Quotulatiousness

November 27, 2011

Scalzi tweets the Lord of the Rings movies

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:28

Stream of consciousness tweets as John Scalzi has an at-home movie marathon:

“The Mimes of Moria” is the name of my next band.

Wife is at a rock concert tonight. I’m watching cable TV at home. Thus are illustrated the differences between us.

OSHA clearly has no jurisdiction in Moria.

[. . .]

The Two Towers now I on. I hold the minority view that it is the best film of the trilogy.

That said, I’d’ve trimmed back the ent scenes pretty severely.

I SWEAR I did not realize I was making a tree pun in that last tweet.

I am suddenly aware of just how little difference there is between Orlando Bloom’s Legolas and certain sparkly vampires one could name.

Orcs vs. Stormtroopers. GO. On second thought, never mind. Neither side aims well enough for it to be interesting.

[. . .]

Fun fact: Shadowfax, the horse Gandalf rides, had a younger, hipper sibling named “Darktweet.”

I wonder what dentists think when they look at Orcs. I suspect “that’s a sailboat right there.”

They could have just distracted the Wargs by throwing a bunch of red bouncy balls and yelling “fetch.”

The orcs would be awesome in a Road Warrior movie. The orcs probably WERE in a Road Warrior movie.

November 26, 2011

Gary Johnson as the Libertarian Party candidate

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

Reason is asking their readers if they’d support Gary Johnson as the US Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate:

Former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) tells the Santa Fe New Mexican that he feels “abandoned” by a Republican Party that shut him out of all but two of GOP presidential debates so far. As a result, he’s mulling over the idea of running for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination.

[. . .]

There’s little doubt that Johnson — who unambiguously supports an end to the drug war, a non-interventionist foreign policy, reproductive rights, liberalized immigration policy, free trade, and many other libertarian position — would be the highest-profile LP candidate at least since Ron Paul hit the hustings back in 1988. As a pol who won election twice in a Democratic-heavy state and governed to bipartisan acclaim, he’d also be the first one who could point to administrative experience and success, which would surely help with publicity for the LP’s existence and positions.

TV commercials don’t have to be irritating

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

Scott Jordan Harris explains that the purpose of TV advertising isn’t — despite all the evidence to the contrary — to irritate the hell out of viewers:

Many of the best short films I see each year are adverts, and this shouldn’t be surprising. There is a small audience for shorts that aren’t shot by Pixar and shown before Disney films, and there are miniscule budgets available for them. Most shorts are apprentice pieces, showy announcements of the skills of film-makers who want to be making features, and display so many signs of it that they fail as individual films.

Adverts do not suffer these problems: their budgets are relatively big, their audience numbers are assured, and they are by nature self-contained. What’s more, they have to be good — very, very good — if they are going to outcompete their rivals.

To disregard commercials as beneath consideration — to adopt the ‘it’s just an advert for a shop!’ mentality that Brooker has, or pretends to have — is naïve, and flows from the feeling that adverts are inherently artistically bankrupt, or rather that they are any more artistically bankrupt than the majority of movies.

This is simply not the case. Most movies are designed to sell us something, from popcorn and DVDs to high-end items advertised through the sophisticated trickery of product placement. Compared to blockbuster films, which charge admission to sell us merchandise, a television advert is relatively benign: it does not pretend to be anything other than it is and it honestly announces its intentions.

This why a good advert is so pleasing: being won over by one is like being won over by a magician’s illusion. We know that it wants to suck us in, and so we are on guard against it. When, despite ourselves, it manages to amuse us, we know it has worked hard to do so.

Daniel Hannan on how the “Occupy” movement misunderstands the right

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

In his latest column in the Telegraph, Daniel Hannan lists ten mistaken beliefs that the “Occupy” folks seem to have about conservatives:

1. Free-marketeers resent the bank bailouts. This might seem obvious: we are, after all, opposed to state subsidies and nationalisations. Yet it often surprises commentators, who mistake our support for open competition and free trade for a belief in plutocracy. There is a world of difference between being pro-market and being pro-business. Sometimes, the two positions happen to coincide; often they don’t.

