How to make a movie

I don’t know diddly about the process of making movies or the work that goes into them.  But if I had to guess the most effective way to make good movies, it would look a lot like the way Joss Whedon made “Much Ado About Nothing.”  Just from reading the stories from the actors, it sounds like a lot of fun, and a real collaborative effort.  Amy Acker’s comments were especially interesting.  Can’t wait to see the movie!

Brilliant!

This analysis from Reason concisely states the reason I think that the Keynesian model is not applicable to the current economic situation.  Here’s the text:

In The Washington Times, businessman Mike Whalen (who’s associated the free-market think tank NCPA) writes up an interesting take on why various federal stimulus program have tanked like the Titanic (while causing few ripples on the way down).

His points are worth thinking about.

According to the Keynesians, the remedy for today’s economic problem is for the federal government, as the single biggest actor, to “prime the pump.” As government money starts to ripple through the economy, consumers and businesses will be encouraged and cautiously respond with limited increases of their own. Vroom! The economic engine steadily revs up in billions of responsive steps until happy days are here again. This pump-priming reaction is termed the “multiplier effect.”

There are many reasons to doubt that the multiplier exists at all and if it does, it certainly isn’t at the levels the Obama administration has claimed. As Reason’s economics columnist Veronique de Rugy has pointed out, the administration claimed that one dollar of government spending would create as much as four dollars in economic activity while other economists were coming in with multipliers of between 0.8 and 1.2, meaning that each dollar of government spending might yield just 80 cents to $1.20 in activity. Even if accurate, that buck-twenty is nothing to write home about, especially given the fact that government spending has to be pulled out of some other part of the economy via current or future taxes or borrowing. Which casts huge doubt on the possibility of any stimulus to work.

But Whalen isn’t simply dumping on Keynesianism, he’s bent on pointing out that even its latter-day adherents are straying far from their master’s theory. And in this, he’s surely correct. As Allen Meltzer has argued, Keynes was against the very sort of large structural deficits that characterize contemporary federal budgets and policy, believing instead that deficits should be “temporary and self-liquidating.” And Keynes believed that any sort of counter-cyclical spending by government should be directed toward increasing private investment, not simply spending current and future tax dollars on public works projects.

Or, to put it another way: If the federal government had a strong track record of responsible spending, it would mean one thing if it went into hock for a short period of time to goose the economy (again, whether this would work is open to question). It means something totally different when a government that spent all of the 21st century piling on debt and new, long-term entitlement programs responds to an economic downturn first by creating yet another gargantuan entitlement (Obamacare) and taking on even more debt in the here-and-now. This cuts in a Milton Friedmanesque, monetarist direction too. If the Federal Reserve had not been keeping money artificially cheap for the past couple of decades and it worked to lower interest rates and increase the availability of money in a given moment, that would mean one thing. Promising to keep rates low for the next couple of years – after years of loose money and statements that all those bubbles weren’t bubbles at all – doesn’t mean the same thing.

Whalen again:

I think John Maynard Keynes would be horrified at the slavish adherence to this simplistic strategy by so many policymakers and economic thinkers, as his theory was much more complex. This thinking might be correct under circumstances other than those in which we find ourselves. If the ratio of our national debt to gross domestic product was low – say 25 percent – and the federal government had run surpluses before the downturn, this college freshman-level Keynesian analysis would have great weight. Put another way, if Uncle Sam were a rock-solid financial entity with low debt to value and he had judiciously used debt for capital improvements that were accretive in value, as the biggest dog on the porch, a stimulus might work.

But with a national debt of more than $14 trillion and unfunded, future “off the books” debt of Social Security and Medicare combined at $104 trillion in present value, according to the Dallas Federal Reserve, Uncle Sam ain’t the man he used to be. This in turn makes American businesses that are sitting on a pile of cash focus on deleveraging. The American consumer is doing the same. In fact, from where I sit, it appears as though everyone except Uncle Sam is working like mad to strengthen his balance sheets. The legitimate fear across the country is that Washington’s refusal to join our common-sense parade will result in higher taxes, more regulations, more inflation and Japanese-style stagflation. In other words, Washington’s attempts at stimulus through spending are having the opposite effect. Businesses and consumers stay hunkered down.

If the federal government announced a real road map to fiscal soundness, the impact would be truly stimulating. If American businesses and consumers saw that Washington was really cutting, not just reducing future increases, there would be tremendous relief and an increase in confidence across the country. Job creators would sing “hallelujah”; they would get off their wallets, start hiring, and then you’d see that Keynesian multiplier kick in.

