Only in SC can you have a think thank where nobody thinks, and where they claim to be doing journalism without doing any.

With help, the South Carolina Policy Council has been ginning up the animal spirits of the base by cribbing stimulus grants without knowing what any of them are actually about. It's how you run a Southern think tank that doesn't think.


In today's chapter, we consider their denunciation of an academic study:

Modeling family factors in the transmission of wealth: $226,333

Jobs “created”: 0

This study might be defensible if it had something to do with creating wealth today, but the project focuses on “specifying conditions under which men were able to accumulate wealth between 1850 and 1870 in a native born US population of related individuals.” Shelf science at its worst.

Apparently nobody at SCPC reads books. Compare that asshat response to this NYT story about where Nobel laureate William Faulkner got his inspiration for some of the greatest American fiction of the 20th century: 

...The manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Specialists have been stunned and intrigued not only by this peephole into Faulkner’s working process, but also by material that may have inspired this Nobel-prize-winning author, considered by many to be one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century.

“I think it’s one of the most sensational literary discoveries of recent decades,” said John Lowe, an English professor at Louisiana State University who is writing a book on Faulkner. He was one of a handful of experts who met Dr. Francisco at the hand-hewn log house in Holly Springs last month. There they saw the windowpane where a cousin, Ludie Baugh, etched the letters L-U-D-I-E into the glass while watching Confederate soldiers march by — a scene that appears in several Faulkner works.