These days it seems that there’s a new think tank springing up on every corner, covering so many different issues and interests. But there’s one area that’s still underserved in the think tank world, so Adam Thierer is inaugurating a new think tank to cover those areas:
I’m pleased to announce my new venture: The Sin Think Tank. The mission of the Sin Think Tank will be to promote prurient interests, gun play, gambling, unhealthy eating, and alcohol and tobacco appreciation. Some of our positions or programs will include:
* The Bob Guccione Fellow in Cultural Studies
* The Joe Camel Chair in Environmental Analysis
* The Smith & Wesson Institute for Peace
* The Jack Daniels Center for Spirited Discussion
* The Center for Gambling Promotion
* The Dunkin Donuts Nutrition & Nourishment Initiative (aka, the “Feed the World” initiative)
* The Hunter S. Thompson Foundation for Free Living & High Times
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I believe it was the historian Robert Conquest who said that every organization eventually behaves as though it is run by a secret cabal of its enemies. I have seldom seen any more convincing evidence of this than the “No Pressure” video released by the anti-global-warming activist campaign 10:10.
[. . .]
The reaction from AGW skeptics was no surprise; many fulminated that the mask had slipped, and this video is the agenda of environmental fascism writ large. Thoughtcrime brings death! Conform! Obey! Or die . . . and the survivors get pieces of their friends spattered all over them as a warning. I think we open a more interesting inquiry by taking the 10:10 campaign at their word. They thought they were being funny.
[. . .]
There’s a mind-boggling disconnect from the feelings of ordinary human beings implied here, a kind of moral and emotional incompetence. It’s as though the 10:10 campaigners were so anesthetized by the secretions of their own zealotry that they became incapable of understanding how anyone not living deep inside their reality-tunnel would react.
[. . .]
To update Lewis, your garden-variety power-mad monster might commit the atrocities in this video, but only because they are not funny — because they spread fear or demonstrate power and ruthlessness. The kind of idealism that aims to be “tormenting us for our own good” may be what is required before you think blowing up schoolchildren with the push of a button is funny.
As many have commented, how could this video possibly have been professionally written, directed, acted, filmed, and edited with nobody actually noticing how awful it was? Were they all so morally sure of the righteousness of their cause that the didn’t recognize (or care) how most people would react to their casual — even cheerful — butchery?
One of the most interesting features over at Ace of Spades HQ used to be the daily economic round-ups by Monty. Unfortunately, he had to take a breather, but we’re able to get an occasional update like this one:
[In which Monty, long away from the neighborhood, returns to save the local mom-n-pop bank from a hostile takeover through a stylish melange of breakdancing, infectious urban beats, and the rap music that all the youngsters seem to be so fond of. Thrill to the parachute pants, Jheri curls, and mirrored wraparound sunglasses! (The soundtrack, “Monty Raps! Funky Accordion and Theremin Music For These Troubled Modern Times”, now available in fine discout outlets nationwide!)]
[. . .]
I just wouldn’t be me if I didn’t point out that gold is now $1314/oz as I write this. I bought some gold five years back at about $500/oz; that’s a pretty damned good rate of return for something that’s just supposed to be an inflation hedge. The naysayers can continue mumbling that I can’t eat gold, that I will be crucified on a cross of gold, the gold is just metal and has no innate value — I will simply point to the fact that it has outperformed every other investment in my portfolio, and by quite a large margin. And as a long-term store of value, I trust it a hell of a lot more than Treasuries. (Silver has done even better in absolute terms.)
