NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Scaling up from atomic assembly and individual nanodevices to macroscopic systems.
Archive for 2011
January 28, 2011
MARY KATHARINE HAM: To “Sir” With Love.
“DENIAL OF MONEY FOR HOUSEKEEPING:” Defining “domestic violence” down.
MICKEY KAUS: Letting Obama Off The Hook: Megan McArdle Is Way Too Understanding. “The dude just sold us an expensive universal health care program on the grounds that it was really a program of deficit-cutting entitlement reform (because it would ‘bend’ the health care cost curve)! Now that it’s time for real deficit-cutting entitlement reform instead of fake reform, he throws up his hands and says ‘Sorry, can’t be done. I’ll just tread water for a while.'”
EGYPT’S TIANANMEN SQUARE MOMENT?
PROF. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Fact-checking Bill Keller on NYT-Bay of Pigs suppression myth. “The suppression myth has it that the Times, at the request of President John F. Kennedy, suppressed or emasculated its reporting about the pending Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. But as I discuss in Getting It Wrong, in the 10 days before the ill-fated assault, the Times published several detailed reports on its front page discussing an invasion and exiles’ calls to topple Fidel Castro. And, I note, there is no evidence that Kennedy either asked or persuaded the Times to suppress, hold back, or dilute any of its pre-invasion reporting.”
Campbell is the author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. The Bay of Pigs story is one of them.
IT’S BACK: The Balanced Budget Amendment. When this was hot in the 1990s, I thought it was overly strong medicine. But the sickness seems more severe now, so I’m liking it more. Especially with a spending-as-percent-of-GDP cap.
“COMBAT OPERATIONS HAVE ENDED:” Obama’s Afghanistan Gaffe. “He was getting Afghanistan mixed up with Iraq. If this were Reagan or George W. Bush, the press would be all over it, depicting the president as senile, stupid, doddering, a pawn of his aides or vice president, or worse. Instead, the press has almost entirely ignored it.” The narrative is that he’s a brilliant speaker. Facts that interfere with the narrative get ignored.
UPDATE: A reader emails: “First we have a SOTU that is heavily plagiarized and now a verbal blunder…..I think the evidence is clear he is merely a puppet for Joe Biden.” Heh.
IN THE MAIL: The Ayatollahs’ Democracy: An Iranian Challenge.
THE AMERICAN NOMENKLATURA: “Increasingly our nation is divided, not between Rs and Ds, but between TIs and TBs: tribute imposers and tribute bearers. The imposers are gigantic banks, agri-businesses, higher education Colossae, government employees, NGO and QUANGO employees and the myriad others whose living is made chiefly by extracting wealth from other people. The bearers are the rest of us.”
BRUCE YANDLE: Where Do Jobs Come From?
BURN, AMERICA BURN: It’s not just Frances Fox Piven rooting for riots and violence in America. Here’s former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges on the Greek riots:
Here’s to the Greeks. They know what to do when corporations pillage and loot their country. They know what to do when Goldman Sachs and international bankers collude with their power elite to falsify economic data and then make billions betting that the Greek economy will collapse. They know what to do when they are told their pensions, benefits and jobs have to be cut to pay corporate banks, which screwed them in the first place. Call a general strike. Riot. Shut down the city centers. Toss the bastards out. Do not be afraid of the language of class warfare—the rich versus the poor, the oligarchs versus the citizens, the capitalists versus the proletariat. The Greeks, unlike most of us, get it.
Plus this from Matt Welch:
Hedges’ recent apocalyptic tear (which has resonance for at least some libertarians, not to mention Pagans) includes urging on sabotage two months ago, and calling corporations “little Eichmanns” last week. And this is no fringe character here–Hedges continues to receive respectful hearings in the Washington Post, Philadelphia Inquirer, Vancouver Sun, et al, and just last week he was named a finalist for the L.A. Press Club’s Online Journalist of the Year. You will search in vain for any mention of Hedges by the scores of journalistic commenters who have been warning for more than a year now (inaccurately, in my opinion) about impending political violence, inciteful right-wing rhetoric, and borderline sedition.
