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Christopher DeMuth who ran the American Enterprise Institute for 21 years does his swan song.
… Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity–superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities.
To be sure, think tanks–at least those on the right–do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. We are “schools” in the old sense of the term: groups of scholars who share a set of philosophical premises and take them as far as we can in empirical research, persuasive writing, and arguments among ourselves and with those of other schools.
This has proven highly productive. It is a great advantage, when working on practical problems, not to be constantly doubling back to first principles. We know our foundations and concentrate on the specifics of the problem at hand. We like to work on hard problems, and there are many fertile disagreements in our halls over bioethics, school reform, the rise of China, constitutional interpretation and what to do about Korea and Iran. …
Victor Davis Hanson was in Iraq for a few weeks and gives his prognosis.
Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject — best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.
Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win — victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.
But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.
I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.
Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.
But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the “Sunni Triangle” to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida. …
Mark’s Corner posts. One with perceptive thought.
… If one looks at recent history, the Republican nominee with the fullest, most profound political philosophy, the one who’d thought most seriously about the role of government and its relationship to individual liberty, was Ronald Reagan, who formed his views while doing other stuff. If instead of spending the Fifties doing movies and TV and speechifying for GE (and reading National Review), he’d been a Congressman or Senator, I doubt he’d have developed any kind of coherent worldview.
Thomas Sowell on the Taylor/Johnson Duke book.
… “Until Proven Innocent” also tells us about one of the forgotten victims of the Duke rape case — the African cab driver who cast the first doubt on the indictment, by saying publicly that one of the accused young men was with him in his taxi at the time the rape was supposedly happening.
A flimsy charge against that cab driver from three years earlier was suddenly resurrected, and District Attorney Michael Nifong had him picked up by the police, indicted and put on trial — where he was quickly acquitted by the judge.
Could this country survive as a free nation if every District Attorney used the power of that office to intimidate any witness whose testimony undermined the prosecution’s case?
How long will we in fact survive as a free nation when our leading universities are annually graduating thousands of students each, steeped in the notion that you can decide issues of right and wrong, guilt or innocence, by the “race, class and gender” of those involved?
That is what a large chunk of the Duke University faculty did, while few of the other faculty members dared to say anything against them or against the Duke administration’s surrender to the lynch mob atmosphere whipped up on campus.
In much of the media as well, the students were treated as guilty until proven innocent, and those who said otherwise were often savaged. …
Times, UK reports the British court decision against Gore’s book.
John Fund posts on Gore’s Nobel problems. Drudge is reporting Gore’s canceling appointments for today and flying to Europe. What will Bubba say?
Want to make micro-loans to third world entrepreneurs yourself? AdamSmith tells how. If you follow the link, you’ll find they have enough lenders at this time. Pickings will repeat this in three months to see if things have changed.
… a friend emailed me yesterday about Kiva, a non-profit organization that allows you to lend money to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world. So like Professor Muhammad Yunus – the pioneer of microfinance and recent Nobel Prize winner – you too can become a banker to the poor. All it will cost you is some foregone interest, and apparently Kiva’s entrepreneurs have a less then one percent default rate. …
Good news. WSJ says the bloom is off the rose for ethanol.
… Opposition to the ethanol industry’s goals has grown significantly stiffer. The so-called barnyard lobby — representing the meat, livestock and poultry industries — says high corn prices are hurting its profits. The price of corn-based animal feed has increased about 60% since 2005, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“Our single biggest priority is for Congress to reject a new renewable-fuels mandate,” says Jesse Sevcik, vice president of legislative affairs at the American Meat Institute, a meat and poultry trade association.
Other groups that were originally sympathetic to ethanol are drifting away. They fear that the fuel’s advantages are outweighed by the rise in corn prices, which they say increases the cost of foods ranging from steak to cereal. “Many policy makers were seduced by ethanol,” says Cal Dooley, president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association. He opposes increasing federal support for ethanol.
The Agriculture Department says consumers can expect to pay as much as 4.5% more for groceries and restaurant meals this year over last, up from a 2.4% rise the year before. …
Max Boot with a cautionary tale about abuse of Wikipedia.
Are there people out there who take Wikipedia seriously as a source of objective information? There shouldn’t be, but unfortunately there are. In fact, lots of students use it a source of first resort. It’s so popular, that whenever you type almost any subject into Google, the first hit is usually for a Wikipedia entry.
Yet disinformation abounds, often motivated by animus or prejudice. There is, for instance, the by-now famous story of a former assistant to Robert F. Kennedy who was brazenly—and completely without foundation—accused on Wikipedia of complicity in the assassinations of both JFK and RFK. (For this sorry tale, see his article.)
A friend has now called my attention to another bizarre distortion, this one an attempt not to besmirch the character of one man but of an entire country. If you look up the Philippine War (1899-1902) you get this entry. And in the very first paragraph you get this statement: “The U.S. conquest of the Philippines has been described as a genocide, and resulted in the death of 1.4 million Filipinos (out of a total population of seven million).â€
I was pretty startled to read this. I have written a whole chapter on the war in my book, The Savage Wars of Peace, and I have never once heard that the U.S. was guilty of genocide. How could it have entirely escaped my attention? …
John Tierney continues the fracas on fat and food fads with a blog post on cascades.
I suspect a few readers — and diet researchers — will take issue with my Findings column about Gary Taubes’ new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,†and his debunking of the myth that low-fat diets will prolong your life. I’ll be happy in subsequent posts to debate the low-fat diet as well as other issues raised in his book, like the causes of obesity and the case for low-carb diets. But before we start the food fight, I’d like to delve into the question of why scientists and other groups fall prey to the fads called “informational cascades.†…
Dilbert has fun with Tierney’s cascades.