Theodore Darlimple on the intimidating revival of the economist John Kenneth Galbraith

Theodore Darlimple is, if you do not know him, one of the most outspoken critics of the Liberal left. Here is a fragment from The Galbraith Revival, published in the City Journal.

...Here we reach the heart of the matter. Galbraith’s thinking about social and economic matters was always de haut en bas; his solutions emerged from the Olympian heights of his own ratiocination, to be applied to the clueless multitudes below. (No doubt his own great height, over 6 foot 8, accustomed him to looking down on people.) His literary style is symptomatic of his attitude, a true case of the style being the man himself. Hundreds of times, he uses question-begging locutions that intimidate with their orotund grandeur. I open a book of his at random and find the following: “The controlling fact is”; “This trade-off is present in all accepted thought”; “Nor should one wish otherwise”; “It has now been adequately urged”; “This is not a matter of choice; it is the modern imperative”; “It would, of course, be a serious error”; “This has long been recognized”; “All of this is to be welcomed”; “The lesson is clear”; “The solution is not difficult; it has the advantage of inevitability.”

The cumulative effect is to intimidate those who believe themselves not well enough informed to contradict so high an authority. We are far from the realm of Jane Austen’s light and ironic “It is a truth universally acknowledged.” When J. K. Galbraith enunciates a truth universally acknowledged, he does not want us to smile inwardly; he wants us to fear not being included in le tout Paris of correct, generous, and humane thought. What fool does not wish to be on the side of the inevitable?

I find Darlimple's observation pretty deft, de bas en haute, so to say. Darlimple's writing is brilliant, but at times, however, disappointingly uneven. The piece on the architecture of Le Courbusier - The Architect as Totalitarian, also published in the City Journal, I found to be too broad-stroked:

There is to be no escape from Le Corbusier’s prescriptions. “The only possible road is that of enthusiasm . . . the mobilization of enthusiasm, that electric power source of the human factory.” In his book The Radiant City, there is a picture of a vast crowd in Venice’s Piazza San Marco, with the legend, “Little by little, the world is moving to its destined goal. In Moscow, in Rome, in Berlin, in the USA, vast crowds are collecting round a strong idea”—the idea being, apparently, the absolute leader or state. These words were written in 1935, not a happy period for political thought in Moscow, Rome, or Berlin, and one might have hoped that he would have later recanted them.

For such insinuations, I would say, the evidence introduced is pretty flimsy. Or look at this paragraph:

When one recalls Le Corbusier’s remark about reinforced concrete—“my reliable, friendly concrete”—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger’s syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger’s syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

I don't know, Doctor Darlimple, that does not look to me like the right diagnosis. Pity - for Darlimple is an otherwise sparkling and outspoken intellectual critic.

Gideon Rachman, purveyor of doom at the Financial Times

How the bottom fell out of ‘old’ Davos - on the waning influence of the US and 'Old' Europe in a world of high rising East Asian countries.

When nations turn into hoarders - how much the world population growth depends on food supplies, and how much the latter depend on fossil oil energy

Why America and China will clash - about what's behind Google's recent decision to stand up to the Chinese government's tendency to suppress Internet access

America is losing the free world - how Barack Obama was turned down by high officials of brasil, India, South Africa and Turkey at the Copenhagen Climate summit. He writes: "...Revealingly, both Brazilian and Chinese leaders have made the same pointed joke – likening the US to a rich man who, after gorging himself at a banquet, then invites the neighbours in for coffee and asks them to split the bill."

More of his Financial Times columns here. Rachman also has an excellent blog.

Andrew Sullivan's ghost bloggers

Sullivan Ends Vacation Early To Respond To Ghostblogger Criticism - writes Michael Triplett.

"Any editorial views published as such on this blog are therefore mine and mine alone. But the content and counter-argument are generated by the collective mind of the readers, under-bloggers and the rest of the blogosphere. I think it’s cleaner and simpler not to clutter the blog up with bylines, and to retain its identity as one single narrative conversation. As long as you’re transparent about that, and we have been, I see no problem", writes Andrew Sullivan.

