humor

[I]s the sacrifice of 58,000 Americans worth a bad Yankee team?

The answer is obviously yes.

This is a question that could tear apart the nation... Red Sox Nation, that is. 

More here.  I really don't think this is anything more than a coincidence, and I certainly don't agree with the blogger's estimation of Lyndon Johnson. 

Still, if one wanted to develop a completely unsubstantiated hypothesis, however, one could posit that the explanation for this correlation is that under a GOP president, the mercurial owner of the Yankees faced fewer contraints to royally f**k up interfere in the management of the team, resulting in some spectacular flame-outs on the diamond. 

It's not true, of course, but it's a more entertaining urban myth than Obama's citizenship status or Bush's role in the 9/11 attacks. 

When someone publishes an op-ed, longer essay, or book, they have to write a tagline.  It's usually two sentences describing their title and affiliation, and whatever big projects are associated with them. 

After watching the preview for The Invention of Lying, however, I began to wonder what these tag lines would look like if they were brutally honest.  With a nod to Megan Mcardle's "Full Disclosure" post from a few years ago, here's fifteen examples I came up with: 

• Jack Silver is a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Studies.  He has been Henry Kissinger's bitch for something like three decades, so when Henry passed on writing something for us, he was the next logical choice.     

• Suzie Wong has never been to the country about which she is writing.  What's in this op-ed is culled from a quick perusal of the Economist and a few phone calls.     

• Cass Bunstein is a law professor.  He dashed off this essay in his head while commute to work this morning, wrote it in under thirty minutes, and it's still smarter than anything, my dear reader, that will ever pop into your brain. 

• Augustine Cornington has been teaching at an obscure state school for two decades, lying in the tall grass, waiting for her archnemesis to make a mistake in print.  This book review is her chance to completely eviscerate him. 

• Joe Schlub Jr. is a law professor.  This essay is a badly mangled version of an interesting idea he heard Cass Bunstein riff on at a cocktail party last week. 

• Andrew McClutchen is a former governor.  He hopes that this op-ed is the first step in getting beyond that horrible sex scandal from a few years ago. 

• Madeleine McFadden is a former cabinet secretary, and did not write a single word of this policy essay.  It is possible she read the first few paragraphs of it, but that's being really optimistic.

• Jane Babbington has no extraordinary policy expertise.  She does have an awesome book jacket photo, however, and will have better hair and skin than you do until the day she dies.  

• Lou Marston is a very smart professor at Princeton University.  This op-ed is woefully underplaced because he took his own sweet time writing it, and this issue is from last week's news cycle.  

• Robert Knaus lost the capacity to write long-form essays years ago - what you just read is what an intern scraped together from one year's worth of Twitter tweets. 

• Ann Stoneham is the foremost expert on this topic, and cannot write her way out of a paper bag.  Her uber-competent editor busted her ass for the last 48 hours to try and convert this essay into semi-readable prose

• Gwen Pollard is an area expert at a prominent DC think tank.  She fervently hopes that everyone has forgotten how completely wrong she was about this topic just five short years ago.

• C. Thomas Pope is a professor at the University of Chicago, and his worldview hardened into an inpenetrable black mass the day he turned twenty-four.  As no amount of contradictory evidence will cause him to change his mind, he is perfectly willing to make absurd, idiotic statements without worrying that he is wrong. 

• Richard Jensen is a professor at Harvard University.  He has the Mother of All Balloon Payments due on his mortgage next year, so any extra income helps. 

And, of course.....

• Daniel Drezner is a professor at Tufts University, and is publishing the fifth version of exact same idea with this essay.  Seriously, the man would be nothing without the cut and paste function.

Readers are warmly welcomed to come up with their own brutally honest tag lines in the comments. 

According to the Associated Press, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev wants to get outside of the DC beltway in his next trip to the USA: 

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev says he would like to meet with "dissidents" when he visits the U.S. next week.

Russian news agencies quote him as telling a group of visiting foreign experts that "I believe there are dissidents in the United States."

ITAR-Tass quotes him as saying: "Let them tell me what problems the United States has. That won't be bad, considering the Soviet experience."

