Are my aunt and her neighbors kidding themselves out of desperation? That’s possible; it’s hard to live without hope, and people can be creative at manufacturing reasons to be optimistic. (Though the truth is that Iraqis are not, as a rule, an optimistic group, and are inclined by cultural habit to see things darkly. But that’s another story.) It’s true that the murderers in Iraq are still at work. On the other hand, I’m far more inclined to take seriously a picture of Baghdad that comes from a life-long Baghdadi than one coming from a Westerner who has parachuted into town for a while, and who doesn’t speak the language.
Yet Iraqis who desperately want to lead normal lives are not the only ones with an incentive to interpret events in their own interests. If one listens to the usual suspects among certain journalists, academics, and politicians, the ongoing crackdown is futile and doomed to fail. But that’s a conclusion that many of these figures reached even before the security sweep began. In other words, some of the crackdown’s critics have created incentives, professional and personal, to perceive Iraqi and American failure. People can be creative at manufacturing reasons to be pessimistic, too.
One of the early proponents of anthropogenic global warming has changed his mind:
His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” in l’ Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro’s retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. “The cause of this climate change is unknown,” he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the “science is settled.”
Apparently the Atlas launch I mentioned earlier is Thursday night, not Friday. Makes it a little tougher to go up and see it, but probably worth it anyway, even if we lose a little sleep.
Mark Whittington has a useful set of recommendations on space policy for the next president. I could nitpick some of it, but there’s actually little with which I disagree. But I think he missed one: reform ITAR.
Mark Whittington has a useful set of recommendations on space policy for the next president. I could nitpick some of it, but there’s actually little with which I disagree. But I think he missed one: reform ITAR.
Mark Whittington has a useful set of recommendations on space policy for the next president. I could nitpick some of it, but there’s actually little with which I disagree. But I think he missed one: reform ITAR.
Which is the extreme position: to think that people should be able to put substances into their own body without government interference, or that people should be imprisoned for ingesting smoke from burning leaves?
Is it really “extreme” to think one religion inferior to another? I’m not a member of either one, but if one religion really does preach peace and turning the other cheek, and another believes that all non-adherents to it should die, who really doesn’t believe that the former is superior to the latter? This kind of loony moral relativism is what I find extreme, and not in a good way.
In any event, like Glenn Reynolds, I consider myself an extremist, but an eclectic one. And like Barry Goldwater, I don’t think that’s necessarily a vice.
Looking at alternative outcomes of the Reagan-Thatcher-John Paul II world, it is hard to see how any other leaders in any of the three seats of power could have done better, and very easy to see how they could have done worse — all the way to outbreak of nuclear war. Therefore, while leaving any actual theodicy to more venturesome commentators, it is easy to see why some considered the advent of these three leaders (and their not-statistically-likely serial survival of assassination attempts) to be providential. Since I find theodicy to be too problematic to consider (if God does move human events directly, there’s far too much moral dark matter assumed in the problem for we poor three-dimensional observers to be able to draw any conclusions from it), I think O’Sullivan spent either too much time or too little discussing that possibility. If we assume we cannot intuit divine knowledge or intention in specific human events, then that is all one can really say about the matter; if we assume one can understand such things, then the events O’Sullivan discusses would be one of the principal theological events of our century, and could easily merit not just the bulk of O’Sullivan’s book, but a library full of books.
We need to come up with more leaders like them. Sadly, I don’t see any in office currently, or in the current race.
Congress could give some well-regarded “best and brightest” regulators a big pile of cash, say $100 billion, and have them correct prices by trading, buying when they think prices should rise and selling when they think prices should fall. If regulators really do know how to choose good price pushes, then not only will they correct “biased” stock prices, they will increase their pile of cash, and we won’t need to give them any more.
If, however, regulators lose their pile of cash, let them come back to Congress begging for more, explaining how they had it all wrong before, but now they know when to push prices up versus down. And after very some public hang-wringing, let Congress give them another $100 billion to work with. And if regulators come back a few years later asking for even more money, explaining how they had it all wrong again, but now they know how to do it right, let Congress given them another very public scolding, along with another $100 billion.
And if regulators lose that pile, maybe Congress and the public will have had enough, and will quit the price fixing business. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me thrice, shame on me. The $300 billion will have been well worth it to clearly show regulator inefficiency, especially since that money would just have been transferred to financial speculators, the people who really rationalize stock prices.
Sadly, though, I suspect that many still wouldn’t get the clue.
He’ll be pretty embarrassed in a couple decades, when we’ve evolved beyond HTML (and the thing’s getting a little wrinkly). Of course, by then, tattoo removal technology should be pretty far along as well…
on Reagan, Thatcher and the Pope.