The Continuing Crisis
O'ROURKE, P.J.
*As we go to press the U.S. presidential election is still several days away. But let us hazard a mad guess about the outcome . . . . Yes, Mondale carries Queens, Berkeley,...
...Congress has issued a report criticizing UNESCO for inefficiency...
...eln Dublin the Grand Marshal of the New York St...
...With such reasonableness prevailing at the bargaining table, can UK labor peace be far off...
...How about Lesotho...
...However, in the interest of accuracy, we should like to point out that we did not invent the Adam Smith necktie...
...There was a violent demonstration in London on September 27...
...These and other instances illustrated that Axelrod's model is more than just a matter of "garbage in, garbage out...
...Hey, so sue me...
...Commanding officers who visited the front were appalled at these "outbreaks of peace," and would rant and rave about fighting units that " d i d n ' t seem to know there was a war going o n . " But as soon as they left, things would return to their "normal" cooperative equilibrium...
...oNature note: More than 7,000 caribou drowned in Quebec as a result of hydro-electric dams built because coal-burning generators damage the environment...
...Can anti-clericalism _9 . . be far off...
...P...
...Also, we do not offer an Edmund Burke necktie, and do not plan to d o so, since Mr...
...But both sides were careful never to initiate hostilities...
...A group of famous people are getting together to investigate the private lives of selected newspaper reporters.,Just kidding...
...Norma and Don Lipsett Props, The Decatur Shop One Tyrrell Square North Adams The People's Republic of Michigan High Jesuitry Just came across your July "Continuing Crisis.'t Congratulations...
...These days it's the ominous peace pastoral or the Church's reflections on economic justice which serve as the source o f the prelates' rejuvenation as well as a target for outrage from civil religionists on the right_9 Although none of the hierarchy are Jesuits, we may be comfortably certain that the Church is up to her usual "high jesuitry"--i.e, doing her job--when she catches hell in stereo, as has been the case of late...
...You ~ay or may not recall that it was the would-be president Hollings who last year derided this same episcopal body as " a bunch of kids...
...True, the Reds can now equal America's ability to lose illconceived wars against fanatic natives in places nobody cares about...
...The report is 157 pages long and it took six months to prepare...
...CBS executives admit they lied but say they have a license from the FCC to do it...
...The U.S...
...and Italy have signed a new extradition treaty allowing for rapid deportation of organized crime figures...
...And how about the elections in Nicaragua...
...Or Raymond Don,van wisecracks, either...
...The Contadora group has worked out a great peace treaty for Central America...
...Mideast specialists theorize that Islamic Jihad doesn't really exist...
...In addition, if one regards "gain" over a less-than-infinite time span (i.e., one's own life), even the premise of fixed rewards will not deter use of a shortterm-gains policy...
...Or tell the Commies to get stuffed...
...mWilliam D. A. Geary Deer Park, New York William Tucker replies: There is some sense to Mr...
...It seenis the CIA was running a surveillance mission looking for evidence olaf, reign intervention in the Salvadoran guerrilla war...
...Now Indira Gandhi has gotten into the act...
...Jon-Erik Hexum, star of .the new series "CoverUp," shot himself in the head with a blank...
...Maybe we can help fix it...
...Jamieson's article is further proof that today one simply can't trust everything one reads in the media or in scholarly tabloid journals printed on cheap paper...
...if "economy" cannot be modeled successfully then how can the far more complex interaction of human desires and aspirations...
...One would not have to be a "Lion among Christians" in order to run up a high score in this situation...
...Publicity ploy...
...Morse Award...
...There must be some nation somewhere that Nicaragua can get t o sign this treaty...
...No John Zaccaro jokes, please...
...Bloody hell, lad, sheep are practically human...
...But, the real world does not cooperate in simple models: The "values" of cooperation and antagonism vary continually, with evil often triumphing at least in the short term and under its Own idea of "gain," and the best of cooperative policies often coming to disastrous ends...
...The Prisoner's Dilemma is a useful and accurate model for real-life biological and human situations...
...They love treaty signings...
...Elsewhere on the mayhem front, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is not panning out...
...Good will gesture...
...Who says the British Miners Union is intransigent...
...Ferdinand Marcos is finding out the hard way that murdered political opponents never give stupid interviews to Playboy, cheat on their income tax, or get caught in hotel rooms with coat check girls from El Morocco...
...It'll be fun...
...This is a far cry from my days in college when we killed ourselves with our own drugs...
...oOnce again R. Emmett TyrreU, Jr., W.H...
...Advisers in El Salvador Followed Unit to Battle Zone...
