant, impatient, accusatory, and radical — very radical.” In response, DuBois said: “This is a totally abhorrent invitation to students to participate in a witch hunt & against their professors.”

What of KnowThyNeighbor.org? Is it “inflammatory” and “not a positive way to address the concerns”? Is it true that “any sober, concerned citizen would look at this and see right through it as a reactionary form of McCarthyism [and that] any decent American is going to see through this kind of [left]-wing propaganda”? Perhaps it’s “beneath contempt” as “a totally abhorrent invitation to [citizens] to participate in a witch hunt against their [neighbors].” You decide.

Google has published just a handful of some of the most popular search terms of 2005. As you can see in the graph, when Google charts the popularity of the search phrase “the force” and the “dark side” over the year, “the force” wins overall. I suppose we can take that as good news.

By the way, “Yoda origami” has been the second-most popular search phrase of the last two months in bringing people to my blog.

A hospital has banned visitors from “cooing” over newborn babies to protect their dignity and parents’ right to confidentiality.

People have been told they should resist the temptation to touch or be too familiar with the new arrivals. They are also being warned to respect patient confidentiality by not talking to staff or parents about babies.

. . .

Debbie Lawson, the neo-natal manager at the special care baby unit, said: “We know people have good intentions but we need to respect the child.

“Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me.”

HT: relapsed catholic

I’ve been reading the Gulag Archipelago on and off for a while. Solzhenitsyn wittily lances the Soviet insanities while recognizing that the problem is not mainly with a particular government but with the human condition.

I credited myself with unselfish dedication. But meanwhile I had been thoroughly prepared to be an executioner. And if I had gotten into an NKVD school under Yezhov, maybe I would have matured just in time for Beria.

So let the reader who expects this book to be a political exposé slam its covers shut right now.

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: Know thyself!

Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren’t.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 168

But whereas one can’t lay all the blame at the feet of social institutions, neither is an unjust society simply the fault of the individuals it comprises. A particular culture can encourage or discourage various virtues and vices. The problem with the Soviet culture, Solzhenitsyn seems to suggest, is that it deliberately unmoored itself from any cultural tradition. The result was that when it came time to make legal rulings or set public policy, those in charge acted on what was most expedient for them at the moment. Solzhenitsyn quotes from a 1919 trial transcript:

Accuser: “This tribunal is not supposed to concern itself with any nondescript criminal actions but only with those which are counterrevolutionary. In view of the nature of this crime, I demand that the case be turned over to a people’s court.”

Presiding Judge: “Ha! Actions! What a pettifogger you are! We are guided not by the laws but by our revolutionary conscience!”

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 304

Note how the judge glosses arbitrariness and expediency as a “revolutionary conscience.” The October Revolution overthrew not just those in power but centuries of Russian legal tradition, tradition which had ended the death penalty and restricted torture. “Revolutionary conscience” allowed the Soviets to sneak them back in.

The court must not exclude terror. It would be self-deception or deceit to promise this, and in order to provide it with a foundation and to legalize it in a principled way, clearly and without hypocrisy and without embellishment, it is necessary to formulate it as broadly as possible, for only revolutionary righteousness and a revolutionary conscience will provide the conditions for applying it more or less broadly in practice.

With Communist greetings,
Lenin

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 353

Solzhenitsyn comments:

With the exception of a very limited number of parliamentary democracies, during a very limited number of decades, the history of nations is entirely a history of revolutions and seizures of power. And whoever succeeds in making a more successful and more enduring revolution is from that moment on graced with the bright robes of Justice, and his every past and future step is legalized and memorialized in odes, whereas every past and future step of his unsuccessful enemies is criminal and subject to arraignment and a legal penalty.

Gulag Harper & Row, 1973 page 355

I’m not sure that’s exactly right. Take the American Revolution. Although the United States overthrew the British rule, it did not abandon the authority of British legal precedent, some of which is cited still today. Moreover, to justify their actions many of the the American revolutionaries appealed to what they saw as over-arching principles in natural law, law which theoretically included the British as well as the Americans. So while the Americans revolted and seized power, they didn’t try to create legal principles from whole cloth, as did Lenin. And I don’t think the United States is exceptional in that regard. The Soviet Union invited the kind of injustice Solzhenitsyn describes, not simply because its founders overthrew the government but because they overthrew moral and legal authority as well. By trusting in “revolutionary conscience,” they allowed the sinful human heart alone to cut the public line between good and evil, with terrible consequences.

