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.
In the wall mural of global incompetence that is our Crisis Era, Haiti has become the most lurid corner, a hallucinatory labyrinth worthy of Hieronymus Bosch; not so much the canary in the mine as a collapsed side tunnel whose maimed and trapped victims are within earshot and line-of-sight of First World institutional leaders already fumbling with a dozen groundwater leaks and toxic gas buildups in the main shafts.
In this rather confused video clip (some of it in text form in this article), Biden seems to be saying that (1) he believes the “30,000 Palestinians killed” number which has been circulating, which most observers believe is bogus, (2) that Israel is violating the international rules of war, which he says “we” changed following WWII, and (3) strongly implying that Israel is conducting carpet bombing, which is false. He also says that Hamas would like a ceasefire because they would “have a better chance to survive and rebuild.” He is apparently just fine with this outcome.
He also says he told the Israeli war cabinet: “Do not make the mistake America made,’… we should not have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was not necessary. It was not necessary. It caused more problems than it cured.”
Whatever one thinks about the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, it requires a special kind of cluelessness to not notice the geographical closeness of Gaza-based Hamas to Israel, and the immediate and murderous nature of the threat that Israel faces.
Or, more likely, he does realize this, but does not consider Israeli lives to be very important when measured against Michigan electoral votes.
For those of you who brought your copy of The Screwtape Letters, open to Chapter 1:
Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism [disbelief in the supernatural] is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future.
This is relevant to discourse in general. Jargon means different things to different people; it is key to preventing meaningful communication. Social media is a gold mine of jargon, or a dilithium mine in the case of the original Star Trek. (Roddenberry hadn’t invented latinum yet.) Somebody will chastise the later spinoffs for being “woke” or “too political,” and someone else will claim that the show was that way from the start. Looking over the original series I find little in the way of allusion to real-world politics or ’60s liberalism, and nothing compatible with modern leftism.
Hayek, Fascism, and the Administrative State
An interesting piece on the tradition of limited government in Spain
A Danish manager working in Russia finds that his workers are looking for a more authoritarian style of leadership
Related: Culture and combined arms warfare
Civilization versus the Pathocratic State
The Disintegrating Conscience and the Decline of Modernity
Why are semiconductor companies not more enthusiastic about taking the lavish subsidies available under the CHIPS act?
Observations of the series and from other sources
I am 7 episodes into the series, based on the 100th Bomb Group at Thorpe Abbotts in Britain during WW II, and am thoroughly enjoying it.
I became so interested in the series that I started to read a book on the last surviving member of the 100th Bomb Group, John “Lucky” Luckadoo. I was surprised to learn that the series was so accurate they brought many of the historical figures to life, with no fictional embellishment.
As an aside, the one thing even this author did that bugged me a bit was refer to what was the US Army Air Force as the “Army Air Corps”. It seems a common mistake. A minor nit perhaps, but by June 1941, the US Army decided that the mission of their Air Force had expanded such that their aviation arm was its own Air Force: