Michael Kinsley delivers a beatdown to Newsweek

SEATTLE, Washington - I recently made some tepid sarcastic comments about the newly redesigned Newsweek, admittedly without even picking up a copy.

When it comes to snarky beatdowns, there are amateurs and there are professionals, and Michael Kinsley is a professional. Mr Kinsley was recently canned by Time and seems to have vented his anger on poor Newsweek by trashing their makeover.

Amidst all the snark were many good points about the nature and evolution of newsmagazines. Some snippets:

In his editor's letter... Jon Meacham says, "We are not pretending to be your guide through the chaos of the Information Age," which concedes a lot of ground from the get-go. Why not at least pretend? Why else would people pick it up, let alone subscribe?
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That said, Meacham's vision of a magazine full of exciting narrative and provocative arguments isn't terrible, if he could pull it off every week. Sadly, though, he has been defeated by what Mikhail Gorbachev used to call "the approaches of the stagnation period." He says he wants "provocative (but not partisan) arguments." Which would be what? "Let's paint the Capitol dome dark brown"? Or, "Try cooked carrots--they're not too bad"? It's not easy to be provocative if you're looking over your shoulder for the partisanship police.
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Why, for that matter, is there still a letters page? It's the first page of content you come to. Five one-paragraph comments on the issue published two weeks ago--room for little more than a thumbs up or down. On the Internet, thousands of people have their say immediately and at length. And then a self-parody: "Your thoughts on swine flu" -the cover story two weeks ago--"in six words." Hali McGrath of Berkeley, California, submitted, "Blah, blah, swine flu, blah blah." And Newsweek published it.
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It's been said that the test of a newsmagazine is whether you would grab it if you'd been trapped in a coal mine for a week and had one hour to catch up. And after a week trapped in a coal mine, perhaps an hour with a picture of Miss California in a bikini will be more useful than any explanation of why she's in the news. But the new Newsweek maintains the same irritating practice as the old one of half-explaining, which is no use either to those who already know the story or to those who don't.
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My favorite feature in the Scope section, and possibly in this entire issue of Newsweek, is called (for no special reason that I can determine except for a failed attempt at a pun) "The Reign of Spain." And it consists of a handsome chart comparing the unemployment rate in Spain in December 2007 and in March 2009 with the unemployment rates in other countries on those same dates. Why Spain? Why those dates? Why these other countries? Newsweek's entire explanation: "Unemployment in Spain is soaring as the country sheds thousands of low-skilled jobs."

First test of Yellow Leaf Cupcake Co - FAIL

SEATTLE, Washington - When I noted the opening of the Yellow Leaf Cupcake Company in Belltown, I pointed out that they're offering 30+ flavors and it may be tough to master them all.

Here's their first Flavor Fail... the first exotic flavor that isn't quite right: Vanilla Cupcake with Vanilla Frosting. They put chocolate sprinkles on it.

I guess you can offer an unlimited number of flavors if you're going to simplify by putting chocolate sprinkles on everything.

Ideology, fecundity, and mobility

SEATTLE, Washington - In case you didn't hear in the aftermath of the 2004 election, white fertility rates had an incredibly high correlation with voting patterns - Bush carried 25 of the top 26 white-fertility-rate states, while Kerry carried the bottom 16 states in this category.

This was pointed out today in a post by Bryan Caplan that was a response to Arnold Kling's grim assessment that demographic trends were going to result in stagnant, single-party Democratic rule in the coming years.

Caplan (who's very much into nature-vs-nurture stuff) countered Kling's grimness with the idea that the higher birthrates combined with an intergenerational correlation in ideological preferences spells trouble for Democrats in the long term.

I'm not buying it. Even if there is some small genetic component to ideology, it can't possibly be enough to counter the fact that a certain percentage of young people currently flee and will continue to flee their stagnant red-state origins.

Many years ago, I was on a feverish, catch-all conspiracy email list (remember those?) One member would often post stories about "infiltration" of homosexuals in the school system etc. and then note that "homosexuals can't reproduce, so they have to recruit to replenish their ranks". That's an asinine observation about homosexuality, but I think I can twist that quote around on this issue: "Heartland religious conservatives can't recruit, so they have to reproduce to replenish their ranks."