2. What has happened since 2008 is not capitalism. In a capitalist system, bad banks would have been allowed to fail, their profitable operations bought by more efficient competitors. Shareholders, bondholders and some depositors would have lost money, but taxpayers would not have contributed a penny.

[. . .]

6. Nor, by the way, does state intervention seem to be an effective way to promote equality. On the most elemental indicators — height, calorie intake, infant mortality, literacy, longevity — Britain has been becoming a steadily more equal society since the calamity of 1066. It’s true that, around half a century ago, this approximation halted and, on some measures, went into reverse. There are competing theories as to why, but one thing is undeniable: the recent widening of the wealth gap has taken place at a time when the state controls a far greater share of national wealth than ever before.

7. Let’s tackle the idea that being on the Left means being on the side of ordinary people, while being on the Right means defending privileged elites. It’s hard to think of a single tax, or a single regulation, that doesn’t end up privileging some vested interest at the expense of the general population. The reason governments keep growing is because of what economists call ‘dispersed costs and concentrated gains’: people are generally more aware the benefits they receive than of the taxes they pay.

November 25, 2011

“[Fill-in-the-blank] is now a clear and present danger”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Andrew Orlowski explains how we keep falling for junk science through media exposure:

Firstly. An obscure researcher or scientist will make a dramatic claim.

The media picks up on this, and a reporter is assigned to the story. The reporter will have no scientific background — but looks to the state and the bureaucracy to do something. Anything.

The hapless minister is then hauled on to explain the inaction. He will be intelligent — he is likely to have a PPE from Oxford, like the presenter — but no specialist knowledge. He, too, trusts the scientists.

A pledge is then made to increase funding for the scientist who makes the claim.

A pledge is also made to act — by introducing legislation or other regulations. Perhaps a task force or committee will also be involved:


Illustrations: Andy Davies

The bandwagon is now rolling.

Climategate 2.0 for dummies

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

For anyone who managed to avoid hearing about the original release of emails from many of the leading lights in the anthropogenic global warming community, revealing a much more sordid and less-than-honest process to publicize information on the global climate, James Delingpole explains why the latest batch of emails are important:

The latest batch of emails, leaked by a person or persons unknown (but whoever they are they deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least) comprises 5,000 files, dumped as before onto a Russian server, revealing private correspondence between many of the scientists at the heart of the Great Global Warming scam.

These are men like Penn State’s increasingly infamous Michael Mann (inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick) and the University of East Angia’s Phil Jones: not just two-bit research assistants but the “experts” whose data, research papers and lobbying forms the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) pronouncements on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The IPCC, in turn, is the organization on whose doomy prognostications of man-made climate disaster our political leaders base their policy. So when Obama pours billions of your tax dollars into failed clean-tech companies like Solyndra, when you are banned from using the kind of lightbulbs that actually illuminate a room rather than merely flicker and give you a headache, when the EPA’s Lisa Jackson tries reducing the number of showers you take or seeks to regulate when you use your aircon, when your energy bills rise and your flights grow more expensive due to carbon taxes — all these infringements on your economic wellbeing and your liberty can be traced back to these Climategate scientists. This is why Climategate matters.

November 24, 2011

US to be crushed by Oriental economic juggernaut, film at 11

Filed under: China, Economics, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

  • “I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I get the uneasy feeling that America is history”
  • “The power behind the [. . .] juggernaut is much greater than most Americans suspect, and the juggernaut cannot stop of its own volition, for [it] has created a kind of automatic wealth machine, perhaps the first since King Midas.”

This kind of statement can be found in all the prestigious newspapers, opinion journals, and magazines . . . in the late 1970s through the late 1980s. The economic juggernaut of the day was Japan. It was poised to crush the feeble remnants of American capitalism with the all-powerful keiretsu, Japan’s corporate conglomerate organizations. The strong would smash the weak, leaving America (and the rest of the Anglosphere) in the dust. Just in case you didn’t follow economic history, it didn’t happen.

Today, the economic bogeyman is China:

“We are getting our clock cleaned by Chinese state capitalism,” wrote Robert Kuttner, now editor of The American Prospect, earlier this year at The Huffington Post. Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Simon Johnson piled on at the annual conference of the American Economic Association, declaring, “The age of American predominance is over. The [Chinese] Yuan will be the world’s reserve currency within two decades.” The conservative Citizens Against Government Waste even aired a television commercial featuring a Beijing economics class in 2030 in which a professor explains how America became indebted to China. The professor concludes, “So now they work for us.” The class chuckles knowingly.

