Category Archives: View

View sort of for Thursday, August 25, 2011

This is a test on Thursday August 25 from my laptop. I had to install LiveWriter and get it set to take care of my web site. Before I could do that I had to buy some time for my AT&T wireless gizmo. Clearly it all worked. Then I could not figure out how to get anything previously posted back into Livewriter for editing. This is a very peculiar experience. Clearly I am away from the Manor just now. The house crew reports that Sable is fine, all is well, and I will have stories: it’s still AT&T which is still The Phone Company when it comes to dealing with them. But that’s for another story.

It looks as if you have to keep local copies of anything you did in LiveWriter – if there’s a way to get them back off the cloud, I don’t know it yet.  The problem with the cloud is that it discourages you from making local copies. In any event I didn’t transfer any of them from the home system to this laptop.  It’s another adventure.

That turns out not to be the case. Double Click in LiveWriter on the Open Recent Post choice and that opens a new screen of options including downloading the titles of all the stuff on the log, meaning they can be brought back in and edited at need, keeping everything in the cloud until needed.

One of the reasons I started this place was as a daybook, a sort of open log. Over time it sort of lost that function although when I am on the road that returns.  I could delete all this but I think I’ll leave it. I am about to write up an AT&T experience as a short BYTE piece. It has been a long, and not particularly productive, day, but some progress has been made. Anyway I am now in control of LiveWriter and my WordPress log book, and I can get back to work on something more interesting.

View 689 Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Today’s Wall Street Journal offers us “A Value Added Tax Fuels Big Government”.

President Obama is now talking about a "balanced approach" to deficit reduction that includes a "revenue component" achieved by "tax reform."

Among the tax reforms getting attention is a value-added tax, or VAT. Similar to a sales tax (more about this below), the value-added tax has become a significant part of the revenue systems of Europe and also has been adopted by over 100 other nations. The VAT is believed to be a magical device that can stuff government coffers with money without untoward economic political consequences. It is no such thing.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576518274100145458.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

It is a warning that ought to be taken seriously. A VAT would lock the 7% exponential growth of government in place for decades; the result would be a doubling of the size and cost of government every 12 years until the collapse of the economy. The effect on the deficit would be even more drastic: at first the added revenues might reduce the deficit but as the effect of the tax worked its way through the economy, more jobs would be exported, more freedoms would be lost as we floundered about trying to keep things going, and more money would have to be borrowed to meet the costs which rise steadily.

If you doubt this, note that “Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said recently that food stamps were an "economic stimulus" and that "every dollar of benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity." There is always a good reason to spend more money. This is from an article entitled “Keynesian Economics vs. Regular Economics” which continues

Many observers may see how this idea—that one can magically get back more than one puts in—conflicts with what I will call "regular economics." What few know is that there is no meaningful theoretical or empirical support for the Keynesian position.

Economist Robert Barro then goes on to examine the evidence for the Keynesian multiplier, and finds little to none, while there is historical evidence that it doesn’t work.

The multiplier theory says that paying money to the poor for existing – Keynes once used the fantasy of burying jars of money for the poor to go out and dig up – gets that money into the economy. They will spend it, because they don’t have any money, and they need to eat. This creates demand for food, employing farmers, millers, bakers, teamsters, and others. The increased demand sparks the economy.

All of which sounds reasonable, but note that what happened in the housing market was that inserting money into the housing economy stimulated demand, that demand drove up prices, and the result was a bubble. The same seems to be happening to education. I was able to get through University by working. I did have three years of something like $30/week on the Korean GI Bill, out of which I had to pay tuition, books, and all living expenses. The GI Bill essentially covered tuition and my rent in an elderly lady’s home; food, books, clothing, and everything else were up to me. Fortunately we did not have federal minimum wage laws. I was free to engage with Reich’s Café, and took a “board job”. That consisted of an hour’s work at noon each day for a meal at any non-rush hour I chose. I also got tips, usually about a quarter for the hour. It wasn’t much, but it kept me fed. As to books, there was the library. It wasn’t a lavish living but I managed until I wangled an undergraduate assistantship in the animal lab.

With today’s education costs a year on the GI Bill wouldn’t cover a quarter’s tuition, and certainly wouldn’t leave anything over for rent.