Problem is, a certain percentage of these "reproduced" folks leave the Heartland and move to coastal urban centers and turn into leftist Democratic voters. This migration strikes me as largely unidirectional. If you live in a big city, like Seattle, you probably have some friends who moved there from [insert dumpy red state here] as young adults, often leaving their religious upbringing behind. How many people go in the opposite direction? How many Boston Brahmins or young Seattle urchins leave home to become religious conservatives in Nebraska?

There's a reason the migration is unidirectional - people (especially young, curious folks) are going to head for the more dynamic, less restrictive lifestyle. Cultural homogeneity and an alleged 6,000 year old Earth are not great bases for recruitment - you have to "birth" people into that world-view and hope they stick around. Dynamic culture, sex, drugs, and a government that allegedly will tend to your more costly worldly needs? As Drucker said in Heat, "I don't have to sell this and you know it, 'cause this kind of shit here sells itself."

I had to use all sorts of labels and terms here I usually avoid - Red State, Heartland, blah blah... oh well. Only way to make my point.

A new cupcake player in Seattle - unless it's Sunday

SEATTLE, Washington - There's a new cupcake player in town - the Yellow Leaf Cupcake Company in Belltown.

I'd like to say I've been there, but they just opened on Friday and they're closed Sundays. The hours listed on their website are 7:30 to 5 Monday to Friday, and 9 to 5 Saturday. Geez... come on. This isn't as bad as the four-and-a-half-day schedule at Shoofly Pie, but it looks like I have to take a day off from work to try the cupcakes at this joint.

They list 30+ flavors on their website (plus seasonals!), serving nine varieties every day. That sounds to me like too many flavors to master, especially for a new joint, but they must know more about this than me; they're the ones opening a cupcake shop and I'm the one sitting around with my thumb up my ass, complaining about my humdrum life.

Bold innovations at Newsweek: raising price, renaming sections

SEATTLE, Washington - Among the innovations being pondered by dead-tree publishers is the idea of cultivating a higher-quality, more passionate readership base (that will be more appealing to advertisers) by raising your price and your perceived level of quality. The Newsosaur discussed this in the context of newspapers.

Relatively expensive niche products like The Economist are cited as a validation of this (risky) strategy.

Newsweek is pushing ahead with this strategy. They're raising the newsstand price by $1 to $5.95, and raising the rates paid by subscribers.

As far as swanking up the content? Well, they're renaming the "Periscope" section... it will now be called "Scope". And the back page will be named "The Back Page".

I hope you have more than that up your sleeve, Newsweek

Laptops for the ladies?

SEATTLE, Washington - Wow... Dell launched a female-targeted site called Della that tried to pitch laptops to women by mentioning its use in calorie counting, watching cooking videos, etc....

And there was a backlash! I'm shocked!

A little-known victim of the Islamic Revolution

SEATTLE, Washington - As if there weren't enough negative consequences to having a country fall into the control of fundamentalist Muslims - turns out one of the victims of Iran's Islamic Revolution in 1979 was an almost-completed Orson Welles film that might be a classic.

By the early 1970s Welles was developing The Other Side of the Wind, a film about an aging film director returning from years of exile in Europe to direct a final, avant-garde Hollywood feature. Welles's reputation for profligacy forced him to hunt high and low for new suckers to fund his ventures, and one of the investors in Wind was an Iranian production firm run by Medhi Mouscheri, brother-in-law of the Shah of Iran.

By early 1979 shooting was finished and Welles was editing the film when the Shah was overthrown, marking the beginning of a 20+ year battle over the ownership of the film (which sat in a humidity-controlled vault in Paris the whole time). The newly-installed theocratic regime presumably had better things to do than work through film investments. Welles died in 1985 and his heirs, like all heirs, were in the thick of much of the legal tangle-work.

The Other Side of the Wind's fate is now in the hands of Peter Bogdanovich, who was one of the actors in the film. In 2004, Mr B (whose career bogged-down-ovich after the success of The Last Picture Show in 1971) announced that he would edit the remainder of the film and release it. We're still waiting - Mr B seems to be pulling a Duke Nukem Forever with this, dripping news out every so often without ever producing any results.

A clip or two of the movie can be seen in documentaries, and some who have seen a good hunk of the footage claim that it's top-notch work, with an Academy Award-level acting performance by John Huston as the aging director. Can Bogdanovich possibly craft the film into something resembling Welles's original vision, or will it bear the stamp of Bogdanovich? Here's one clue - if The Other Side of the Wind finally gets released and you see Cybill Shepherd in it... that was Bogdanovich's doing.

