I'M OFF

Well, I haven't quite finished my summer project yet (sooo close), but I'm off on vacation for the next week and a half. Don't expect to be blogging anything too much in that time--which isn't really anything new.

BELLY OF THE BEAST

I go there so you don't have to. What I found there today:



"I have come to feel strongly that the greatest service I can still render to my fellow men would be that I could make the speakers and writers among them thoroughly ashamed ever again to employ the term 'social justice'."


--Friedrich Hayek, The Mirage of Social Justice, p. 97

This is the ruling economic philosophy--of course for The Right, but also for the center-right Left, though they don't necessarily recognize it--of our day. And the battle over this philosophy is a war we need to be thinking more about.

Amazing. Though the man looks like a Nazi (he was Austrian, after all), allegedly the Nazi campaign of terror led him to formulate the ideas ensconced in Road to Serfdom--the manifesto of neoliberal fascists. And yet, he conspired with Nazi-sympathizing economists in the aftermath of WWII from the Bank for International Settlements and elsewhere to propagate conservative libertarian economic philosophies with...none other than a Jew (Milton Friedman).

Politics makes strange bedfellows.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

to me!



Now that's a birthday cake.

POLY-SCI?

Mmmmmmmmmm delicious.

Just goes to show you the difference between UPS, where we all went to college, and a big, public, land-grant university. At UMass, when we talk about Poly-Sci, we mean Polymer Science--not Political Science. Polymer science is so big at UMass, they get this swank new building.



Meanwhile, the ol' standby economics department--my domicile for the next four or so years--gets a dilapidated 50's era monolith.

As far as I can figure, they get this nice building because they do weird shit like this: cutting holes in the sides of cows to dissolve rubber in their tummies. I just study radical economics. Not as much industrial or military application of what we produce.

I guess it all comes back to the utility function, though. My department may not get the multi-year NSF and DOD grants, but we don't have to work with cow feces either. Isn't individual agency grand? While they are shoulder deep in ol' Bella, I'm in some old dungeon breathing asbestos and typing on a Commodore 64 computer. Try estimating a two stage least squares model on one of these babies:

CAFTA AIN'T 'BOUT TRADE

When The Onion is spoofing trade deals, you know it's a scam.

WE'RE IN GOOD HANDS

Yes, people at the US Department of State don't even understand the difference between the Renminbi and yuan.

That's a good indicator of the US approach to Sino-American relations.

RONALD REAGAN BOULEVARD

Congressdouche Henry Bonilla (R-TX 23) wants to rename 16th St. NW in Washington, DC.

Oy gevalt!

MARKET IDEOLOGY MACHINE IN ACTION

Right wing think tanks arm public school teachers in two countries with free instruments of market fundamentalist propaganda.

Cash-strapped, over-worked public school teachers get an entire curriculum for free--no effort, no cost. The market fundamentalist movement gets thirty new minions to do their bidding, indoctrinating class after class of social studies students with market theology. It's a win-win. The right wingers will even reimburse travel expenses.