Hey, Dan, have fun -- but I hope you won't be disappointed. I've been a Freemason for 30-odd years, and all I got was a collection of funny handshakes.

Being in a world-wide conspiracy is not what it's cracked up to be.

Who on Earth is Bilderberg?

Who made Steve Gutenberg a star?

Of course, bap is also British slang for a woman's breast. Could this be some sort of international neocon swingers' convention? "An ingenious method of indoctrinating next generation elites" indeed. Shocking! Absolutely shocking!

Dan,

If you're gonna sell out then you might as well go whole hog. Clearly, you should hold out for an all expense paid getaway week in Tuscany, Italy with Jennifer Garner in addition to considerable fame and fortune. Never do things by halvsies, Dan. That's our problem in Iraq now. Neither fish nor fowl. So go for the whole shebang! :-)

Dan, I know that there are some fairly unrigorous types who have caught some of the research on the BAP, but I would have thought that the underlying point deserves to be taken seriously. The statement that the BAP aims to "indoctrinate the next generation's elites" ought to be uncontroversial; it aims to pick young people with potential, and to get them to meet together and network, increasing the chances that they will be able to sustain good careers in future. I would guess that's a large part of the reason you're going there. It's going to be a bit easier for you to get tenure at Chicago with the BAP on your CV, and it will be a lot easier for you to be the next generation's Paul Wolfowitz (or whoever) if you have a background as a Chicago professor.

Furthermore, the BAP is an organisation with an explicit, non-confidential, neo-liberal agenda. Hence the "Bilderberg propaganda" line (btw, it is beyond me why any mention of the Bilderberg group gets you treated as a tinfoil hat case; it's a real group and it does have meetings, where important policy issues are discussed between important people). There's bound to be a lot of free market groupthink there.

Some people think that tight networking organisations for people who tend to end up with important government jobs, aren't necessarily terribly good for democracy. I think that they deserve a little better than your casual treatment here. (This probably deserves a longer post on CT).

I've got your Dan Drezner right here.

If you want to be secretive, why put up a website advertising the fact that you're being secretive?

I guess you can't get CV points for belonging to a totally secret society, though. Unless the people who care about your CV are also in the society...

"Don't you have one of those fancy wifi laptops that lets you post at Starbucks?--ed.Alas, the big blogger money seems to escape me."

Not sure that big blogger money exists, Dan, but I do know this: all of sixty bucks gets you a decent WiFI card. Now if you're trying to escape teh Tyranny o' Blogging for few days, that's another matter.

In The Russia House http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100530/

Sean Connery ponders the question of wether he would give up his country for the love of a woman. The answer was yes, but the woman was Michell Pfeiffer.

I thought it was a no brainer.

If they offer jeniffer garner, go for it.

BTW what happened to Salma Hyak?

Forget Jennifer Garner.

A Young Diva Tries on a Storybook Success for Size

Not all of the crazies are locked up, some of them are blogging about conspiracy after conspiracy. This would remind me of the "Floride is a Communist Plot" type of paranoia if it wasn't so funny. Excuse me a minute, I hear a fluttering noise, what on earth....... OMG, black helicopters spiraling down on my abode, I must get this off before the catch me and take me away. OMG... here they come, pounding the door down.. I'm..........