These hacks don’t mind violence at all, so long as it’s perpetrated by the right people, against the right people. Meanwhile, Hedges in the past has been on the receiving end of some grassroots action I can approve. More on that here.
Liberation under the Piven doctrine effectively becomes a choice by the serfs of which aristocracy they believe will do best by them, since worth is determined by the political process anyway. Which side do we back by our “mass actions”? Liberation becomes the process of putting the “right” people in charge of the masses. It is not — it is never — putting the masses in charge of themselves.
Why not put the masses in charge of their own lives? Because that would require facilitating innumerable transactions and contracts between individuals. That would require self-interest and economic calculation to propel the system. That would mean a market, whose job it would be for the state to keep fair, and that were too little a role for such as Piven thinks should rule the roost.
Meet the new boss, yada yada.
LAW REVIEW CIRCULATION continues to plummet. Well, between SSRN on the front end, and Lexis and Westlaw on the back end, this isn’t a huge surprise.
HEADLINE OF THE DAY: In Desperation Move, Egyptian Regime Shuts Down Access To IowaHawk.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Andrew Klavan: The Highway to Hell, Leftist Remix Edition.
SPUTNIK MOMENT: Soviet space expert James Oberg comments: “I’m seeing up close how ‘Palin Derangement Syndrome’ can compel otherwise intelligent people to foam at the mouth and babble nonsense to prove they’re right and she’s wrong. . . . It’s more complicated, but the essence is, Palin was right: the Soviets sowed the seed of their own collapse by setting off the Space Race.”
This is more like a “party like it’s 1773 moment.” We keep having those.
COLLEGES HAVING TO ADJUST TO guns on campus.
JENNIFER RUBIN: New Black Panther Party case: The facts are in.
JAMES TARANTO: The Politics of Bloodlust: Barbara Ehrenreich, Hendrik Hertzberg and the left’s disturbing preoccupation with violence. “America’s liberal left is preoccupied with salacious fantasies of political violence. These take two forms: dreams of leftist insurrection, and nightmares of reactionary bloodshed. The ‘mainstream’ media ignore or suppress the former type of fantasy and treat the latter as if it reflected reality. This produces a distorted narrative that further feeds the left’s fantasies and disserves those who expect the media to provide truthful information.”
Of course, nowadays that last group is known as “suckers.” Taranto continues:
But wait. How has it escaped Ehrenreich’s notice that the past two years have seen the greatest flowering of grass-roots democracy in America since the civil rights movement? We refer, of course, to the Tea Party movement. To be sure, you won’t see any Molotov cocktails at a Tea Party gathering. You may see some guns–a normal part of life in most of America–but they will be borne lawfully and not used violently.
Since the Tea Party advocates individualism and not socialism, we may assume that Ehrenreich strongly disapproves of it (as does her pal Piven). But to bemoan the dearth of grass-roots activism in America without even acknowledging the Tea Party’s existence suggests a detachment from reality bordering on the clinical.
Even odder, many on the left have advanced a false narrative in which the Tea Party is violent. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg did so in a column last week, in which he was still trying to justify the media’s falsely blaming the right for the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. . . . Hertzberg is saying no more than that liberal journalists like himself are justified in perpetuating the myth of conservative violence because they promulgated it in the first place.
Perhaps he is right that it is not the product of opportunism but rather of sincerely held prejudice. But would it be a defense of, say, Theodore Bilbo or Joseph McCarthy to say that they sincerely believed the prejudices and falsehoods they espoused? What’s more, Bilbo and McCarthy were politicians. Why is it so hard for journalists to remember that their job is to tell the truth?
It’s never too late for one more shot at blood libel, I guess. Read the whole thing. And remember: One could ask Joe McCarthy “Have you no decency?” With Piven, Hertzberg, Ehrenreich, et al., there’s no need to ask.