“Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

Ron Paul 2012 – For A Strong Economy And Strong Terrorists

Funny thing is, even with that 1/3 of the population of Brooklyn Alaska manages to provide a significant fraction of domestic energy and fossil fuel production. What does Brooklyn manage to do in this regard? Send another couple legislators to Congress to vote for buying it from hostile countries overseas instead, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Most of which is profit to the governments of those countries.

SO… will we ever see enough of O’s transcripts to find out why he left Occidental and what he did at Columbia?

(Oh, and for what it’s worth… most potential employers, when looking at someone over thirty, are far more interested in their recent work record rather than their academic transcript from when they were twenty. Zero was a college professor with a rather disturbing lack of academic publications for today’s publish-or-perish atmosphere).

I don’t. She had the best from McCain’s team trying to groom her for prime time and she couldn’t tell Katy Couric what she liked to read for Pete’s sake, to say nothing of not making any effort to learn anything about foreign policy. Her book and pronouncements further demonstrate that Yeem is right – the woman doesn’t think she needs to learn anything.

Population-wise, Alaska is about one third as important as Brooklyn. Beyond that, she did one thing she promised to do, but has, through her inattention, let the corruption back in the state. She could not and did not follow through with her duties.

The difference between her and Obama is that Obama went to schools that emphasize getting the forms and vocabulary right – the Ivy league still has some standards, after all. Obama thinks he doesn’t need to learn anything because he thinks he already knows it all (I think it was David Foster who linked to the piece about Obama not listening to others in his brief foray into the private world). Palin doesn’t listen to others because people keep telling her she’s a fresh breath of air being an outsider and that she should stay untainted. Sometimes ignorance lets you go do something others thought was impossible, but most of the time it just makes you ineffective. Even mavericks should know why the fence was put up before they knock it down.

Seriously, if one of us had to hire someone with her academic credentials (it’s not that going to the schools she did is that bad, it’s the number of institutions in that plural “schools”), poor preparation for the VP job interview, and demonstrated lack of follow through in her previous job, would we hire her? No.

The Left regularly accuses the Right of stupidity. They were wrong with Reagan, they are wrong a lot of the time. But this time? This time the stopped clock is right on time. The woman is a moron.

I could say the same thing about you, Yeem. I wouldn’t be able to provide any support for that claim, but that didn’t stop you, did it?

There is an amusing video today at Ann Althouse’s blog. It’s an hour but interesting to see Michelle Goldberg try to explain her attraction to Obama and why she is still enthusiastic. It was worth an hour to watch it. Sort of revealing although I doubt Ms Goldberg realized it.

Conservatives industrialized our civilization and eliminated poverty, famine, and plagues. Liberals have fought them every step of the way. Now liberals are set to reverse all that conservatives have accomplished.

the two are quite alike, just with their very similar psychological profiles tailored to very different audiences.

the vehemenence with which people insist there is a difference between them in narcissism rather illustrates that.

Health care, cap-and-trade and card check are the big current examples

Leftists try to duplicate in law and regulation everything the market might do, but better, and so they have to get incredibly detailed and complex. And if they acknowledge the law of unintended consequences, there really is no logical end to stacking the complexities, because the solution to one problem always creates others.

Neither approach is right in all circumstances, but the free-market one is better in the vast majority.

Which is an excellent reason to vote for her. After the depredations of FDR’s brain trust, JKF’s and LBJ’s best and brightest, and Bush’s and Obama’s Harvard and Yale grads, I’d support a Constitutional amendment to ban anyone with a better than a high school education from elective or appointive office.

http://photoncourier.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_photoncourier_archive.html#112645692359183379

OTOH, I’m a little less impressed with Gladwell since I found out about the “Igon Values”…

http://whohastimeforthis.blogspot.com/2009/11/gladwells-igon-value-problem.html

Anyhow. There’s another point, about all this “simplicity” vs “complexity” nonsense: It’s garbage. Why measure the “complexity” of somebody’s ideas at all? Who cares? What matters is whether they’re right. The Standard Model of physics is a good theory, but not because it’s complicated. It’s a good theory because it has predictive value. You could easily whomp up an even more complicated theory which was absolutely dead wrong. Al Gore and Amanda Marcotte would choose to believe the more complicated of the two, because they are not capable of evaluating either theory on its merits as science, and so they are left piddling around measuring silly and irrelevant proxies like “complexity”.

Lefties love to talk about irrelevant crap like that, mostly in terms of themselves: How “complex” or “creative” they and their ideas are, how their writers have a more elegant prose style than ours do, how they live in more exciting and fashionable neighborhoods with better restaurants, they dress better, they’ve got more musicians and artists, and blah blah blah.

Having recourse to reality, we don’t need recourse to that crap. We don’t have to hypothesize that literary taste maybe correlates with good sense about economics, because we can actually measure the effects of different economic policies instead.

We can and we do, but they’d rather prove that markets don’t work by accusing Fox News of being vulgar. In fact, Fox News is vulgar, but that fact tells us very little about economics.

These clowns are fundamentally not just unserious, but antiserious. It’s been said before, but we’re talking about how things work in the real world, and they’re talking about how much they want to feel good about themselves and the group they belong to. “Truth”, to paraphrase Barbie, “is hard!” Communal self-affirmation is much easier. Feels better, too, at least until the bill arrives.