Economics

Stop The Presses!

In a “man bites dog” moment, Lester Brown gets something right:

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 – mostly poor – countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state’s crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the process of grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot afford to do so.

Time to stop this latest nuttiness in farm subsidies.

Political Commentary

This Is Beyond Parody

Are the Dems really going to be so foolish as to put out a report titled “The Neo Con”? I just saw a crawl on cable indicating that they will.

Way to play to your nutty fringe base, and turn off the sensible electorate. I hope they do it.

[Update in the early afternoon]

Robert Goldberg, on the increasing (and increasingly hard to hide) anti-semitism of the left. And I think that, at this point, most of us know what “neocon” is code for.

War Commentary

Birds Of A Feather

Gerry Adams is meeting with Hamas.

Reminds me of the old joke about the guy walking down the street in Ulster, when he feels the barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.

“Now would you be Protestant, or would you be Catholic?”

Thinking quickly, he says, “I’m a Jew!”

There’s a pause, and then, “Begorrah, and I’m the luckiest Palestinian in Belfast.”

And then there’s the variation.

“So, then would you be a Protestant Jew, or a Catholic Jew…?”

War Commentary

Creating More Terrorists

I’m sure that any minute, we’ll see editorials railing against radical Islamists about this:

FAR-RIGHT extremists have adopted the tactics of Islamic jihadis by posting videos on the internet in which they threaten to behead British Muslims.

The films show balaclava-clad white British men brandishing guns, knives and clubs, calling on all Muslims to leave Britain or be killed. One appears to be a soldier who has served in the Gulf.

In one film, a man tells Muslims to “go home” or risk being burned alive. He threatens, “I’ll cut your head off”, and claims to have “comrades” across Britain who have “had enough”.

Any minute now.

[SOUND=”Crickets Chirping”]

[/SOUND]

War Commentary

Iranians Love America

And aren’t that thrilled with their government. Someone at the WaPo (in the travel section) got off script:

What took place over the next fortnight astonished me. Everywhere I went — from the traffic-choked streets of Tehran in the north to the dusty desert town of Yazd in central Iran, to the elegant cultural centers of Isfahan and Shiraz — I was overwhelmed by the warmth and, dare I say it, pro-Americanism of the people I met.

Ponder the irony of that last statement for a moment. While much of the rest of the world seems to be holding their collective noses at us Americans, in Iran people were literally crossing the road to shake an American’s hand and say hello. Who knew?

Initially, when Iranians asked me where I was from, I’d suggest they guess. But this game quickly proved too time-consuming — no one ever guessed correctly. So instead I would simply mumble “American.” And then their faces would light up. For better or worse, Iranians are avid fans of America: its culture, films, food, music, its open, free-wheeling society.

Which reraises the question. How to punish a rogue, tyrannical government without harming its people?

Political Commentary

The Real Reality-Based Community

“Hatewatch” over at Winds of Change has a nice roundup of links, including one called Idiotarian Seethings. Control-F twice on that phrase to get to the meat, though the whole thing is fun, as usual. I particularly liked this bit:

Early in July, NRO’s Jonah Goldberg did his part to entertain the right-wing blogosphere by tracking down this piece of comedy gold, wherein an ambitious DU denizen attempts to demonstrate that 9/11 was a conspiracy by failing to collapse steel rabbit fencing. The true entertainment only starts, as is often the case in these swamps, when other budding scientists attempt to explain why they too are moved by his demonstration. By all means, enjoy yourselves.

But there’s a serious point here for political discourse, one that often gets lost in the growing populism on both the left and the right: experts are good. Not everyone can do or know the things that they do. It’s not just that being an expert causes you to have the knowledge that you need to evaluate things within your field – it’s that immersion in a way of thinking that seems to be related to particular objects gets you in the habit of thinking a certain way. It’s why chess masters can ‘see’ a board and topologists can ‘see’ a knot. Not to be overly pedantic, but it seems like certain objects are easier to understand by thinking in certain ways. An expert has developed cognitive habits as well as broad knowledge. That why an amateur and an expert can know exactly the same amount of things and can be exactly as smart, and the expert might have insights that the amateur might never stumble into.

Of course, that’s beside the point in two ways. First, this guy isn’t an amateur in anything – he’s just an tool (click through if you want some entertainment). Second, however, this anti-expert populism (most often expressed in blog triumphalism) isn’t distributed evenly across the left and right of the political spectrum. To be more specific, when the right challenges ostensible experts, it seems that the people doing the challenging are actually better at the matter at hand than the people being challenged: Allahpundit and Dr. Shackleford are very, very good at Photoshop and that Reuters idiot is very, very not.

Meanwhile, on the left, we’ve got American Apparel checkout workers and Starbucks baristas going toe to toe with MIT architects on the weight that reinforced cross-sections can bear – a matchup hilarious but for the passion with which the checkout workers and baristas insist that they have an opinion that they’re entitled to. The urge to debunk the reasoning of experts is dangerous across the board, a seed that can blossom into full-blown anti-intellectualism. It just seems that when the right does it, they end up being right. And that’s a difference worth noting.

Of course, expect the usual idiotarian seethers in the comments section to seethe at this.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!