Here is a page of instructions for mounting solid-rubber tires on 19th Century bicycles. And as this video shows, riding such a bike was no picnic either.
—-
Related: “Simple” Old Technology
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.
Here is a page of instructions for mounting solid-rubber tires on 19th Century bicycles. And as this video shows, riding such a bike was no picnic either.
—-
Related: “Simple” Old Technology
The Atlantic Monthly has a sometimes thoughtful, at times irritating, article by Paul Elie on the late theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the political struggle being waged by the Left, Middle and Right over his intellectual legacy. An excerpt:
“The biblical sense of history can make Niebhur seem like something other than a liberal. In the ’60’s, his religiosity made him suspect on the New Left, and in the years after his death, his work resonated with the thinkers who were turning against that era’s liberal reforms”
It wasn’t Niebuhr’s religiosity that made him suspect with the New Left but his anti-totalitarianism, something that a movement deeply afflicted with an authoritarian certitude and spasmodic nihilism could ill abide; indeed, they still seem to despise Niebuhr for his unwillingness to equivocate about Leftist tyranny. Elie is correct though, that the original Neoconservatives (the ones who actually made an intellectual journey from Left to Right) such as Norman Podhoretz had high regard for Niebuhr’s writings. I myself first heard of Niebuhr from reading David Stockman’s bitter memoir The Triumph of Politics. Stockman may have repudiated Ronald Reagan but he remained true, almost adulatory, to Niebuhr:
“The scales fell from my eyes as I turned those pages [ of Children of Light, Children of Darkness – ZP] Niebuhr was a withering critic of utopianism in every form. Man is incapable of perfection, he argued, because his estate as a free agent permits-indeed ensures -both good and evil…Through Niebuhr I dimly glimpsed the ultimate triumph of politics” ( Stockman,24).
I do not profess to be an expert on Reinhold Niebuhr or his philosophy, having read only one of his books, but the polemical war over Niebuhr that Elie critiques has, in my view, an air of ahistoricality to it. Perhaps with not the completely unhinged lunacy of the similar debate over Leo Strauss, but like Strauss, Niebuhr has been lifted by both sides out of the mid-20th century intellectual context that illuminated his ideas, in order to serve as a barricade for the political battle over Iraq and the Bush administration.
My gut reaction is that Niebuhr, were he alive today, would be writing things that would not sit well with some of his would-be reinterpreters and with more nuance and wisdom than for which his contemporary critics give him credit.
ADDENDUM:
Peter Beinart, who comes in for much criticism from Elie for the following link, on Reinhold Niebuhr.
Cross-posted at Zenpundit
Well, maybe. Here’s a situation where a video record came in handy:
Via Rachel comes a WSJ column about a physician who charges his patients flat, monthly rates rather than billing by appointment or procedure. This seems like it might be a good system. It resembles monthly plans for cellphone service, where service providers makes money in part because many subscribers use fewer than their allotted minutes, and subscribers who go over the limit pay a higher rate for the marginal minutes. (The fact that the prepaid medical plan doesn’t cover everything is its way of dealing with high-demand, high-cost customers who are analogous to cellphone users who exceed their allotted minutes.)
Naturally, the innovative physician’s business is under attack from regulators and insurance companies, but it appears that he is more than holding his own (one insurer is considering offering a plan to complement the prepaid service). It will be interesting to see if his business model is viable in the long term and in markets other than the one that he serves.