The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Ed Conard And Crackpot Economics

by Elias Isquith May 5, 2012

David Frum asks Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon as well as other successful tech enterprises, what he thinks of Ed Conard’s theory that the investors among the .01% are the indispensable risk-takers that fuel the American economy. As it turns out, not much: Risk-taking? These guys aren’t risk-takers. Think of the founders of Google. They came from middle-class families and went to Stanford. Short of inheriting the crown of England, there’s nobody in this life less exposed to risk ...

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Stimulus first, austerity later

by Tim Kowal May 5, 2012

Via Alex Tabarrok, a recent study by Richard Evans, Laurence Kotiloff, and Kerk Philips at VoxEU examines the effects of long-term large-scale redistribution of young Americans’ savings to the elderly: [T]he young, because they have longer remaining lifespans than the old, have much lower propensities to consume out of their remaining lifetime resources. This prediction is strongly confirmed for the US by Gokhale et al (1996). Hence, in taking from young savers and giving to old spenders, which Uncle Sam ...

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I Can’t Drive 55.

by David Ryan May 5, 2012

I read the below tweet from Megan McArdle about middle class driving habits (under the cut) while I was riding the Long Island Railroad and a couple of minutes later a woman asked me if people ever tell me I look like Sammy Hagar, and then asked to take my picture to send to her boyfriend, who apparently is a big Sammy Hagar fan. That’s as good a lead in as any for this post, which is about the notion of ...

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MON TIKI Update 5/4/12

by David Ryan May 4, 2012

Beams back out, now we’re starting to deck the hulls. In the foreground is the decking over the aft locker/spare bunk, including the cutout for the hatch. On the far hull you can see the tumblehome panels installed. With a little luck the hulls will be completely closed in by some time next week, and we’ll be coming out of the barn the week after that!

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Finally, the fried chicken proof you’ve been searching for

by Rose Woodhouse May 4, 2012

Russell, my co-blogger over at Blinded Trials, and I text each other…rather frequently. Since we’ve been doing our sub-blog (which is a total blast!), a continual source of texting delight for us is the search terms that people use to find us. What made that person search for that? What made them click through to us? What did they make of our post when they did? Usually these involve some outlandishly entertaining misspelled sexual proclivity. A recent search term was a little different. It was, ”articles ...

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Friday Jukebox

by Rufus F. May 4, 2012

Hopefully, nobody else wanted this honor. I haven’t done it in a while. Plus, the Reverend Horton Heat played at my favorite bar on Wednesday and I was the DJ for the night, spinning old rockabilly, blues, gospel, rock’n’roll, and garage rock records in between the bands. The Reverend sent his complements on the music, so I’m doing it again for their show tonight. My complements for the good Rev’s music too!

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Avengers, Culture, Wackadoodle, and Weekend Open Thread

by Jaybird May 3, 2012

It just means that my head and my heart tell me it’s 1945. They tell me that when I switch on the radio, it should take a minute to warm up and music should come out, not noise and foul language. They tell me that when I talk about God as something real, people should understand, not look away as if I’m crazy. They tell me that I should be winning a war that will make the world free and ...

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Jonah Goldberg’s Very Small Penis : How One NRO Correspondent Plans to Kill Your Children, Eat Your Puppies & Sodomize Your Kittens

by Tod Kelly May 3, 2012

I should probably start off by saying that as far as I know Jonah Goldberg has a fine and average sized (or bigger!) penis, and that to my knowledge he has never advocated any harm to your children. And for all I know he’s a vegetarian. But in this NPR interview (h/t Burt), he calls for a more openly argumentative society, and says that’s why he followed a book with the needlessly inflammatory title Liberal Fascism:The Secret History of the ...

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Mid-Season Mad Men Studies: “And would it have been worth it, after all?”

by J.L. Wall May 3, 2012

I grow old … I grow old … I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. –T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” In my post on the Season Five premiere, I suggested that ...

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The Talented Mr. Conard

by Elias Isquith May 3, 2012

Ed Conard is a very wealthy man. Hundreds of millions. He’s also a former executive at Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old haunt. The two are friends to this day. (In fact, you may recall a short-lived and minor scandal involving a dummy company donating $1 million dollars to Romney’s Super PAC — that was Conard.) Conard’s, now retired from Bain and private equity in general, is also an aspiring public intellectual. He’s got a book coming out soon, a strident defense ...

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Let us be pedantical for all love! Pt1 – When was Jack Aubrey Born?

by Nob Akimoto May 3, 2012

Dear reader if you are anything like me you may on occasion grow tired of dealing with the daily inanity of what has come to be termed the political media. So for my next blog post I am going to deal with a subject dear and near to my heart: the works of Patrick O’Brian. Now like many fans of a nerdish bent I’m prone to overthinking the finer points of the fictional world. Today’s point of analysis will be ...

