A political fiasco of historic proportions
Obama is ailing, yet the bunch of political misfits posing as Republican presidential candidates can’t make any mileage from that.
Read my spiked article in full here.
Merry Christmas and Best Wishes for 2012!
Hope you enjoy the holiday season, and see you in the new year!
2011’s best articles
Here are my top 10 articles for the year (in alphabetical order by the author's last name):
"Politics' fatal therapeutic turn," Dissent, by Zelda Bronstein
"Condemned to joy: the Western cult of happiness is a mirthless enterprise," City Journal, by Pascal Bruckner
"Health now: a provocation," The Chronicle of Higher Education, by Mark Edmundson
"The rise of the new global elite," The Atlantic, by Chrystia Freeland
"The forever city," Wall Street Journal, by Robert Hughes
"Beyond the welfare state," National Affairs, by Yuval Levin
"Rethinking the idea of 'Christian Europe'," Pandaemonium, by Kenan Malik
"American tinderbox," The American Interest, by Walter Russell Mead
"Books as bombs: why the women's movement needed The Feminine Mystique," The New Yorker, by Louis Menand
"The end of the future," National Review, by Peter Thiel
And, as a bonus:
"How to make a decent cup of tea," Slate, by Christopher Hitchens
As I did for last year's "best" list, I've deliberately excluded my fellow spiked contributors. My congratulations to Brendan O'Neill and the spiked editorial team for producing the liveliest, must-read publication out there.
Blaming all the president’s men
Journalist Ron Suskind's scintillating account of chaos and dissent in Obama's White House would be better if he had shaken off his teenage habit of blaming everything on Wall Street.
Read my review of Confidence Men, in the spiked review of books, here.
Does Moneyball explain baseball?
The movie Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt, is now in cinemas. I read and thoroughly enjoyed Michael Lewis's book, but haven't had a chance to see the movie yet. But friends have asked what I think about the Moneyball premise - that is, the use of statistical analysis to improve the performance of sports teams - and here's what I tell them.
I would agree that the Oakland A's did play better than what you might expect from their relatively low payroll. Making the playoffs in a number of years during the heydey of Billy Beane's Moneyball era was a significant achievement. But the A's never made it to the final round (the World Series), and so I think it is hard to call them an unqualified success story.
I do think there is a germ of truth in the idea: you can use statistics to better understand the game of baseball. As Duleep Allirajah notes in his spiked article, baseball, with set-piece match-ups between pitchers and batters, lends itself more to statistical analysis than a more fluid sport like English football or basketball. Baseball scouts can become enamored with players who "look the part" of great athletes, even though there are well-chiseled types who fail and there are heavy-set types who look more like they should be sipping beer at a softball game who excel (just look at David Wells). Mining data can be a corrective to poor, subjective scouting reports.
But even baseball cannot be reduced to the kind of statistical analysis cited in Moneyball. You can't capture everything about performance in team sports by breaking it down to statistics, because there are multiple individuals working together at the same time. At first glance it might seem that baseball can be boiled down to a pitcher facing a batter, but that pitcher is getting signals from his catcher regarding what pitch to throw. Behind the pitcher are seven players in the field who will have a huge influence on the likelihood the pitcher will get the batter out. For his part, the batter is also receiving signals from coaches. Whether there are other runners on base will also be important as to how the pitcher will throw to him. There are many, many variables at play. Continue reading→
This week’s articles of note
"The path to 270: demographics versus economics in 2012 presidential election," Center for American Progress, by Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin (pdf)
"How the Euro crisis could destroy the US economy," The Atlantic, by Jim Tankersley
"Secret Fed loans helped banks net $13B," Bloomberg Markets Magazine, by Bob Ivry, Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz
"2012 = 1968?" New York Magazine, by John Heilemann
"Shale gas gives rise to era of energy independence," Marketwatch, by Myra P. Saefong
"What makes British people happy: sex, exercise and going to the theatre (!)," The New Yorker, by Michael Schulman
Frustration with democracy in the US
In an essay for spiked, Frank Furedi argues that the oligarchs of the European Union have turned decisively against democracy, in favor of elevating technocrats to positions of power in order to impose punitive austerity measures that do not have the backing of the electorate. Reading Furedi's article, I was struck by how there are similar trends at work in the US, albeit in a different form.