UPDATE 2018/10/29: The long wait is almost over, The Other Side of the Wind drops on Netflix on 2018/11/02

Garbage report on "savings" from ditching car and using transit

SEATTLE, Washington - Economict Thomas Sowell made the oft-quoted observation that economics is not about solutions, it's about trade-offs. Keep this in mind as you read the America Public Transportation Associations's drivel on how much you can "save" every year by getting rid of your car and using public transit instead.

APTA pegged the "savings" at $8,600 per year across the top 20 transit-ridership cities, and $10,483 in Seattle.

Yes, it looks like riding transit will "save" you money - but what about the trade-offs? What are the costs? If you ditch your car, you're probably severely damaging your quality of life. People don't have cars for the joy of burning money - they have them because the benefits of the car equal or exceed the costs. A car gives you sweet, beautiful mobility, it immensely enhances your work possibilities, your recreational opportunities, your potential for community involvement, on and on. Unless you have tons of time to burn making circuitous trips on transit to do what you have to do, or you're just thrilled with everything within walking distance of your house, you're probably making your life worse.

We don't need the American Public Transit Association to tell us what car ownership costs, or for that matter if the costs are worth it - people have clearly voted with their choices. In fact, in recent polling about luxuries vs. necessities in life, the automobile checked in as a necessity with 88 percent of the respondents, blowing away items like landline phones, televisions, microwave ovens, you name it - even though car ownership was by far the priciest item in the poll.

Each of us can make our own decisions on these matters, without propaganda outfits like the American Public Transit Association telling us about the "savings". I'll keep my car, thanks. I don't have a microwave oven, even though I can afford to line my walls with the things if I want, because I've decided the benefits are too modest.

You can make a really shit life for yourself if you want to by eliminating all "costs" regardless of benefit. As a commenter on the seattlepi.com story on the APTA report noted:

Living in a tent would save about $42,000 per year. Giving up table wine would yeild $240 per year. Using old newsprint and forgoing commercial TP would save a whopping $48 per year. Movies? Nix your montly movie night habit with the wife and you would save nearly $1,200 annually. Coffee at Starbucks? Drinking tepid water each morning would net about $600 per year in savings. Want to save big? For go kids. The cute little buggers cost you more than $13K a year...throw in childcare so you can have a fulfilling career...another $8K minium. Everything in life is not always about saving money

which I reproduced here for its sentiment, in spite of the massive spelling, grammar, and usage errors.

A brief tour of Brooklyn espresso joints

NEW YORK, New York - I decided to spend my Sunday morning having a few espressos in Brooklyn. I avoided the places I have visited repeatedly in the past (Gimme Coffee! and Gorilla) in favor of some first-time visits.

My first visit was to a month-old spot featuring Stumptown beans in Cobble Hill. The place may be called Cafe Pedlar or Coffee Pedlar - as you can see in the photo, there's no identification on the outside of the building, no sandwich board, nothing. Some sources say "Peddlar" but I did see it spelled with one "D" inside.

Judging from internet postings this charming-turned-hip-turned-gentrified 'hood needed good espresso, so good for them. They need a couple more tables so I could not photograph the espresso, but it was better than adequate. They use a La Marzocco machine - come on, that's a 2nd string machine nowadays.

I then decided to lose my virginity on a few matters - making my first visit to the Greenpoint neighborhood and riding the G train. The G is the one line that does not enter Manhattan, and when I've spotted it in the past it had like 4 cars instead of 10, and nobody was on it, so I was worried. I figured that G might stand for "gangsta" and that my life might be on the line.

Similarly, I had barely heard of Greenpoint and didn't know if it was a decent 'hood or a shooting gallery. Turns out, it's just another bland Brooklyn far outpost - similar to Red Hook but without an Ikea to create buzz. It's also a Polish enclave - they had Polish bakeries, Polish restaurants, even a Polish credit union!

My espresso hit in Greenpoint was Café Grumpy. They offer products from a variety of roasters and use a Synesso machine. They offered the regular espresso and a "guest" espresso (pile on a few more and they'll be up to the four different espressos offered at Caffé del Doge in Palo Alto).

I went with a regular espresso and it was the best one of the day. Nice and short, dark crema, no bitterness, no aftertaste. Grumpy has a Chelsea location so perhaps I'll incorporate it into my Manhattan trips going forward.