This gloomy message of American decline relative to China appears to be seeping into popular consciousness. An April 2011 poll by Xavier University found that “a stunning 63 percent believe that the Chinese economy is more powerful than the US economy.”

“The U.S. could lose its status as the world’s biggest economic power within five years,” reported The Daily Mail in April. The Mail article was based on calculations released by the International Monetary Fund projecting that total Chinese GDP, adjusted for purchasing power, will surpass U.S. GDP by 2016.

Can that be? Let’s do the math: China’s total GDP is around $6 trillion today. Assuming 10 percent GDP growth for the next 20 years, China’s GDP would rise to $40 trillion. If the U.S. economy grew at, say, 3 percent a year, total GDP would be $27 trillion. Back in 2007, before the financial crisis, the investment bank Goldman Sachs issued a report projecting that Chinese GDP would be $26 trillion in 2030, compared to $23 trillion for the U.S. It bears noting that current Chinese purchasing power per capita is about $6,000, compared to $46,000 for Americans.

That’s not to say that it’s impossible — the longer the US government struggles to avoid cutting back, the more likely it is that the US will enter a long economic decline — but China has economic problems a-plenty.

November 22, 2011

Herman Cain and the most awkward anecdote so far

Filed under: Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:16

I suspect Herman Cain has managed to talk himself out of the GOP nomination race with little anecdotes like this one:

Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer. He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”

“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.

He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”

“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign — not that I had anything against foreign doctors — but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”

“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”

The crowd laughs uneasily.

Oh, good. He’s not quite xenophobic, just religiously . . . cautious. At least he chose the right kind of place to tell this little story:

By the time Herman Cain took the stage, Jesus had already been crucified, resurrected and returned to Earth to collect the faithful once that day.

Cain made a campaign stop Friday at The Holy Land Experience, a Christian-theme amusement park in central Florida where visitors pay $35 to watch a reenactment of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ just minutes from Disney World.

In the park, which is run by the religious television station Trinity Broadcasting Network, employees dressed as shepherd boys, pharisees, Roman soldiers and merchants from first-century Israel lead the faithful on tours through the re-created streets of old Jerusalem, perform re-enactment shows and serve as baristas in the coffee shop. Over the course of a day at Holy Land, you can take communion — fed to you from the hand of a bearded actor playing Christ with flowing brown hair — browse an impressive collection of early Bibles, rock out to praise-song karaoke, get baptized and even have your picture taken with Jesus on a Harley.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

November 21, 2011

Oh, good: the age of hagiographic Beatles stories may be coming to a close

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 17:02

Or, if not a close, at least a pause:

Given the vastness and variety of the literature, it would be incorrect to say that the Beatles story has been whitewashed, not when it includes so many get-even tell-alls and book-sized sumps of sensational gossip. But there is a quasi-official version of events, and when it is reissued periodically from the tireless Beatles public relations machine, the narrative does tend to take on the unblemished pallor of approved history. For 50 years the Beatles have been the rock group you could take home to meet Mom, and nobody close to their stupendous commercial enterprise seems eager to undo the image.

Paul, Ringo, the two widows, and what remains of the original Liverpool crowd keep the history tidy for reasons that are surely as much personal as fiduciary. Beatles Anthology, the eight-hour, supposedly definitive documentary the Beatles machine released in 1995, omitted any unpleasantness that might cast a shadow on the sunny version of the Beatles story, aside from a few inescapable anecdotes about illegal drug-taking. There was no mention of the now-legendary sybaritic excesses of Beatles tours, or the friends, wives, lovers, children, and employees betrayed or discarded on the way to the top. The sulfurous rancor that at last pulled the group apart, and which continued in punishing and pointless legal maneuvers for another generation, was mostly ignored. Even today, Paul and Ringo have stalled the rerelease of the 1970 documentary Let It Be owing to its glaring display of the group’s lassitude, self-loathing, and crisscrossing bitterness. And they’re right to keep it locked away, if the point is preserving the image of the moptops. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Let It Be, but I don’t recall wanting to take any of those Beatles home to meet Mom.