Not so, says lawprof blogger Ann Althouse, about ghost contributions by Sullivan staffers Patrick Appel and Chris Bodenner:

"I seriously believed I was interacting with Sullivan, a writer I have respected for maybe 20 years. I wouldn’t have bothered with Patrick (or Chris). I really don’t care what they think. If they insult me, they are to me like any number of bloggers who insult me and whose bait I don’t take. I would always take Sullivan’s bait, because Sullivan is important. Not to know whether it’s Sullivan or one of them makes a mush out of the whole blog. I’m not wading through all of this ghost-generated verbiage and guessing about what might be the real thing."

Scott Brown wins the Massachusetts election for the open senate seat

Journalist David Gergen had asked in the election debate if Scott Brown would be willing to "...sit in Teddy Kennedy's seat and [say] I'm going to be the person who's going to block [health care reform] for another 15 years." Scott Brown's memorable response might have won him the election right there: "With all due respect, it’s not the Kennedy seat, and it’s not the Democrats’ seat. It’s the people’s seat."

Shortly thereafter, we hear from Scott Brown supporters like Fred Barnes, who wrote that The Health Care Bill Is Dead:

"The impact of Republican Scott Brown’s capture of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for decades by Teddy Kennedy will be both immediate and powerful. "

And we hear from Kyle Trygstad

"Just two people -- John F. Kennedy and Edward M. Kennedy -- had been elected in the last 58 years to the Massachusetts Senate seat Republican Scott Brown won yesterday. The seat's legacy and Democrats' dominance in the state were no match, however, for the lethal mix of Brown's message and a poorly run campaign by Democrat Martha Coakley, as well as a shifting public mood..."

And from Rich Lowry:

"Scott Brown did the mind-blowing last night. He won the Senate seat formerly held by Teddy Kennedy, in the state that's the cradle of contemporary liberalism, after trailing by 30 points."

Also from progressive leaning Thomas Edsall, in his Ghost Story:

"The victory of Scott Brown in the fight for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat shines a light on a trend in American politics that ought to deeply trouble progressives..."

So what was it in the end - did Scott Brown win Ted Kennedy's seat or did he win the people's seat?

'World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown'

Read the Sunday Times article on the latest screw-up at the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who had claimed that the Himalayan glaciers were melting so fast that they could disappear by 2035.

"Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.", had said the IPCC benchmark report of two years ago. The Sunday Times article tracks down how the claim ended up in the IPCC report.

But wait, it is actually worse: some of the glaciers are melting down, just at a much slower rate than advertised. By its incompetent overshoot, the IPCC has done a huge disservice to understanding Global Warming. It is unclear how the IPCC can recover its scientific reputation after this.

For more on Himalaya glaciers and their rate of meltdown - read about the observations made by satellites from space Himalayan Glacier Melting Observed From Space, a March 2007 story in Science Daily.

Mozart, Die Zauberflöte, Il Seraglio, and the sources of European Orientalism

Ibn Warraq writes about the venturing of European Enlightenment era art in to the spiritual territory of Orientalism, as reflected in Mozart's Magic Flute and The Abduction from the Seraglio.

"The [Enlightenment] Orientalists and their indefatigable intellectual curiosity, scholarship, and translations had incalculable consequences for the development of art, philosophy and politics in Europe, an influence passionately chronicled by Raymond Schwab in The Oriental Renaissance. Orientalists changed forever the intellectual and spiritual landscape of Europe, and allowed artists, writers, and composers to enter imaginatively and sympathetically into civilizations hitherto unfamiliar to Westerners, to accord the Orient dignity and respect, and to people European works with Orientals, seen as equals. It was in this intellectual and spiritual milieu that Mozart created some of his most sublime music. Perhaps Die Zauberflöte, Il Seraglio, and cantata K.619 can be seen as reflections in art of Orientalist research."

More of Ibn Warraq's writings can be found here.

Oliver Stone's new Showtime documentary "Secret history of America" stirs trouble

Hitler? A scapegoat. Stalin? I can empathise. Oliver Stone stirs up history

Oliver Stone: "Hitler was a scapegoat"

"Stalin has a complete other story," Stone said. "Not to paint him as a hero, but to tell a more factual representation. He fought the German war machine more than any single person. We can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and its been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect ... People in America don't know the connection between WWI and WWII ... I've been able to walk in Stalin's shoes and Hitler's shoes to understand their point of view. We're going to educate our minds and liberalize them and broaden them. We want to move beyond opinions ... Go into the funding of the Nazi party. How many American corporations were involved, from GM through IBM. Hitler is just a man who could have easily been assassinated."