Also of note at Grumpy is the bathroom - they have dozens of Polaroids of people on the walls, a few of which have captions and a few of which have cryptic numbers. There may be some sort of logic to it but I wasn't in the mood to decipher anything.



From Grumpy I strolled in the rain towards Williamsburg. (I seem to be the only person in New York with rain hat and slicker). I stopped for breakfast at Mugs Alehouse on the way, eggs Benedict and an Anchor Steam beer (which the waitress kept referring to as "Anchor Steamer" beer). The bar, of course, had a television with a distorted picture.

I made my way down Bedford Avenue, the hip heart of Williamsburg, passing a Japanese-Malay fusion restaurant and similar atrocities, before arriving at Oslo Coffee Company on Roebling St. I didn't recognize their coffee beans but they did have a Synesso machine.



The demitasse was from Caffé Vita, and it was not the only sign of Seattle in the room; the sink had a bunch of stickers from Seattle affixed. Vita, Bauhaus, Top Pot, a few Ballard stickers, even some less-prominent joints like Herkimer and Tougo were represented.

Seattle beans, Seattle stickers, rain, Seattle espresso machines - I decided to call it a day.

On watching stretched 4:3 images on 16:9 screens

NEW YORK, New York - I don't watch television much, but nowadays the first thing I have to do when I check into a hotel with a wide-screen HDTV is fiddle with it to get the picture down to 4:3 ratio. Genuine widescreen pictures (16:9) are only available if the hotel is shelling out for high-def service (none seem to do this) or grabbing the over-the-air HD signals but they all seem to configure the TV in "stretch" mode so that the 4:3 image gets stretched over the whole screen.

I consider it essentially nuts that people would want to watch the distortion produced by stretching the image. Yet, not only do I see this in hotels and bars, sometimes I go over someone's house and when they're watching a channel being delivered in 4:3 they have it set up to stretch the image. It looks broken to me, crazy, unwatchable, but even this HDTV guide notes that some people prefer to watch the distortion instead of having some of the screen go unused.

Analysis of "best" lesbian sex scenes in the movies

SEATTLE, Washington - I've been running low of things to rent on Netflix, so I decided to work through about.com's list of the Best Lesbian Sex Scenes in the Movies. Here is my analysis:

Tipping the Velvet: Disappointing

Better than Chocolate: Hot lesbian action

When Night is Falling: Disappointing

If These Walls Could Talk 2: Didn't see it

If These Walls Could Talk: Disappointing

Head in the Clouds: Did I rent the Utah cut of this film? Since when does dancing count as lesbian sex??? FAIL

Lost and Delirious: Disappointing

Wild Side: Disappointing

The Hunger: Disappointing

Bound: Hot lesbian action

Don't believe that a WA income tax will only tax the "rich"

SEATTLE, Washington - The politicians are scraping around for new revenue sources in Olympia, but at least for the moment they have shelved the idea of creating a state income tax on people earning above $250,000 per year.

Now, you're welcome to think that the state should have an income tax (although it would probably drive people like me from the state). There are legitimate pros and cons. But you're a straight-up sucker if you think such a tax would continue to only be levied on the "rich" going forward.

Look at the history of the federal income tax for guidance on this. The first federal income tax created after the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913 only applied to income above $3,000 (which if you do the math is almost $65,000 in 2008 dollars). The bottom rate was 1% (ONE Percent!), going up to 7% for income above $10,000,000 in 2008 dollars. Given the $3,000 threshold, less than two percent of American households paid any income tax at all at that time.

This tax was pitched as just grabbing a bit from the very very rich, those who could afford it, just as the proposed Washington income tax has been pitched.

Interestingly, when the 16th Amendment was being debated, there was talk of putting a 10% hard cap in the amendment. This was rejected, because it was considered absurd, a total howler, that the income tax rate could ever rise that high. (See here). In fact, by 1918 (under wartime conditions) the top rate had blown right through the inconceivable 10% barrier all the way to 77%.

State governments can't wage war as a justification for raising taxes, so they just institutionalize big spending increases and new programs in good times and then start cooking up ideas for ways to take more money to pay for these things when things sour. This phenomenon is discussed in detail in the excellent cover story from this month's Reason magazine.

Of course, every last penny of the government spending (in programs that sometimes did not even exist a few short years ago) is alleged to be indispensable, crucial to the functioning of a civilized society, kids will be starving in the gutters if anything is cut, etc etc.