My point is not that the GI Bill benefits ought to be larger: it is that the costs of education have risen exponentially, largely because so much money was injected into the system. When more money chases goods, the costs of the goods rise. In the case of education, I would argue that each rise in cost has come with a diminished quality all up and down the education line from Kindergarten to Graduate School, but that’s another discussion. Certainly the costs have risen exponentially and well above inflation rates.

Feeding the beast with VAT will produce more of what we have, without a lot of benefits; but be prepared for an onslaught of arguments for “Balance” and to be seduced with fair words about how painless and invisible a VAT will be.

Don’t feed the beast.

Notes on Economic Liberty

For those interested in Distributism, there is a discussion in yesterday’s mail. This morning I added a few more remarks to my reply. It is a discussion worth continuing. The late economist David McCord Wright speculated that Marx was correct in his prediction that capitalism inevitably trended toward greater and greater concentrations of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, and noted that there is considerable evidence for that observation in the pre-WW II concentration of European wealth into cartels. He also noted that the United States with its Sherman Anti-Trust Act had to some extent avoided that, and that this deserved much more study.

There are many other critics of unrestricted capitalism (including, of course, me). Among them were Wilhelm Roepke with his “Humane Economy” which was at one time a great deal more popular among conservatives than it is now. Neo-conservatives like Irving Krystal who came out of the Marx-Trotsky tradition did not so much reject Roepke as pay attention to others, particularly Hayek who favored a more “pure” libertarian approach to economics. Roepke was from a different tradition. He began as a socialist, but over time that changed. He also had practical experience: Roepke was one of the architects of the German Economic Miracle, and his Humane Economy rejects unrestricted capitalism and unrestricted growth; it is not an endorsement of Distributism so much as an attempt to apply many of the distributist principles to practical economics.

Wilhelm Röpke considered Ordoliberalism to be "liberal conservatism," against capitalism in his work Civitas Humana (A Humane Order of Society, 1944). Alexander Rüstow also has criticized laissez-faire capitalism in his work Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus (The Failure of Economic Liberalism, 1950). The Ordoliberals thus separated themselves from classical liberals^[2][6] like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. [From Wikipedia]

Roepke’s goal was freedom, and he repeatedly said that he rejected “all forms of collectivism.”

Notice that easily missed word: he distrusted all forms of collectivism. Roepke was an equal opportunity individualist. He feared the tendency even of capitalism to instrumentalize human beings, to turn the “market” or the “state” or “the forces of history” into things in themselves, crushing the very freedom it claims to admire. The market is made for man, not man for the market.

Freedom, then—rightly understood as obligation—is at the core of Roepke’s thought. But why should freedom work and socialism fail? Because it understands man not as an embodied appetite but as a soul. Our deepest need is not for things but for each other. He wanted a society in which

“… wealth would be widely dispersed: people’s lives would have solid foundations; genuine communities, from the family upward, would form a background of moral support for the individual; there would be counterweights to competition and the mechanical operation of prices; people would have roots and not be adrift in life without an anchor; there would be a broad belt of an independent middle class, a healthy balance between town and country, industry and agriculture.”

http://www.amconmag.com/article/2009/apr/20/00016/

It is also argued that Roepke had some influence over the direction of the Chinese economy, but I have no direct evidence of this.

If I seem to devote a great deal of time to Roepke, of whom many readers will find this the first clue to his existence, it is because I find his views congenial. I assigned A Human Economy along with Parkinson’s Evolution of Political Thought to my senior political theory seminar when I was teaching political science, and I would certainly include it on the reading list now. I do not believe that unrestricted capitalism can survive populist democracy, even when there is a strong Constitutionalist tradition. The trend is toward the more usual cycle of political systems, with Republics leading to Democracy and Democracy leading to a servile state and the rule of a New Class if they do not succumb to a Friend of the People who becomes a tyrant. Roepke and Wright offer an alternate path that may be acceptable to both masses and elites.

At one time Congress took such matters seriously, and produced documents discussing economics, the Welfare State, and Freedom. I even contributed to such discussions. I don’t think Congress has done that much since the late 1990’s.

I have often summed my political/economic views into a few simple axioms (which are not original with me, but I do not remember their source): Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. I find those principles consistent with all I know of politics and economics and their history.