The authorized version has been buffed in recent weeks with commemorations of the tenth anniversary of George Harrison’s death, at age 58, from cancer. There he was again, peering out from the cover of Rolling Stone, just like old times. Life magazine, always a codependent in Beatles mythmaking, disinterred itself long enough to get out a special celebratory issue. HBO aired a four-hour documentary put together by Martin Scorsese, Living in the Material World, which is also the title of a companion book of quotes and pictures released by Harrison’s widow Olivia.

The book is the size of a paving stone and as sumptuously produced as any coffee-table accessory can be. Scorsese’s movie, on the other hand, is a mess. Like too many documentaries nowadays, it lacks a single narrator, leaving the viewer helpless as the movie jumps back and forth through each stage of the Beatles story, from blitzed-out Liverpool to blissed-out Rishikesh. Anyone unfamiliar with the small but necessary roles in the dramatis personae will find himself wondering who all these people are. Where’d this Astrid woman come from, and how come Stuart Sutcliffe is dead all of a sudden — and now that you mention it, who was Stuart Sutcliffe anyway? Poor Pete Best, who he? (The answers for the uninitiated: Hamburg, Germany, where she befriended the young Beatles; a brain tumor; the Beatles’ first bass player; and .  .  . it’s complicated.)

Unlike most of the folks around my age, there’s almost no Beatles music in my collection (at least, by the Beatles: I’ve got Stanley Jordan’s wonderful version of Eleanor Rigby, and one or two other covers). While I wouldn’t go as far as Kathy Shaidle (“Beatles were phonier than Partridge Family, Monkees put together”), I would say that I’ve generally considered the Beatles to be over-rated.

November 20, 2011

If you’re not paying for the service, you are the product

Filed under: Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

John Naughton points out that TANSTAAFL still applies, even to “free” services on the internet like Facebook and Twitter:

Physics has Newton’s first law (“Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed”). The equivalent for internet services is simpler, though just as general in its applicability: it says that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

The strange thing is that most users of Google, Facebook, Twitter and other “free” services seem to be only dimly aware of this law. Facebook, for example, handles the pages of 750 million users, enables more than half of that number to visit and update their pages every day and hosts more than 70 billion photographs. The cost of the computing and communications resources — in terms of server farms, energy, bandwidth and technical expertise — required to make this happen doesn’t bear thinking about. And my guess is that most Facebookers don’t think about it.

But it costs money — millions of dollars a month, every month. The monthly amount is called the “burn rate”. It comes from investors who make their cash available for burning in the hope that it will eventually pay off in terms of a stock market flotation or the evolution of a profitable business whose shares will be worth holding. In the internet era, the favoured strategy has been to “get big fast” (the title of a famous book about Amazon — that is, add users/subscribers at an exponential rate, and then find a way of monetising the resulting hordes.

November 18, 2011

A topic that sends the Guardian off into deep social conservative waters

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

Of the various British papers I link to on a regular basis, the Guardian is the most liberal. It can generally be depended upon to come down on the liberal side of any question except for one:

… on the broad subject area of sex and sexuality, the Guardian, more often than not, comes down on the side of repression. The paper comes very much from the liberal, middle-class, English tradition, and the one subject the English middle-classes have always had trouble dealing with is sex. The Guardian also tends to take anti-sex campaigners more seriously if they adopt the “feminist” label than if they crusade under a more old-fashioned “morality” banner. On this subject, the Guardian’s coverage can swing from liberal to deeply conservative in the blink of an eye.

I blogged recently about the UK Government’s steps towards Internet censorship, using the excuse of “protecting children from pornography”. The Guardian, normally a warrior against censorship, lost its mind in an editorial on the subject, using Daily Mail-type phrasing such as “…bombarding of people’s homes and children by pornography…” and “…the destructive effects of pornography on relationships and values…“. The editorial also mentioned a recent government-commissioned report on “sexualisation”, neglecting to mention that it came from a Christian lobbying organisation. The idea that anyone who doesn’t want to see porn is “bombarded” with it is of course laughable, and serious research on porn has yet to reveal the harmful side effects claimed by conservatives of various shades.

