Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
David Foster Annika posted two Edna St. Vincent Millay poems from the World War II era–which inspired me to look up a Stephen Vincent Benet poem from the same period. I think it’s something we could all benefit from reading right about now.
This poem, Listen to the People, was read over nationwide radio on July 7, 1941–five months before Pearl Harbor. The full text was also printed in Life magazine. Here it is…
An old copy of Forbes ASAP (2/22/99) has an article on supercomputing which includes this quote from a nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos:
Weapons designers play the societal role of witches in fairy tales–we scare people into behaving.
This captures very well the Cold War image of nuclear weapons–they are of the supernatural rather than the natural world; they belong to the realm of fevered nightmares rather than waking thoughts.
Liberals often assert that Evangelical support for Israel is based on Evangelical theology, specifically those aspects having to do with the Second Coming of Christ. This assertion is generally made in a manner which is contemptuous of both Israel and of the Evangelicals, and is intended to portray the opinions of the latter as irrelevant to those who do not share their particular religious beliefs.
I’m sure some Evangelicals support Israel for theological reasons. But I don’t think that theology is the primary factor at work here.
The truth is, most Americans instinctively tend to support Israel. Where hostility to Israel exists in this country, it usually arises from leftist politics and worldviews–and these, in turn, are closely connected to the universities.
Evangelicals are largely outside the force field of attitudes centered on the academy. I suspect it is this, rather than any specific theological factors, which account for the high support for Israel among this group of Americans.
I’d hypothesize that people who come from the same social groups as the Evangelicals, but who are themselves atheists or agnostics, tend to share Evangelical attitudes toward Israel.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol (here, also here.) On Friday, President Bush suggested that the tariff should be eliminated, or at least temporarily waived in order to ease the gasoline supply & price crunch which is expected for the summer.
Both the corn farmers and the sugar industry will oppose this initiative, and it’s unlikely that it will make it though Congress unless the administration does some very effective PR work.
Update: Today’s WSJ endorses the elimination of the tariff, and credits Congressman John Shadegg (Arizona) for pushing this idea. (Shadegg’s specific proposal is to suspend the tariff until 2007.)
Ethanol policy also needs to consider impact on the transportation network. Ethanol cannot be shipped via conventional pipelines (a fact which has received little media attention until very recently) and has to go by rail or barge if long distances are involved. Major railroad bottlenecks seem likely, given that some of the routes needed for domestic ethanol are already heavily used for coal and grain. The Union Pacific has already slowed down shipments of ethanol to the DFW area due to heavy congestion in its rail terminal there.
Imported ethanol might help the overall transportation-capacity situation to some extent, since it can come directly into major east and west coast ports, but isn’t going to help with bottlenecks at blending facilities.
Writing in The Washington Times, Oliver North quotes a representative of the Disabled American Veterans about high unemployment among veterans of the Iraq war. North thought initially that he was talking about those who had been wounded, but the DAV rep disabused him: “You don’t have to have been wounded in action to be ‘unemployable.’ Just to have served in this war makes it tougher to get a job.”
North goes on to tell about a recent experience on an airline flight. His seatmate, a corporate CEO, asked if “all the troops coming back from over there were ‘screwed up,'” and went on to cite a study alleging that more than a third of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan needed psychological treatment.” (There is apparently an AMA study that cites a number of 35 percent.)
Seems to me that when members of a profession publish studies showing an increased need for the services of that profession, one should be a little cautious in accepting the conclusions…just as you should assume your dog is not totally disinterested if he shows a preference for T-bone steak for your dinner choice. But whatever the methodology and threshold used for the study…is it really likely that the need for “psychological treatment” among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is greater than among veterans of, say, D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, and Iwo Jima? And yet clearly, history has shown that large numbers of the latter category have done very well in their careers.