Ah, but what about those safe-haven darlings of investors, municipal bonds? The romance may be on the rocks. I’ve thought for a long time that municipal debt is the next big shoe to drop in this recession/depression/worker’s paradise that we’re living in. Harrisburg, PA made the news recently when they barely escaped having to declare bankruptcy, but Harrisburg is only one of tens or even hundreds of muncipalities in the nation in dire financial straits. There seems to be a belief that the feds will bail them out before things get too grim, but this ignores two facts: a) the appetite for another trillion-dollar bailout is at subzero levels, and b) it’s not clear that taxpayers of one state will be willing to bail out the profligate citizenry of another. Prudent residents of Lincoln, NE or Minot, ND may not wish to fund the rather more lavish lifestyles of a San Diego or Miami. However much we “feel” the federal and state debt, we’d feel a municipal crash a lot harder because it hits us right where we live (literally): trash collection, sewer, water, road repair, snow removal, all the rest. You pay more and more and get less and less from it. (Oh, and guess what the major financial burden on municipal governments is these days? If you said “public-employee pension and health benefits”, give yourself a gold star and then a smack upside the head for being an insufferable know-it-all.)
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Strategypage reports on the ongoing struggle by both the Taliban and the NATO/US forces to influence media coverage, both inside Afghanistan and in the outside world:
In Afghanistan, the Taliban have been very successful with the media, mainly because they give the media what they want, or an offer they can’t refuse. The Taliban know that the media loves stories where the underdog prevails, or where the powers-that-be screw up. Put out the right kind of disinformation, and the media will take it and run it as the truth. Or at least something that could, might or ought to be true somewhere.
The Taliban media people know what the Western and regional media want, and this is provided. For example, the Taliban have invented the idea that Western troops are causing most of the civilian deaths in the Taliban effort to regain control of Afghanistan. But the truth, which is published but not emphasized much, is that most of the civilians are killed by the Taliban, and the Western troops have been killing fewer and fewer civilians, even at the risk of more Western casualties. The Taliban regularly use civilians as human shields. Again, the media mentions that, but it’s something for the back pages. The headlines stress what the Taliban wants, mainly that they are winning, even when they are losing.
For a backwards, almost medieval group, the Taliban (or their non-Afghani advisors) have developed a talent for manipulating the international media coverage:
But you don’t have to bribe or threaten Western media. Just package your lies in an acceptable manner, and your message will be delivered. The Taliban are smart enough to constantly recast their press releases to suit the perceived needs of Western and regional media. All they have to do is note what stories editors are running, and work up new stuff with a Taliban angle. Thus while corruption has been an Afghan cultural problem for centuries, the Western media will swallow whole a Taliban press release suggesting that the Taliban are less corrupt (they aren’t) and this more attractive to the average Afghan (not according to opinion polls, or reports from American troops who deal with local Afghans every day.) But in the Western media, you survive by pushing what will sell, not what is actually happening.
An NFL spokesman confirmed Sunday that the league has informed Allen and the Vikings that the All-Pro defensive end will be penalized and possibly fined if he performs his “calf roping” celebration after a sack. FOX Sports first reported the story.
The league prohibits players from going to the ground in celebrations. After sacks, Allen takes a knee, pretends to rope a calf and then throws his arms in the air. Allen presumably can still perform his celebration as long as he’s standing on his feet.
Allen has performed his post-sack celebration for years so it’s curious the league is threatening punishment now. Asked about the new stance, a league spokesman wrote in an e-mail: “That is how the new head of officiating wants it enforced.”
It is odd that something that’s been okay for Allen’s entire career is suddenly singled out as having been in violation of the rules for all this time. If this trend continues, how long will it be before any celebration by the players will draw an unsportsmanlike penalty?
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O’Rourke, the reformed ex-radical, editor of National Lampoon during the “Animal House” era, war correspondent and, lately, target of what he calls “ass cancer,” continues the anti-statist argument in his new book, “Don’t Vote: It Just Encourages the Bastards” (Atlantic Monthly Press). References to Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and Adam Smith (to whose “Wealth of Nations” he once devoted an entire volume) prove O’Rourke can do the philosophical heavy lifting — yet make it all float on a fluffy cloud of wit. Among his best one-liners:
* “The free market is a bathroom scale. We may not like what we see when we step on the bathroom scale, but we can’t pass a law making ourselves weigh 165. Liberals and leftists think we can.”