Suffice it to say, he's playing with some powerful perceptions here.

Greg Gutfeld writes: "'Stalin, Hitler, Mao, McCarthy — these people have been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,' [Stone] told reporters, managing to slip non-killer Joe McCarthy into the mix, without causing a murmur.

"But hey, he's right about Mao, Hitler and Stalin — it's just so unfair the way things work when you kill millions of innocent people. But true to his blind allegiance to relativism, Stone claims that "we can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good.' Hitler was an easy scapegoat."

"He's right: Finger-pointing is so judgmental. Case in point: Stone claims that conservative pundits will hate the show, maybe because conservative pundits hate excuses masquerading as empathy. Me? I don't care if Adolf's mommy never loved him or the maid made fun of his willy. I had similar problems and I didn't kill six million Jews — I think.

"But saying only conservatives will be upset by this, is really a slap in the face to progressives. For Stone assumes that — unlike right-wingers — the left will willingly accept his revisionist look at history's greatest killers.

"He's right: As embracers of all things relative, they are crackers to his cheese."

Jeff Foust asks: Are astronauts close to extinction?

Read The Future of Human Spaceflight in the MIT Technology Review. It talks about the Augustine Committee, a panel chartered by the White House, which issued in Oct 2009 its report on the future of space travel. And the news is bleak: while the Chinese are preparing for manned missions to Mars,

"The [US] human space flight program... is at a tipping point where either additional funds must be provided or the [human] exploration program first instituted by President Kennedy must be abandoned, at least for the time being."

The current plan is to retire the space shuttle by late 2010, and use Russian Soyuz spacecraft to reach the International Space Station (ISS) until the Ares I rocket (see picture) and Orion capsule are ready. The estimated ready date for Ares I /Orion is 2017. The ISS takes $2-3 billion to maintain yearly, and funding for that is projected at this point until 2015 - when another $1 billion would be the cost of safely dumping it out of orbit.

Foust also writes that

"...Satellites launched on expendable boosters allowed the United States to achieve strategic dominance in space. And Cold War motives disappeared with the collapse of the Soviet Union."

I'm not so much concerned that another country might soon achieve dominance in space - but that a foe might be capable to bring down our satellite infrastructure, thus eliminating our advantage. Here is an analysis by Geoffrey Forden:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2008/01/inside-the-chin/

Forden writes: "...if the short term military consequences to the United States [of a theoretic sneak attack by China on US military satellites] are not that bad, the long term consequences to all space-faring nations would be devastating. The destruction of the nine satellites hit during the first hour of the attack considered here could put over 18,900 new pieces of debris over four inches in diameter into the most populated belt of satellites in low Earth orbit. Even more debris would be put into geostationary orbit if China launched an attack against communications satellites. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, the debris from each satellite would continue to “clump” together, much as the debris from last year’s test. However, over the next year or so—well after the terrestrial war with China had been resolved—the debris fields would fan out and eventually strike another satellite.

"These debris fields could easily cause a run-away chain of collisions that renders space unusable — for thousands of years, and for everyone."

Atul Gawande on the connection between farming and medical care

Atul Gawande is a Cancer surgeon at Brigham And Womens Hospital, a journalist for the New Yorker, a Harvard Associate Prof and a book author. Recently he published The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. If you'd like to understand the US health care conundrum, and what's at stake in the new health care legislation pending in Congress then Gawande's writings would be a good place to start.

Check out his New Yorker article titled Testing, Testing. It playfully makes a few cross references between the agricultural revolution started by the USAID in the 1900s, and - startlingly enough - the role of government in health care today.