I think that this is a fantastic idea, when one considers the potential pool of dissidents.  Fortunately, Andy Heil has come up with a list of possibile dissidents at RFERL's Transmissions blog.  His list:

1. Noam Chomsky
2. Rush Limbaugh
3. Michael Moore
4. Kanye West
5. Sarah Palin
6. Jeremiah Wright
7. Gus Hall
8. Sean Penn
9. Chirstopher Hitchens
10. Eric Cartman

This is an excellent start, but I think we can add a few names to the old dissident list.  Let me think.... who else is railing against the System these days?

1. Glenn Beck
2. U.S. Representative Ron Paul
3. Glenn Greenwald
4. Dick Cheney
5. Serena Williams
6. U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich
7. Jimmy Carter
8. U.S. Representative Joe Wilson
9. Terrell Owens
10. Beyonce (OK, technically, she's not railing against the system -- but as much of a jackass as he might have been, Kanye was right:  this is the most awesome video ever.  She was robbed, and I blame The Man). 

I'm just trying to imagine Medvedev meeting this crew. 

Commenters are encouraged to suggest additional names in the comments.

The Daily Telegraph reports scientific confirmation of something I have known deep, deep down in my psyche for going on three decades: 

Talking to an attractive woman really can make a man lose his mind, according to a new study.

The research shows men who spend even a few minutes in the company of an attractive woman perform less well in tests designed to measure brain function than those who chat to someone they do not find attractive.

Researchers who carried out the study, published in the Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, think the reason may be that men use up so much of their brain function or 'cognitive resources' trying to impress beautiful women, they have little left for other tasks.

The findings have implications for the performance of men who flirt with women in the workplace, or even exam results in mixed-sex schools.

Women, however, were not affected by chatting to a handsome man.

Well, beyond proof that there's a very fine line between the truth and The Onion, I think there are several fascinating implications from this finding. 

1)  You gotta admit, this explains a lot about Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi.  He is the foreign policy leader who seems most determined to be close to attractive women.  If you think about it, it's nothing short of miraculous that Berlusconi hasn't screwed up more than he actually has. 

2)  Attractive first ladies are trouble.  The closest the United States came to a nuclear confrontation was the Cuban Missile Crisis -- which just happens to be when Jackie Kennedy is first lady.  A coincidence?  Oh, I think not! 

One can only hope that Presidents Obama and Sarkozy will recognize this and prevent Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni from being the 21st century equivalents of Helen of Troy. 

3)  Suddenly my Britney Spears suggestion is making a lot more sense. 

4)  Add another explanation to Angelina Jolie's relative success as a celebrity activist.  Semi-seriously, it would be interesting if gender was a determining factor in the ability of celebrity activists to move the agenda. 

5)  Whichever country makes Salma Hayek their queen will have finally chosen the One Woman to Rule Them All!!!

Dd I miss anything? 

My top ten notes, quotes, flotsam and jetsam from four days at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting in Toronto, Canada:

1)  I predict a bevy of papers over the next six months with titles like:

• "The Political Economy of International Roaming Charges."
• "States, Social Revolutions, and Why AT&T Sucks."
• "A Rational Choice Explanation of Why Your American Cell Phone Does Not Work in Canada."
• "An Empirical Test of Limited iPhone Usage in a Foreign Land." 

2)  Someone had the whimsy to locate a Hooters restaurant right next to the conference center.  And no, I do not know who went there.

3)  Pehaps related to the Hooters thing, the book room at APSA had a new wrinkle this year -- free five minute massages from a local massage school.  And hell yes, I took advantage of this offer! 

4)  Said by a book editor as someone was buying one of his press' books:  "Yeah.... good luck slogging through that one." 

5)  Books available for just three bucks at the conference -- indicating that these titles had either jumped the shark or never caught fire: 

• Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded
• Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine
• Andrew Bacevich's The Limits of Power
• Noam Chomsky's Failed States
• John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

6)  Overheard:  "I have to tell you my Cornel West and Ronald Reagan anecdote." 

7)  Someone asked a female political scientist with an ankle tattoo whether it was Tibetan.  She replied, "No, it's Elvish." 

