Maggie's Farm

David Brooks says that the economic rise of China demonstrates that collectivist societies can prosper.

I think he is wrong. Seems to me that the unleashing of individual enterprise and free markets (combined with free markets for labor, lower business taxes than the US, and globalization) are what have unleashed China's belated industrial revolution. In other words, individualism. But I am no expert on the subject (and neither is Brooks).

There is still one Path to Prosperity.

Furthermore, I wonder whether this whole subject of Asian collectivism is a myth. Police state-enforced collectivist "harmony" can give the appearance of a collectivist ethos - but only the appearance.

From the wonderful old PBS series, this hilarious clip about parents, government, and schools (h/t, Clayton Cramer):

From The Dartmouth.com:

Dartmouth alumni have the highest mid-career median incomes in the country in comparison to other college graduates, according to a survey by PayScale, Inc., a company that compiles compensation information across business sectors.

Hmmm. Maybe because so few of us become community organizers and politicians. Wah-hoo-wah.

Not quite related: Does the Ivy League turn people into arrogant jerks? One quote:

It's unseemly to ask for sympathy for having survived Yale, but the truth is, I'm still recovering from my experience there. Perhaps only the self-deprecating sense of humor of a Calvin Trillin can get across to the non-Ivied public what it was like without sounding boastful about answered prayers.

There are disadvantages to an elite education; I'm just not sure that they're the ones that Deresiewicz mentions. When I meet someone who went to Yale, I search for the haunted recognition beyond the Boola Boola. But no one wants to reopen old wounds. When pushed, some of my friends confess that Yale made them feel rotten and insecure, and they continue to judge themselves against the extraordinary achievements of their classmates. Others claim they have spent their lives disappointed to never again find such a rich intellectual environment.

Sheesh. And not a single mention of the rich "dating" environment. Maybe that's because it's about Yale...

And who claims that college nowadays is about "higher" education anyway, unless you are in the hard sciences? My view? Make high school a 3-year tough grind, and college a 3-year tough grind - and get these kids out of the grip of the educational industry and out into the world before they grow soft, soft-headed, and spoiled.

Boeing's long-awaited, state of the art 787 Dreamliner has delay after delay.

I found an old piece suggesting that Scrubex may become a thing of the past. An ancient naval tradition - and navies are (partly) about tradition.

Photo is a Scrubex on the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2005. That is a good work-out.

I routinely catch up with Samuel Pepy's Diary, from which this bit from Aug 8, 1665:

Up and to the office, where all the morning we sat. At noon I home to dinner alone, and after dinner Bagwell’s wife waited at the door, and went with me to my office … So parted, and I to Sir W. Batten’s, and there sat the most of the afternoon talking and drinking too much with my Lord Bruncker, Sir G. Smith, G. Cocke and others very merry. I drunk a little mixed, but yet more than I should do. So to my office a little, and then to the Duke of Albemarle’s about some business.

I think it's great to read diaries in snippets. The new one is George Orwell's diaries. This entry from Aug 9, 1938 (Marx is Orwell's dog):

Caught a large snake in the herbaceous border beside the drive. About 2’ 6” long, grey colour, black markings on belly but none on back except, on the neck, a mark resembling an arrow head (ñ) all down the back. Did not care to handle it too recklessly, so only picked it up by extreme tip of tail. Held thus it could nearly turn far enough to bite my hand, but not quite. Marx¹ interested at first, but after smelling it was frightened & ran away. The people here normally kill all snakes.

From Chantrill in American Thinker, one of the best short essays of the year: The Politics of the Social Safety Net. One quote:

But the real problem is that the expansion of the safety net has led to increase in government power and the rise of the beauracracy. This combined to diminish individual responsibility which diminishes ones productivity and accumulation of wealth. With less wealth, it's easier to be dependent. With more people jumping in the net, taxes go up to maintain benefits, which cuts savings, which increases the demand for the safety net as more people retire destitute from taxation in furtherance of its support.

Let's be real - we are never going to see a change in the safety net for too much political power is invested in, and generated by it. Also, its very existence has enabled our population to grow as those who would have otherwise died from disease, exposure or starvation due to lack of wealth have been spared by it (sorry for the cruelty).

It's not going away. Any safety net, no matter how modest, who provides it, or what name you give it will mature into a welfare state.

Read the whole thing.

I am no big fan of the Olympics and no big fan of China, but I did see some of the opening in a pub last night. This is drummers from the Boston Globe's collection of remarkable photos from the opening (h/t, Flopping):

That could almost be a well-regulated warehouse. Asia never had that individualistic ethos that we value so highly and which fuels our pathetic self-importance. However, I thought this photo of musicians could be a pic of competitive blogging - or maybe unison blogging, like the Vast Right Wing Echo Chamber:

A review of John McWhorter's book of the above title begins thus:

For the past forty years and more, a fraud has been perpetrated on the Western world. Since at least the appearance of the first issue of Rolling Stone in 1967, it has been a common assumption that popular music, particularly rock and roll, is about social change. The story has become an Ur-text for any child growing up in America -- or England or the rest of the world for that matter. It is a pop culture creation myth: In the beginning the world was void, without sound, thought or feeling, when Elvis Presley descended, Prometheus-like, to bring eroticism, fun and rebellion to the dull gray world. And as the Church Fathers followed Jesus, others came to carry the message of social revolution forward: the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, even the Grateful Dead.

