The Power of Narrative: History of World War II

Via Instapundit, Tigerhawk links Wretchard: “It is a measure of the power of narrative that we publicly grieve more for the deaths of our enemies than those of our allies in a war that is now fading quickly from human memory.”

As the New York Times remembers Hiroshima, try this quiz. Name the two greatest losses of civilian life in the Pacific war. Hint. In both cases the civilian casualties were greater than Hiroshima’s. In one case the event took place on American soil.


Casualties
Hiroshima 70,000–80,000
Battle of Manila 100,000
Nanjing 300,000

Check out the Belmont Club comment thread, too.

Those killed at Hiroshima, and later Nagasaki, were killed in spite of their
being non-combatants.

Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing
were killed because they were non-combatants. Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.

When the Americans carried the day, the killing stopped as soon as the victory was won.


We've nothing to apologize for.

And for a powerful example of how to counter the "narrative", go back to the link at the top of this post and watch the Bill Whittle vs. Jon Stewart video linked by Glenn Reynolds.

A feisty view here.

The value of returning to original source documents when studying history.

Confucius and Clarity of Language

Brought forward from an old post:

Confucius said:

“If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. 


Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

The translation above makes me wonder how the end of a sentence is indicated in Chinese.  That's some first sentence.  We're really not used to long sentences these days.  I put in a paragraph separation just to make the quote easier to get through.

The piece from which this quote was taken makes some over-broad statements about government spending.   But it includes some really good points about how people have been misled about government money.  Click on the link at the bottom of the page for comments from readers which reveal some of the ways government involvement tends to make everything more expensive while sometimes making stuff seem "free".   David could tell many similar stories.  Money from government allows corrupt or astonishingly inefficient systems - public or private -  to survive much longer than they would if they had to earn their own money.

Dr. Helen has some interesting advice concerning how teachers can help their students think critically and clearly understand some of the ways propaganda works:

"  . . . in my opinion, it is not your job to decide the politics of the students in your class, it is your job to expose them to the critical thinking skills that will help them make informed decisions and back them up in a reasoned way. This is what is sorely lacking in our present educational system."

Did you know that there was a Propaganda Game ?  Some non-PC books for kids would also help provide some balance to the liberal mindset which filters down from our higher education system.

It was a dark and stormy night

Winners of the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Including one Dishonorable Mention.

Via Cassandra, who also links an accidental, multi-author effort in which she participated in 2004. Inspired by her purchase of a new car. Some people are more "into" automotive engineering than others.

Too Weak to Fail

George Will on the bailouts of GM and Greece:

To understand the pertinence to America of events in Greece, notice General Motors' most recent misbehavior. A television commercial featuring CEO Ed Whitacre demonstrates the institutional murkiness and intellectual dishonesty that result when the line between public and private sectors disappears. . . .

Under crony capitalism, when government and corporate America merge, both dissemble.

"Crony Capitalism" (AKA "Corporatism") is a big part of what this book (published pre-Obama) is all about. And with the addition of "The Chicago Way", Crony Capitalism becomes an even bigger feature of American politics.

Will continues:

Now American taxpayers also own a little bit of a small nation. They provide the U.S. contribution of 17 percent of the assets of the International Monetary Fund, which is giving Greece $39 billion (the IMF also is contributing $321 billion to a "stabilization" fund for other eurozone nations with debt problems). So the U.S. government, which would borrow 42 cents of every dollar it spends under the president's 2011 budget, is borrowing to rescue Greece and others from the consequences of their borrowing.

Greece, whose gross domestic product is below that of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, is "too big to fail," meaning too inconveniently connected to too many big banks. Bailing out Greece really rescues European banks that improvidently bought Greek bonds. . . .

Read the whole thing for details concerning the idiocy of current European borrowing patterns, and comparisons to the situation in America. Plus the dopiness of the current position of the Greek communist party. And the uselessness of the value-added tax, which is a big feature in the finances of the "PIIGS", the European countries currently in the worst financial shape.

Germans are furious about being the biggest bailers in this bailout of a nation where tax evasion is pandemic. . . .

Why accept "austerity" (as that is understood in Greece -- no more annual bonuses of two months' salary, no more retirement at 53)? Suppose, after pocketing some of the bailout, we just threaten to collapse and make a mess of "Europe"?

Greece now knows the terrific strength of weakness. Beware of Greeks -- or any other people -- receiving gifts.

There are a few predictions out there that the entire world economy could collapse in the next few years --- REALLY collapse. Perhaps the examples of GM and Greece show us how this might become possible.

Parental Warning Label on the Constitution and Declaration of Independence?

We MUST protect children from history (and science - read on, and please watch the Michael Crichton videos).

