FRANK J. FLEMING: Anti-Intellectualism:

The main problem may be confusing “simple” with “dumb.”

If something is simple, then dumb people will believe it. And if dumb people believe something, then soon some conclude that smart people should believe something else. There’s a flaw in that philosophy.

Why shouldn’t you touch a hot stove? There’s no complex, smart answer to that. You’ll get roughly the same answer from Stephen Hawking that you’d get from Forrest Gump: It’s hot, and it will hurt.

But say you were going to argue that you should touch a hot stove. That would have to be a very complex answer, since it defies basic logic. And some people could run with that, talking in detail about pain receptors and the brain’s reaction to stimulus, and come up with a very smart-sounding argument on why touching a hot stove is a great idea.

Others will go further and mock all those ignorant people in the flyover states for their irrational fear of hot stoves and announce, “The most enlightened thing to do is to press one’s face against a hot stove.” Those people are what we call intellectuals.

Similarly, when someone comes up with a well-reasoned argument backed by top economists that two plus two equals five, there’s no brilliant way to refute it. The only response is: “No, you’re an idiot; it’s four.” But if you say that, you’ll be called anti-smart people.

Well, when the wave of anti-intellectualism sweeps America, Frank’s probably safe.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Growth Is Not An Easy Solution For Europe’s Woes. “For one thing, the euro itself is a major contributor to the lack of growth. Italy and Greece, especially, used to rely on serial devaluation to keep their relatively low-productivity tradeable sectors competitive. Do we have a way to dramatically increase productivity in their small, family-owned farms and firms? Keep in mind that a preponderance of such firms is not simply a historical accident; it’s generally thought to be a symptom of fairly low trust levels which make it problematic to hire strangers or invest your money in them. Greece, Italy, and Spain also have terrible demographics.”

It’s very costly to be a low-trust society. That’s something some of our political leaders should keep in mind, as they pursue policies likely to lower social trust and cohesion.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Who benefits from a low trust society? And why would they care if such an outcome imposed costs on others?”

HOW TO FIND YOUR FLASHLIGHT DURING A BLACKOUT.

Personally, I have these things scattered around the house, especially at the bottom of the stairs and in the basement hallway, bathroom, etc. They’re nightlights, but they turn on as flashlights if the power goes out. I also keep one of these keychain LED flashlights on my keychain. It’s amazingly handy.

UPDATE: Changed the link on the keychain flashlight. Reader Ben Samuel emailed that some reviewers on the other link were complaining that it was a counterfeit. Everybody seems happy on the one I changed it to. I think I bought through that link, though.

LET’S HOPE: TSA Facing Death By A Thousand Cuts.

AN INSTA-POLL:

UPDATE: Why no Jon Huntsman, Gary Johnson, or Buddy Roemer? I like Johnson, but he’s never gotten traction. The others have even less chance. On the other hand, John Galvin writes:

You left out Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and anybody else.

When Reagan ran against Carter, I, like a lot of others, would have voted for Anybody, including Donald Duck, over that clown. Same goes this time.

I left out the syphilitic camel, too. That disappointed reader Shane Boyd. Hey, you can’t please everybody.

THE HILL: House GOP releases payroll-tax package under Obama veto threat. “The legislation will add $25.3 billion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The congressional scorekeeper also noted that the bill includes lower caps on discretionary-spending ceilings agreed to in the summer’s debt-ceiling deal that could reduce the deficit by $1 billion. But CBO cannot include those assumptions in its official score, it said, because they are subject to the enactment of future legislation.”

If revenue is an issue, just add some of my tax proposals to the bill.

#OCCUPYHOLLYWOOD:: Filmmaker Busted For Tax Scam.

AND NOW, IN “HUMAN RIGHTS” NEWS: Red Cross To Investigate If Gamers Are War Criminals.

UPDATE: Charlie Martin says there’s less to this story than meets the eye, and sends the ICRC response.

WAS RUSSIA behind Stuxnet? “So what better way to maintain Russian interests, and innocence, than to plant a worm with digital U.S.-Israeli fingerprints? After all, Russian scientists and engineers are familiar with the cascading centrifuges whose numbers and configuration – and Siemen’s SCADA PLC controller schematics – they have full access to by virtue of designing the plants.”

AT AMAZON, Holiday Flurry deals in Clothing & Accessories.

FRANCE HAS second thoughts on the Euro. “The French have growing reservations about the euro: 36% want to withdraw from the eurozone and go back to the franc, the old national currency; 4% have no opinion, which means that they don’t warmly support the single European currency; 44% say it is a handicap in the present context of a world economic crisis; 45% say it doesn’t serve the national interests of France; and a staggering 62% say it is damaging the average French family’s standards of living and purchasing power.”

#GREENFAIL: Durban Climate Change Talks Suspended.

ENERGY: North Dakota Produced 488068 barrels of oil per day in October, 2011 for another record high.

Related: Potential Shale Plays In The World.

BRITAIN: Thousands Of Homes Without Power On Coldest Day of Winter.

AT AMAZON, up to 50% off on men’s, women’s, and children’s boots.

