in the Practice, full of Errour and Imposture; And in the Theory, full of unsound Imaginations...
My classmate Josh, in the midst of a serious discussion on the President's changes to his bioethics council, laments:
The president is free to do whatever he wants with his bioethics council. He can stack it with witch doctors and alchemists and propose a 10 billion dollar plan to turn lead into gold. He is the president, and thats the prize you get for winning the election.
I think Josh has hit on something great, here, though. Knock the budget back by a factor of ten, and what he's got isn't so much an enormous boondoggle but an episode of Mad, Mad House. And while I'm generally not in favor of government intervention in entertainment, I might be willing to bend the rules here:
- $10 million is less than Sci-Fi probably paid making yet one more reality show.
- The show could run on C-SPAN (let's face it, are witch doctors and alchemists less sensible than most of what you'd see there? and is anyone watching?), widening its demographic greatly.
- The new show would thus free up time on Sci-Fi for them to bring back Farscape.
- Alchemists included kabbalists, Christian thinkers like St. Aquinus, Arab scholars from antiquity, and some of the best thinkers in the sinophone world. Witch doctors (to the extent that the term is used for shaman) have even wider range. (And those are just the ones I know of.) Can you say, 'multicultural!'
- The Presidential Alchemy Panel would do a lot more towards teaching our kids Latin and mathematics than Mad, Mad House.
- Democrat's have often complained that Bush has the devil's own luck--let's put it to use! Who knows, against all expectations of anyone at all, it just might work. It's as good a solution as anything else Bush has done to eliminate the deficit thus far.
Update: How do you guys write so fast? Another reader points out that listening to Paul Krugman rant about 'budget alchemy' when he means it literally would be another plus.