"At the start of the twentieth century, another indispensable but unmanageably costly sector was strangling the country: agriculture. In 1900, more than forty per cent of a family’s income went to paying for food. At the same time, farming was hugely labor-intensive, tying up almost half the American workforce. We were, partly as a result, still a poor nation. Only by improving the productivity of farming could we raise our standard of living and emerge as an industrial power. We had to reduce food costs, so that families could spend money on other goods, and resources could flow to other economic sectors. And we had to make farming less labor-dependent, so that more of the population could enter non-farming occupations and support economic growth and development.

"America’s agricultural crisis gave rise to deep national frustration. The inefficiency of farms meant low crop yields, high prices, limited choice, and uneven quality. The agricultural system was fragmented and disorganized, and ignored evidence showing how things could be done better. Shallow plowing, no crop rotation, inadequate seedbeds, and other habits sustained by lore and tradition resulted in poor production and soil exhaustion. And lack of coördination led to local shortages of many crops and overproduction of others.

"You might think that the invisible hand of market competition would have solved these problems, that the prospect of higher income from improved practices would have encouraged change. But laissez-faire had not worked. Farmers relied so much on human muscle because it was cheap and didn’t require the long-term investment that animal power and machinery did. The fact that land, too, was cheap encouraged extensive, almost careless cultivation. When the soil became exhausted, farmers simply moved; most tracts of farmland were occupied for five years or less. Those who didn’t move tended to be tenant farmers, who paid rent to their landlords in either cash or crops, which also discouraged long-term investment. And there was a deep-seated fear of risk and the uncertainties of change; many farmers dismissed new ideas as “book farming.”

"Things were no better elsewhere in the world. For industrializing nations in the first half of the twentieth century, food was the fundamental problem. The desire for a once-and-for-all fix led Communist governments to take over and run vast “scientific” farms and collectives. We know what that led to: widespread famines and tens of millions of deaths.

"The United States did not seek a grand solution. Private farms remained, along with the considerable advantages of individual initiative. Still, government was enlisted to help millions of farmers change the way they worked. The approach succeeded almost shockingly well. The resulting abundance of goods in our grocery stores and the leaps in our standard of living became the greatest argument for America around the world. And, as the agricultural historian Roy V. Scott recounted, four decades ago, in his remarkable study “The Reluctant Farmer,” it all started with a pilot program."

For the rest of the story, read here.

I am particularly interested in Gawande's take on how government fixed farm agriculture while maintaining it private - because elementary education finds itself in the same conundrum: a mass of schools and teachers that need guidance on which education techniques work and which don't. Gawande comes at this from the angle of the health care indiustry - but his analogies and conclusions may apply to precollege education as well.

Gawande was recently interviewed by Charlie Rose on Jan 5, 2010 the subject of health care. Watch it! It will be a good 1/2 hour well spent! You'll learn about Boeing's four-engine Flying Fortress planes and how they got their pilots not to forget to unlock the ailerons after take-off. You'll also see the connection with today's lengthy, convoluted medical procedures that lead to human and heart wrenching treatment mistakes made by doctors.

As a bonus, Gawande talks at length in the Charlie Rose interview about what worked and what didn't in the Universal Healthcare reform in Massachusetts initiated two years ago, and what the implications are for the upcoming US health care bill.

"The Suicide of the East?", by Philip D. Zelikov

Philip D. Zelikov has a perceptive review of the Cold War events of the XXth century, and the dismembering of the USSR. The Suicide of the East? was published in the Dec 2009 Foreign Affairs. Here is an excerpt:

"...Archie Brown, one of the greatest living Kremlinologists and the author of The Rise and Fall of Communism, was paying attention to Gorbachev long before ordinary people had heard of him. Gorbachev was a model young Communist, carefully prepared for high office. He had been handpicked for the leadership by Yuri Andropov, then the head of the KGB. Andropov liked creative moves such as those by Kádár in Hungary, but he was also, as Brown writes, "an implacable opponent of overt dissent and of any development in the direction of political pluralism." Andropov had led the way in the choice to invade Afghanistan. Looking to Gorbachev, he wanted a first-rate modernizing Marxist to sustain the momentum against Politburo colleagues so senescent that, nostalgic for Stalin, they were still complaining about Nikita Khruschev even in the 1980s.

