recursion

You should check out the Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid by Don Luskin.

It's like a visit to an alternative universe where black is white, up is down, and 2+2=5. I read some other righty blogs and NRO from time to time, but Luskin takes the cake. Instapundit rarely goes on in detail about his beliefs, and "fisking" is so tedious only immature adolescents must read it -- let alone do it. Luskin, however, describes the strange conservative tax-cuts-are-god philospohy in great detail. It is a sight to behold.

Take this example where he tries to debunk Warren Buffet's attack on the Bush tax plan:

Now let's see how that would change if taxes on dividends were eliminated. Buffett looks at a scenario in which Berkshire Hathaway declares a $1 billion dividend (it actually pays no dividend currently), to which 31% stakeholder Buffett would be entitled to $310 million tax free. That would raise his total income to $360.3 million, on which Buffett says he'd pay an average tax rate of 3%. Buffett says, "And our receptionist? She'd still be paying about 30 percent, which means she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would to such government pursuits as fighting terrorism, waging wars and supporting the elderly."

But 3% of $360.3 million is $10.8 million -- still 144 times what the receptionist would pay.

Note what Buffet wrote: "...she would be contributing about 10 times the proportion of her income that I would..."

And what Luskin writes: "...still 144 times what the receptionist would pay."

They are talking about different things. And unless Luskin has a 3rd grade reading comprehension level (who knows, maybe he went to school in Texas), he's misrepresenting what Buffet is saying in order to make his argument. In other words, either he's an idiot or a liar.

There's more where that came from. Check it out, if you can stand it.

Andrew Orlowski kicks the beehive again.

I like what he's doing. I think blogs are great. I read a lot of them. But the people who puff them up as a new world order are hyping. It's a continuation of the libertarian/utopian dream of an independent internet. As Lawrence Lessig's work has shown, this is an illusion. The internet has great power to connect people, but it's what they do with those connections in the real world that is most interesting.

That's why groups like MoveOn, Meetup, and the Howard Dean campaign are worth more than any number of "social software" pundits. I'm tired of blogs about blogs. I don't fault the creators of these tools for being proud of what they've made. But are blogs going to lead us into the techno-utopia promised land? No. But it will help us use the democracy we already have better.

Oh. And it provides a way for teenaged girls (of all ages and genders) to share their daily events and thoughts with their friends. The digital archeologists of the future will grateful for that.

There's something about books that just makes me want more when I have some. I've got a stack to read, and I'm feeling the urge to buy a new stack already.