Read the whole thing.

The town council took the significant step in June of moving from merely encouraging citizens to install solar panels to making them an obligation. The ordinance, the first of its kind in Germany, will require solar panels not only on new buildings, which fewer people oppose, but also on existing homes that undergo renovations or get new heating systems or roof repairs.

To give the regulation teeth, a fine of 1,000 euros, about $1,500, awaits those who do not comply.

Read the whole thing, and consider the possible effectiveness of solar panels in Germany. These folks are insane. Truth be told, it's probably more sensible just to pay the fine, and then throw the rascals out.

It sounds like the politics of Seattle (h/t, Junk Science), or like the Massachusetts government medical plan. The world is full of sanctimonious jerks who want to tell other people how to live.

The Grand Army of the Republic Highway, U.S. 6, runs from Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod to Long Beach, California.

Its history is interesting in the ways it was patched together. Bit of trivia: Route 6 was "the road" Jack Kerouac meant to take, but he got caught in a rainstorm on the Bear Mountain Bridge north of NYC, so made other plans.

Photo is the Sagamore Bridge built in 1935 over the Cape Cod Canal on US 6.

What sorts of idiots think that plug-in cars are any less CO2-producing than gas cars? (No, I am not calling Insty an idiot.) Where do they think electricity comes from? Unless you have tons of nuke power, of course. No evil, evil CO2 from nukes.

nb: I think this is all a tempest in a teapot anyway, and doesn't matter one bit. In a year or two, we'll all be laughing about the AGW scams and frenzies.

Mark Helprin takes a long look at China, Rich Country, Strong Arms. One quote:

China's success in amplifying its power is due in part to what may be called "the gift of the Meiji." That is, the transformation of the Japanese slogan fukoku kyohei—rich country, strong arms—into the Sixteen-Character Policy: "Combine the military and the civil; combine peace and war; give priority to military products; let the civil support the military." After humiliation and occupation by the West closely parallel to what also befell China, predominantly agricultural Japan rapidly transformed itself into an industrial state that could successfully wage war with modern arms against Russia, a second-tier European power, and then, not that many decades later, offer a mortal challenge to the world's leading naval power, the United States.

It was able to vault with preternatural speed into the first ranks of the leading nations because it understood the relation of economic growth to military potential. Unlike the United States, which, almost unconsciously, governs itself reactively and predominantly for the short term, China has plotted a long course in which with great deliberation it joins growth to military expansion.

From a stunning post at HuffPo:

Dreams from My Father is a staggeringly beautiful book, lyrical, powerful and poetic. It is also the story of a man who has been many men, all named Barack Obama. In his own eyes, he is one race, but also another. He is an American, but also a Kenyan. He is from Hawaii and also the Kansas heartland. He is Harvard elite, then the Chicago streets. At times he decries the very clay from which he was made, only to remake himself again.

At each place and stage, as Barack Obama chronicles the chapters of his life, he tells us how he has re-invented himself, becoming the role he inhabits, though not falsely or in-authentically, like Bill Clinton. He actually seems to transform himself, becoming what must be next. He has been called distant, aloof and somewhat unapproachable, perhaps because we cannot approach what he does not have, a solid core. His soul seems to be molten and made up of dreams, which is at once breathtakingly inspiring and forbiddingly indeterminate. When this young man with the flowing, passionate core, when this candidate without the solid-center changes positions and transforms himself as we watch, it leaves Americans much more in doubt about who he is and how he would lead us. It also reveals an Obama of unapproachable arrogance and inestimable self-regard: He appears confident voters will appreciate his superiority regardless of where he journeys or what he becomes to meet his political ambitions.

John McCain is a complete and well-formed man. Barack Obama is completing himself. As he moves to fit what he perceives to be a right-of-center country, he distances himself from the simple and authentic passion of a young candidate who once pledged "Change We Can Believe In."

This is the trap Barack Obama has made for himself, the one he cannot escape, the one Hillary Clinton foresaw, the one that may doom him. The Obama campaign knows it too. In fear the dream is being lost drop-by-drop, they are going negative on John McCain. Maybe the aliens should ask to meet McCain, as well.

Read the whole thing. The point is that Obama is not a man - he's a boy. He's an Icarus who bought his own hype. Thus his polling is weakening as the realities become clearer. Even the greedy sanctimonious Lefties are upset, even though they think they know he is really one of them. He is exploiting their innocent, childish mentalities.

As Environmental Repub says,

...Sen. Barack Obama has proven to be an empty suit in spite of news coverage that would make the Pope blush. The Dem base is suffering from buyers remorse it seems.

