CapitalistImperialistPig

A dear old friend sent us one of those emails, marked up in 5 colors, of outrages some nutso judge claims to have found in the healthcare law. He cites, but does not quote, the relevant passages. Because I no longer have the patience, I don't bother to track down the reality. Because I'm too nice a guy, I didn't reply: "Dear X. Suggest you stop smoking crack and listening to Glenn Beck. It's rotting your brain."

I saw an impressive theatrical version of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment tonight. I'm not sure how the adapters managed to cram the sprawling novel into 90 minutes, but they did, and to excellent effect. This is a story with some important intellectual weight, and Raskalnikov does as much damage to Nietsche and Consequentialism as he does to the hapless murder victims.

String theorists are very smart. We know this because: (a) you need to know a lot of physics and even more math to understand string theory (and Math is Hard ! - Barbie) and (b) because they keep telling us so. Because people (Ok, their moms and other string theorists, anyway) have always told them they are so smart, some string theorists have found it convenient to set themselves up as experts in all sorts of stuff - climate change, for example. And volcanology. CNN at least is convinced. Lubos finds CNN interviewing Michio Kaku , string theorist and science popularizer, about the Yellowstone supervolcano (more Yellowstone here and here ). Not that I blame Michio. If Rebecca Hillman or other hot Anchorette wants to interview me, I'm available. I can talk about anything, including superstrings, the Superbowl or volcanology - and I even experienced the last big Yellowstone quake. Actual volcanologist Erik Klementi was not amused . I guess he wanted to be interviewed. Or ma...

I was having dinner with some of my contemporaries - that is to say a bunch of other old geezers and geezerettes - not so long ago, and the conversation turned to the manifold intellectual deficiencies of today's students. It started with the film prof complaining that his students didn't know who Gregory Peck or understand the old Hollywood studio system. What little I understand of the "old Hollywood Studio system" was probably embedded Sunset Boulevard - the Lloyd Webber version - but I didn't want to dwell on that. Others complained that most students couldn't write a decent essay - true dat - and so on. I couldn't resist stirring the pot, so I had to ask how many of us knew who Ke\$ha was? I also wondered how our insights compared with the fact that IQs seem to keep rising, and the fact that the current generation is not only a lot smarter than us, but is even a lot smarter than we were before we became senile. I've never been one of the popu...

Tyler Cowen and other semi-conservative economists are flogging the notion that the unemployed are unemployed because they aren't worth their keep - that they aren't being hired because they can't produce enough value for it to be worthwhile for an employer to hire them. Economically speaking, they can produce only zero marginal product. The advent of the automobile caused the transportation value of the horse to drop below the value of the cost of maintaining him, so a lot of formerly useful horses earned a ticket to the glue factory. Is that the designated fate of the American unemployed, metaphorically anyway? Paul Krugman and other Keynesians maintain that the actual problem is insufficient aggregate demand - there just aren't enough people willing and able to buy stuff. At one level, both explanations are almost tautologically true. Given large enough demand, everyone would be hired. If employers were convinced the hiring someone would produce a profit for th...

Amy Chua has got to be the most successful self-promoter since Glenn Beck emerged from the ass-cheeks of Zeus - or wherever it was he came from. It's somewhat interesting to wonder how she managed to push so many people's buttons. I think she manages to play on common fears - the fear of every parent that they aren't doing right by their kids and the fear that China is surpassing and threatening the US, for example. She also manages to make herself at once threatening and unlikeable - she's judgemental, anti-American, racist, hypercompetitive, and impossibly full of herself. Janet Maslin of the NYT weighs in: “There are all these new books out there portraying Asian mothers as scheming, callous, overdriven people indifferent to their kids’ true interests,” Amy Chua writes. She ought to know, because hers is the big one: “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a diabolically well-packaged, highly readable screed ostensibly about the art of obsessive parenting. In truth, Ms...

Paul Krugman takes us back to Grace Slick in the sixties as preparation for tomorrow's column. I was never a doper of any sort - unless you count beer, but this song definitely made a big impression on me when I was a young soldier. Somehow the ambiance transcended both it's mileau and it's own message. Ditto for Hair - it feels like the anthem of my generation even though I was never of it. From Wikipedia: Slick and Tricia Nixon, former President Richard Nixon's daughter, are alumnae of Finch College. Grace was invited to a tea party for the alumnae at the White House in 1969. She invited the political activist Abbie Hoffman to be her escort and planned to spike President Richard Nixon's tea with 600 micrograms of LSD. The plan was thwarted when they were prevented from entering after being recognized by White House security personnel, as Slick had been placed on an FBI blacklist.