...As he notes himself, the highest score can be achieved, not by cooperating, but by consistently betraying the other person...
...Instead, the 1984 prize for literature went to Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert...
...And the Vietnam war wasn't even a nuclear one...
...What Jaroslav probably means is: Poesy's with us all the time, Like sex and death and gin and lime...
...Mencken and Millard Fillmore T-shirts...
...This would fit the pattern since security specialists had theorized that our new Embassy couldn't really be attacked...
...But let us hazard a mad guess about the outcome . . . . Yes, Mondale carries Queens, Berkeley, Greenwich Village, and the northside Chicago ward which includes the monkey house .in the Lincoln Park Zoo...
...But they are lagging way behind in drugaddicted veterans, domestic riots, and rock concerts in cow pastures full of half-naked hippie girls...
...He threatened to soap the east wing storm windows with PLO slogans...
...They would exchange perfunctory artillery rounds--often hitting the exact same targets every day with such regularity that "you could set your watch b y i t . " In some instances, snipers would hit the exact same spot on dugouts hundreds of times, just to let the other side know what they could do...
...Students at Brown University passed a resolution asking the campus health center to stock cyanide pills so that the students could kill themselves in case of atomic war...
...They sat right down and signed the treaty with . . . . Well, the treaty isn't actually with anybody...
...A shadowy group called Islamic Jihad claimed credit for the blast...
...Accounts differ as to whether the President invited him to bob for apples or just told him to go soak his head...
...We considered Bob Tyrrell and Ed Feulner T-shirts, but so far the market demand for these has been very minimal...
...Former Watergate security guard Frank Wills has been hired to help market the diet drink and to coauthor the Dick Gregory~Frank Wills Watergate Break-In Cookbook...
...Run that one by usone more time and let's see if we can get a net over it...
...But it's not a bad idea...
...I'd like to think this was for tying up traffic on March 17 and giving cretinous teenagers an excuse to vomit green beer at ten in the morning...
...Certainly no further away than Bloomington...
...The "model" used, "the Prisoner's Dilemma," is stacked in favor of cooperation at all times: thus, it is little surprise that a "cooperative" program would win against a broad range of "opponents...
...In my review of The Evolution of Cooperation, I may not have put enough emphasis on the real-life examples that author Robert Axelrod is able to marshal in support of his argument...
...Or just some dumb Bolsheviks with muddled shipping orders...
...Will the blind man lead that mute to the podium so he can give a speech to the deaf...
...This is a war not a waltz contest...
...Speaking of moribund politicians, there's quite an Aquino ground swell building in the Philippines...
...He was only pulling the President's leg, of course...
...On every computer sold there should be attached an OSHA-grade warning sticker: GIGO--that is, "Garbage In, Garbage Out," a caution familiar to old hands who grew up with flaky equipment but lost on many neophytes, especially social researchers...
...It's made out...
...But apparently it was for gun running...
...von Dreele, Jeff MacNelly, and other such notables (not to mention this writer) have been passed over by the Nobel people...
...Herewith an extract from his works: than killing and murdering...
...General Westmoreland vs...
...Your highminded, reference to America's Roman Catholic bishops as "brat kids" earns you our first annual Ernest Hollings Award for original insight into the rights of religious expression-formerly the Samuel F.B...
...However, we regret that there are still many great Americans who do not own even one Adam Smith necktie...
...The fate of four and a half million Chinese is one thing...
...Their crime at that time was in seeking passage of tuition tax credits for low and moderate income private school families...
...These neckties, with the famous Tassie Medallion cameo profile of the Sainted Adam were first "manufactured and sewed" by a conservative student group at St...
...of seaweed...
...We thank you for this opportunity to correct the record...
...They wear native dress and trot out all the wives and drums, etc...
...Remarkable how assassination improves a politician...
...Andrews in the late 1960s...
...My poems are sometimes not so swell...
...These two headlines ran cheek and jowl on the front page of the October 20 New York Times: "4 Americans From C.I.A...
...Hard to say...
...A burglar who is continually given wrist-tap sentences, for example, will be able to pursue a successful career as a "non-cooperator" with regard to other people's property...
...Dick 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 Gregory is selling a powdered protein drink called "Dick G r e g o r y ' s Bahamian Diet...
...Patrick's Day parade has been sentenced to four years in jail...
...The Decatur Shop initially imported some of these ties and then started offering our own version in the early 1970s...
...Sound familiar...
...Indeed, the only way to rack up more points is to be so blessed as to be in a population of "Christians" (always cooperate) and pursue a "Lion" policy ("screw you, Jack...