Rick Moran considers these ideas at some length.

And, as Moderate Voice sadly notes, John McCain has just begun to campaign, and he has some real pros working with him now.

What did it do? A quote from Pakistan Picaresque in The Wilson Quarterly:

The year was 1992, and Lucymemsahib and I were helping the government of Pakistan prepare a grant proposal for the country’s Social Action Program (SAP)—a comprehensive effort to renovate Pakistan’s health, education, and water sanitation systems that the World Bank and a consortium of other multinational development organizations had pledged to support. Specifically, we were looking into ways to attract more women to provide ­midlevel health services in rural areas. As head of the Pakistan Nursing Council, Mrs. S. presided over the governmental organization responsible for the recruitment, training, and certification of nurses at Pakistan’s 60 civilian nursing schools and a handful of specialized military institutions.

The SAP we helped prepare, which ran from 1993 through 1998, turned out to be a dismal failure, as was the one that followed in 1999–2003. Subsequent programs, especially since 9/11, show every indication of being as unsuccessful. The critical indicators of maternal and child health tell it all. Estimates of Pakistan’s maternal mortality ratio since 1990 range from 300 to 800 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births; even the low end of this range is unacceptable. By contrast, Sri Lanka, another South Asian country, with an income per capita that was roughly comparable to Pakistan’s at the beginning of the 1990s, saw its maternal mortality ratio fall from 92 per 100,000 in 1990 to below 50 today. The infant mortality rate in Pakistan in 2003 was 76 per 1,000 live births, as compared with 11 in Sri Lanka. In the developed countries, the infant mortality rate is only about five per 1,000 live ­births.

Beyond the health care sector, the story is much the same.

It's a good case study of what really happens in the real world, despite the best of intentions.

The Voyage of Life, Childhood, 1842. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

By Herb London at TCS. It begins:

In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called "The Cold War At Home." As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf Hitler. And victimology stands as the overarching theme of the course.

Communists in the United States are merely benign civil rights advocates and union supporters. The word espionage never once crossed the lips of the instructor.

An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been devoted to the "lavender persecution" - harm imposed on gay Americans. Presumably, this group was more adversely affected by McCarthy's allegations than others.

Despite the recent scholarship on the period such as Alan Weinstein's well researched book on Alger Hiss or Stanton Evans' biography of Senator McCarthy, views that do not fit the prevailing orthodoxy aren't entertained. Pounded into students is the view that America engaged in "totalitarian practices" not unlike the Soviet enemy we decried.

What is marriage? Some provocative thoughts at Chronicle, concluding:

In the meantime, Dolan and the marriage scholars she ably represents and cites — such thinkers and inspired researchers as Nancy F. Cott, David Cressy, Alison D. Wall, and Stone — offer a further message to conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. If they truly understood the institution's history, they might fall to their knees and thank God that gay people want anything to do with such a conceptual mess.

Is it really a mess? It's been a sacrament for a long time.

Bird Dog gave me some seedlings to try in the garden, warning me that they don't grow like squash, but like gourds. (They are an edible gourd, same as pumpkin.)

Vigorous doesn't describe it. These things are like Jack's beanstalk, and bugs leave them alone. You're supposed to pick them before they get much over a foot long.

Americans may consider them to be an Italian heirloom vegetable, but they are grown all over Asia. You peel them and cook like summer squash. Sometimes people fry them, too.

Photo: A cucuzzi, with an overgrown cucumber for comparison.

Our friend Jonah Goldberg on Prosperity and It's Discontents. Poverty and trouble is, indeed, man's default condition. One quote:

The interesting question isn’t “Why is there poverty?” It’s “Why is there wealth?” Or: “Why is there prosperity here but not there?”

At the end of the day, the first answer is capitalism, rightly understood. That is to say: free markets, private property, the spirit of entrepreneurialism and the conviction that the fruits of your labors are your own.

For generations, many thought prosperity was material stuff: factories and forests, gold mines and gross tons of concrete poured. But we now know that these things are merely the fringe benefits of wealth. Stalin built his factories, Mao paved over the peasants. But all that truly prospered was misery and alienation.

A recent World Bank study found that a nation’s wealth resides in its “intangible capital” — its laws, institutions, skills, smarts and cultural assumptions. “Natural capital” (minerals, croplands, etc.) and “produced capital” (factories, roads, and so on) account for less than a quarter of the planet’s wealth. In America, intangible capital — the stuff in our heads, our hearts, and our books — accounts for 82 percent of our wealth.

Any number of countries in Africa are vastly richer in baubles and soil than Switzerland. But they are poor because they are impoverished in what they value.

He nails it. Read the whole fine thing.

Politics is so complex, isn't it?

No joke - apparently Obama promises his kids a puppy if he's elected. It's all about hope, kids. The News Junkie believes that Obama will give him a pony and a new, hopeful outlook on the communal paradise to come.

Aircraft electrical assembly inspector, Vega Aircraft Corp., Burbank, Calif.