More another time; it is a subject worth continuing.

A note on Parkinson’s book. The book is public domain, and there is a free copy available in pdf format on line. I gave that in a previous note. We are working on putting together a Kindle edition, which we will sell at a nominal fee. This will be in a good format and copy edited; the pdf version is very hard to read and I fear will drive potential readers away from what I still consider one of the best histories of political philosophy. Parkinson is not sufficient for understanding political thought, but he is better than most standard works, and his critiques of some of the political philosophers borders on being necessary. He raises points that need to be considered. Anyway we are working on that, and I’ll let you know when it’s done.

Regarding the eBook of Mote in God’s Eye, some formatting and proofreading errors were discovered and the book has been taken down temporarily while those are fixed. It will be back then the proofing is done. (This is being done by my New York agent so I don’t know the schedule but they regard it as high priority given the volume of sales we’ve had since it went up.)

And I am still working on getting the California Sixth Grade Reader into eBook shape; my advisors and readers who worked on it have done an admirable job, but now it’s pretty well up to me.  I’m dancing as fast as I can.

Can anyone suggest a good free cover for WEST OF HONOR? It’s a story of infantry war with essentially modern weapons in a Beau Geste setting…

A note on economic recovery and despair:

Spending, not entitlements, created the enormous deficit. We can get out of this hole.

http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-spending-not-entitlements-created-deficits#ixzz1VrBaD18e

View 689 Tuesday, August 23, 2011

I don’t do topical news, but today seems dominated by it, and I ought to be aware:

The topical news is the continued “Tripoli has fallen, sort of,” news from Libya. It seems only a matter of time, and perhaps the delay is a good thing, giving the West time to think how to respond and giving the sane rebels time to organize. We can wish them well.

And I will say that Obama’s reluctant response, assuming the position of hindmost, turned out well. Britain had a long tradition of muddling through that often worked; and Obama’s strategy of providing air power and some logistics while being involved minimally produced results at low cost. Qadaffi appears to be doomed. There is open looting in Tripoli, a sure sign that the security forces of the government are not in control in large areas of the city.

A tyrant is out, and unlike in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are not in. It happened on President Obama’s watch and he deserves the credit: without the US strike forces the rebels would long ago have been snuffed out.

Of course the concentration on Libya was interrupted by an earthquake between Richmond and Washington. At least one person is known to have motion sickness from this 5.9 quake between Charlottesville and Spottsylvania Courthouse. As a result three New York airports have been shut down, sections of the Pentagon evacuated, and there was an hour of great concern and reaction along the eastern seaboard.

A 5.9 magnitude earthquake jolted the East Coast, rattling people from Martha’s Vineyard to Washington, D.C. to North Carolina, prompting the evacuation of Congressional buildings, slowing rail and air traffic, and taking two nuclear reactors offline.

The earthquake sent people pouring out of office buildings, hospitals, the Pentagon and the State Department. The pillars of the capitol in Washington, D.C. shook. Alarms sounded in the FBI and Department of Justice buildings, and some flooding was reported on an upper floor of the Pentagon as a result of the quake.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/earthquake-measured-59-magnitude-rattles-washington-york/story?id=14364643

Presumably they will have fewer problems than Los Angeles did with the 6.6 Sylmar earthquake about 9 miles northeast of my house in 1971. One of my grandchildren is in pre-school in Washington. One presumes that life will return to normal along the east coast.

I have heard that there are some consequences, and of course most of the reactions were to what people thought might be a terrorist attack; it’s not astonishing that security agencies might think so. They have got themselves a live fire test, apparently without serious consequences. There is talk of allowing government workers a day off. Shut down the government because of a 5.8 40 miles away. It tells us that we can do without the government for a day or two.

Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilisations, say scientists

Rising greenhouse emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/aug/18/aliens-destroy-humanity-protect-civilisations?CMP=twt_gu

A NASA study reviews scenarios for alien contact, and it’s not pretty

Scientists say aliens could decide to destroy humanity to save other civilizations

News DeskAugust 20, 2011 04:48

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/weird-wide-web/science-alien-attack-scenario-climate-change

Air & Space

Aliens Could Attack Earth to End Global Warming, NASA Scientist Frets

Published August 19, 2011

| NewsCore

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/08/19/aliens-could-attack-earth-to-end-global-warming-nasa-scientist-claims/#ixzz1Vt8uUebW

I have had considerable mail about a brief Internet storm asserting that NASA has published a report about aliens attacking the Earth because we aren’t green enough. It turns out that didn’t happen: there was a paper,

Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis

Seth D. Baum, Jacob D. Haqq-Misra, & Shawn D. Domagal-Goldman

Acta Astronautica, 2011, 68(11-12): 2114-2129

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1104/1104.4462.pdf

The third author lists affiliation with NASA Planetary Science Division. The paper was not sponsored by, or submitted to, NASA. It was just a speculative paper by some postdocs looking for a publication. Not easy reading – a bit dry and academic for my taste – but it attempts to cover the subject raised earlier about contact with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences, and deal with logical sequences. If this is your subject it may be worth your time.

The more interesting story is the big Internet reaction to it.That story is told here:

BEHIND THE Aliens-Will-Smite-Us News Story

It isn’t every day that a research paper published in an obscure academic journal attracts its own, full blown article in a major newspaper. It isn’t every day that a science correspondent writes an article that merits a headline as bizarre as the following: Aliens may destroy humanity to protect other civilizations, say scientists.

http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/08/19/behind-the-aliens-will-smite-us-news-story/

If you’re not familiar with the web site, it’s worth your attention.

There is a Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Joy of Reading ‘Pinocchio’ – on Paper” but it hides behind a pay wall, at least for me. I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal paper edition, but they want more money for on-line access even for those who subscribe to daily paper delivery, and that infuriated me enough that I didn’t bother to find out how much more they want. I understand that newspapers need revenue and they can’t survive if they give everything away, but in my experience they don’t pay much for op-ed – the real expense is in salaried reporters and data gathering – and I’d have though that allowing access to that sort of thing might be a good advertisement for full subscription. In any event, WSJ seems to have come up with a way to aggregate Google findings in such a way that you can find a refernce to the article, but you get the paywall teaser if you click on it. At one time Google insisted that if you want to be in Google you have to give some kind of access. I haven’t been following that closely enough, and perhaps I ought to look into it. I’m all for newspapers surviving, and I understand the need for some kind of paywall, but it’s still annoying when I subscribe to something I can’t access on line.

Just now I tried to get hold of their customer service to upgrade the darned subscription, and so far I have wasted considerable time. Their log in is designed to look sophisticated but in fact is primitive. The whole system sucks dead bunnies. I get a rep who said she had changed my password, but of course I hung up before trying it. Now I am back on the phone waiting.

They are trying to commit suicide.

I had better post this because I may be here all day. Actually it’s worse. I’ll be here all week.

Update. I seem to have a username and password that the Journal online finally recognizes. I am unsure of why all this took so long. Twice I got people whose first language is not English and that may be part of the problem; last time I got a young lady in upstate New York who understood what she was doing, and all went smoothly. 

The article is

 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576516404015970050.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The other morning, our daughters woke up clamoring to hear Pinocchio before breakfast. I’m not one of those who vows to always cling to the printed page. Before we left for California, I topped off my iPad with a dozen new titles. I accost strangers on airplanes to show them how dandy it is to load thousands of pages (including this newspaper) onto something the size of a shirt cardboard.

But part of the connection our daughters make with Pinocchio seems to be that he’s a little puppet-boy in a book they hold, hide and run to find in the morning, not digits in a download.

It’s rather charming, and refers to a later edition of an illustrated Pinocchio that I may have encountered about the time I was in first grade. I agree that books have a panache that online doesn’t always have.

