While his accusation was out of order and unseemly, again we see he was right.  Wilson accused the President of lying when Obama said that health care reform wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants.  Recently, Obama tipped his hand on that claim, saying we had to make more the existing illegal ones legal so they can get health care.  The impression was not that they’d go back to their home country and use the legal process.  The President wants to simply, vaguely, go about "resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all."

Poof, you’re legal!  Now, we still don’t cover illegal immigrants.

Except that any attempt to even figure out of someone is legal or not is being shut down by Democrats.

Senate Finance Committee Democrats rejected a proposed a requirement that immigrants prove their identity with photo identification when signing up for federal healthcare programs.

Finance Committee ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said that current law and the healthcare bill under consideration are too lax and leave the door open to illegal immigrants defrauding the government using false or stolen identities to obtain benefits.

Grassley’s amendment was beaten back 10-13 on a party-line vote.

So they say that illegals won’t be covered, but they promise not to check.  Don’t ask, don’t tell. 

Accountability government at work.

From Eliot Cohen:

Unless you are a connoisseur of small pictures of bearded, brooding fanatical clerics there is not much reason to collect Iranian currency. But I kept one bill on my desk at the State Department because of its watermark—an atom superimposed on the part of that country that harbors the Natanz nuclear site. Only the terminally innocent should have been surprised to learn that there is at least one other covert site, whose only purpose could be the production of highly enriched uranium for atom bombs.

Pressure, be it gentle or severe, will not erase that nuclear program. The choices are now what they ever were: an American or an Israeli strike, which would probably cause a substantial war, or living in a world with Iranian nuclear weapons, which may also result in war, perhaps nuclear, over a longer period of time.

Understandably, the U.S. government has hoped for a middle course of sanctions, negotiations and bargaining that would remove the problem without the ugly consequences. This is self-delusion. Yes, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy stood side by side with President Barack Obama in Pittsburgh and talked sternly about lines in the sand; and yes, Russian President Dimitry Medvedev hinted that some kind of sanctions might, conceivably, be needed. They said the same things to, and with, President George W. Bush.

That’s right, the much-maligned diplomat George W. Bush was part of a diplomatic effort, continued by Barack "Change" Obama, to get Iran to abandon the nuclear weapons program that they’ve denied but that the world knows they’re gearing up.  The talk and the Sternly Worded Letters(tm) from the United Nations have bought Iran the time they needed and brought us to the brink of either war on Iran or war from Iran. 

Rock, meet hard place. 

Cohen goes on to say that, at this point, it’s really too late and too difficult to remove the threat via a tactical strike, as Israel did in 1981, and an all-out war with Iran is a difficult proposition, because of the consequences to oil production, a potentially expanded war in the region, and because the Obama administration can’t even sell Afghanistan as "the good war" anymore. 

His suggestion is the kind of "meddling" that Democrats have shown distaste for in the past but which we’re left with after all the talking has proved fruitless; overthrowing the regime through something other than overt war.  The alternative is living with a nuclear Iran, and if you think they’re bothersome now, what with financing terrorism in the region, just wait until they have a  missile with a nuke on top and no one dare cross them.

At least we won’t have a nuclear Iraq with a regime also bent on terrorism.  You can thank Dubya for that, and reserve your thanks from the UN.  Over a decade of what passes for diplomacy and negotiation got us precisely nowhere.  History is repeating itself.

Most of the coverage from last week’s meetings at the United Nations focused on leaders of rogue nations. But the most important speech was one given by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a tough speech and one worth watching. It’s also a speech that historians may look back upon years from now as very prophetic. Take time to watch it all.

During the last to night time basement biking sessions I’ve watched the movie Katy?, see here and here for more. In the context of the some of the conversation that arose today over my short essay on the UN some remarks come to mind. One commenter (JA) remarked:

This distinction is really just a symptom of the deeper distinction — the right, being more nationalistic, looks at the UN solely from a what-can-we-get-out-of-it point of view, while the left, being more humanistic, believes that the same principle that says a nation’s citizens should have a say in their government also says that the nations of the world should have a say in whatever passes for global “government.”

