Skip to main content

A note on think tanks

In this article, the following think tanks are considered:

Libertarian

Conservative

Progressive

The following is a juxtaposition of the above libertarian and conservative think tanks (and advocacy groups) against the progressive ones.

Political/Philosophical Ideology

In all of the conservative and libertarian organizations, concrete ideas or persons are used in the name and/or mission and/or motto to highlight distinguishing conservative and/or libertarian focus, un-apologetically. In the progressive ones, political and philosophical leanings are (a) left unstated, or (b) implicitly centrist, or (c) explicitly "centrist" and "non-partisan". Furthermore, vague and fluffy terms ("American", "priorities", "progress") are used. This apologetic refrain ("I'm not left-wing; I'm simply moderate/independent/non-partisan, etc.") is pervasive in left-wing journalistic watchdogs as well (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Public_Integrity), while right-wing media outlets are proudly so.

Finances

In all but two of the libertarian and conservative organizations, the wiki entry show finances (both revenue and expenses) and, consistently, it is the case that revenue exceeds expenses, as one might expect. In the progressive ones, finances are not revealed (at least, on the wiki page) in all but one (and, in that case, only revenue is revealed, not expenses).

A note on funding sources (a hat tip to the Kochs)

George Soros' Open Society Foundations contributes major funding to all but two of the other progressive organizations (http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1237). Hopefully, this would bring balance and perspective to those drinking the "Koch-addiciton" KoolAid.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

the brave new economy

A free(er) market is emerging and has been emerging ever since the advent of the Internet and the Web. Newer technologies have accelerated this. Old inefficiencies in knowledge and access to the market are quickly disappearing. Participation is increasingly peer-to-peer (P2P). Participants can produce, create, curate, give, lend, sell, share, auction, consume, take, borrow, buy, reuse, rent and/or barter goods, services, cash, credit, currency, equity, debt and/or knowledge. The resultant economy is highly collaborative and is sometimes referred to as the ‘ sharing economy ’. Efficiencies are being introduced and value is being created in the smallest of markets. Non-profit activities are thriving as well, in addition to for-profit ones. The marketplace is becoming, at once, global and local. An important subset of the new economy is collaborative and crowdsourced , and may be described as commons-based peer production . Asymmetries in information are diminished by algorithms (Google
Post a Comment
Read more

Migrating from MS SQL Server to MongoDB

The following contains notes from various attempts at migrating 2.5GB of MS SQL Server data to MongoDB, on an 8 GB, quad-core, 64-bit Windows 7 Enterprise machine. [TERMINATED]  http://mssql2mongo.codeplex.com/ : Simple to use. Exponential slowdown observed in migration. For a total of the 50 million records spanning two tables, the following migration times were observed: 1 second for the first 100,000 records,  30 minutes for 1,000,000, 20 hours for 16 million (after which I terminated the process). [DID NOT WORK] http://rubydoc.info/gems/mongify/ : A ruby-based approach. Use Ruby 1.9.3 (tiny_tds dependency causes problems with Ruby 2.0). Install DevKit before installing the mongify gem. Also, use ' sqlserver ' as the adapter in the .config file. Then, before running ' mongify check <config-file> ', install the gems  activerecord-sqlserver-adapter  and tiny_tds . At this stage, it fails. ' mongify translation <config-file> ' fails as well.
1 comment
Read more

the World Cup draw -- an alternative proposal

The FIFA World Cup seeding and draw system has consistently produced groups of death and groups comprised mainly of teams that fail to invoke passion or imagination from fans around the world, except perhaps for such teams' own fans. The latest edition is no exception -- and may even be the worst ever on this measure. An outline of the draw system can be seen here . We have one group which contains Switzerland, Ecuador and Honduras and another consisting of Russia, Algeria and South Korea!! And, on top of this, we have at least three, if not four or more, groups of death. Depending on one's perspective, esp. given the recent rise of African powerhouses, all of the rest of the groups may even be considered Groups of Death!! This is a disservice to football fans around the world, not to mention the skilled and enterprising teams that worked hard to get here. To address this, I propose a simplified draw system : Randomize Pot 1 and assign to Groups Assign remaining Pots t
4 comments
Read more