"Some historians are brilliant interpreters who offer provocative new syntheses of the record. Others, perhaps not so flashy, build up the bedrock of knowledge with thorough, careful scholarship. ... (Fortunately, the profession has room for both.) Brown has carefully assembled his facts when he importantly observes, of the 1985 selection of Gorbachev to lead the Soviet Union:

'The views of every member of the Politburo at the time of [Konstantin] Chernenko's death are known. It is, accordingly, safe to say that if anyone from their ranks other than Gorbachev had been chosen as general secretary, the Soviet Union would have neither liberalized nor democratized. . . . If Andropov had enjoyed better health, minor reform, stopping far short of what occurred under Gorbachev, might well have proceeded. If Chernenko had lived longer, nothing much would have changed while he was general secretary.'

"The Soviet empire did not end up crumbling from the outside in. It changed from the inside out, starting at the top. Gorbachev's initial reforms failed and even made matters worse, exposing problems and causing panicked hoarding as goods disappeared from shelves. Especially in 1987 and 1988, Gorbachev redoubled reform instead of backing away. What is more, instead of following the Chinese and Hungarian model of trying economic reform without democratization, he went for some political reform, too. The decision to seek legitimizing elections came simultaneously in the Soviet Union and in Poland. It was a deeply un-Marxist initiative. Marx and Engels had never had much use for democratic processes. Historical materialism was a doctrine of science, not political marketing."

The 'Meat' on Pakistan

"Why does Pakistan hate us" - another Slate story with Chris Hitches at his best:

"Give credit to the vice president: He really does enjoy politics and "can't see a room without working it," as a colleague of mine half-admiringly remarked last Wednesday morning. We were waiting to enter the studio and comment after Biden had finished his interview with the Scarborough/Brzezinski team, in which the main topic was Afghanistan. Exiting, he chose to stop and talk to each of us. Not wanting to waste a chance to be a bore on the subject, I asked him why he had mentioned India only once in the course of his remarks. Right away Biden managed the trick—several good politicians have mastered this—of reacting as if the question had been his own idea. Of course, he said, it was vexing that Pakistan preferred to keep its best troops on the border with India (our friend) rather than redeploying them to FATA—the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas—where they could be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida (our enemy). My flesh was pressed, and it was on to the next...."

The actual meat of the story is to be found further down:

"This, then, is why the Pakistani elite hates the United States. It hates it because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli right-wingers, as well.) By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy. Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbor.

"This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased..."

The irony...

... of Barack Obama is that he's persuaded himself to be a War President just as he was preparing to give his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. The irony of George Bush is that he wasn't embarrassed to keep as trophy the gun of Saddam Hussein whom he refused to duel.

Chris Hitchens in Beirut

When he visited Beirut last February, Christopher Hitchens almost did himself in. He was happily walking on the street, when he saw a swastika poster of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. He took it upon himself to deface it, and surely enough a party loyalist grabbed his arm and called a group of thugs. As Hitchens was pulled around towards the trunk of a car, as luck would have it the whole scene was happening in front of a chic cafe. The customers started shouting at the attackers. That scared them off for a fraction of a second, which was sufficient for Hitchens to step into a car, still with his life but with a fist in his face.

There is something to be said about Hitchens' courage to match his verbs by his deeds. One of his recurring obsessions has been to follow thoughts to their logical conclusion, wherever they may lead. If all of us were to do that, most assuredly the world would be a better place. One of Hitchens' fascinations has been with George Orwell, who went to fight for Republican Spain, but in due time had squared with the perils of the Comintern totalitarianism.

And it's not the first occasion Hitchens has had to reflect on the honest consequences of honorable thoughts. One of the most memorable pieces he's written about the Iraq was A Death in the Family. A young college-age reader of Hitchens named Mark Jennings Daily follows the writer's excitement about liberating Iraq, signs up for service, and is killed months later by an IED. Hitchens writes:

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr. Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.? Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his poem "Man and the Echo":

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot? …
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?

Hitchens has sparred in the past with his old ideological friends regarding how to approach Islamic extremism. He's left the New Republic on the tail of a debate with Noam Chomsky, which I have not read, but should find fascinating.

Until I do that I just have one question: was Hitchens right to deface the disgusting sign in Beirut?

"And I'll take my answer off the air".