IN RUSSIA, THOUSANDS PROTEST PUTIN, VOTE FRAUD. “Tens of thousands of Muscovites thronged to a city square to protest against alleged electoral fraud and against Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his party on Saturday, and demonstrators gathered in other rallies across the vast country, the largest public show of discontent in post-Soviet Russia. CBS News correspondent Charlie D’Agata reports there have been clashes in St. Petersburg, with riot police dragging away protesters. Demonstrations in Moscow have so far been peaceful but they are growing in number and anger.”

This in spite of the fact that the government has imprisoned the blogger who called for them, and opened school today to keep students away from the marches. Can you say “running scared?”

MICKEY KAUS: Obama Suddenly Not So Hot On Unions? “It’s almost as if Obama thinks private sector Wagner act unions are 1) doomed 2) politically toxic or 3) unnecessary in the coming age of benevolent paternalistic charity capitalists! … P.S.: Abandoning unions would of course fit in all too well with Tom Edsall’s ‘abandoning white working class’ thesis.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Wanted: Blue-Collar Workers. “That may sound odd, given that the region has suffered from unemployment for a generation and is just emerging from the worst recession in decades. Yet across the heartland, even in high-unemployment areas, one hears the same concern: a shortage of skilled workers capable of running increasingly sophisticated, globally competitive factories. That shortage is surely a problem for manufacturers like Wright. But it also represents an opportunity, should Americans be wise enough to embrace it, to reduce the nation’s stubbornly high unemployment rate.”

EUROPE: Jim Bennett wasn’t crazy about the Felix Salmon post I linked yesterday, and instead recommends this by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Europe’s blithering idiots and their flim-flam treaty.

Given that Merkozy cannot bring themselves to accept that Europe’s debacle stems from the euro itself, from a 30pc currency misalignment between from North and South, and from an over-leveraged €23 trillion banking bubble that German, French, Dutch, Belgian regulators allowed to happen… given that, yes, I suppose they have to find a scapegoat.

They have to whip up a witchhunt against somebody, so why not Anglo-Saxon bankers? Nasty reflexes are at work. German and French politicians in particular should be very careful about inciting populist hatred against a group that makes such easy prey. We have been there before. . . . No doubt these dramatic events will be uncomfortable for Britain, but this will all be swept away by bigger events before long. The Europols have not begun to work out a viable solution to their deformed and unworkable currency union, and perhaps no such solution exists. The system will lurch from crisis to crisis until it blows up in acrimony.

By then, a separate cluster will have emerged (not the 10 “outs” against the 17 “ins”, always a ludicrous concept), but rather a loose Anglo-Nordic-Swiss grouping that may not do so badly on the fringes and may begin to solidify into a seductively comfortable outer tier.

The mere existence of such a constellation might change the calculus of isolation for Spain should it finally tire of Franco-German dictates and depression, or should the Portuguese at last conclude that enough is enough.

Does France, for that matter, really want to be locked into a clammy embrace with an ever stronger Germany? The whole purpose of monetary union for Paris was to tie down a reunited Germany with silken cords. France now finds its own hands tied because of EMU, reduced to a humiliating side-kick.

Jim comments: “Of course, Ambrose is full of English understatement and reticence; I wish he would let go and tell us what he really thinks.”

SPACE NEWS: NASA clears SpaceX for trial run to space station. “A private company will make a trial cargo run to the International Space Station in February, a key step in a new U.S. program to buy spaceflight services on a commercial basis, NASA said on Friday. California-based Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon cargo capsule from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on February 7.”

Obama’s space policy is one of his few initiatives that looks like it’s working.

JAMES TARANTO: Newt Year In Jerusalem: The Associated Press literally doesn’t know the meaning of the word “fact.” “It would not have been hard to recast this story to make it journalistically sound, though it would have entailed a bit more work. . . . Instead, the AP published what is essentially an opinion piece, and a rather lazy one at that. If we may borrow Gingrich’s favorite word, to label that a ‘fact check’–as if it had some greater authority than actual reporting–is fundamentally dishonest.”

#OCCUPYFAIL: The Coming Rift between OWS and the Unions: Longshoremen Reject Port Blockade. “Well over a month ago, when the whole OWS thing was full of piss and vinegar, Occupy Oakland convinced all the other Occupations from San Diego up to Vancouver to stage a total blockade of all West Coast ports on December 12, bringing (it was hoped) the capitalist system to a sudden crashing halt. While the plan is still afoot, the intervening weeks changed the political landscape so much that now I’m pretty sure many of the Occupiers wish they hadn’t made such grandiose pronouncements. On the day the plans were made for the overly ambitious port blockage, OWS felt (in its delusional little bubble, at least) that it was on the upswing, that America was joining them, that the revolution had arrived. Now? Not so much.”

EUROPE’S GREAT DIVORCE. “What is clear is that after a long, hard and rancorous negotiation, at about 5am this morning the European Union split in a fundamental way. . . . So two decades to the day after the Maastricht Treaty was concluded, launching the process towards the single European currency, the EU’s tectonic plates have slipped momentously along same the fault line that has always divided it—the English Channel.”

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: Quoting Ken Layne: “It’s 2001, and we can Fact Check your ass. And you, like many in the Hate America movement, are no longer able to dress your wretched ‘reporting’ in fiction. We have computers. It is not difficult to Find You Out, dig?” Ah, those were the days.