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Words And Phrases

by Burt Likko May 2, 2012

I am unlikely to read Jonah Goldberg’s new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas. It’s not that I object to Jonah Goldberg in particular and it’s not an ideological issue — it’s that there’s a ton of other reading I’ve got queued up, a ton of writing I’m trying to get done, and a lot of day job pressure on my time and mental energies. By the time Mr. Goldberg’s new book would ...

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The Tragedy of Prometheus

by Guest Authors May 2, 2012

by Sam Wilkinson I have never seen the movie Alien from beginning to end. I have seen the entire movie, but only ever in pieces. I can’t bring myself to watch it in one go, if only because it is so incredibly terrifying. That is a testament to the movie’s creators. Amongst the reasons I find the film so profoundly troubling is captured here. Because the movie was so successful, it spawned sequels, one of which was good, the rest of which really weren’t and then, ...

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On Obama’s Afghanistan Speech

by Elias Isquith May 2, 2012

I thought the President’s speech last night was interesting, especially for an address just shy of 11 minutes long. The basics: Obama declared victory in Afghanistan (basis: wanting) and promised to soon take the United States’ ball and go home. (Of course, when you wage covert war, home is where the drone strike target is.) And he did so on the one-year anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, validating those who believed that one of the primary reasons ...

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Walking in the Footsteps of Pioneers

by Mike Dwyer May 2, 2012

“Patrick Henry Esq., Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, to all whom these presents shall come greeting. Know ye that by virtue and in consideration of a land office treasury…there is granted by the said Commonwealth unto Francis Taylor a certain tract or parcel of land containing one thousand acres

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Advertising and Manipulation

by Jason Kuznicki May 2, 2012

This morning I saw a pretty young woman wearing a T-shirt from Brooklyn Brewery. Involuntarily, I recalled the last time I’d had some of their beer. It was pretty good, I remembered. I should get some on the way home. In other words, the advertising worked. Now, Brooklyn makes some very good stuff. Often phenomenal stuff. But honestly, there’s no way I’d be buying any of it except for the gentle reminder I got this morning. Questions for the League: ...

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The Politics of Hope

by Scott H. Payne May 2, 2012

It’s been a busy period up north. I went off radar for a while to volunteer on a federal leadership campaign for the guy I thought should be the next Prime minister of the country. And that wound up eating up most of February and March. I’m only just getting back to cruising altitude now. On the upside, my experiences in that leadership race, plus experiences from the one in which I’d volunteered a year prior in British Columbia, coalesced ...

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Richard Grenell, We Hardly Knew Ye

by Elias Isquith May 1, 2012

Steve Benen weighs in on the recent (utterly inside baseball) news that, due to his stubborn unwillingness to not be gay, Richard Grenell has lost the privilege of being Mitt Romney’s foreign policy spokesman: The larger significance of this is what it tells us about Romney’s relative weakness in the face of pressure from his base. The former governor hired a qualified former Bush administration official; the right said gay people are bad people; so Romney quickly accepted his own ...

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The Morally Degenerate Sociopath’s Defense of Counter-Terrorism….

by Nob Akimoto May 1, 2012

Fellow League blogger Ethan’s post about the Obama foreign policy dredges up perhaps the biggest tension point regarding Obama’s foreign policy: Counter-Terrorism policy. Somewhat coincidentally Administration Counter-Terrorism Adviser John Brennan gave a speech on Monday further clarifying the Administration’s CT policy. As noted by Bush Administration legal adviser Jack Goldsmith, this comes as an additional follow up to an existing literature of legal justifications for the Administration’s broad targeting of Al Qaeda operatives. (For those that are inclined, Kenneth Anderson ...

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Locke’s (somewhat Hobbesian) Second Treatise

by Rufus F. May 1, 2012

[Note: No promises, but this post will likely make more sense if you first read my post on Hobbes's Leviathan. There will not be an exam.] Okay, so previously, I said that the neat contrast that’s often drawn between Locke and Hobbes doesn’t really work so well because they’re not as far apart as one might think. Let’s not go too far with this though; there are some differences there, which are worth looking at in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. ...

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Occupy May Day: Strike Today, Legislate Tomorrow?

by Elias Isquith May 1, 2012

It’s May Day, a day that’s long been circled in many an Occupiers’ calendar as a hopeful starting date for part two of the Occupy movement. The Guardian has got a continuously updated blog, covering the protests in New York City and throughout the country (and to a lesser extent the world). So far there doesn’t seem to have been any big congregations of protestors or altercations between protestors and police; and I can attest that, at least as far as ...

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