And this wasn’t a one-off: on the icky subject of sex, the Guardian is often deeply conservative. I recently interviewed strippers who are defending themselves against campaigners who threaten their right to work in the London boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets (podcast coming soon). These women are articulate, well-paid and belong to trade unions. Yet, the Guardian is apparently convinced that stripping is bad, and refuses to take seriously the voices of the women themselves who earn a living that way; instead, they give a platform to “feminist” (aka sexual morality) groups who use fascist-style propaganda methods (such as claiming a non-existent link between strip venues and rape) to attack the venues and the people who work in them. While women who strip have offered to write for the Guardian about their experiences, only one ex-dancer, Homa Khaleeli is published, because she tells “the truth about lap dancing” — in other words, she makes the “exploitation” and “objectification” noises that Guardianistas want to hear.

The Guardian has a confused idea of defending sexual freedom. While Gay, Lesbian, Transgender issues are treated with the appropriate straight-faced correctness, other forms of sexuality and sexual freedom have Guardian journos giggling like school children. Fetishes, swinging, polyamory, BDSM, open lifestyles, bisexuality and sex work… these aren’t causes for free speech but excuses for the Guardian to pander to middle-England prejudices (and have a good, Carry On giggle in the process).

November 17, 2011

Can someone do to Gingrich what Dan Savage did to Santorum?

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

I was pretty sure that the GOP had gotten rid of Newt Gingrich back in the 1990s in the same way you’d scrape dog poop off the sole of your shoe, but through some totally inconceivable twist of fate, he’s back:

Republican voters’ esteem for Newt Gingrich has been rising fast. At this rate it might someday equal, though not surpass, his regard for himself. Gingrich is not a person with an ego. He’s an ego with a person.

Just listen to his explanation of why it took him a while to catch on with voters: “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do.”

Other GOP candidates sound like they are merely campaigning for office. Gingrich, however, hurls verbal thunderbolts like Zeus, as the lights flicker and the earth shakes. Hopelessly in love with the sound of his own voice, he exhibits a stern, overbearing self-assurance that gives his pronouncements weight even when he is uttering nonsense.

[. . .]

Still, it’s hard to believe his campaign will survive extended scrutiny. One reason is his know-it-all personality. George W. Bush was the guy you’d like to have a beer with. Gingrich is the guy you wouldn’t want to be stuck next to on a long flight.

[. . .]

It’s not just this administration that causes him to shoot blood out of his eyes. He said Muslims should not be allowed to build a mosque near Ground Zero “so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” He said that “our elites are trying to create amnesia so that we literally have generations who have no idea what it means to be an American.” Newt loves to conjure up terrifying monsters that only he can vanquish.

At moments like these it’s hard to know whether he suffers intermittent derangement or simply will stop at nothing to demonize political opponents. Either way, he bears no resemblance to anyone Americans have ever entrusted with the presidency. Gingrich is, as he says, unique. That’s just the problem.

Snapshots from Greece

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Germany, Greece, Media, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:54

Brendan O’Neill has a few snippets from Athens:

‘Prime ministers should be chosen by us, not Angela Merkel,’ says the taxi driver taking me to the Acropolis. Taxi drivers here love talking politics, and they love hating Merkel. She’s treated as the arch villain of this tragedy. Magazine covers show a massive Merkel playing with Greek politicians as if they were dolls. Graffiti invites her to do things that are probably anatomically impossible. My advice to her is to avoid visiting Greece for the duration of The 100 Days. Probably longer.

•••

The taxi driver also tells me he can’t relate to Papademos. ‘He’s not a man of the people’. But it’s precisely Papademos’s lack of experience in dealing with the grubby, demanding demos that endears him to the EU elite, which fought tooth-and-catapult to have him installed as PM. As one European economist put it: for Brussels the great thing about Papademos is that he ‘speaks the language and shares the philosophy of [the] EU and ECB’ and that he ‘comes in without officially representing a party’. That is, he’s apolitical, unchosen, boring and bureaucratic — just the kind of politician the EU likes. It’s already a cliché, but that doesn’t stop it being true: Athens is now both the birthplace and graveyard of European democracy.

