PJB – C-SPAN – 5.2.10 – NOON EST

May 1, 2010 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Ideas, Media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Politics, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

Pat Buchanan will be the guest tomorrow on C-SPAN’s monthly three hour interview and call in show In Depth.

Back in the day: PJB in his EOB office.  RN recruited the youngster —his first hire for his new presidential campaign— in 1967 from the editorial page of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.  He served on the White House staff until 1975.

You Can’t Win ‘Em All

October 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Barack Obama, Humor, Ideas, Obama administration, economy | 2 Comments 

The winners of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics were announced today in Oslo.  Americans Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson shared the award for their work in the area of economic governance.

Professor Ostrom, a political science professor at  Indiana University in Bloomington is the first woman Nobel laureate in this category.  She describes her work as studying “how local people, as well as government officials, have attempted to solve very difficult resource problems.”

Dr. Williamson is an emeritus professor of microeconomics at Berkeley.  He has developed a theory in which business firms represent alternate governance structures and are studied in terms of conflict resolution.

The Nobel Academy said that their work over the last three decades has “advanced economic governance research from the fringe to the forefront of scientific attention.”

The “First Take” wags over at Dow Jones’ MarketWatch took a different approach to the story.  Under the headline ”Obama fails to win Nobel prize in economics,”  Tom Bernis wrote:

LONDON (MarketWatch) — In a decision as shocking as Friday’s surprise peace prize win, President Obama failed to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences Monday.

While few observers think Obama has done anything for world peace in the nearly nine months he’s been in office, the same clearly can’t be said for economics.

The president has worked tirelessly since even before his inauguration to wrest control of the U.S. economy from failed free markets, and the evil CEOs who profit from them, and to turn it over to wise, fair and benevolent bureaucrats.

From his $787 billion stimulus package, to the cap-and-trade bill, to the seizures of General Motors and Chrysler, to the undead health-care “reform” act, Obama has dominated the U.S., and therefore the global, economy as few figures have in recent years.

Yet the Nobel panel chose instead to award the prize to two obscure academics — Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson — one noted for her work on managing collective resources, and the other for his work on transaction costs.

Other surprise losers include celebrity noneconomist and filmmaker Michael Moore; U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner; and Larry Summers, head of the U.S. national economic council.

It is unclear whether the president will now refuse his peace prize in protest against the obvious slight to his real achievements this year.

We Have Ways Of Making You Laugh

August 23, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Humor, Ideas | 2 Comments 

Leave it to a German academic —Helga Kotthoff of the Frieburg University of Education— to conduct research establishing that, as a headline in the Telegraph puts it, “Humor is an act of aggression.”  (Which, as headlines go, is in the category of “Dog Bites Man.”)

The decidedly humorless gender-oriented study, published in the Journal of Pragmatics, argues  that “the ability to make others laugh confers a degree of control which dominant people exploit to show they are in charge.”

“Those ‘on top’ are freer to make others laugh. They are also freer to be more aggressive and a lot of what is funny is making jokes at someone else’s expense,” she said.

“Displaying humour means taking control of the situation from those higher up the hierarchy and this is risky for people of lower status, which before the 1960s meant women rarely made other people laugh — they couldn’t afford to.

“Comedy and satire are based on aggressiveness and not being nice,” she said. “Until the 1960s it was seen as unladylike to be funny. But even now women tend to prefer telling jokes at their own expense and men tend to prefer telling jokes at other people’s expense.”

The differences between men’s and women’s ability to become comedians starts very young, she said. Boys as young as four or five tell more jokes, frolic and clown about while girls tend to be the ones doing the laughing.

But in later age women tend to become funnier because they feel freer to not be seen as ladylike.

She said humour, including teasing, was a mix of ‘bonding and biting’ and women often use humour to form social bonds with their friends while men often use humour to vent frustration. But both sexes use comedy as a means of controlling others.

She said: “For example, doctors sometimes use humour to comfort patients but also to silence them if, for example, the patient displays too much knowledge of a medical condition.

“Nurses and midwives tend to tell jokes about patients but not when the doctor is present. And when someone initiates a joke they tend to be ignored if they are in the presence of someone of a higher status.”

Until the sexual revolution of the 1960s women rarely became comediennes in public or private because most humour is an act of aggression, she said. “A study in the late 1980s showed that men use sexual jokes as a way of verbally undressing a woman who rebuts his advances; his humour was aggressive in essence.”

Me, I prefer not to think much about it and just adopt what might be called the French approach: I surrender to laughter.