View 682 Friday July 8, 2011
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Today’s Wall Street Journal has an op ed essay called “The Road to Serfdom and the Arab Revolt” that ought to be required reading for everyone in the State Department, although I suspect that few in State read WSJ. Fouad Ajami of the Hoover Institution has a good analysis of what is going wrong in the Arab world. He also calls attention to F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. Hayek’s 1944 masterpiece is such an essential part of any intelligent citizen’s education that I tend to forget that there are many who have not read it. If you know anyone who hasn’t, rag them until they do. It’s not a long book, and it’s not difficult reading. One key discussion in the book is “Why the worst get on top.”
I don’t know how you can read the WSJ op ed on line. It used to be that if you reached a WSJ piece by Google, you could read it all, but lately I find that there’s no continuation. I subscribe to the Journal, and I even know how to access it through the app in my iPad, but I haven’t yet figured out how to read the entire contents of a Journal article through Firefox; however I can do it through Internet Explorer. I suppose I ‘ll figure that out one day. Anyway, from the article
In his 1944 masterpiece, “The Road to Serfdom,” Hayek wrote that in freedom-crushing totalitarian societies “the worst get on top.” In words that described the Europe of his time but also capture the contemporary Arab condition, he wrote: “To be a useful assistant in the running of a totalitarian state, it is not enough that a man should be prepared to accept specious justification of vile deeds; he must himself be prepared actively to break every moral rule he has ever known if this seems necessary to achieve the end set for him. Since it is the supreme leader who alone determines the ends, his instruments must have no moral convictions of their own.”
There’s more. Read Fouad Ajami by all means, but it’s more important that you read Hayek. The Road to Serfdom is one of the essential books of the Twentieth Century.
FALLEN ANGELS is a science fiction adventure novel by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. Much of it is satirical but it has its serious moments. The premise is a world in which The Ice returns: a good part of Canada is under glacial sheet ice, which is moving south. There is Climate Change all right, and human actions affect it. It has just been released in Kindle format by Amazon, and if you haven’t read it, you might like to. There has long been an eBook edition from Baen and that remains – it can even be had free from Baen – but this edition has been prepared with great care as an eBook, and Larry, Michael, and I have done a new afterword.
While we are on today’s WSJ, “Sorting the real from the phony spending cut options” by Fred Barnes isn’t bad. If you believe as I do that much of the economic debate is Kabuki theater – see yesterday’s View – then there won’t be a lot of surprises in there, but it may explain a few things to those who haven’t thought so much about it.
The morning started well enough. I seem to be over the debilitation flu or whatever it was that laid me low from February to May, and I woke up full of determination to get started on a new Computing at Chaos Manor column for Chaos Manor Reviews. Then Roberta went for a walk and twisted her knee, and next thing I knew it was off to Kaiser. That all went well and she’s all right if a bit immobilized, but the rest of the day was consumed by locusts.
Last night when I connected my iPhone to the iMac for synch and charging, the iPhone was dead off. It started itself, and when it came on it showed the charge bar: a very thin slice of bright red. Clearly it had run out of power while in my pocket. All very well – it would charge overnight. But when it came time to go to Kaiser and I put the phone in my pocket, it still showed that red thin slice as if it had not charged at all during the night. When we got to the Kaiser center it still showed that when I turned it on. I had brought the charger and while waiting for Roberta I plugged it into the wall. Then I read the wall Street Journal editorial page. The little “I am charging” icon on the phone came on, but the red slice display never changed. Never. So when we got home, I figured that the battery was deaded, and it was time to get it fixed since I depend on that mobile phone. Actually I headed out for the Apple store with the intention of buying an iPhone 4. I should have got one a year ago, and would have by now except that different things kept delaying me. Time to do that. I headed for Fashion Square. Filled the car on the way. Had a shrimp burrito in the food court. Went into the Apple Store. Turned on the phone. It showed itself fully charged. It worked just fine. Nothing wrong with it at all.
Turned around and came home. It’s time to update my phone, but I sure didn’t need to do that today. But if you wonder whiy this is late and I haven’t got any other real work done today, there was more of the same all day. The day was eaten by locusts.
