Cargo Cult Science and the State
I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas–he’s the controller–and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exac

The Blind Leading The Blind
Now, as we’ve all been taught for many years, the free market is the tool of evil brutes, who’d just as soon toss your kids into a sweatshop (if not outright slavery) to produce products that are dangerous and deadly, and will collude amongst their fellow ruffians to ensure that consumers have no recourse to change. Our government, on the other hand, is full of sweetness and light, and is the only possible thing protecting the masses of humanity from the fate those blackhearts in business would press on you. Previous presidents, of course, understood that it was important to keep some of these nefarious characters around, preferably in ones cabinet where they

The War of the Whoppers
For some time, it looked like Republicans were more persuasive liars than their counterparts in DC. After all, they (with the assistance of Judith Miller and The New York Times) convinced a great deal of Americans that aluminum tubes had been intercepted which were to be used to create nuclear bombs. Visions of Islamic terrorists flooding across our southern border with truckloads of nukes provided the rest of the political support necessary for us to begin military operations in Iraq. Of course, these so-called weapons of mass destruction were never found, which forced President Bush to state that he “fully understood that the intelligence was wrong, and [he was]

Quote Of The Day
Words fail: Ari Fleischer Communications, a sports public relations firm headed by the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been hired by BCS officials to help remodel the tattered image of college football’s postseason system. I can’t wait to see what softballs Jeff Gannon tosses as questions during the pressers.

Conspiracy Theory Of The Day
Goldbugs have long-believed that central banks try to manipulate the price of gold, i.e. dumping gold onto the market at certain times to keep the price down, then slowly re-acquiring it after the spike passes, etc. But in an era where the goldbugs are predicting $2000/oz and higher (I’ve seen predictions of $5000/oz), I don’t think the central banks have enough gold in their vaults to blunt that rise — and even worse, if they made a concerted effort to dump it, that very signal would push prices through the roof. Even worse, it’s a prisoner’s dilemma. The central banks are helped if they all dump the gold, but if one goes rogue and starts buying it all u