Children must be especially vulnerable to history when they get to high school, judging from the actions of some educators. In North Carolina, they proposed starting high school American History in 1877. You know. About the time the Progressive Movement got its start. Earlier history would be "covered" in civics and economics (???) classes. Our intellectual betters dropped this proposal after protests and made new proposals which would meet their goal of downgrading early American history.

Orson Scott Card:

Remember that the people creating this new curriculum were taught in college not to value the old "hero-centered" stories; they were taught to despise the works of "dead white males."

But America was created, like it or not, by the mostly-British-ancestry men who led the struggle for independence and created the Constitution and then fought the bloody Civil War to end the evil practice of slavery in America.

They were the good guys. They were the heroes. And if we downgrade their achievements, and then make the modern heroes of the Left the only ones we teach about in high school, it's still going to be propaganda for the Left. . . .

It is time that tax-supported education cease promulgating the values of the extreme Leftist elite that dominates the university faculties and the educational establishment, and accept that the job of education is to transmit the values of the people who pay the taxes.

When we require people, under penalty of law, to send their children to the public schools, then there is a solemn responsibility to pass on to those children the culture that made our nation a light to the world. (Which it is, except in the delusional mindset of America-hating intellectuals who have no qualms about attacking America while sucking on the public udder.)

There are no educational experts; their "educational science" is a joke; and even if it were not, their expertise as "professional educators" would only extend to methodology, not content.

The content of courses is another matter entirely, and we all have a right to a voice in deciding that. Especially history courses, since those are the classes that create the American self-story for the next generation.

No one group should own the teaching of history in our schools -- like our government, it should be a compromise among all the beliefs that are part of our polity. But the arbiter should always be the facts, not one ideology.

State and national educational administrations have long been dominated by one elitist minority which thinks its favorite facts are the only ones that it is important to teach.

They are still in charge. That is the problem, and the fact that they are still proceeding with the downgrade in America's founding stories (and the misplacement of the religion of environmentalism in world history instead of science) says that their agenda has not changed at all.

How did this happen? It's quite simple, really. Democrats have been controlling the state government for decades. . . .

Orson Scott Card is a Democrat. He's not a totalitarian. Read the whole thing.  (No wonder home schooling is becoming so popular these days.)  He also had a few words to say about science education:

And another thing: When they're designing the course for world history, they have shown no sign of eliminating that offensive proposal of including in it a unit on environmentalism. . .
The only appropriate place to teach about the subject is in biology class, and it will be called "ecology" and it will be based solely on actual science. Which, as has been obvious all along to anyone who understands what honest science looks like, will include "global warming" only to the same extent that biology class should include "Piltdown man" -- as an example of how science can be temporarily damaged by hoaxes designed to promote a particular point of view.

O. C. Card is not the only famous science fiction author who has worried in public about the damage to science by the environmental movement. Watch the three Michael Crichton videos linked at the link above. We could all learn something by studying the thoughtful way in which he answers students' questions. It's a shame that he left the world when he was so young. We're fortunate that educators allowed him on campus to talk with students, and that someone recorded these extraordinary encounters.

How Barak Obama Invented Himself

Despite the fact that he had written two autobiographical books, most Americans really didn't know much about Barak Obama when he was elected President.   Most of the mainstream media seemed to play a cheerleading role more than an investigative role concerning Obama's candidacy.

 Here's an interview with the author of a new, somewhat hagiographic biography. There's a lot of information in the interview about how Obama invented a black identity for himself. Early on, he apparently presented himself as the head of a "Joshua generation", with the promise of leading blacks into the promised land.

Consider this interview (and perhaps the book) along with the following articles by another man with a white mother and a black father, just like the President.  Although he addresses Obama's relationships with blacks elsewhere, these articles focus on the President's relationship to whites:

Obama and our post-modern race problem:

The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

Barak the Good:

Well, suppose you were the first black president of the United States and, therefore, also the first black head-of-state in the entire history of Western Civilization. You represent a human first, something entirely new under the sun. There aren't even any myths that speak directly to your circumstance, no allegorical tales of ancient black kings who ruled over white kingdoms.

If anything, you may literally experience yourself as a myth in the making. . . .

Does this special burden explain Barack Obama's embrace of scale as vision (if I don't know what to do, I'll do big things)? I think it does to a degree. It means, for example, that a caretaker presidency is not an option for him. . . .

Of the two great societal goals — freedom and "the good" — freedom requires a conservatism, a discipline of principles over the good, limited government, and so on. No way to grandiosity here. But today's liberalism is focused on "the good" more than on freedom. And ideas of "the good" are often a license to transgress democratic principles in order to reach social justice or to achieve more equality or to lessen suffering. The great political advantage of modern liberalism is its offer of license on the one hand and moral innocence — if not superiority — on the other. Liberalism lets you force people to buy health insurance and feel morally superior as you do it. Power and innocence at the same time.