...Good old Iraq, with the help of Iran, continues to engage in what may be the most tedious armed conflict since Ohio's dispute with Michigan over Toledo...
...The mainland Chic.ms are modifying their economic system...
...oIndira Gandhi should serve as inspiration to all women looking for full political equality--sikh and ye shall find...
...Britain, which sacrificed men and gold without stint to keep the vile Argentine's grasping claws off the Falklands, has punted Hong Kong without so much as an irate letter to the Times...
...There was a name for this during the 1930s...
...Some tanks and fighter planes were found in the goodies but no pins or razor blades...
...The Spirit of Adam Smith We very much enjoyed T. John Jamieson's "Dressed to Kill" (TAS, August 1984...
...Shimon's trick or treat haul this year was 1.2 billion dollars...
...Our Embassy in Beirut got blown up again...
...During recent negotiations Union head Arthur Scargill gave in to government demands on a key point and agreed that it was all right to close a coal mine when there wasn't any coal left in it...
...The next little gremlin to drop by was Shimon Peres...
...Don't you believe it...
...But he's sounding (continued on page 59) THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 9...
...Meanwhile Baghdad has imported Egyptian bureaucrats in an effort to make Iraq's government operate more efficiently...
...One would only have to be a noncooperator living in a society that is not very diligent in punishing infractions...
...Following extensive flood damage in the Korean peninsula, North Korea has sent 370 trucks full of rice, clothing, and medical supplies that it can ill spare to South Korea which doesn't need them...
...Thanks to our multi-million dollar advertising campaign (in The American Spectator and elsewhere), we have in the past decade sold thousands of the Adam Smith cravats...
...stealing sheep is another...
...When one side did kill someone, the other retaliated immediately, on the principle of "two tits for one tat...
...This type of gnostic proof of moral values is often defeated by the complex nature of humanity...
...Black Americans have trouble finding jobs...
...CBS to date...
...He does far more than rely on computer print-outs...
...General Westmoreland denies he lied but says if he did it was only to the public and that's all right...
...Poor quality of Russian-made hashish pipes and hi-fi equipment is probably to blame...
...I predict the Mondale forces do well there, too...
...It's all part of a Russian attempt to achieve parity with the United States...
...The demonstrators were protesting big business, the arms race, unemployment, and the use of animals for medical experiments...
...Come on, you guys, quit holding each other up in the clinches...
...Don't worry about Hong Kong stock market prices, however...
...The Nicaraguans are particularly fond of it...
...you ask...
...What the hell, I'd rather pen a bit of fluff Than knock somebody on their duff...
...O'Rourke Garbage In, Garbage Out In William Tucker's review of The Evolution of Cooperation (TAS, September 1984) there may be less cause for celebration than voiced...
...Probably his best example is the "Live and Let Live" policy that arose spontaneously among soldiers facing each other across the trenches during World War I. Stuck in a long-term "prisoner's dilemma," soldiers on both sides fell into a policy o f "don't-fire-unless-fired-upon...
...But I don't think it applies in the case of the "Prisoner's Dilemma...
...It killed him...
...Axelrod gives numerous examples where real-life cooperation has evolved--even in the most adverse circumstances...
...Yes, you're a clever young brood of curmudgeons, and your editor is an awful bright boy...
...Here's something to factor in when taking the measure of prime-time television's cerebral content...
...No improvement is expected until Chernenko is replaced with younger, more vigorous Kremlin leadership...
...If it's not from Tony Alamo or Planned Parenthood, it's you guys...
...Leon Trotsky, John F. Kennedy, Che Guevara, and Harvey Milk all gained historical stature and support for their policies this way...
...Geary's point, in that the scoring of any game can be "rigged" to produce the desired results...
...Thus, the Prisoner's Dilemma is not "stacked in favor of cooperation at all times...
...No word yet on whether we discovered us before the crash...
...It seems that Tucker has fallen for the old trap of circular reasoning and the relatively new one of, " I f the computer agrees it must be right...
...Jamieson would probably not buy or wear one if we d i d We do, however, offer Edmund Burke T-shirts, as well as Russell Kirk and H.L...
...Perhaps this is losing something in translation...
...Profits, competitive pricing, and e~'en some private property will be allowed though the party organization will retain ultimate totalitarian control of society...
...Halloween came early at the White House when Andrei Gromyko showed up dressed in a truly frightful Russian business suit costume...
...Jesse Jackson appeared on "Saturday Night Live...
...comparing American corporate management policies as a whole with almost any other industrialized democracy points this out...
...Killed As Plane Crashes in El Salvador" and "3 U.S...
...Nefarious plot...
Vol. 17 • December 1984 • No. 12