* “We’re individuals — unique, disparate, and willful, as anyone raising a household of little individuals knows. And not one of those children has ever written a letter to Santa Claus saying, ‘Please bring me and a bunch of kids I don’t know a pony and we’ll share.’ “
* “The most sensible request of government we make is not, ‘Do something!’ But ‘Quit it!’ “
* “Conservatism is a flight from ideas. As in, ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ ‘What’s the big idea?’ and ‘Whose idea was that?’ “
O’Rourke, 62, is a cool Republican. It’s a lonely job. What can the rest of the party do to join him?
“I don’t think Republicans have ever been cool,” he says. “Abraham Lincoln tried growing a beard.”
Yes, and look what happened to him.
“It’s always going to be cooler to have wild visionary ideas for society and the future. All we can really do is see that we’ve got a society where as many people grow out of cool as fast as they possibly can.”
A post at The Economist looks at the ongoing debate on liberal/libertarian joint concerns:
My colleague noted the other day the discussion Matthew Yglesias has been having with his readers over whether liberals and libertarians can agree on some regulations they both hate. So, here’s a regulation I hate: you’re not allowed to swim across the lake anymore in Massachusetts state parks. You have to stay inside the dinky little waist-deep swimming areas, with their bobbing lines of white buoys. There you are, under a deep blue New England summer sky, the lake laid out like a mirror in front of you and the rocks on the far shore gleaming under a bristling comb of red pine; you plunge in, strike out across the water, and tweet! A parks official blows his whistle and shouts after you. “Sir! Sir! Get back inside the swimming area!” What is this, summer camp? Henry David Thoreau never had to put up with this. It offends the dignity of man and nature. You want to shout, with Andy Samberg: “I’m an adult!“
I would gladly join any movement that promised to do away with this sort of nonsense. For example, Philip K. Howard’s organisation “Common Good” works on precisely this agenda. Common Good’s very bugaboo is useless, wasteful legal interference in schools, health care, recreation, and so on. But what you quickly note with many of these issues is that they’re driven by legal liability concerns. You have a snowblader in Colorado suing a resort because she crashed into someone. You have states declining to put up road-hazard signs because the signs prove they knew the hazard was there, which could render them liable for damages. You have the war on children’s playgrounds. The Massachusetts swimming ban, too, is driven by liability concerns. The park officials in Massachusetts aren’t really trying to minimise the risk that you might drown. They’re trying to minimise the risk that you might sue. The problem here, as Mr Howard says, isn’t simply over-regulation as such. It’s a culture of litigiousness and a refusal to accept personal responsibility. When some of the public behave like children, we all get a nanny state.
As Robert Heinlein put it, “The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skimmed milk because the baby can’t eat steak.”
Strategypage shows why Pakistan is doing itself more harm than good on the Afghan border:
After a recent incident where U.S. helicopter gunships crossed into Pakistan, in hot pursuit of Islamic terrorists, and killed three Pakistani soldiers (and a lot more terrorists), Pakistan cut one of the two NATO supply routes that pass through Pakistan. Aside from the fact that the Pakistani soldiers fired on the NATO helicopters (which they often do, even when the choppers are on the Afghan side of the border), the U.S. didn’t have to remind the Pakistanis that such a gesture was self-defeating. The Pakistani government is heavily dependent on American economic and military aid, and more and more of the supplies for foreign troops in Pakistan is coming from non-Pakistani sources. This hurts Pakistani businesses that move, and often provide, the supplies.
At the moment, about half those supplies come through Pakistan. The Pakistanis only closed, for about a day, one of the two main routes. About 30 percent of the supplies come in via Central Asia railroads, and another comes from the Black Sea, via rail to the Afghan border. The remaining 20 percent comes in by air. But some of that may be shifted to the Central Asian route, which is much safer (from bandits, bad roads and the Taliban) than the Pakistan routes.