This is an old formula for power, last used effectively on the presidential level by Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson's Great Society was grasping for moral authority after the civil rights movement. I doubt any white president could use it effectively today, and even ObamaCare passed by only a three vote margin in the House and with no Republican support at all. Worse, in the end, it passed not to bring the nation better health care but to pull a flailing Democratic presidency back from the brink. . . .

Mr. Obama's success has always been ephemeral because it was based on an illusion: that if we Americans could transcend race enough to elect a black president, we could transcend all manner of human banalities and be on our way to human perfectibility. A black president would put us in a higher human territory. And yet the poor man we elected to play out this fantasy is now torturing us with his need to reflect our grandiosity back to us. . . .

Of course, these views can't tell the whole story of Mr. Obama's rise to power, but the information at the links starts to add some pieces to a puzzle - how and why did he rise so fast, and then fall in popularity so fast?

UPDATE: From 2009, a former Democratic aide to Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, Brent Budowsky: Why is everyone saying "No" to President Obama?

Last Friday the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for doing nothing. Don’t blame the president. He did not ask for it, and had the grace to say he did not deserve it.

The Nobel Prize gets to the heart of the matter of the Obama presidency. The prize was not awarded to President Obama, but to the idea of Obama. . . .

The president has described himself as a Rorschach in which others with divergent views project their views onto him. This is brilliant politics in a campaign but a disastrous approach to governing. Opponents become energized, supporters become depressed, power centers become disrespectful, and the president who tries to be many things to many people influences very few to do anything of substance for change. . . .

Shelby Steele was not correct in predicting that trying to be too many things to too many people would prevent Obama's election. But maybe he was right about the eventual ability of Obama to "win" on policy issues.

It seems to me that Mr. Budowsky, as late as October of 2009, still viewed the President as trying to be "too many things to too many people" on the domestic front. Fascinating how different his perspective was from mine. I noticed that the President immediately started playing to his progressive base after his election while treating Americans who disagreed with him as insignificant (dismissing Republicans in Congress with, "I won" during his first meeting with them, for example,) or as enemies. Unfortunately for him, his base was not as large as he might have thought it was. His sudden reversal of the promise to be a "healer" alienated many. His policy proposals have sometimes reflected what may have seemed to him to be political realities, at odds with his statements, twitter and blog communications with his liberal base, and Mr. Budowsky's article reflects disappointment from that camp. But by then, the President had just about stopped two-way communication with the "other side".

His tendency to defer actual work on policy to his staff and the Democratic Congress followed the pattern he had shown when he headed up the Harvard Law Review, where people who did the actual work recalled him as sort of a figurehead leader there, too - showing up to say a few inspiring words and to talk with people from time to time while others shouldered the burden of putting the publication together.

Our last election was one in which America would probably have done better if there were a ceremonial leader of America (sort of the equivalent of the Queen of England) in which role Obama would have been a natural, along with a working President.

It seems to me that the President was exceptionally good at image-making. He did not seem to understand the "governing" bit too well, though. Virginia Postrel on Obama's "glamour problem":

reason: You’ve called glamour a beautiful illusion. A lot of people would say that describes President Obama.

Postrel: Yes, President Obama is a very glamorous figure. Glamour is a particular form of illusion. It’s an illusion that tells a truth about the audience’s desires, and it requires mystery and distance. During the campaign people projected onto Barack Obama whatever they wanted in a president or even in a country. Lying is usually a bad thing, but they would project onto him that he was lying about his positions because he secretly agreed with them: “Anyone that smart has got to be a free trader at heart. He’s just saying this to pander to those idiots. He can’t really mean it.”

You’ve seen, as he’s taken office and tried to govern, this back and forth where he is consciously or unconsciously trying to maintain his glamour—which requires a kind of distance from the political process so that people can continue to see him as representing them, regardless of their contradictory views—while actually trying to be president, which means you have to decide what to do about Guantanamo. You have to decide what health care bill you’re going to back. You have to decide all these things, and you’re going to make somebody disillusioned. This morning I saw that the former editor of Harper’s is about to write a book, The Mendacity of Hope, attacking Obama from the left. That’s the power and the downside of glamour. . .

What's In the Bill? Two "Knowledge Problems"

Even members of Congress who helped draft the Health Care Bill seem  shocked by what is in it. Why is this?