Smartphone Hubris

WHITEFISH, Montana - I'm on my first vacation since getting an internet-enabled phone. I figured it would be sweet... no messy paper maps, no getting lost, find a restaurant with a few clicks.

One problem - T-Mobile doesn't serve Montana. Not just the podunk part I'm in... the whole damn massive state. So I'm scrounging for wifi, just like the not-so-old days.

The time is right for Terminator to end

POST FALLS, Idaho - All of the buzz indicates that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is going to be canceled after one-and-a-half seasons. Now, who will be the hottest chick on television once Summer Glau is off the air? I won't know because I'll probably again retire from watching TV for 5-10 years.

SPOILER ALERT

Still - if you saw the last episode, you know that this is the time to end the series. Based on how it ended, if they did do another season it's possible that Glau would have to play a human instead of a cyborg. And if that happens, I think dear Ms Glau would end up getting exposed. Let's be honest - we're not talking about acting talent on the level of a Faye Dunaway or Kate Winslet here.

Update: a re-assessment of Summer Glau here.

News Flash! - some politicians made intelligent, prescient comments six months ago

SEATTLE, Washington - It's looking more and more likely that GM will fire for bankruptcy, in spite of the fact that they've gotten tens of billions of dollars in aid and have been essentially taken over by the allegedly brilliant inner circle of the Obama administration. I was beating the drum for bankruptcy back in November. In fact, it was so obvious back then that a bankruptcy filing with no taxpayer aid was the correct path, even some politicians knew it.

A couple senators mentioned in November that a government cash infusion to GM would just put off the inevitable. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) knew the truth:

Mr. Kyl, the Senate's second-ranking Republican, added, "Just giving them $25 billion doesn't change anything. It just puts off for six months or so the day of reckoning."

Those were tepid comments compared to Richard Shelby (R-AL):

"Companies fail every day and others take their place. I think this is a road we should not go down," said Mr. Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

"They're not building the right products," he said. "They've got good workers, but I don't believe they've got good management. They don't innovate. They're a dinosaur in a sense."
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"It's not the General Motors we grew up with. It's a General Motors that is headed down this road to oblivion," said Mr. Shelby. "Should we intervene to slow it down, knowing it's going to happen? I say no, not for the American taxpayer."

Normally every word out of the mouths of politicians is nonsense, but note that the Times article is dated November 17, right after the election; you have a window of a couple weeks there where the politicians of the losing party will make sense, before the whole bullshit cycle revs up for the upcoming (i.e. two years in the future) election.

RIP - Harry Kalas (1936 - 2009)

SEATTLE, Washington - If I think back and try to re-create in my mind a hot, sticky summer night in South Jersey as a kid, Kalas's voice calling a Phillies game is a required element.

RIP

The end of intellectual isolation a.k.a. when I was your age...

SEATTLE, Washington - I've given a bit of thought here and there in the last few months to what my life would be like if I was just coming into adulthood today, instead of almost 20 years ago. One of the impetuses for this was a blog post from Neil Best last fall, where he mentioned that his employer asked if he had a business need for the pager that he was issued years ago. Not only did he not know the whereabouts of the pager, but he wondered if young adults reading his post even know what a pager is.

(I rolled with a pager in the mid-1990s).

The internet, of course, is the big deal of my lifetime. I first started accessing the internet in 1994 or so, via dialup, as a 22 year old. I recently chatted up some younger folks at the coffee shop, who have had full-blast internet access since they were 9 or 10 years old; they barely remember a world without it.

Of course the mid-1990s internet was a different place, with primitive web sites (go look at copies of your old favorites) and email lists ruling the day. Today we have blogging and RSS, and you can read from and interact with a large number of people from every nook and cranny of the human spectrum.

Intellectual isolation is a thing of the past. This was brought up recently in a post by Dr Joseph Salerno, discussing how students interested in out-of-the-mainstream Austrian economics no longer have to seek out the tiny number of graduate programs that have an Austrian concentration; they can apply to the best schools possible and still stay in the dialogue on Austrian thought:

When I went to lunch after the panel with four Rothbardian TES members I was not asked once to recommend an "Austrian" graduate program--much to my surprise and delight. Rather the discussion revolved around the pros and cons of the grad programs they themselves had researched and applied to. None of them fretted that he would be "intellectually isolated"--a ridiculous complaint in this age of the Internet , Facebook networking, Mises.org, etc.

