Notes and observations. Diversions and digressions. All done far too infrequently.
Tuesday, March 29, 2005
The obvious restated
Stanley Crouch makes the case for a Jazz Museum in Harlem
... there is something different about jazz, which is largely a performance art based in improvisation. Its richness allows for the listener and the performer to enjoy the invention of value, which is what artistic improvisation means. It is not just pulling anything out of the air; it means pulling value out of the air.
That's the best description of improvisation I've ever read. Congress should sign up for another million.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Sunday, March 27, 2005
The New York TImes reviews Paglia
Read the entire review. It's largely laudatory but a little forced in the end. James sees the need to let just a little of the air out of the balloon.She flies as high as you can go, in fact, without getting into the airless space of literary theory and cultural studies. Not that she has ever regarded those activities as elevated. She has always regarded them, with good reason, as examples of humanism's perverse gift for attacking itself, and for providing the academic world with a haven for tenured mediocrity. This book is the latest shot in her campaign to save culture from theory. It thus squares well with another of her aims, to rescue feminism from its unwise ideological allegiances. So in the first instance ''Break, Blow, Burn'' is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Very good question for the economic historians among us
Saturday, March 19, 2005
Libertarians v. Conservatives; The Case Study of Terri Schiavo
The libertarians will have none of the sanctimony, arguing that the decision to end a life is a private matter that doesn't warrent government intervention. No one is committing fraud; someone's in charge according to the courts and that's the husband. What business does Congress have in overruling a federal court judge? What ever happened to the separation of powers? Will the Repubilcans overreach one more time, (the real reason they may lose.)
Samizdata.net carries the water for the pull-the-plug crowd rather convincingly. And Micha Gertner at Catallarchy will brook no Schiavo analogies to the Holocaust.
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Why do I think Jeffrey Sachs is a dangerous man?
The noted economist William Easterly sums it up better than I ever will in the Washington Post.
Sachs pays surprisingly little attention to the history of aid approaches and results. He seems unaware that his Big Plan is strikingly similar to the early ideas that inspired foreign aid in the 1950s and '60s. Just like Sachs, development planners then identified countries caught in a "poverty trap," did an assessment of how much they would need to make a "big push" out of poverty and into growth, and called upon foreign aid to fill the
"financing gap" between countries' own resources and needs. This legacy has influenced the bureaucratic approach to economic development that's been followed ever since -- albeit with some lip service to free markets -- by the World Bank, regional development banks, national aid agencies like USAID and the U.N. development agencies. Spending $2.3 trillion (measured in today's dollars) in aid over the past five decades has left the most aid-intensive regions, like Africa, wallowing in continued stagnation; it's fair to say this approach has not been a great success. (By the way, utopian social engineering does not just fail for the left; in Iraq, it's not working too well now for the right either.)
For more on Easterly, read my brief review of his stupendous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics.
Libertarianism as the "Marxism of the Right"
The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. Simple physical security, which even a prisoner can possess, is not freedom, but one cannot live without it. Prosperity is connected to freedom, in that it makes us free to consume, but it is not the same thing, in that one can be rich but as unfree as a Victorian tycoon̢۪s wife. A family is in fact one of the least free things imaginable, as the emotional satisfactions of it derive from relations that we are either born into without choice or, once they are chosen, entail obligations that we cannot walk away from with ease or justice. But security, prosperity, and family are in fact the bulk of happiness for most real people and the principal issues that concern governments.
Read the whole thing.
Catallarchy has an equally well-argued response. This, however, isn't convincing.
Meanwhile, try Brian Caplan's Libertarian Purity Quiz.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Thursday, March 03, 2005
The end of atheism, first Antony Flew now the world!
As British philosopher Anthony Flew, once as hard-nosed a humanist as any, mused when turning his back on his former belief: It is, for example, impossible for evolution to account for the fact than one single cell can carry more data than all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.
Writes Turkish philosopher Harun Yahya, "Atheism, which people have tried to for hundreds of years as 'the ways of reason and science,' is proving to be mere irrationality and ignorance."More on atheism by way of Jane Galt.