Month: June 2012

Brad Plumer advocates scrapping "the $775 billion spent [globally] each year subsidizing oil, gas, and coal." He explains why this probably won't happen, even though the cost of the subsidies could be devoted "to efficiency upgrades or lump-sum payments to citizens": 

Will Hickey, an energy expert who teaches in South Korea, notes that in many oil-producing countries that subsidize fossil fuels — like Nigeria — the public has “no faith in central governments to deliver on employment and growth.” Even if most of the benefits accrue to the rich, fuel subsidies are often the simplest, most practical way to run a welfare state. “The fuel subsidy,” Hickey writes, “is the only real claim to ownership or bona fide shared interest most people have on resources in their own country.”

The natives miss Michael Lewis.

In sad, vain, pathetic reality shows in a desperate search for celebrity. Like the campaign of 2008.

Politico laments the "smallness" of the 2012 campaign. Jamelle Bouie blasts back:

The monstrous truth of this dynamic is that it’s driven by political journalists. They are the ones who breathlessly cover campaign tweets in a desperate bid for web traffic, they are the ones who act as glorified opposition researchers, evaluating claims on the basis of whether they’ll be used in an ad, and not whether they’re accurate or truthful. The obsessive focus on trivia, the constant search for gaffes—these are things generated by the political press. … With little effort, you can easily imagine a more substantive and interesting treatment of the presidential campaign; journalists could inform readers, rather than exhaust them with vapid minutiae.

Regarding the above video, the original clip that Andrea Mitchell ran of Romney is here.

My review of the new Ridley Scott movie is here. The in-tray suggests I am an outlier. Thread to come.

A beekeeper calls them "masters at risk management": 

Take, for example, their approach toward the "too-big-to-fail" risk our financial sector famously took on. Honeybees have a failsafe preventive for that. It's: "Don't get too big." Hives grow through successive divestures or spin-offs: They swarm. When a colony gets too large, it becomes operationally unwieldy and grossly inefficient and the hive splits. Eventually, risk is spread across many hives and revenue sources in contrast to relying on one big, vulnerable "super-hive" for sustenance. Here's another lesson by analogy: No queen bee is under pressure for quarterly pollen and nectar targets. The hive is only beholden to the long term. Indeed, beehives appear to underperform at times because they could collect more. But they are not designed to maximize current returns; they are designed to prevent cycles of feast and famine.

Christian Lorentzen believes that contemporary novelists have difficulty writing about class. Will Wilkinson builds on that thought:

First, novelists just don't know enough about business or people in business to write about them well. Second, novelists are wordsmith intellectuals who feel poorly treated by the distributive principles of market societies and tend to resent those who thrive in its non-semiotics-based class structure. Third, novelists have left-leaning ideological personalities that, on the one hand, make them curious and empathetic, but, on the other hand, make it hard for them to imagine what it's really like to experience the world as a right-leaning ideological personality.

L.V. Anderson worries that Pixar's new movie is "poised to pass the stereotype on to a whole new generation":

The spectrum of fiery redheaded-ness has at least a couple of axes. Fiery redheads can be promiscuous like Jessica Rabbit or the titular Red-Headed Woman, or asexual like Pippi Longstocking or Anne of Green Gables—this usually depends on the age of the target audience of the book or movie in question. They can be ruthless, like Rebekah Brooks (whose hair gets a mention in virtually every article written about her) or ultimately kind, like Mrs. Weasley in the Harry Potter books. (Rebekah Brooks is, of course, a real person, unlike the other characters mentioned here, but the press has been happy to cast her as an archvillain in the New International hacking scandal.) And, of course, there are degrees of fieriness, from the petulant, perpetually mid-tantrum Merida to the cool, collected Joan Harris (née Holloway) of Mad Men.

Hanna Rosin is much more positive:

The radical question this movie takes on is women and power. Not power as in leadership—it’s perfectly clear that the Queen is the only legitimate leader—but raw physical power, edging over into violence. In her essay "Throwing Like a Girl," philosopher Iris Marion Young argues that the early-life failure of girls to use their bodies in lateral space or to throw their whole weight behind physical tasks limits their imagination and sense of potential. These are the kinds of limitations Merida takes on in an early exhilarating scene when she rides through the forest shooting everything in her path.