This strikes a chord with me. Even as a young, moronic 1st year college student in 1990, I had a budding interest in economics. I took courses from econ professors in my first two semesters, and was then soured on the whole topic for years.

What happened? I ended up with two semesters of indoctrination from unreconstructed Marxist professors^* which, even as a young moron, was out of line with my budding intellectual inclinations. The Macro class textbook was a long paean to wise government planning and Keynesian ditch-digging written by Robert Heilbroner and James K. Galbraith. Heilbroner was a socialist for most of his adult life before throwing in the towel and declaring capitalism to be superior; I doubt Galbraith will ever throw in the towel.

My personality seems better suited to being an eccentric small-college professor than my current corporate drone status, and pursuing economics in college to the bitter end might have landed me in such a career. In 1990, I simply assumed that the nature of economics was what was presented to me in my early classes and texts; today, given sufficient interest, I would have balanced the stuff in class with supplementary learning more in line with my expectations and seen that I was not getting exposed to the whole soup and nuts in college.

I've had various chances to correct my trajectory in life (including nearly changing my major in graduate school in 1997), and fumbled the ball every time.

My interest in econ has been recently rejuvenated by reading best-of-breed blogs. There isn't a whole lot stopping me from just throwing it all away and going back to school to do a PhD today, except inertia, my belief that people's mathematical ability erodes over time, and my own trait of not being very adept at long-term, open-ended tasks.

Sound like whining? Yes, I'm whining. I ultimately have no one to blame but myself. My excuses are weak. But my When I Was Your Age lesson is: you can now cook up all sorts of excuses for how your life goes, but having a lack of information, or being exposed to an inadequate spectrum of information or opinions, is no longer an excuse.

* I want to note, these were two of the nicer guys you could possibly meet; in fact one helped me get into the class of the other when it was overbooked. This does not validate the bad economics.

ESPN cross-promotional juggernaut comes to Seattle

SEATTLE, Washington - ESPN has drawn quite a bit of ire from some sports fans and sports media pundits about their relentless cross-promotion - it often seems like an ESPN property can't even give you the weather forecast without pitching something coming up soon on a Disney-owned property (Disney being the corporate parent of ESPN). It often goes beyond the boundaries of sports (e.g. all the stars of upcoming Disney movies who mysteriously keep showing up in the Monday Night Football booth).

Today, 710 KIRO officially flipped over to the all-sports "710 ESPN" format, and host Kevin Calabro had to jump in the tank right away. Calabro interviewed John Clayton in the first half hour of his new 3pm talk show, and at the end of the interview he noted that Clayton had to run because he had a segment to do on ESPN television.

By the way, Clayton's popular Saturday morning local show is moving to the new station. The writeup notes that Clayton "is seen, heard and read across nearly all of the company's multimedia platforms", but no mention that he's been hosting a popular and respected local Saturday show on competitor 950 KJR for more than 15 years.

I don't expect 710 ESPN to mention 950 KJR by name, but they should at least acknowledge in the writeup that Clayton is a local - he got his break at ESPN after working for years at the Tacoma News-Tribune.

Intelligence vs. Wisdom

SEATTLE, Washington - My current man-crush, Don Boudreaux (sorry, Daniel Craig, times are a-changing), recently made some interesting comments about intelligence, wisdom, and economics.

Dr Boudreax got on the topic as a result of a Newsweek article about Paul Krugman where Krugman notes that part of his original attraction to economics was that it seemed to reveal "the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems." Boudreax noted the hubris of proposing button-pushing "solutions" to address issues in complex market economies - what Hayek called "the fatal conceit".

In response to comments that Krugman is "no dunce" and that he probably has a appreciation of complex markets comparable to his own, Boudreax noted:

A believer in the existence of buttons to push is either overly impressed with his or her own intelligence or simply unaware of the true complexity of any market economy (or both).

It's true that Krugman is no dunce. I have absolutely no doubt that his I.Q. is significantly higher than my own -- and, more relevantly and much more impressively, that it is significantly higher than that of 95 percent of all other economists. But intelligence is not the same thing as wisdom. In fact, I suspect that, after I.Q. reaches a certain (above-average) level, I.Q. and wisdom are negatively correlated with each other. Cleverness becomes mistaken for insight. The two are not at all the same.