Except, of course, that it wouldn’t be Keynesian at all. Which I don’t think anyone would care about.

Whalen’s entire article is here.

Really?

Purdue has a “director of multicultural efforts to end sexual assault?”  Really?  Can someone explain that to me?

Take them at their word

According to ynetnews.com, this news from Iran:

“Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah, considered one of the Islamic Republic’s most radical clerics, issued a religious edict on his website whereby suicide attacks are not only legitimate but are a must for every Muslim.”

I suspect no one edits this guy’s writing.  “Suicide attacks are … a must for every Muslim”?  Really?  Should we now expect every adherent to self-destruct in the next few days?  Not exactly a way to grow the faith, you nut-job.

Round Two!

*Now* I get it!

I’ve been puzzled about the vitriolic hate directed at Sarah Palin ever since she was introduced to a national audience. The seething and ranting has reached epic proportions and has gone way beyond any disagreement over policy positions. Was it simply that Palin was an attractive, relatively conservative woman? Was is that she wasn’t a product of the so-called elite educational institutions? Her political credentials were no worse than many other national candidates, so that couldn’t have been it. So what was it?

The answer came to me yesterday, when the Young Master and I were driving back from a mini-vacation visiting the Shiloh battlefield park. While driving in Kentucky, I saw a small pick-up with a bumper sticker on the back window which stated, “Palin does not speak for THIS woman!” While surprisingly free from ad hominem attacks or or scatological references, it illustrated the problem with Palin – she’s a woman. In the eyes of the left, that is simply inexcusable.

Why should anyone think that Sarah Palin speaks for anyone other than herself? When she speaks, she says what she thinks, not what all women think. People can chose to accept what she says or not, or debate certain points with her, or engage in any other sort of rational debate with her, but the conversation is still with *her* and not with any collection of people other than ones that specifically say she represents them. And there is the problem – the left cannot accept that individual people have individual opinions.

Political power for the left is premised on identity politics – race, sex, gender or class, its all about acting collectively, and being treated collectively. Individualism, and individual opinions, are frowned on, if not actively discouraged. Thus, when a member of the coalition of the oppressed speaks out in a manner the officially-sanctioned leaders of the oppressed don’t approve, that person must be delegitimized and destroyed. Dissent from the official positions cannot be countenanced, otherwise, the power of the coalition leaders is diluted.

In other words, the left is being hoist on its own identity-politics petard. As more members of the coalition of the oppressed begin expressing individual opinions, the coalition leaders loose political power. Instead of simply pandering to the self-appointed leaders of the collectives that make up the coalition, politicians have to actually take policy positions and debate those positions. Once that happens, the left starts losing.

So the next time you hear or see an unhinged attack at Sarah Palin, Clarance Thomas, or any other individual whose race, ethnicity, gender or class makes them purported members of the coalition of the oppressed, what you are really seeing is the self-destruction of collectivism. Ain’t life grand?

Indiana House Democrats and their carefully considered response to legislation

Oh, screw it…

Snomageddon? Foo. Revolution in Egypt? Bah. Economic malaise? Piddle.

Young Master, take note!

When you don’t know what you are talking about,

Shut UP!

Yahoo!  isn’t exactly known for its in-depth journalism, but even they should refrain from stupid stuff like this teaser, which showed up on the homepage today:

“Fighter jet priced to move at $175,000

The dream of owning a jet similar to the one Tom Cruise flew in “Top Gun” gets more affordable.”

The article in question was about the sale of a Saab 35 Draken.  The Draken, one of the cooler design to come out the Saab design works, was a fighter that was built between 1955 and 1974 as a single-seat Mach 2 interceptor.  The fighter employed a unique double-delta design and was roughly contemporaneous with the US Century Series fighters, including the F-102 Delta Dagger and F-104 Starfighter.

Tom Cruise, on the other hand, was flying F-14 Tomcats in “Top Gun.”  The F-14 Tomcat is a supersonic, twin-engine, two-seat, variable-sweep wing fighter aircraft first deployed in 1974 as a fleet air-superiority fighter.

For comparison:

A Draken

A Tomcat:

Pretty much the only similarities between the Draken and the Tomcat is that both have wings.  To say that it is “a jet similar to the one Tom Cruise flew in “Top Gun”" is like saying you could fulfill a dream by buying a Chevette because it is similar to the car Tom Cruise drove in “Days of Thunder,” since both have four wheels.

Idiots.