Glenn Reynolds goes a little deeper into Representative Henry Waxman's outraged, totalitarian-style demands that corporate CEOs subject themselves to a show trial to explain why they drifted from "the narrative".    Waxman and his friends planned so carefully to hide from voters most of the big costs of their health care bill until after the election, and these CEOs have the audacity to follow regulations which Mr. Waxman voted for, and which require those CEOs to disclose some of those costs NOW! Unacceptable!   Reynolds explains:

Economist Friedrich Hayek explained in 1945 why centrally controlled "command economies" were doomed to waste, inefficiency, and collapse: Insufficient knowledge. He won a Nobel Prize. But it turns out he was righter than he knew.

In his "The Use of Knowledge In Society," Hayek explained that information about supply and demand, scarcity and abundance, wants and needs exists in no single place in any economy. The economy is simply too large and complicated for such information to be gathered together. 

Any economic planner who attempts to do so will wind up hopelessly uninformed and behind the times, reacting to economic changes in a clumsy, too-late fashion and then being forced to react again to fix the problems that the previous mistakes created, leading to new problems, and so on. . .

Hayek's insight into economics and regulation is often called "The Knowledge Problem," and it is a very powerful notion. But recent events suggest that it's not just the economy that regulators don't understand well enough -- it's also their own regulations. This became apparent when various large businesses responded to the enactment of Obamacare by taking accounting steps to reflect tax changes brought about by the new health care legislation. The additional costs created by Obamacare, conveniently enough, weren't going to strike until later, after the November elections.

But both Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and Securities and Exchange Commission regulations require companies to account for these changes as soon as they learn about them. . .

Obamacare was supposed to provide unicorns and rainbows: How can it possibly be hurting companies and killing jobs? Surely there's some sort of Republican conspiracy going on here! More like a confederacy of dunces. Waxman and his colleagues in Congress can't possibly understand the health care market well enough to fix it. But what's more striking is that Waxman's outraged reaction revealed that they don't even understand their own area of responsibility - regulation -- well enough to predict the effect of changes in legislation.  In drafting the Obamacare bill they tried to time things for maximum political advantage, only to be tripped up by the complexities of the regulatory environment they had already created.   It's like a second-order Knowledge Problem.

. . . The United States Code -- containing federal statutory law -- is more than 50,000 pages long and comprises 40 volumes. The Code of Federal Regulations, which indexes administrative rules, is 161,117 pages long and composes 226 volumes. No one on Earth understands them all, and the potential interaction among all the different rules would choke a supercomputer. This means, of course, that when Congress changes the law, it not only can't be aware of all the real-world complications it's producing, it can't even understand the legal and regulatory implications of what it's doing.

Read the whole thing.

Update:  Explaining why Congress gave companies subsidies for not dumping retirees into the federal system when MediCare drug coverage was enacted.

Tea Partiers, Progressives and Political Ideologies

Scott at Powerline discusses a piece on the Tea Party movement by Michael Barone:

In "Tea partiers embrace liberty, not big government," Barone situates the Tea Party movement at one end of "an argument between the heirs of two fundamental schools of political thought, the Founders and the Progressives." Barone describes it as an old argument that has "been raised again by the expand-government policies of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders." Barone optimistically observes that "[m]ost Americans... are rejecting the path of dependence and are intent on declaring their independence once again." Here's hoping.

Of course, the Progressives have good intentions. Scott also recommends some books and articles on the ideologica origins of the Progressive Movement in America. With special attention to Woodrow Wilson.

Given the tense political times in which are are living, it might be a good idea to understand a little better where Progressive are coming from.

Our Christmas Gift from Congress

The Democratic Senators have been tirelessly wheeling and dealing over "health care reform", promising special gifts from the taxpayers to residents of states whose senator(s) are on the fence concerning how to vote. And both our senators and representatives have been asked to vote on several measures which they have not been given the opportunity to read.

Think back on your Christmas shopping this year. How long did it take you to decide on a suitable gift for everyone on your list? Think about gifts you have received from loved ones in past years that just didn't seem quite right. Then consider Virginia Postrel's piece on giving gifts. She takes it from the personal to the political in the last sentence:

The problem of buying good presents for other people, even people you supposedly know well, illustrates that old familiar Hayekian concept, the knowledge problem. If you can't even give your loved ones the right presents, how likely is it that a central authority could make the right decisions for everyone?

There are about 300 million people in the United States. Could YOU set up a centrally-run health care system which would serve all of them well at a reasonable cost? The Senate Leadership is so confident of their superior insight that they are trying to add language to make it very difficult for future Senates to change the rules concerning their Care Rationing Board. Follow the link. Time to read some Hayek. Thomas Sowell's Applied Economics wouldn't be a bad choice, either.