•••

Yet the graffiti expresses exasperation as well as anger — a deep disappointment with Greek workers. Commonly scrawled phrases are ‘Wake up!’ and ‘Stop being slaves!’ You get the impression that the Greek left, which is rowdier and noisier than its western European counterpart, is as annoyed with the masses as it is with Merkel. In Syntagma Square, nothing much remains of the radical protest camp that so excited outside observers earlier this year and which provided the template for the global ‘Occupy’ movement. There is just a memorial tree, with political paraphernalia attached to it in remembrance of the camp. It’s like one of those shrines that pops up on roadsides where someone has been killed by a speeding car, only it is adorned, not with wreaths, but with balaclavas, goggles and batteries (which were thrown at the police). It has the unwitting whiff of being a gravestone not only for the Greek left, but for Greek politics itself.

November 16, 2011

Will Penn State cancel its football program?

Filed under: Education, Football, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:11

Given that they generated $50 million in profits from a $70 million revenue stream, the “smart money” is betting against:

If the Allegations Are True, Penn State Should End Its Football Program: Next week, Penn State plays Ohio State in a battle of scandal-plagued programs. The thought of these two facing off ought to send chills through the NCAA, any alum of either school, and anyone who loves college sports. Penn State and Ohio State seem determined to convince America that big-college athletics is beyond redemption. Just bear in mind: What Penn State is accused of is 10,000 times worse than what Ohio State did.

At Penn State, one of two must be the case: Either the accusations are false or they are true. If false, then Penn State, Joe Paterno and all others implicated deserve their honor back. If the grand jury presentment is true, we have barely scratched the surface of Penn State’s disgrace.

If the charges are true, not only did the Penn State football program allow its facilities to be used for the abuse of children, Penn State athletic officials and academic administrators were more concerned with preserving their money and power than with stopping future molestation. (The grand jury found the Penn State administrators’ explanations for inaction “not credible.”) If the charges are true, the phrases “Penn State” and “Joe Paterno” forever will be synonymous with the word “shame.”

[. . .]

Joe Nocera of The New York Times notes, “In 2009, Penn State football generated a staggering $50 million in profit on $70 million in revenue, according to figures compiled by the Department of Education. Protecting those profits is the real core value of college football.”

If Penn State’s trustees and new administration really cared about shame at the school, the remainder of the football season would have been canceled. Their actions suggest that what Penn State’s trustees and new administration really care about is making the public think honor has been restored, in order to keep the money flowing.

If the charges are shown to be true, the way Penn State could prove contrition, and recover perspective, would be to end its football program. Penn State is talking about contrition, but talk is cheap. Ending the Nittany Lions’ football program would prove contrition.

Don’t expect China to save your economy

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent along this link which should pour cold water on the notion that China will step in to save the economies of other countries:

China’s economy has a reputation for being strong and prosperous, but according to a well-known Chinese television personality the country’s Gross Domestic Product is going in reverse.

Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in a lecture that he didn’t think was being recorded that the Chinese regime is in a serious economic crisis — on the brink of bankruptcy. In his memorable formulation: every province in China is Greece.

The restrictions Lang placed on the Oct. 22 speech in Shenyang City, in northern China’s Liaoning Province, included no audio or video recording, and no media. He can be heard saying that people should not post his speech online, or “everyone will look bad,” in the audio that is now on Youtube.

In the unusual, closed-door lecture, Lang gave a frank analysis of the Chinese economy and the censorship that is placed on intellectuals and public figures. “What I’m about to say is all true. But under this system, we are not allowed to speak the truth,” he said.

Despite Lang’s polished appearance on his high-profile TV shows, he said: “Don’t think that we are living in a peaceful time now. Actually the media cannot report anything at all. Those of us who do TV shows are so miserable and frustrated, because we cannot do any programs. As long as something is related to the government, we cannot report about it.”

China, for all its amazing growth and rising economic prospects for (some of) its population, is still not a modern economy. The government — specifically the military — is too deeply involved at far deeper levels than other governments and the reported economic figures may or may not have any relationship with reality. When your boss is a general, he has ways of ensuring that you report the “right” results that a civilian CEO cannot match. It’s not just your job you risk by reporting unwelcome results.

I’ve ridden this hobby horse, as Jon calls it, many times over the years.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress