EPATER LE BOURGEOIS: “I would trade a successful career for a family of my own.”
The title of an entry by Amelia McDonell-Parry at thefrisky.com
H/T to Glen Reynolds, aka Instapundit
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“. . . the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does, and only that. All the rest is Digibabble.”
- Tom Wolfe,
from Digibabble, Fairy Dust, and the Human Anthill
in Hooking Up (published in 2000)
Wolfe, I would argue is the greatest writer and social critic of the last 50 years. His three novels are all astonishing works of great literature, and his essays are light years ahead of his contemporaries in their identification, documentation, and critique of social trends.
His books are worth reading and re-reading.
“What is important in history is not only the events that occur but the events that obstinately do not occur. The outstanding event of modern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear. For many millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum was filled, by fascism, Nazism and Communism, by attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental politics, form much of the substance of the history of our century. But for many more millions – for the overwhelming majority of the human race, in fact – religion continued to be a huge dimension in their lives. Nietzsche, who had so accurately predicted the transmutation of faith into political zealotry and the totalitarian will to power, failed to see that the religious spirit could, quite illogically, coexist with secularization, and so resuscitate his dying God. What looked antiquated, even risible, in the 1990s was not religious belief but the confident predictions of its demise once provided by Feuerbach and Marx, Durkheim and Frazer, Lenin, Wells, Shaw, Gide, Sartre and many others.”
- Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 700
This is one of the best presentations of data I have ever seen. It may be the shortest 20 minute talk you will ever listen to.
On one level, I am highly impressed by the elegant presentation of the data.
On a second level, I am fascinated by what the data shows – our conceptions of the world are rooted in data that is now 50 years old. In many ways the “developing third world” has caught up to the western world – at least in small family size and high incomes.
On a third level, there are still inequalities in health, especially infant mortality.
Unexamined in this presentation are the implications for nations whose fertility has fallen below replacement levels. In those nations, population will decline and there will be severe economic difficulties in funding pensions and healthcare for the elderly.
Still, watch the talk. One of the best from TED:
hat tip to NRO & the Llama Butchers
“I want to steer markets.”
“I want them set free!”
Nice visual play on the mal-investment hangover!
The 1929 crash exposed the naivety and ignorance of bankers, businessmen, Wall Street experts and academic economists high and low; it showed they did not understand the system they had been so confidently manipulating. They had tried to substitute their own well-meaning policies for what Adam Smith called ‘ the invisible hand’ of the market and they had wrought disaster. Far from demonstrating, as Keynes and his school later argued – at the time Keynes failed to predict either the crash or the extent and duration of the Depression – the dangers of a self-regulating economy, the degringolade indicated the opposite: the risks of ill-informed meddling.
- Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 240
I teach the chapter entitled Degringolade to my students tomorrow. In context, the chapter title is a trilingual pun. The students’ first assignment was to research the meaning of the title.
The climategate emails were ‘hacked’ in the same way the that Toto hacked open the curtain that revealed the truth about the wizard of Oz.
And the warmers’ response is the same as the wizard’s: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” “The emails were hacked!”
- Rob Shearer
Harding inherited an absentee presidency [Wilson had been incapacitated by a stroke for the last 17 months of his second term] and one of the sharpest recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan was later to call it ‘our last natural recovery to full employment.’ But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the only president in American history who actually brought about massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure.
- Paul Johnson, “The Last Arcadia” in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties
Peter the Great, born 1672, Tsar of Russia 1682-1725
Below, I have linked in a sample chapter from my current writing project, Famous Men of the 18th Century.
Like the previous Famous Men books, this one will include about 30 short biographies of key figures whose lives will collectively, tell the story of the period from 1700-1800. The target audience is students in the 6th-11th grades. In our scope and sequence, we’d recommend parents use this book with their sixth or seventh graders, and then again in the junior year of high school.
Comments and feedback will be most appreciated. This chapter began as part of the original series by Poland and Haaren, but if you compare their text with mine, you will see that I have made large alterations and added a great deal of additional material.
My target is to finish these chapters by the end of next summer. I’m looking forward to taking a crack at the American founders as well as key figures from Britain and France. Though I must confess that I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how interesting Peter and King Charles XII of Sweden have turned out to be.
- Rob Shearer
Famous Men-18th Peter the Great
“. . . his methods of therapy have proved on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than cure the sick. We now know that many of the central ideas of psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formulated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel’s Laws, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false.”
- Paul Johnson, Modern Times, p. 6
The reading assignment for the Year Four students at the Schaeffer Study Center this week is chapter one, “A Relativistic World.”
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