A very interesting observation in a short piece by Scott Stein, a blogger with whom I am not familiar:

I am re-reading Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and came across a passage that, though about the problems with monarchy, applies perfectly to today’s political class. . . Paine’s words describe the entire political class — career politicians and bureaucrats of both major parties with enough ego to want to govern

Men who look upon themselves as born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.

Think of members of Congress who have not worked in a business in decades, or ever, whose professional lives have for years consisted of self-aggrandizing committee meetings and speechifying — think of them confidently telling people how some new regulation will or will not affect businesses. Think of members of Congress who voted for a thousand-page bill that they have not read (and even if they have) confidently explaining how this will improve the lives of people subject to their whims, subject to the votes they cast in an act of party loyalty or as a political trade in order to receive funding for their home state or support for their own pet projects. . . (emphasis mine)

Read the whole thing.

Our ruling class has been developing for decades. But look at this graph of Presidential Advisors since Teddy Roosevelt. It shows the percentage of advisors with prior private-sector experience. Quite striking. Some presidents don't seem to value a private sector perspective much. No wonder the academic and bureaucratic mindset prevails in government. Theory and ideology are so much more attractive than messy reality.

Iowahawk: The True Christmas Spirit of the Beltway

Time to put Washington aside for a little time, preferring Frank Capra over Iowahawk, and to concentrate on having a Merry Christmas.

Coming Home from Copenhagen

Roger L. Simon summarizes his experience at the Copenhagen Climate Conference: "I have seen the future, and it stinks.

I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.

His comments on the European press and on ClimateGate are interesting. Also:

Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)

Simon did take advantage of his trip to repair a hole in his education:

But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home . . . finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first.

From the comments:

I would also urge you to read Hayek’s collection of essays titled “The Fatal Conceit”. I fortunately read his polemic 40 years ago and realized that I loved liberty more than equality. Hayek said that those that placed a higher value on liberty did better on any measure of equality, other than that of the grave or the gulag, than those who purported to produce a society of equals.

Weekend Break - images and a little music

Hope you enjoy them.

Classic illustrations of Dickens novels.

Snowflakes up close.

Beautiful Libraries.

Jay Walker's Library.

Sippican Cottage: Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. Sometimes this guy writes in a way that really gets to me. And then he posts of video of a Japanese country-western group.

After-Christmas Reading - How the World Works

Thomas Sowell's reading list: Dick Morris is the man who helped rescue Bill Clinton's presidency from a situation similar to Obama's situation now. He may not always be correct in his prognostications, and he may be annoying sometimes, but he knows how Washington works.

The Character of Nations sounds interesting.

The very title of “The Character of Nations” is a challenge to the prevailing ideology that denies or downplays underlying differences among individuals, groups and nations. There are many examples of these differences. For example, Professor Codevilla says: “While it is unimaginable to do business in China without paying bribes, to offer one in Japan is the greatest faux pas.”

He sees the things that are valued differently in different cultures as the key to everything from economic progress to personal freedom.

But these values are not set in stone— which means that countries which currently benefit from a given set of values can lose those benefits when those values get lost.

Codevilla says: “The reason why inhabitants of the First World should keep the Third world in mind is that habits prevalent in the countries that became known as the Third World are a set of human possibilities that any people anywhere can adopt at any time. As Argentina showed in the twentieth Century, falling from the First World to the Third can be easy and quick.”

I'm not in the market for a college right now. But Sowell's own books on the housing boom and bust and Applied Economics are timely. The first is said by reviewers not to spare any involved segment of society from criticism. The second is recommended for people planning new social programs, or voting for people who create new social prgrams. So that those programs don't end up hurting more than helping.

Here's a post by someone I don't know much about for people who think that there's such a thing as laissez-faire capitalism in the United States.

The current state and the current banking sector require one another; neither can exist without the other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.

Remember this point the next time somebody tells you that "free market madmen" caused the current financial crisis that is threatening to undermine the economy. There is no free market. There is no "laissez-faire capitalism." The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine "laissez-faire capitalism" has never existed.

Guess I'm going to have to break down and read something by Hayek. Update: Former lefty radical Roger L. Simon recommends The Road to Serfdom, which he just finished reading, as a way to improve your understanding of world events today, ("Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944.") and a commenter recommends The Fatal Conceit. I've also been thinking that I should read something by Gramsci or Lakoff, to help me understand the post-Stalin thinking and actions of the Left.

From New Ledger, an interview with the author of "The End of Secularism" - by which he means the end of the idea that secularism is a neutral position to which everyone should default when in public. Interesting. And a list of other books, heavy on world history.

For science fiction (or movie) buffs, there's a Michael Crichton retrospective. Videos from his educational activities here and here.

Comic relief for grumpy people: Compilatation of Florence King's columns in her Misanthrope's Corner.