Finally there is “Off the San Francisco Rails”, about a new entitlement called New Starts that appears to be a way for the people of Joplin, Missouri to pay taxes to pay for a $2 billion subway from Chinatown San Francisco to a quarter mile from the BART station on Market Street. The project doesn’t appear well designed to me, but it’s San Francisco, and thus not my business – except that apparently all of us get to pay for it if the Department of Transportation approves.  Just why we should pay for a San Francisco subway (well, they’d pay for SOME of it, but we get to pay for a lot) is not clear to me, but this seems to be an entitlement we can do without, at least so long as we have to borrow money to pay for it. One may make a case for federal subsidies of Interstate Highways and such like, but a subway from Chinatown to the Ferry Terminal (well, most of the way) does not seem to be anything vital to the interests of the United States as an entity, or even to California. If San Francisco needs it let San Francisco pay for it, just as I would not expect San Francisco to pay for a Los Angeles Subway that actually goes to our airport.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903918104576500452522248360.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop

This is an inevitable consequence of the 7% exponential growth of government spending that is at present built into our system. We are $Trillions in debt and the debt is growing: why should the children of kids in Joplin, Missouri be required to pay for a Chinatown, San Francisco, subway? At what point do we return to transparency and subsidiarity?

If you have not subscribed, or renewed your subscription in a while, this would be a great time to do it. Just Go Here.

View 688 Sunday, August 21, 2011

· Libya Falls?

· Teacher in America; Barzun on culture

The shores of Tripoli

It would appear that Qaddaffi is finished. Rebels have advanced to the outskirts of Tripoli, and there are risings among those in Tripoli itself. Khaddafi has up to now been able to hire Berbers and Tuarag and Bedoins and other tribal mercenary units to defend his rule in Tripolitania, but apparently that has not been enough.

It is significant to note that there seems to be actual coordination between the mostly Cyrenaican rebels of East Libya and the dissidents in Tripoli itself. We have no way of knowing how many actual Kaddafi loyalists there might be; certainly there are some, perhaps even a majority in Tripoli, but it is likely to be brittle support. After all, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, last Communist ruler of Rumania and his wife, were safe enough until the elite security guards decided to join the uprising, after which they were hastily “tried,” “convicted,” and shot by an eager firing squad despite his contention that he was the legal President of Rumania…

It is not clear where Qadafi is; he may not even be in Libya. There are reports that one of his sons has been arrested by the rebels. Another radio report says that Tripoli has fallen and Kadaffi has surrendered. Apparently it is only a matter of time until his mercenaries quit on the grounds that they will no longer be paid…

It is likely that Obama will claim credit when Kaddaffi falls. The real authors of the fall of Tripoli are probably British and French special forces who managed to turn a group of insurgents accustomed to firing all their ammunition into the air into an effective fighting force capable of sustained operations. There is also some likelihood of Delta Force and CIA involvement. It is clear that the NATO air and sea bombardments saved the rebellion to allow it to fight another day, and once that was assured allowed a rebel advance preventing the very likely outcome of stalemate and de facto partition of Libya into the Ottoman provinces from which it was formed by Italy after World War I. The story of the Libyan revolt will occupy historians for years. Who gets credit for what comes next is as unclear as to who will be the actual winner when the smoke clears.

It’s certain that it happened on President Obama’s watch, US participation was important if not decisive, and the entire cost of the operation was a lot less than if we had made a commitment to go in or become formally involved. It’s not over yet, but it looks now to be headed for a better outcome than we got in Iraq. Of course what I advocated in Iraq was the construction of monuments. Actually, it was more complicated than that: I do note, though, that I contemplated adding Tripoli to the places where we might build monuments – and that doing that would have been a very great deal cheaper than what we did.

Barzun, Teacher in America, and the language of rule

I was looking for a passage I dimly recall reading in about 1950 when I was still in Christian Brothers College high school in Memphis, and came across the incomparably valuable Teacher in America by Jacques Barzun. Barzun, born in 1907 in France, now lives in San Antonio, Texas. He is a national treasure, and has written at least two books I would put on the list of works that every educated person ought to read at some point in his life. Teacher in America is one of them. I grew up in a middle class family, and so far as I know no one in my ancestry was ever a college graduate, much less an intellectual. My father was a salesman who became a radio broadcasting executive. It was always intended that I should go to college, but the general expectation and encouragement was that I would pursue a medical career. Teacher in America didn’t really change that expectation – a partial color blindness coupled with the necessity to get an honor grade by identifying slides in Vertebrate Embryology did that – but it did give me to understand that there was such a thing as an intellectual, and there were intellectual careers other than Medicine or Law. The fact that I remember the book sixty years after reading it should be sufficient. In the course of looking for an on-line version of the book – there isn’t one so far as I can tell, and almost certainly no edition authorized by Professor Barzun – I found a Time Magazine review published the year the book came out. If you have any doubt that a book published in 1945 can still be relevant I refer you to that review.

