Author: Andrew Sullivan

Tyler Cowen Alex Tabbarok adds a few wrinkles to an old Dish thread.

Robin Hanson observes:

Watching Journey to the Center of the Earth, I noticed yet again how folks seem to like adventure stories and games to come with guides. People prefer main characters to follow a trail of clues via a map or book written by someone who has passed before, or at least to follow the advice of a wise old person.

…relative to fiction, real grand adventures tend to have fewer guides, and more randomness in success. Real adventurers must accept huge throws of the dice; even if you do most everything right, most likely some other lucky punk will get most of the praise.

Now that cap and trade has turned stiff, Bradford Plumer pages through the other items in the energy bill:

For now, it looks like the only cap that can pass through the Senate would be watered down and do more harm than good. So we're left with the combination of EPA Clean Air Act regulations—which, first and foremost, will shutter a lot of older coal plants and prevent new ones from being built—along with a grab-bag of subsidies and regulations that would ramp up renewable power and tamp down on energy waste. That's not a recipe for the long-term transformation of the U.S. economy. And it's not going to be the sort of thing you can use to sign an international climate treaty. But in the short run? Sure, a strong energy bill plus the EPA could make a fair bit of progress. But so much depends on the gritty details. And no one knows how those will shake out yet.

E.D. Kain looks at the prospects of a liberal-libertarian alliance:

I think the real obstacle to a libertarian-left alliance is the labor movement. In the UK that movement has its own party. Here, the Democrats are the nominal representatives of labor. I think for libertarians this will be a major hurdle. I see a Cameron-like Republican party emerging before I see a real reformation of public worker unions.

The Daily What digs up a gem on Vimeo:

Fabian Brunsing’s public art installation “Pay & Sit: The Private Bench” imagines a dystopian tomorrow in which even the most quotidian of conveniences — resting a moment on a park bench — have become soulless objects of enterprise.

Using the Silver-Zogby spat as a starting point, Jim Manzi details how "538 has created a real business model problem for pollsters":

Silver intelligently combines multiple polls to make more accurate predictions than are usually achieved by any one individual pollster. On one hand, the math of this is irresistible – in the real world, voting models often work. On the other hand, it would be pretty uncomfortable for a pollster to combine his own results with various competitive poll results to achieve equivalent accuracy (or at least to do so transparently). So, the pollsters do all the tedious work to collect and analyze the data, and then Nate Silver comes along and creates all this value with it in a way that is hard for the pollsters to duplicate. You can see why this situation might upset the pollsters.

Today on the Dish, bloggers reacted to the WaPo's big feature on the police state. Andrew's take here. He also tackled the Christianists over Mel Gibson, replied to Frum on the state of the conservatism, threw up his hands at the GOP over spending, and kept his eye on Israel's campaign against Turkey.

Palin coined a Bushism and inspired a Twitter meme. Gallup had her in the lead for 2012, Blumenthal explained disparate polling, and a reader illustrated her immense clout in congressional races. Levi and Bristol made bank. More Palin drama here, here, and here. Andrew responded at length to Weigel's refudiation of Trig-gate, noted Cameron's wife's refusal to fly pregnant, and offered a belated take on the Levi-Bristol engagement. Sprung countered Weigel on Palin's need for policy chops, Chait realized the GOP can't contain her, and Goldblog glowered at her assault on the Ground Zero mosque.

Chris Good and TNC covered the departure of racist Mark Williams, the Brits leaked the latest withdrawal date from Afghanistan, Marc Lynch discussed our ever-possible bombing of Iran, Greenwald kept the heat on the NYT over "torture," and Bruce Bartlett dropped his jaw at the GOP's fantasy over the Bush tax cuts. Surge fail update here and here. California cannabis update here and here. Alex Ogle reported on a cash incentive program to lower AIDS in Africa and Chris Blattman worried about the drug trade there.

Noah Millman came around on marriage equality and Virginia Postrel talked glamour. Cailey Hall watched soldier music videos and Alexis Madrigal meditated over a YouTube bullying case. MHB here, VFYW here, and a young Sully face here.

— C.B.

The online teasing of a trash-talking 11-year-old girl gets uglier and uglier.  Alexis Madrigal has a poignant take on the enraged reaction of her father (now removed from YouTube but preserved in Internet parody):

[Y]ou know, there was a time when these kinds of threats worked, and maybe it was a good thing. Words like that from a dad just might put a scare into some cruel 13-year-olds on a mission to ruin some kid's life for fun. In the old days, dads could handle harassment of their little girls. They'd pick up the phone line and yell at prank callers. They'd show up at schools and tell some kids to back off.

Parents want to protect their children, but a precondition of that is being able to know what or who the threat is. Father and daughter alike are now living inside one of those nightmares where the thing that's out to get you remains perpetually just out of sight and reach.

FROM. HER. FATHER. Those words used to mean something. Mostly it meant, "I'm a full-grown man and I'm willing to use physical force to stop you from hurting my kid, you punk kid." But who is the man in this video going to scare? Everyone knows his threats are empty, that he's bluffing and helpless. And he does, too, which must make it all the more enraging.

Julian Sanchez is worth reading:

If we were getting this little value for our money in any other sector, you’d find no shortage of legislators eager to make the issue a personal crusade—but investing time and resources in ferreting out inefficiency in a Special Access Program is likely to be a costly endeavor with little promise of a self-congratulatory press release as a reward for one’s trouble.  And that’s on the generous assumption that legislators are in a position to provide much more than oversight kabuki: Intelligence briefings, as many have complained, are typically minimalist affairs where no documentation is provided and note-taking is forbidden. In practice, legislators need to rely on the specialized expertise of a handful of cleared staffers who, even when they’re allowed to attend briefings, are spread gossamer thin. The intelligence agencies themselves are happy to paint any moves toward accountability as efforts to “handcuff” them—with little danger of being publicly gainsaid—and we’ve got 1,931 private firms with a vested interest in keeping the sluice gates jammed open.