Sunday cat pix

Concrete particular Cathood.

Tenure-track feline

Successful
candidate.

The Department of Felines at Female Science Professor’s home institution recently hired a new cat. She describes the process:

We recently interviewed several candidates intensively, following the European model of interviewing all candidates at the same time (very efficient). We were, in theory, open to hiring at any level, and we did interview one very intriguing candidate who would have had to have been hired at a senior level […]

Sad to say (I speak for myself), they did not hire the senior candidate. I must admit that of our two senior cats, one has definitely entered the post-work era of his career. But the other maintains an active program of research.

Unsuccessful
candidate.

In the comments FSProf has also posted one of the successful candidate’s Reference Letters. You may find it helpful if you’re trying to place a promising kitten this year. A sample:

Kitten X has not been part of my research group at the shelter, but I have seen him in his cage and I’ve seen him interact with other shelter workers and felines – he is the “go-to” kitty for advice about all things involving kittens.

Sunday cat pix

Musa devotes her nap time to vol. 50 of the collected works.

Musa, 19 Nov 2007

Sunday cat pix

Just one Sunday cat pic today. Josie would spend most of her time outside if she could. But unlike Musa, she exhibits no great desire to go out when it’s cold. The picture below gives you a nice profile of her cornea, which is almost spherical. —Speaking of eyes, here’s a nice trompe-l’œil from Nantes: La locomotive rouge (via Athéna).

Click on the picture below…

… and make me an “influenceur”. I promise to use my influence only for good, never for evil.

Recommandé par des Influenceurs

If the link doesn’t work, there’s a little more information at La Feuille .

When you’re done with that, go to the collection “Manuscrite” at Léo Scheer and watch works in progress (via Léo Scheer’s weblog, via La Feuille). Unfortunately, the manuscript pages are displayed in a rather slow Flash presentation, but once it’s loaded you can read the work; and on another page you can rate it. I’m not sure I like that idea. Imagine writing Ulysses or La vie mode d’emploi under those conditions.

Sunday cat pix

Josie in disarray. This is what happens when half your staff is out of the country.

Monsieur Chat a dix ans!

Source: M. Chat’s World

Oui, c’est l’anniversaire de Monsieur Chat, la création de Thomas Vuille. M. Chat s’est montré pour la première fois en 1997 à Orléans. Maintenant on le trouve à Paris et à beaucoup d’autres villes françaises, et aussi à Londres, New York, Sarajevo—et tout continent sauf l’Afrique. Voyez le blog Les Petits mots de cat pour quelques exemples de type classique.

Des liens:

• Le Site officiel
  Biographie de l’artiste, nouvelles de M. Chat.
• Le Pool de M. Chat à Flickr
  Avec 297 photos.
• Monsieur Chat
  Site encyclopédique: voyez si M. Chat est arrivé à votre ville.

The left’s totalitarian vision

Our future according
to Liberals

Dr. Helen, who comments on society “from a (mostly) psychological perspective”, lays it out in all its horrifying detail. Liberals want to turn America into

a college campus with free food, shelter and recreation.

The good doctor’s perspicuous view of liberal aims owes something, no doubt, to her having interviewed Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, a book that has already received the strong endorsement of Charles Murray. Goldberg believes that

[…] for a lot of liberals and progressives, the end of history is a giant college campus, or increasingly, Europe. You know, this place where you’ve lost any great ambition, everyone’s much more concerned with self-esteem, with caring for each other.

The Glenn and Helen Show: Jonah Goldberg on Hillary, Huckabee,
and Liberal Fascism, at 11min, 30sec (via Sadly, No!)

What Goldberg means by ‘ambition’ is something like this:

I’ve long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the “Ledeen Doctrine.” I’m not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” That’s at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago.

“Baghdad Delenda Est, Part Two” National Review, 23 April 2002

It’s true that no university has yet thrown any small countries against the wall. I’m afraid that in all likelihood none has even wished to do so. That is a definite flaw in their character. Only the School of the Americas has shown some gumption in this respect.

So there you have it: caring for each other is bad, whacking small little countries is good. Anti-fascism in a nutshell.

As an antidote to Goldberg’s pretenses to scholarship, Jean-Pierre Faye’s work on “totalitarian language” is a good starting point. See

Langages totalitaires. Critique de la raison narrative, l'économie (Hermann, 1972) German translation: Totalitäre Sprachen (Ullstein, 1977).

Théorie du récit. Introduction aux Langages totalitaires (Hermann, 1972) — a briefer presentation.

La Raison narrative (Balland, 1990).

Le Piège (Balland, 1994)—on Heidegger and the language of National Socialism.

Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be any translations of these works into English, but see “The critique of language and its economy”, Economy and society 5.1 (Feb 1976) 52–73. Langages totalitaires is a minute examination, first of narratives and events in the French Revolution, and then of key phrases like “conservative revolution” and “national socialism” in Germany during the 1920s and 30s. The bits and pieces that were compounded to form the ideology of Nazism were indeed more complicated than one might have thought. But they don’t amount to anything resembling liberalism. Not if by that you mean a historically real liberalism—the New Deal, say, plus the anti-racism and anti-bigotry that became part of the Democratic party’s platform in the sixties.

Added 31 Dec: The “Ledeen Doctrine” could just as well be called the “Presidential Initiation Rite Doctrine”. See R. W. Apple, Fighting in Panama: The Implications; War: Bush’s Presidential Rite of Passage, New York Times 21 Dec 1989. See also Spiderbytes; Allan Nairn, “No More Coddling Big Criminals. Huckabee Fails to Get Tough on Crime”, News and comment 18 Dec 2007.