Many commentators in the US, coming from different perspectives, have expressed frustration and impatience with the workings of government, mainly with regard to the issue of growing federal government budget deficits and debt accumulation. Such reactions were prominent in the summer, as congress fought down to the wire over the raising of the debt ceiling. They emerged again last week, as the so-called "supercommittee" of Senate and House members - which was set up as a last-minute compromise from the summer's negotiations - failed to reach a deal to reduce the deficit.
Political scientist and leading intellectual Francis Fukuyama recently wrote that the failure of the supercommittee has roots that "go to the very nature of the political system". Fukuyama says that America is a "vetocracy", whereby the US system of checks and balances have "metastasized" to the point where partisan politicians can stymie legislation and delay executive branch appointments. In its place he would like to see a "democratic dictatorship", as the British Westminster system is sometimes called, that could pass laws more rapidly.
It is interesting that Fukuyama explicitly calls for reforms that replace the mass of political representatives with technocrats: Continue reading→
McDonald’s out-smarts San Francisco’s toy banners
Tomorrow San Francisco's "Healthy Food Incentive Ordinance" - which prohibits restaurants from providing free toys with meals unless the food meets its guidelines - comes into effect. The city government passed this law about a year ago, and it mainly targets McDonald's, which provides a free toy with every one of its Happy Meals.
Will this mean the end of kids' toys with meals? No. McDonald's has announced that it will introduce a ten cents charge for the toy, the proceeds from which will go to its charity, Ronald McDonald House. This will ensure that people keep buying Happy Meals with toys, and makes the San Francisco killjoys look dumb and flat-footed.
The background to this is that liberal-led San Francisco is the most ban-happy city in the country. In a trenchant criticism, Benjamin Wachs and Joe Eskenazi note:
In recent years, San Francisco government has passed numerous laws to make us healthier, greener, and — in the city's eyes — all-around better people. Whether we like it or not. This includes banning the sale of cigarettes in drugstores, and, later, supermarkets; banning plastic bags in large chain stores; banning bottled water in City Hall, and the sale of soft drinks on government property; banning the declawing of cats; making composting mandatory; and forbidding city departments from doing business with companies that were involved in the (pre–Civil War) slave trade, yet haven't publicly atoned.
But San Francisco is only leading a pack of other cities, such as New York, Chicago and Seattle, that have taken it upon themselves to regulate people's lifestyles.
Eric Mar, the city supervisor who sponsored the ordinance, appeared unfazed by McDonalds' move, according to a report in the Washington Post: Continue reading→
Rise in parents opting-out of vaccinations for kids
An analysis by the Associated Press finds that the number of parents that are opting out of vaccination shots for their kids has increased in more than half the U.S. states over the past five years. Eight states - mainly in the West and Midwest - now have levels of exemption that exceed 5 percent, a level that public health officials say is concerning.
Some areas within states have vaccination exemption rates of 20 percent or higher. Parents who skip vaccination shots not only put their kids at risk, but also the health of other children (including those that have received shots). The AP notes that studies have shown that measles has suddenly re-emerged in some communities with higher exemption rates.
A newer trend is an increase in exemptions on the basis of "philosophical" reasons. In the past, the primary reason was for religious reasons, as in the case of the Amish who have traditionally refused vaccination shots. However, it is now increasingly the case that people opt-out on the grounds of a preference for alternative medicine or beliefs about negative health effects from vaccines. These people tend to be "college-educated white people", with a higher concentration in politically liberal communities.
Based on interviews with parents who opt-out, the AP notes: "Several parents said that while they believe health officials mean well, their distrust of the vaccine-making pharmaceutical industry only continues to grow." This is what underlies liberal stances on many issues today: from food to the environment to politics, at rock-bottom is the fear that a big corporation is doing bad things, including kill people. It is a modern form of conspiracy theory.
The article finds that "some in public health are exasperated by the trend." It is frustrating when people ignore the established medical opinion in favor of a backward idea (for example, some continue to bang on about a link between vaccines and autism, well after this theory has been demolished). However, despite the public health risks associated with opting-out of vaccinations, it is important that we uphold parents' primary right to autonomy to make decisions for themselves. Legal compulsion for vaccinations is not the solution, as it will override basic rights and raises other practical problems.
This week’s articles of note
“Pre-occupied: the origins and future of Occupy Wall Street,” The New Yorker, by Mattathias Schwartz
“Pepper-spraying taxpayers: ‘diversity’ boondoggles are the real scandal,” National Review Online, by Heather MacDonald
“How I stopped worrying and learned to love the OWS protests,” Rolling Stone, by Matt Taibbi
“‘The new Tammany Hall,’” ...