8)  In conversation:  "Things I do not worry about disappearing:  death, taxes, and [a prominent political scientist's] ego." 

9)  I was puzzled and saddened by the paucity of panels about the financial meltdown and Great Recession.  I was really puzzled and saddened by the low attendance at the few panels that addressed this topic. 

10)  The most gratifying thing I heard at the conference:  "Your zombie post was awesome!!!"

Today, your humble blogger will be furiously trying to finish a draft paper before the friggin' students come back to campus hard at work at his day job, preparing for the fall semester.  So I'm outsourcing today's blog content to two videos.

The first has been making the rounds, but it's still funny.  And it's funny because, as Alex Massie observes, "this is horribly close to being a verbatim report from some ghastly cable TV "news" shoutfest.... proving once again that the "fake" news is often better than the so-called "real" news." 

I give you, from the Onion, the Minotaur debate:

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

And, sometime this month is the three-year annivesary of the funniest bit Denis Leary as ever done anywhere at any time.  It's not easy to find this video, but for your viewing pleasure:

Your humble blogger has occasionally prided himself as something of an authority on the intersection between celebrities and international relations.  Which brings me to Jessica Biel.   

Sure, the woman in the picture above these words seems pleasant enough, but according to McAfee security, she's not what she seems.  This Reuters story by Belinda Goldsmith explains: 

Actress Jessica Biel has overtaken Brad Pitt as the most dangerous celebrity to search in cyberspace, according to internet security company McAfee Inc.

For the third consecutive year, McAfee surveyed which A-list celebrity was the riskiest to track on the internet after Pitt topped the list last year and Paris Hilton in 2007.

Biel, 27, who shot to fame in the TV show 7th Heaven and most recently starred in Easy Virtue, was deemed the most dangerous, with fans having a one-in-five chance of landing at a website that has tested positive for online threats, such as spyware, adware, spam, phishing and viruses....

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, who have featured on most celebrity list this year, were not at the top of risky public figures to search.

The Obamas ranked in the bottom third of this year’s results, at No. 34 and No. 39 respectively.

You can access the Top 15 list here.  Some interesting tidbits: 

• Megan Fox and Angelina Jolie are tied for 8th.  Read into that what you will. 
• Celebrities jump the shark before they lose their utility to cybercriminals.  My proof:  Jessica Simpson, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Kim Kardashian remain in the top 15. 
• Declining soft power of America, my fanny:  13 of the 15 celebs on the list were American -- Gisele Bundchen and Rihanna were the only non-American celebrities on the list. 
• In yet another justification for her unparalleled status as Your Humble Blogger's Favorite Online Crush, Salma Hayek is not on this list. So there -- go ahead and search her out on these interwebs. 
• Flavor Flav did not make this list... exactly. 

A question to readers:  if this were a truly just world, which celebrities should be at the top of this list?

Alex Massie alerts us to this BBC story about modeling who would win if the dead actually did rise from the grave: 

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada.

They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures....

To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose "classic" slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films....

[T]heir analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity's only hope is to "hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often".

They added: "It's imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else... we are all in a great deal of trouble."  

Now, one could argue that this finding represents a Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious. On the other hand, the report has clear freaked out Alex Massie:

[The researchers] are cheating. It's like something out of Dad's Army: You can't fight like that, it's not in the rules... Then again, if we can be destroyed by Zombie 1.0, just think how powerless we'd be when confronted by Next Generation Zombies...

To try to make Massie feel better let's have some fun with this and ask a different question -- what would different systemic international relations theories* predict regarding the effects of a zombie outbreak? Would the result be inconsequential -- or World War Z? 

A structural realist would argue that, because of the uneven distribution of capabilities, some governments will be better placed to repulse the zombies than others. Furthermore, anyone who has seen Land of the Dead knows that zombies are not deterred by the stopping power of water. So that's the bad news. 

The good news is that these same realists would argue that there is no inherent difference between human states and zombie states.  Regardless of individual traits or domestic instiutions, human and zombie actors alike are subject to the same powerful constraint of anarchy. Therefore, the fundamental character of world politics would not be changed. Indeed, it might even be tactically wise to fashion temporary alliances with certain zonbie states as a way to balance against human states that try to exploit the situation with some kind of idealistic power grab made under the guise of "anti-zombieism." So, according to realism, the introduction of zombies would not fundamentally alter the character of world politics. 