After Hurricane Charley hit Florida in 2004, 77 percent of the deaths blamed on the hurricane were classified as unintentional injury.

So the biggest danger comes after the storm has passed, when you’ve already sighed with relief (or resignation) and started rebuilding.

DURBIN: But there was one case, one case in particular that hasn’t been mentioned today that I’d like to ask you about, and that was the case involving Bob Jones University.

That was one of the most troubling decisions of the Reagan administration. It was a decision to argue before the Supreme Court that Bob Jones University should keep its tax-exempt status with the IRS, even though it had an official policy that banned interracial dating, denied admission to any applicants who engaged in interracial marriage or were known to advocate interracial marriage or dating.

When the Reagan administration took that position, it reversed the position of three previous administrations, including two Republicans, all of whom argued that Bob Jones was not eligible for this tax-exempt status.

This sudden reversal by the Reagan Justice Department, which you were part of at the time, led to the unusual step of the Supreme Court appointing a special counsel, William Coleman, as a friend of the court, to argue in support of the IRS.

In 1983, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against the Reagan administration and against Bob Jones University.

Judge Roberts, there was a heated debate within the Justice Department about whether or not to defend Bob Jones University and its racist policies. More than 200 lawyers and employees of the Civil Rights Division, representing half of all the employees in that division, signed a letter of protest. William Bradford Reynolds, the head of the Civil Rights Division, strongly supported defending Bob Jones. Ted Olsen — another person well known in Washington — opposed this defense of Bob Jones.

Which side were you on? What role did you play in the decision to defend Bob Jones University policy?

ROBERTS: Senator, I was ethically barred from taking a position on that case. I was just coming off of my clerkship on the Supreme Court, which ended in the summer of 1981.

Supreme Court rules said that you could not participate in any way in a matter before the Supreme Court for a certain period of time. I think it was two years or whatever it was. And it was within that period. This involved an issue before the Supreme Court.

So I was ethically barred from participating in that in any way.

DURBIN: The memo that you wrote about the Bob Jones University position, the memo of December 5th, 1983, that summarized it, leads one to believe in reading it that you were present during deliberations on this policy. Is that true?

ROBERTS: No, Senator.

DURBIN: You were not?

ROBERTS: I was not involved in the policy because of the bar on participation.

DURBIN: There appears to be another memo, which I’m going to send to you, dated September 29th, 1982, with your handwriting in it, relative to this same issue. And I don’t want to surprise you with it. I’ll send it to you, and if tomorrow we get a chance, we can revisit it.

Let me ask you this…

SPECTER: Senator Durbin, may we have the numbers there? The staff needs those in order to track them for the record.

DURBIN: I’d be happy to. This is dated September 29th, 1982.

SPECTER: And it has a number on it?

DURBIN: No number, but we’ll give you a copy.

SPECTER: OK. Thank you.

DURBIN: We’ll share it with the judge. I want you to have — this is not a surprise, I just want you to take a look at it.

We had a nominee for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, Carolyn Kuhl. Do you know her personally?

ROBERTS: Yes.

DURBIN: Served in the Justice Department with her.

ROBERTS: Right.

DURBIN: When she came before this committee, Senator Leahy asked her several questions, and she said when she testified, quote, I regret having taken the position I did in support of the government’s change of position on Bob Jones. The nondiscrimination principle and the importance of enforcement of civil rights laws by the executive branch should have taken sway and should have been primary in making that decision.

I appreciated her candor on that.

What is your belief? Was the Reagan administration position on Bob Jones University the right position to take?

ROBERTS: No, Senator.

In retrospect, I think it’s clear the people who were involved in it, as you say, themselves think that it was an incorrect position. I certainly don’t disagree with that.

DURBIN: Thank you.

Let me move to another topic.

LEAHY: I’m sorry, Senator. I didn’t hear the answer.

ROBERTS: The answer is no.

I don’t think it was the correct position to take.

DURBIN: Thank you.