The passage I was looking for is intended to be in my preface to the Kindle edition of The California Sixth Year Literature Reader, a public domain book that my advisors and a few readers have assisted in generating a Kindle edition with attractive format. Making it attractive turns out to have taken longer than I expected, but it shouldn’t be too long now.

The passage I was looking for from Teacher in America was

“Not a few of the students who apply to me for admission to the present form of Erskine’s [Great Books] reading course give me as a reason that they want “the background” and will have no other chance to “get it”, because they are about to study medicine or engineering. Their idea is we “give it” and they “get it.” But what is it that changes hands in this way? Background is the wrong word altogether. What is acquired is a common set of symbols, almost a separate language. I open today’s paper and I see over a story of naval action: ‘David-Goliath Fight by Foe at Sea Fails.” Immediately, I infer that some small enemy flotilla fought a larger force of ours. The image was instantaneous, and would have suggested more—namely the foe’s victory—had not the writer added that it failed.

“A common body of stories, phrases, and beliefs accompanies every high civilization that we know of. The Christian stories of apostles and saints nurtured medieval Europe, and after the breakup of Christendom the Protestant Bible served the same ends for English-speaking peoples. Bunyan and Lincoln show what power was stored in that collection of literary and historical works known as the Scripture, when it was really a common possession. We have lost something in neglecting it, just as we lost something in rejecting the ancient classics. We lost immediacy of understanding, a common sympathy with truth and fact. Perhaps nothing could better illustrate the subtlety and strength of the bond we lost than the story Hazlitt tells of his addressing a fashionable audience about Dr. Johnson. He was speaking of Johnson’s great heart and charity to the unfortunate; and he recounted how, finding a drunken prostitute lying in Fleet Street late at night, Johnson carried her on his broad back to the address she managed to give him. The audience, unable to face the image of a famous lexicographer doing such a thing, broke out into titters and expostulations. Whereupon Hazlitt simply said: ‘I remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of the parable of the Good Samaritan.’

“It is clear that no account of explaining, arguing, or demonstrating would have produced the abashed silence which that allusion commanded. It was direct communication; the note that Hazlitt struck sounded in every mind in the same way and it instantly crystallized and put into order every irrelevant emotion. That, if I may so put it, is what ‘background’ does for you. Even today, without Bible or classics, everyone possesses some kind of tradition which he uses without knowing it. The man who should look blank at mention of George Washington and the cherry tree, or who had never heard of Babe Ruth, or who thought that Shakespeare was an admiral, would get along badly even in very lowbrow circles. He might be excused as a foreigner but he would be expected to catch on as soon as he could. This does not mean that culture is for keeping up with the Joneses; it is talking to your fellow man—talking more quickly and fully than is possible through plodding description.

“In college and after, it so happens that the fund of ideas which it is needful to possess originated in great minds—those who devised our laws, invented our science, taught us how to think, showed us how to behave. They spoke in highly individual voices, yet rely on the force of a common group of symbols and myths—the culture of the West.”<snip>

I have remembered the essence of that passage from the moment I first read it on a bus on East Parkway Avenue in Memphis more than sixty years ago. It remains true even if, in the past few decades, the cultural life of America has begun to come apart. It remains important that those who would be the ruling class be able to communicate; else those who can communicate become even more the ruling class. But that is another story. Barzun continues in that vein for several more pages; after reading them I was determined to become part of those initiates who understood the language of rule.

I took the trouble to type it out because I intend to include it in a preface to the California Reader when I get that formatted for Kindle. My intention is to put that out as a public domain work, not copy protected, with a preface and some commentaries for $0.99. The notion is that the small fee won’t prevent who intends to read it or expose it to younger readers from getting it, and it will trigger the efficient Amazon association machine which will make many aware of its existence.

In digging around for other stuff I found this review of Escape From Hell that may be interesting.

I have just re-read what I wrote about what we should do in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, and in the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, and I don’t have anything to be ashamed of. It seems that back then – prior to my 50,000 RAD brain cancer treatments – I had the energy to put together a composite of some Views and Mail on the subject of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq. It’s worth your reading if you find the subject interesting.