Classic children's literature available here.

How the Science became "Settled"

Didn't those CRU scientists ever have a chemistry or physics teacher?

A lot of people seem to be in shock that they threw away their raw data and won't reveal their computer models. The Big 3 networks maintained a news blackout concerning ClimateGate for 12 days (and the BBC had kept the information under wraps for 6 weeks before that). But now Jon Stewart has done a segment on the scandal. Won't be long now until the Big 3 (and other reluctant journalists) have to say something. Maybe they'll focus on the leak, like Senator Barbara Boxer or the New York Times:

We won’t publish on illegally acquired documents. You know, unless doing so would hurt national security, or something.

Meanwhile, the "swarm-intelligence of the blogosphere" is producing lots of information on the technical aspects of the scandal. A ClimateGate document database is up at PajamasMedia if you want to take your own look into how the data fell short of normal scientific standards. More resources here, and here. Or follow some of the links below for a quick education about why the current scandal is important.

Why are scientific standards so low for "climate science"? The medical device company Tigerhawk works for has to validate the software for its studies. Officers of the company (like him), and others, would be subject to prison time if they threw away the raw data for a study which they used to support the use of a new product. He reacts to the revelation that scientists at CRU threw away much of their raw data:

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

So, basically we are being asked to restructure the entire economy of the planet on the say-so of a few "scientists" whose work cannot be verified or even reconstructed. Is there any intellectually honest person who thinks that is a good idea?

THERE APPARENTLY ARE people who still think it's a good idea. Prodigious amounts of carbon will be spewed into the environment for the upcoming climate conference in Copenhagen.

Asked to comment on the Climategate scandal, some environmentalists still insist that nothing much has changed because the studies were peer reviewed and because "The Science is Settled".

Fabulous how the "Pentagon of Climate Change" at CRU was able to get the science "settled" in spite of so many obstacles. Like a prominent, tenured professor of meteorology at MIT who is a "denier":

The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. . . .

What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 . . . represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.

A re-cap of some of the techniques used by the alarmists to "settle" the science:

1. Coercion and manipulation involving peer review: Some scientific journals published papers with which they disagreed, so they got those journals blacklisted and/or editors fired.

2. Ad hominem attacks: Some of the alarmists equated anyone who didn't follow the narrative with holocaust deniers. But as Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt and Clive Jones remind us, the Holocaust actually happened. Blair has a little fun imagining a counter-slur for the "warmies" at the last link.

3. Denying access to data: Since they couldn't even replicate their own data, top global warming alarmists refused to provide any information to people who wanted to check their work in a normal, scientific manner. They even threw away much of their raw data. They discussed deleting even more information after receiving FOI requests, and probably actually did delete more data.

4. Reinforcing "the narrative" outside the scientific community: The media and celebrities advanced the narrative.

5. Protecting moneyed interests: Politicians, along with Big Business and Big Academia had a lot riding on their conclusions. Careers of scientists have been ended and lives ruined for challenging the data of people with more prestige, when the stakes were not nearly as high.

This helps explain why many of the "denier" scientists who have publicly challenged the alarmist data are already retired or are professionals in other fields. And why a scientist who agrees with the theory of man-made global warming, but who suggests cheaper and more people-friendly solutions which do not involve control over the world's economy, lost his job after an inquisition-style hearing.

Why did they think they were justified in these (un)ethical practices? There have long been reasons to suspect that rigorous scientific methods were not being used by many of the scientists who "settled the science". It's time we better understood the philosophy behind Post-normal Science and its use in the Proof of Global Warming. From 2007:

Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, argues in the Guardian that while scientific evidence may cast doubt on Global Warming why believe science? When a larger truth must be expressed, then "post-normal" science must be employed. . . .

Hulme argues that Global Warming is so important that everyone must act to stop it, whether or not it is scientifically known to exist.

Seems to me that this philosophy gave people permission for the distortions of traditional science which allowed the science to become settled in the most politically advantageous way. The discussions in the comment threads for these two-year-old posts are extremely interesting in light of the recent scandal. If politically-correct thinking like "post-normal science" is invading even the hard sciences in universities, we have some serious reforms to consider. Incidentally, costs for higher education are rising faster than health care costs in America.

Historic perspective: We've been facing doom from melting arctic ice off and on for 128 years.

Happy Birthday Johnny Mercer, Happy Anniversary Rogers & Hammerstein

Powerline celebrates the 100th birthday of Johnny Mercer, with an appreciation of his place in the Great American Songbook, with lots of links and a video of Midnight Sun,

"It's as if the lyric itself is a midnight sun, a last blaze of an Alley style extinguishing itself..."