A liberal institutionalist would argue that zombies represent a classic externality problem of... dying and then existing in an undead state and trying to cause others to do the same. Clearly, the zombie issue would cross borders and affect all states -- so the benefits from policy coordination would be pretty massive.

This would give states a great opportunity to cooperate on the issue by quickly fashioning a World Zombie Organization (WZO) that would codify and promnulgate rules on how to deal with zombies. Alas, the effectiveness of the WZO would be uncertain. If the zombies had standing and appealed any WZO decision to wipe them out, we could be talking about an 18-month window when zombies could run amok without any effective regulation whatsoever. 

Fortunately, the United States would likely respond by creating the North American F*** Zombies Agreement -- or NAFZA -- to handle the problem regionally. Similarly, one would expect the European Union to issue one mother of a EU Directive to cope with the issue, and handle questions of zombie comitology. Indeed, given that zombies would likely be covered under genetically modified organisms, the EU would trumpet the Catragena Protocol on Biosafety in an "I told you so" kind of way. Inevitably, Andrew Moravcsik would author an essay about the inherent superiority of the EU approach to zombie regulation, and why so many countries in Africa prefer the EU approach over the American approach of "die, motherf***ers, die!!"  Oh, and British beef would once again be banned as a matter of principle. 

Now, avid followers of social constructivism might think that Wendt and Duvall (2008) have developed a model that would be useful for this kind of event... but you would be wrong. Back when this paper was in draft stage, I specifically queried them about wther their argument about UFOs could be generalized to zombies, vampires, ghosts, the Loch Ness monster, Elvis, etc.  Their answer was an emphatic "no":  aliens would be possessors of superior technology, while our classic sci-fi canon tells us that the zombies, while resistant to dying, are not technologically superior to humans. So that's a dead end.

Instead, constructivists would posit that the zombie problem is what we make of it.  That is to say, there are a number of possible emergent norms in response to zombies. Sure, there's the Hobbesian "kill or be killed" end game that does seem to be quite popular in the movies.  But there could be a Kantian "pluralistic anti-Zombie" community that bands together and breaks down nationalist divides in an effort to establish a world state. Another way of thinking about this is that the introduction of zombies creates a stronger feeling of ontological security among remaining humans -- i.e., they are not flesh-eaters (alas, those bitten by zombies are now both physically and ontologically screwed). 

Unfortunately, I fear that constructivists would predict a norm cascade from the rise of zombies. As more and more people embrace the zombie way of undead life, as it were, the remaining humans would feel social pressure to conform and eventually internalize the norms and practices of zombies -- kind of like the early-to-middle section of Shaun of the Dead. In the end, even humans would adopt zombie-constructed perceptions of right and wrong, and when it's apprpriate to grunt in a menacing manner. 

Now, some would dispute whether neoconservatism is a systemic argument, but let's posit that it's a coherent IR theory.  To its credit, the neoconservatives would recognize the zombie threat as an existential threat to the human way of life.  Humans are from Earth, whereas zombies are from Hades -- clearly, neoconservatives would argue, zombies hate us for our freedom not to eat other humans' brains.   

While the threat might be existential, accomodation or recognition are not options.  Instead, neocons would quickly gear up an aggressive response to ensure human hegemony.  However, the response would likely be to invade and occupy the central state in the zombie-affected area.  After creating a human outpost in that place, humans in neighboring zombie-affected countries would be inspired to rise up and overthrow their own zombie overlords.  Alas, while this could happen, a more likely outcone would be that, after the initial "Mission Accomplished" banner had been raised, a fresh wave of zombies would rise up, enmeshing the initial landing force -- which went in too light and was drawn down too quickly -- in a protracted, bloody stalemate. 

Readers are hereby encouraged in the comments to posit other IR theoretical prediction of the response to a zombie uprising. For example, would the zombie uprising confirm Marxist predictions about the revolt of the proletariat? 

*Alas, your humble blogger does not have the time to puzzle out the zombie effect on two-level games. 

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images