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.
Or since Christmas is over, it ‘Twas: Two men had to be evacuated from an Antarctic research facility after a Christmas brawl.
Polar medivac flights are rare occurrences, one of the most dramatic being a midwinter flight in 1999 for a woman doctor who developed breast cancer and needed urgent treatment.
And those two geniuses needed one because they couldn’t hold their liquor. Hard to live down, and it looks just great on the resume.
Zendpundit posed a bunch of provocative questions over on his site, and I thought they might start some lively discussion over here if we took a stab at them. Here’s my favorite, because it touches on a couple of themes we’ve been exploring on this site over the past few weeks:
If the EU has genuinely changed the twenty century-long warlike character of Europeans to apathetic, bureaucratic, declinists why does the idea of Germany with nuclear weapons still give everyone pause ?
Or for that matter, who’s up for the Japanese Prime Minister announcing a successful test of a hydrogen bomb ? If you’re not but you are also ok on a nuclear Iran, can you give an intellectually credible explanation as to the difference?
Here’s my take: what we are looking at in Europe is a metastable state. In physics, that is a state that should have undergone a phase transition, but is being held back by inertia. One small perturbation, and the whole thing goes up, though. It is the packed snow waiting for a footstep to start an avalanche. The roulette ball perched on the wall between two numbers, waiting for a breath of air to push it over. Not a long-term tenable position, energetically.
In my last post on China, Zenpundit mentioned that a lot of Westerners are confused about what China is and what it is not. That first post was an attempt on my part to try to create a predictive mental model for the future of Chinese politics. I did not, however, manage to cover even half of the terms I’m trying to cram into the thing. One glaring omission that Chinese people would pick up on right away is that I postulated a separate Canton in a putative breakup scenario. The truth is that there has been no strong Cantonese separatist movement since before the Republic, and currently that trend shows no sign of reversing itself. On the other hand, Canton has never in its entire history been as rich as it is now, nor contributed as much to the coffers of the North as it does today. So I weaseled out and finished with the thought that I just don’t have enough information to weight the terms in my model. Which is true.
I value time more than most. I will always exchange money for time if the amount of time I save by hiring something out looks to be a good deal for me. An example of this just took place a couple of days ago. We have had a lot of snow here in Madison and I basically have two options. After work I can get the shovel out and clear it myself off of my driveway and sidewalk or hire someone to plow it. This time I chose the latter since the snow was pretty heavy and wet to boot. On top of that I have been extremely busy at work and am pulling more hours than usual. Sometimes I just want to come home, see my daughters, have a nice scotch, and kick back.
Over at Hit and Run, Jacob Sullum skewers William F. Buckly for comparing people who refuse to support smoking bans to those who provide Zyklon-B to Nazi Death camps Sullum observes:
There’s no need to speculate about the reasons for Buckley’s newfound anti-tobacco faith. He himself ascribes it to his wife’s recent death (“technically from an infection, but manifestly, at least in part, from a body weakened by 60 years of nonstop smoking”) and his own emphysema, caused by “the idiocy of cigars inhaled.”
So, she died at the age of what, 80+, after receiving the benefits and pleasures of 60 freaking years of smoking? I am reminded of the quip made when Julia Child died at 91, “if she hadn’t eaten all that wonderful fat rich food, she might have made it to 92.”
Every action has tradeoffs. Things that bring enjoyment today have costs tomorrow. Stop to smell the roses and it takes you longer to reach your destination.