Mark Steyn is telling stories about Mercer in his music column all month.

We’re after the same rainbow’s end
Waiting round the bend
My huckleberry friend
Moon River and me…

Where is Moon River? Everywhere and nowhere. But, if you had to pin it down, you’d find it meandering at least metaphorically somewhere in the neighborhood of Savannah, Georgia. At one point, the town’s most celebrated musical emissary was Hard-Hearted Hannah, the Vamp of Savannah. But then the American Songbook’s huckleberry friend showed up: John Herndon Mercer, born in Savannah one hundred years ago, November 18th 1909. The family home, the Mercer House, is the setting for the most famous book written about Savannah, Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil. . .

He's writing about songs like Goody, Goody and Blues in the Night and Hooray for Hollywood. More on Midnight Sun and later songs. Mercer didn't exactly get stuck in a rut as far as musical styles go.

But it was also the 50 anniversary of The Sound of Music hitting broadway a couple of days ago.

Good stuff. Great American Songbook, indeed.

Books about America's Early Years

Recommendations here.

Ayn Rand was a nut?

Maybe so. At the very least, she was very single-minded and dogmatic. And it is true that her philosophy does not accurately reflect the values of most conservatives, which is one thing that conservative need to make clear. Even if they respect and agree with part of what she taught.

Pej, who has a libertarian bent, puts the nuttiness of Rand in perspective:

–Peter Wehner. Having read Rand, I would say that she doesn’t even qualify as being a good novelist.

That having been written, I will take Rand over Marx anyday.

Even as a teenager, I didn't think The Fountainhead's story line, particularly the part about Howard Roark not even needing parents, was particularly realistic. But it offered some interesting insights into how the world works. I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but we are getting some business people withdrawing from business activity at this time because of a hostile regulatory environment, sort of like John Galt in the novel.

My theory is that Ayn Rand's rather obsessive and single-minded focus on individual liberty and related values was largely a result of her family's searing experience with Marxists. Having no religion to refer to for a more complete set of moral values, she went toward the opposite of Marxism in her philosophy. She thought that voluntary exchange of goods and services was more moral than police force in economic matters.

Which brings us, sort of, to the image many Progressives hold in their minds about Conservatives:

Our [Democrat] moral values, in contradiction to the Republicans’, is we don’t think kids ought to go to bed hungry at night. ~~ Howard Dean 5/22/2005

That one, sincerely offered and wholely indecent quote pretty much sums up the mindset of Progressives. Disagree with them, you can’t be mistaken, you are evil. What else can be concluded from the erstwhile chairman of the Democratic Party, who actually believes Republicans want children to starve?

It certainly is the basis of the arguments of those who want the nationalization of American Medicine . . . .

Right organizes against its leadership, Left not so much

Wretchard writes about the successful challenge from the Right to the official Republican candidate for the 23rd congressional district in New York, Dede Scozzafava. This embarrassed a lot of people in Republican leadership. This also led to some very emotive, scurrilous language about the Right from NYT columnist Frank Rich. Wretchard points out an interesting question from Mr. Rich:

Where are the Tea Parties of the Left?

Wretchard has more concerning how and why much of the Left's potential revolutionary energy is being channeled into a top-down organization.

There is also some appreciation in this piece of the moderate style of the much-discussed Saul Alinsky, relative to many activists on the Left.

Surprising insights from Saul Alinsky via the Blue Collar Professor:

Let us in the name of radical pragmatism not forget that in our system with all its repressions we can still speak out and denounce the administration, attack its policies, work to build an opposition political base. True, there is government harassment, but there still is that relative freedom to fight. I can attack my government, try to organize to change it. That’s more than I can do in Moscow, Peking, or Havana. Remember the reaction of the Red Guard to the “cultural revolution” and the fate of the Chinese college students. Just a few of the violent episodes of bombings or a courtroom shootout that we have experienced here would have resulted in a sweeping purge and mass executions in Russia, China, or Cuba. Let’s keep some perspective.

The Professor's take on Alinsky's statement above:

Again, what is remarkable about this passage is his recognition that the Communist regimes that are the model for his ideology are also brutally suppressive governments. Conversely, the government he is trying to overthrow is democratic and tolerant of dissent: this is called false consciousness. He cannot recognize that his own values inevitably lead not to liberation but to suppression. Paradoxically, he shares the values of his enemy (capitalists) and deplores the values of his associates (communists). Why?

I think the answer lies in the deluded Leftist belief that things must be "fixed." Yet, they do not attempt to fix the murderous regimes employing their own philosophy; they try to fix those governments which are functioning. Again, why? I can't answer that yet. . .

The Professor has more on the partial adoption of Alinsky's methods and philosophy by President Obama.

