Perhaps the recent “terrorist outrage in the skies”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27terror.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1261890636-QVFR8dRHo8PyDIMOJsWiaA will bring the delusional opponents of group profiling to their senses. But I fear not. It should be a cut and dried case. A “member of a group”:http://www.google.com/search?q=Abdulmutallab+engineering&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a that is “notoriously”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ “associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs”:http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf tries to set off a bomb in a plane and only fails because of sheer luck. The nabobs of political correctness will try to convince us yet again that there are many strains of thought among these people, that most of them are non-violent, that compulsory cavity searches will alienate them and so on, and on, and on. But the PC mafia will be ignoring these people’s plans to “build temples that dominate our major cities”:http://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/completed/completed.html, and “actions taken deliberately to flout our common norms”:http://hacks.mit.edu/. A strong country has a strong culture that it is willing to defend against the enemy – and a willingness to ignore the natterers of multiculturalism when its citizens’ lives are in danger. We were lucky this time. We may not be so lucky the next.
From the category archives:
wandered here from unfogged by mistake
Charles Rowley “laments the cowardice”:http://charlesrowley.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/the-dog-that-does-not-bark/ of his erstwhile band of brothers. In verse, no less (or, if you insist, ‘verse’).
Where are all the real business cycle theorists who once argued that business cycles reflect Pareto-optimality? Where are all the monetarists who used to worry about the inflationary implications of massive increases in the money supply? Where are all the financial economists who used to thrust the efficient capital market hypothesis down the throats of Wall Street brokers? Where are all the law-and-economics scholars who used to boast of the efficiency of the common law? Where are all the New Classical rational expectations scholars who used to explain why systematic fiscal and monetary policies cannot influence macroeconomic activity? Where are all those Friedmanians who used to argue so effectively in support of capitalism and freedom?
Where? Where indeed?
Where have all the free market soldiers gone?
Why, they have run for cover, almost every one!
Their models have failed, their math is undone.
They need new statistics and that is no fun.
They dig into trenches to evade the socialist gun.
Their escape routes are cut off, nowhere else to run.
They hide in the darkness and avoid the free market sun.
Come out, come out, counter-attack and be done!
Much digital ink has been spilled on Ross “I Would Do Anything For Love, But I Won’t” Douthat’s review of Helprin’s “Digital Barbarism”, but no one–except sage Unfogged commenter Witt–has noted what may be the very most annoying part: the insertion of pointless sexism into a fine xkcd cartoon. A cartoon, I might add, that Douthat does not even bother to actually cite by name. Read the comic here. Now feast your eyes:
One of the more trenchant cartoons of the Internet era features a stick-figure man typing furiously at his keyboard. From somewhere beyond the panel floats the irritated voice of his wife.“Are you coming to bed?”
“I can’t,” he replies. “This is important.”
“What?”
“Someone is wrong on the Internet.”
How, might I ask did Douthat know that the voice in question is that of an irritated wife? And what marks the stick figure as that of a man? Oh, right, the unmarked is always male, right? It’s true that xkcd often depicts female stick figures as having longer hair, but this is not invariably so. Verdict: douchebag.
UPDATE: my husband informs me that brilliant unsung CT commenters have been all over this is comments to his post. But the point stands.
“Felix Salmon”:http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2009/06/23/actual-candor-from-jack-welch/ quotes _Economist_ American business editor (and former CT guest-blogger), Matthew Bishop.
This columnist once heard Mr Welch tell a chief executives’ boot-camp that the key was to have the compensation committee chaired by someone older and richer than you, who would not be threatened by the idea of your getting rich too. Under no circumstances, he said (the very thought clearly evoking feelings of disgust), should the committee be chaired by “anyone from the public sector or a professor”.
Truly wonderful. Via “PNH”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, “mock-authoritative citation rules”:http://www.pmla.org/altsource.html for public restroom graffiti, alien communications and much else besides. Suggestions for more such rules welcome in comments.
The “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/21/AR2008122102397.html?nav=hcmodule
This season’s animatronic Baby Alive — which retails for $59.99 — comes with special “green beans” and “bananas” that, once fed to the doll, actually, well, come out the other end. “Be careful,” reads the doll’s promotional literature, “just like real life, sometimes she can hold it until she gets to the ‘potty’ and sometimes she can’t!” (A warning on the back of the box reads: “May stain some surfaces.”) …
_Withnail and I_ some twenty-two years ago (or forty, depending on how you want to measure time):
By now you’ve probably all seen this:
Kevin Drum has one reaction. He also presents a remix of the cover, though I don’t think it’s all that effective. The New Yorker probably doesn’t have the neck to run a McCain followup that would really enrage the cable-news and spin-cycle bottom-feeders, but even if they did, it’d be hard to find a good analog to this one. Here’s one possible place to begin:
I’d suggest putting Dubya in Walken’s uniform, or the “Mission Accomplished” flight suit, and instead of the watch have him holding a tiny, angry-looking John McCain.
The concept of “BIFFO,” long known to those of us from a small island on the western periphery of Europe, hits the “political science blogosphere”:http://fruitsandvotes.com/?p=1635. As Matthew Shugart notes:
Ireland’s new Taoiseach will be a “Big ignorant fellow from Offaly.”
This explanation of the acronym very nearly accords with the more usual explanation that I’ve heard back home, with the prominent exception of the third word. More usually “fellow” is replaced by another word beginning with ‘f.’ Matthew fails to mention that the new Taoiseach, Brian Cowen1 is also a BUFFALO, or Big Ugly [Fellow] From Around Laois-Offaly. Important to know should you ever meet him and wish to preserve the diplomatic niceties of appropriate nomenclature &c.
1 No relation to Tyler, who was bemused when I told him a few years back that an Irish politician shared his surname; apparently it is a quite unusual name when it is spelled with an ‘en’ at the end rather than an ‘an.’
Or how I can’t resist linking to Lee Siegel complaining on _The Daily Show_ about how the market is making the Internets into teh Stupid.
Well I thought it was funny.
“Matt Yglesias”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/super_osama_kulfa_balls.php is amazed that you can buy a coconut-flavoured candy called ‘Super Osama Kulfa Balls’ in China. There’s worse to be found in every German supermarket that I’ve ever been in …