This ties back a bit to at least half of my old quip that the smartest and dumbest 25% of the population gravitate to leftist politics - the really smart ones think that they're not only smart enough to run their own life, but to run everyone else's life as well.

Note the end of this post by Judith Warner, where she says that we are now governed by "this book-writing president and his coterie of brilliant advisers." Well, now we're set - the guys in charge should feel free to fire the CEO of General Motors, shake up the board, funnel the production of the company into unwanted "green" technologies, pour billions of taxpayer dollars down the funnel, etc... after all, they're brilliant.*

Dennis Prager has touched on the topic of wisdom over the years - in particular how young people going to college are immersed in the ideology of the people who tend to populate college campuses (definitely of a certain political stripe, and intelligent - college professors are really smart, right?) and assume this is the Correct Way of Looking At The World, without realizing that there are other factors (e.g. wisdom) that come into play when shaping a world-view and values system.

Codicil: Hopefully this Dr Boudreaux is not the same as the one Tom Tolbert discussed on The Jim Rome Show.

* Warner did not endorse those specific policies, she was just swooning over the brainpower of the guys in charge now.

I live downtown now!?

SEATTLE, Washington - Downtown West Seattle? Oh really. I've talked at times about moving downtown, I guess the downtown has moved to me.

Getting a bit big for our britches here. Downtown Ravenna thinks this is presumptuous.

Remember, West Seattle - most of the rest of the city thinks West Seattle is somewhere in Kitsap County.

Did N.W.A. lift lyrics from Vladimir Nabokov?

SEATTLE, Washington -

From Nabokov's Bend Sinister, 1947:

She sat with parted lips, slightly moving her tightly crossed thighs, producing a tiny sound, soft, labiate, with an alternate crepitation as if she were rubbing the palms of her hands which, however, lay idle.

'Chirruping like a poor lone cricket,' she said.

Portion of "Parental Discretion Iz Advised", from N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton, 1988:

Fuck the regular, yo as I get better the
bitches wanna trick and go stupid up on the dick
So I get 'em hot, thinkin' they're gonna get it
As they sit, rubbin' their legs like a cricket

Even Par - the only noble score in golf

SEATTLE, Washington - When I'm watching professional golf on television, and a player's score is shown as he's walking off the 18th green, the world only seems quite right if the player has shot even par.

If a player is a few strokes over par, then it seems the player did not have his A-game. If he's a few shots under, then you begin to think that perhaps the course was playing too easy.

But even par: a battle to a dead standstill between one of the very best players in the world and an incredibly challenging golf course. There's a certain elegance to the scene, a kind of nobility.

Congrats, Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart!

SEATTLE, Washington - Harrison Ford, 66, and Calista Flockhart, 44, have gotten engaged after seven years of romance.

But, Mr Ford, don't think this eliminates the doubts about your sexual orientation - I can tell from all the Google searches bringing people to my posts on the topic that there is still significant speculation on the issue.

Unsolicited financial advice from New York burger joint

SEATTLE, Washington - I was at Island Burgers & Shakes in Hell's Kitchen last week. If I am not mistaken, they did not used to take credit cards. In a menu insert, they noted that they were now accepting credit card payments, albeit with a transaction fee added to the bill (a perfectly reasonable thing to do).

However, the insert then goes on to tell you that you should not pay with a credit card, even if you don't mind the transaction fee, because "financial experts" advise you not to do so, and better not to add to the "fortunes" of the credit card companies.

I'll make my own decisions on these things, thanks. And Stand has better milkshakes, but I do appreciate the burger variety at Island Burgers & Shakes.

"The World Loves Obama" Watch

SEATTLE, Washington - For anyone who's had their head sufficiently far up their ass to think that all the enmity directed at the USA from other countries was because of the previous occupant of the White House, and that all will be roses because of the current occupant of the White House - some reality checks are coming in.

Venezuela's Chavez calls Obama "ignoramus"

"He goes and accuses me of exporting terrorism: the least I can say is that he's a poor ignoramus; he should read and study a little to understand reality," said Chavez, who heads a group of left-wing Latin American leaders opposed to the U.S. influence in the region.

Report: Iran Dismisses U.S. Outreach as a 'Slogan'

President Obama intends to press ahead with efforts to open a dialogue with Iran despite an apparent setback yesterday when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme religious leader, dismissed U.S. overtures as a “slogan” offering no real change
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He added: “If you are right that change has come, where is that change? Make it clear for us what has changed.”