One can also see where President Obama acquired the style of pragmatism and soft-speaking to mask subversive action. Yet, young people on the Left wear Che shirts, our filmmakers make Che movies, and everything old is new again. . . . "

Read both of the pieces linked above for some interesting insights into our current political situation. Whether you agree or disagree with the authors.

Scary Halloween Reading

From David Horowitz, “Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and Me”. No wonder he needs bodyguards on university campuses. He is writing in an "in your face" style here - denouncing more and explaining less than I would like. I've heard him speak more persuasively and less angrily on the radio than in his opening salvo against Alinsky here. He's a fascinating guy - the son of communists and former champion of the Black Panthers who became disillusioned in part because they murdered each other and their supporters.

You might want to read Alinsky's book before Horowitz' series. Or Sanford Horwitt’s book about Alinsky. Or Gramsci. Why didn't I learn about any of these people in college? I knew something about the radical movements they, and their more violent ideological brethren, spawned. And I had never heard of Lakoff until this year, either. Even though I have been aware for some time of the deceptive misuse and selective application of words which are favorite tactics, or "crucial intellectual moves" within the "progressive" movement.

Alinsky's model worked great for President Obama during his rise to power, but doesn't seem to be working out so well right now. In fact, some of Alinsky's methods are being used against the Head Community Organizer now. From Instapundit:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

Note also the history of the phrase, "Speaking Truth to Power".

Of course, Obama did not accept all of Alinski's advice. He didn't think community organizing worked without a strong leader. And Alinski also warned that when the "have-nots" gained power, they would behave as badly as those whom they had overthrown.

The Alinsky model (and its Gramscian predecessor) is far better at telling people how to overthrow an existing power structure or cultural system than at explaining how to establish and maintain a new structure or system. Something to keep in mind as liberal Democrats steeped (or at least dipped) in the Gramscian tradition make big plans to destroy, rather than reform the insurance industry as we know it and micro-manage your health care. What are the chances now that they will read the final bill before voting on it?

Scary Halloween links from Maggie's Farm.

Oh, and here's a book for kids, too.

Mark Levin: Liberty and Tyranny

Mark Levin talks about his book, Liberty and Tyranny, with Glenn Reynolds. One of his main goals in writing the book was to explain the principles behind conservatism to conservatives who have always "felt" conservative, but weren't sure of the reasons why.

Levin is clearly highly intelligent, but uncomfortable for me to listen to on the radio because of the rather prickly "east coast" style which comes out when he loses patience with someone. I prefer to listen to him in conversation with someone else about an interesting topic (as with Reynolds here). It sounds from reviews like his book is well-written. He went against type to write another popular book - about rescuing a dog from the pound: Rescuing Sprite. HE gets amazingly choked up about that dog on the radio. And earlier, he wrote Men in Black, about the growing power of the Supreme Court.

He talks in this video about his early days in the Reagan Administration, when he encountered boxes of Saul Alinsky's books being distributed through tax dollars. He and Glenn then move to current affairs.

It's an interesting bit of video involving one of the "right-wing radicals" on talk radio. Might change your perceptions a little. Reynolds apologizes for thinking that guys like Levin were too "extreme" in their views of Obama during the election.

Related: Glenn Reynolds worries about the new administration's desire to control the media.

Norman Borlaug, the man who fed the world

"The man who defused the population bomb".

“Norman Borlaug arguably the greatest American of the 20th century died late Saturday after 95 richly accomplished years. The very personification of human goodness, Borlaug saved more lives than anyone who has ever lived. He was America’s Albert Schweitzer: a brilliant man who forsook privilege and riches in order to help the dispossessed of distant lands. That this great man and benefactor to humanity died little-known in his own country speaks volumes about the superficiality of modern American culture.”

American media culture, anyway.

I don't remember learning about Norman Borlaug in school. This 2000 interview gives you an idea what Borlaug did. Pej picks out an interesting segment. Jeff Jacoby calls him "the man who hated hunger".

I do remember learning a lot about Rachel Carson, whose theories turned out to be way off the mark. The application of those theories killed millions of poor people, notably pregnant women and children, in Africa and other third world countries. But she had good intentions and wrote well. Good intentions and effective persuasion are what count today, apparently.

Norman Borlaug "doesn't fit the narrative". A lot of people with good ideas today "don't fit the narrative". A lot of people who are actually taking action to do good "don't fit the narrative", either. We need to look beyond the news to see some of them. You may know a few right in your own neighborhood, or even in your own family.


p.s.: Rachel Carson wasn't the only ground-breaking environmentalist around during the same time period (and before). Another environmentalist who wrote well, and more temperately (at least in the essays I've read).