Pakistan may have helped create conditions that will actually improve the economies of several other countries:
Shipping supplies to Afghanistan via Russian and Central Asian railroads has advantages for the nations it passes through. Russia has an economic interest in this, as more traffic makes it financially attractive for Central Asian nations to invest in upgrading their rail connections to Afghanistan. Tajikistan, for example, is extending its railroad to the Afghan border by building another 145 kilometers of track. Afghanistan itself has no railroads, mainly because there is not enough economic activity in the country to make this worthwhile. Foreign donors have contributed billions of dollars since 2002 to build more paved roads in Afghanistan. Currently, there are 42,000 kilometers of roads there, but only a third are paved. There are few rivers, much less navigable ones, and no access to the sea. The place has long been a logistical nightmare. Most Afghans recognize that roads will make the country more prosperous, by making it economically feasible to export many commodities, and cheaper to bring in, and distribute, foreign goods. Naturally, the Taliban are opposed to all this road building, as it threatens the poverty and ancient customs that Islamic conservatives are so fond of.
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Elizabeth and I have been working through the DVD set of Castle season 2 over the last week (a couple of episodes per night, then off to our respective other activities). We got to the end of the last disc, watched the bonus features and briefly skimmed through the “sneak peak” offerings. All but one of the featured DVD sets was completely unknown to me (“Is that Sally Field?” “I didn’t know there was a mainstream sword-and-sorcery series” “Have you heard of this one either?”).
I’m going to have to hire an inveterate TV watcher to keep me posted on just the names of the current TV shows . . .
In a post advising Vikings fans which games this weekend will be of particular interest (our boys having the week off due to an early bye), this item was quite interesting:
After beating Dallas in Week 1, a loss today will be the ‘Skins’ third straight. There will be fingers pointed, which, from the Vikings’ perspective is good. Those who know their history know that the Vikings offense is a glove fit for certain quarterbacks. One was Brett Favre. When his time ran out in Green Bay, the Packers knew that he could kick butt running the same offense with the Vikings. They shipped him off to the Jets, where he was in a foreign offense for the first time in his career. He posted an 8-4 record before injuring his biceps tendon, but, in the end, failed with the Jets. The next year, he ended up with the Vikings. McNabb is being asked to adjust to a Redskins offense that Mike Shanahan has devised — not a West Coast Offense he has spent his entire career running. McNabb hasn’t signed a contract extension — which many insiders thought was a prerequisite to the Redskins making a trade to get him. Unless the Redskins franchise McNabb next year, he will become a free agent. Déjà vu? Let us be among those to throw out the possibility of McNabb replacing Favre as the Vikings QB in 2011. Just sayin’.
I think that might be a worthwhile scenario . . . if Tarvaris Jackson isn’t re-signed next year, it leaves only rookie Joe Webb on the roster at QB. What little I’ve seen of Webb gives me hope for the future, but I’d be astounded if he was ready to start next season (assuming there will be a 2011 season, of course). Bringing in another aging veteran might make a lot of sense in that situation.
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There is another lit crit thing — I consider it a perversion, myself — that they call “reading with critical distance”. From the writer’s point of view, it as if one has knocked oneself out to prepare a bang-up with-all-the-trimmings Thanksgiving dinner, and had one’s guests troop in, weigh and measure the viands and photograph the table — and then depart having eaten not one bite.
It’s dinner, dammit. You’re supposed to eat it, and be nourished.
And then sit around discussing it, sure, and ask for the recipes, and exchange cooking tips and anecdotes and tales of dinners past, and so on to the limits of the metaphor.
Reading with critical distance only seems to me very nearly the same as not reading at all. For one thing, such a reader is very likely to miss all the essential emotional connections evoked between the lines. To switch metaphors, it’s like serving to a tennis player who stands there and doesn’t hit the ball back, watches it roll off to the side of the court, and then says, “I don’t see the point of this game.”
Bash ’em with me racket, I will…
So whoever it was who was finding this sort of analysis disturbing, I suspect what was happening was you were being pulled out of a former full engagement with the story by this sort of approach to the text, and rightly feeling that something valuable was being taken away, without necessarily being replaced with something of equal or greater value. Trying to hold both modes of reading in one’s brain at the same time must be kind of like having Simon Illyan’s memory chip in place. It may be best to take turns with the two modes.
