Before the Temprance Movement, Americans drank like fishes. Could Russians undergo a similar transformation? Perhaps. Peter civilized Russians (too soon, thought Rousseau) by ordering them to shave. Now Putin hopes to finish the job by turning them from Vodka and dice. Until now he’s ruled as a popular dictator. Will his popularity go up, or down? No betting either way.
June 30, 2009
June 29, 2009
Young Pioneers
Richard Dawkins has hit upon a novel idea: why should only religious children be miserable during the summer months?
June 28, 2009
Eric Blair-o-gram
A lesser-known poem by George Orwell(!), written in 1943. It may be one of my favorite things by him.
Education is for Chumps
This message from Post Secret reminded me of this story from The Onion.
The Atlantic reminds us of what we already know:
Only about half of all college entrants earn degrees within six years. And many who do aren’t learning much: one study indicates, for instance, that only 38 percent of graduating college students can successfully compare the viewpoints of two newspaper editorials.
The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for—that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved.
Exclusivity itself is necessary to the alchemy that transforms an empty mind into an open one. Young men and women are very adept at picking up on cues given by society at large; what message does it send to plunk our hypothetical impressionable youth into what are essentially retirement villages for the young and surround them with motivated dullards, politically-obsessed nags and space-filling middle-of-the-roaders who correctly view their four years of college as a prison sentence for the crime of being young in America, other than that hard work and excellence are unnecessary and perhaps even unwelcome?
Rather than encouraging everyone to spend an extra year at college, our President could do much good by encouraging a good many to stay out entirely. You can’t have an entire country of scholars and gentlemen, and you probably wouldn’t want one even if you could have it.
Welcome Your Promiscuous Overlords
More from The Atlantic:
So citizens of a Pink Police State (I should say subjects) are apt to surrender more and more political liberty in exchange for more and more cultural or ‘personal’ license. And the government of a Pink Police State tends to monopolize and totalize administrative control while carving out a permissive playpen for the people. This tradeoff has a creepy economic component. Already, in places like Russia, China, the Gulf states, and Singapore, we see the machinations of a new ‘laboratory of autocracy’, as oppressive regimes grant wealthy residents de facto privileges to all the sin money can buy. As I’ve asked in our own context, however, how many hipsters are too poor to party? Next to the al Qaeda neanderthals, the harbingers of the Pink Police State pose a far more frightening and serious challenge to the Western model of social order. Nobody frets, like many of our intellectuals did over Stalinism, that maybe Osama got it right. There’s more to worry about when we see China’s youth consent en masse to equality in servitude in the shadow of Macau, Earth’s biggest gambling mecca. Of course the freaky environs of Dubai are a stone’s throw from the real Mecca. The secret depths of perversity and abuse at the ‘frontiers of the West’ — pent-up porn, sex slavery, the whole network reaching from the Baltics through the Balkans, down into the Gulf, and out to Indochina — really needs to be told. But our rapt attention is held instead by Bruno.
I think of the denizens of Huxley’s Brave New World, happy in their libidinous despotism, not missing at all the culture and freedom that their ancestors had painstakingly amassed and defended for a thousand years. I was in my late teens before I realized that there were people for whom the book wasn’t a nightmare but a dream to which they were eagerly looking forward. Oy, what a world! Where’s my soma?
Transform the Industry?
The Atlantic reminds us that the two-hour ad is a much bigger success than the product.
Here’s to praying: “General Motors is hoping its wide-ranging promotional deal with the big-screen Transformers movie will turn around sales woes.” That’s according the Associated Press. In 2007. Oh no.
GM supplied 65 cars for the sequel, and has run some cross-promotional advertising. But film executives have said that the company’s bankruptcy has been what people in both industries know as a “drag.” Tie-in campaigns are supposed to be a boon to film revenues, and GM has been forced to scale back on its Tranformers ads, on account of it having no money.
If they made a car that transformed into a colossal robot it would be a selling point for a product that has few to speak of.
Like Kaus, I’m skeptical of but intrigued by this story which casts GM V.P. Bob Lutz in the role of Catherine the Great on her Imperial Tour. It’s just crazy enough to be true.
June 26, 2009
Drinking and Driving is ok, in your country
Hello everyone. As this is my first tenetive step onto this blog, please excuse any breach of etiquette, crass word play, or just plain old sarcasm. That being said..
I am a people watcher. I like to observe. And when given the opportunity, sometimes it shows core morals (or lack thereof) in a sick humorous tendency of what people will do. It is akin to the young man working out on the road tempted to visit a strip club, a found wallet with cash, or the governors that use public funded trips to indulge their own happiness. No one there will know who they are, will they? These tendencies aren’t limited to just individuals, but also larger groups like businesses and governments. And here is one of my current favorites, StatoilHydro.
StatoilHydro is a Norwegian oil company. It is the largest off shore oil drilling company in the world and in the past has been reported to have involvement in a number of shady deals in Europe and the Middle East. Recently they opened a large number of petro filling stations in Lithuania. And why were these built? Was it to secure a market share of fuel sales? No my good readers these were placed for the lucrative sale of alcohol.
Until Lithuania enacted a law January 1st banning the sale of alcohol after dark, you could buy fuel and heavy drink at the same time. So when Lithuania discovered they had this alarming and rising death toll from drunk driving, so they voted to toughen the drinking laws. Since the ban there has been a drop in alcohol related accidents by nearly 50%.
But our friends at StatoilHydro though don’t care about this and in an official letter to the Lithuanian government they report that the ban has dropped revenue from alcohol sales by 43% and total sales by 23%, they “urge the ability to sell without restrictions” and that the main reason they invested in Lithuania was this alcohol selling ability and may have to enforce massive layoffs.
WELL Howdy, give me my Vodka and 3 gallons of gas!!! The irony in this story is Norway has among the strictest laws regarding the sale of alcohol. And since StatoilHydro cannot do it at home, it seems good to them do it across the water.
No one there will know any different…
Deliverance
At a twenty-odd year remove, the most striking thing about the Thriller video is how well it works as horror. The scenes of wolf howl and zombie smash are better directed than the real thing. It’s also a dance video of early vintage, so the strolling couple’s feet fall on the half-note, or on the quarter when they hurry past the graveyard–I never noticed before. Perhaps he’ll draw comparison to Mozart, another troubled prodigy who spent his later days alternatively fleeing and pining for earlier success.
In a way, Jackson perhaps lived too long. He was an object of horror and fun (captured perfectly by Smigel’s Triumph: ”On a scale of one to ten, how old is Michael’s boyfriend?”). Perhaps in decades to come, when America has gotten over its hang-ups with pederasty and disfiguring elective surgery, people will wonder what all the fuss was about. Jerry Lee Lewis hardly suffers now for having married his thirteen-year-old cousin, after all.
June 25, 2009
Speaking of American Food…
The pizza wars are heating up again. Until now the pizzaria chains have contented themselves with stuffing coupons into my mailbox. No longer. Now I’m getting letters, yes, letters inviting me to try the wares. They’ve already tried cold-calling; next step is to greet me at my door with a hot pie, asking me to try a slice. It’s all for nought. Lately it’s been New York-style by-the-slice takeaway only. The kitchens are dirty and the cheese gooey, but at least it’s honest.
