Barrel Strength

The knock against Bush was that he was “intellectually uncurious”.  Well it is good to see that at least we have intellectual curiosity during this financial crisis!  A NYT article states an interesting fact in this regard.

Other studies have confirmed the general sense that expertise is overrated. In one experiment, clinical psychologists did no better than their secretaries in their diagnoses. In another, a white rat in a maze repeatedly beat groups of Yale undergraduates in understanding the optimal way to get food dropped in the maze. The students overanalyzed and saw patterns that didn’t exist, so they were beaten by the rodent.

Along similar lines, WaPo article about the current financial crisis states the following first-hand experience.

Negotiating with Argentina’s top officials during their multiple financial crises in the 1990s was always an ordeal, and sparring with Domingo Cavallo, the country’s Harvard-trained finance minister at the time, was particularly trying. One always had the sense that, despite their supreme arrogance, the country’s leaders never had a coherent economic strategy and that major decisions were always made on the run. I never thought that was how policy was made in the United States — until, that is, I saw how totally at sea Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy F. Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke have appeared so many times during our country’s ongoing economic and financial storm.

For the record the alma mater of these three esteemed individuals is Dartmouth and Harvard, Dartmouth and John Hopkins, and Harvard and MIT respectively.

I am not the first to notice that the Internet has changed the power relationship between the people and the media. Two cases in point: Ezra Levant, about whom Barrelstrength readers all know, and Daniel Hannan, the British MP who recently told off Gordon Brown.

Ezra’s righteous jihad against the Human Rights Commissions of Canada and its provinces was the first time in this country that a story that the mainstream media refused to cover or ignored became a national story solely because of the blogosphere. Every person speaking in a blog or preaching in a pulpit, as Father Raymond de Souza reminded us, was going to be made vulnerable to the insidious spread of chilling fear. The Rights Commissions are in net retreat, whether temporary or not is open to question.

I quote Father de Souza:

“Ezra decided to fight it because it was the right thing to do. But he went a step further than most. He set out to defeat the HRCs by exposing their tyranny. Anyone who reads Shakedown will be convinced that their defeat is essential for the survival of liberty in Canada. We are not yet three months into 2009, but Ezra may well have written the most important public affairs book this year.”

Read the rest…