Supposedly, training to critical reading makes one “a better reader” but if it results in one being able to happily read far fewer books, I’m not exactly sure where the merit lies. It’s like the hazard of revisiting beloved books of one’s childhood, and finding them swapped as if by bad fairies with inferior changelings. How can one call oneself a better reader as an adult if one is clearly having a much worse read…?
As I was explaining to an attractive young woman the other day, most of my views — my basic political commitments — have not changed in twenty years: I support freedom of expression, equality of opportunity, equal rights for women, etc. and so forth.
Twenty years ago my views were called left wing and these days my views are called fascist.
Since reading the book(s), I often find myself in discussions using the term “incentives” (especially in the sense of perverse incentives: those which produce the opposite of the desired effect). I think there’s much value in this approach to problem solving, and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.
Update: I guess I’ve gotten out of the habit of seeing movies at all. Freakonomics is in the theatres now, but I seem to have uninstalled the movie theatre information app on my iPhone . . . it figures: it doesn’t appear to be playing anywhere near here.
I have to imagine that this little propaganda number was put together by the anti side rather than the pro side:
You don’t agree with this program? No pressure . . . we’ll blow up your kids. James Delingpole thinks it’s great (but not for the cause it supposedly represents):
But with this new monstrosity, truly the great Richard Curtis has excelled himself. It’s so bad, it makes his previous shimmering masterpieces of emetica – Love Actually, The Girl In The Cafe, The Boat That Rocked – look like Battleship Potemkin. It makes the Vicar of Dibley look like a collaboration between Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare. It’s so deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful it makes you wish that the man could be given a ticker tape parade in every major capital city, in gratitude for the devastating damage he has (unwittingly) wrought on the eco-fascist cause.
Update: Apparently, James isn’t the only one who thinks this is sending exactly the wrong message — the campaign is trying to recall the clip:
That, at any rate, is what they keep trying to do — cancelling it whenever it appears on You Tube, pulling it from their campaign website and so on.
Unfortunately their efforts are being frustrated by people on the sceptical side of the climate debate, who keep peskily insisting on reposting the video where everyone can view it. And rightly so. With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.
I don’t think any of us will ever be able to look at another Richard Curtis movie in quite the same way ever again. It may even be that we will now never, ever be able to enjoy another episode of the Vicar of Dibley, because all we’ll be able to think about is Dawn French with a Panzerfaust beneath her cassock ready to blast off the heads of any members of her congregation who don’t believe in Man Made Global Warming. What a sad day this is for us all.
Update, the second: Iowahawk thinks this may well be a great subject for a Harvard Business School case study. Using the principles of “new journalism”, he carefully recreates the situation, constructing dialogue to fit the theme:
London, sometime earlier this year: The 10:10 Project, a nonprofit NGO focused on reducing carbon, convenes a high level meeting in their posh modern conference room. After reviewing PowerPoint on the results of their latest government grant proposals and white-liberal-guilt fund raising campaigns, the 10:10 marketing team reports that previous communication efforts have not been proceeding as expected.
“Perhaps what we need is a fresh new campaign,” offers one of the conferees. “Something different, provocative… something edgy. Something that will really get our message across.” This is greeted with great excitement. The finance director pours through spreadsheets and identifies a budget source. An executive screening committee is appointed who develop timelines and begin scheduling meetings with London’s top agencies and independent film production firms.
Several weeks later, after sitting through a half dozen agency presentations that have yet to meet their standards, 10:10’s highly paid executive brain trust arrives at a meeting at the sleek offices of London’s hottest agency Splodey, Youngblood, Gutz & Bones. After introductions, small talk, and pastries, SYG&B’s creative director — winner of 5 British Clio awards — strolls confidently to the television monitor at the front of the room and walks the 10:10 clients through a scene-by-scene video storyboard pitching a new promotional mini-movie that will solve their communication dilemma. The smoothness of the presentation masks the hundreds of late night man-hours and debating the SYG&B creative department spent in crafting it — but it was worth it.
“Brilliant!” exclaims the 10:10 executive committee chair, to the enthusiastic nods of his colleagues. “Add one more exploding child, and I think we have a winner.”