Yet this gets it backwards. Read the rest of this entry

One of the defining differences between right and left today in the US is that the left is enamoured of the UN while the right thinks it mainly an execrable waste of time, money, and resources of which not the least is mention bandwidth on the global stage. For the most part, I don’t want to concentrate (with one exception at the end of this piece) on Mr Obama’s speech to the UN, which can be found here. Unlike his predecessor, Mr Bush, Mr Obama had nothing but nice and complementary things to say about the UN, which at the very least supports the statement made in the opening. One of the primary complaints that the right has about the UN is that it has a completely open membership. Dictatorships have equal voice with Democracies. Free societies with closed. Coercive with (mostly) non-coercive. For the left, somehow this is not a fault but a feature. For the right, as a feature, it is sort of like more like the “smell feature” the outhouse has over the water closet. Read the rest of this entry

When Joe Wilson said, "You lie!", when President Obama talked about not covering illegal aliens in the health care reform bill, he may have been both out of order and technically wrong.  But President Obama is now showing that there’s another way that Wilson was technically right.

President Obama said this week that his health care plan won’t cover illegal immigrants, but argued that’s all the more reason to legalize them and ensure they eventually do get coverage.

He also staked out a position that anyone in the country legally should be covered – a major break with the 1996 welfare reform bill, which limited most federal public assistance programs only to citizens and longtime immigrants.

"Even though I do not believe we can extend coverage to those who are here illegally, I also don’t simply believe we can simply ignore the fact that our immigration system is broken," Mr. Obama said Wednesday evening in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. "That’s why I strongly support making sure folks who are here legally have access to affordable, quality health insurance under this plan, just like everybody else.

Mr. Obama added, "If anything, this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all."

Republicans said that amounts to an amnesty, calling it a backdoor effort to make sure current illegal immigrants get health care.

If the President had said that during the original speech, Wilson could have smiled broadly.  Essentially the President is saying (if you take everything he says into account), "we’re not covering illegal aliens, but we’re looking for ways to rename them something other than ‘illegal aliens’, after which they’d be covered." 

That was a bit disingenuous.  I think Wilson is owed something of an apology.

From Steve Breen.  (Click for a larger version.)

Yeah, and racists.

Supposedly, George W. Bush squandered all the goodwill we got from the world as a result of the 9/11 attacks.  Enemies became friends, the uncooperative became helpful, and all was right with the world, until Bush screwed it up.  What is forgotten in all of this is that those that opposed us before 9/11 opposed us after it too, with a brief fair-weather friendship in between.  Nothing was actually squandered because nothing was actually gained, other than a brief facade that apparently many fell for.

Of course, when places like France started electing people more aligned to the Right, suddenly actual cooperation with the US was back, but this time the Left ignored it.  The narrative was already in place.  The Iraq war was "unilateral", except for the dozens of other countries helping out.  The world hates us now, except that those countries pretty much hated us before, too.  Going after terrorists, their enablers, and, oh yeah, a Ba’athist that had continually broken the terms of his cease-fire despite dozens of harshly-worded UN resolutions; that pushed the world away.

News flash; they were never really close enough to us to be pushed.  It was all an optical illusion.

But now we have a President who says he wants to mend our fences with the world, and get them to like us again.  He’s made some speeches that got huge crowds, which is all very nice.  But what is he doing to bring people back to loving the US?

This:

WARSAW, Poland – Poles and Czechs voiced deep concern Friday at President Barack Obama’s decision to scrap a Bush-era missile defense shield planned for their countries.

"Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back," the Polish tabloid Fakt declared on its front page.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski said he was concerned that Obama’s new strategy leaves Poland in a dangerous "gray zone" between Western Europe and the old Soviet sphere.

Recent events in the region have rattled nerves throughout central and eastern Europe, a region controlled by Moscow during the Cold War, including the war last summer between Russia and Georgia and ongoing efforts by Russia to regain influence in Ukraine. A Russian cutoff of gas to Ukraine last winter left many Europeans without heat.

[…]

An editorial in Hospodarske Novine, a respected pro-business Czech newspaper, said: "an ally we rely on has betrayed us, and exchanged us for its own, better relations with Russia, of which we are rightly afraid."

The move has raised fears in the two nations they are being marginalized by Washington even as a resurgent Russia leaves them longing for added American protection.

The Bush administration always said that the planned system — with a radar near Prague and interceptors in northern Poland — was meant as defense against Iran. But Poles and Czechs saw it as protection against Russia, and Moscow too considered a military installation in its backyard to be a threat.

"No Radar. Russia won," the largest Czech daily, Mlada Fronta Dnes, declared in a front-page headline.

Say what you want about Bush, but he went after those with designs on killing us.  Obama is supposedly mending fences by ticking off our allies, in order to not offend a nuclear Russia. 

Why should Russia be offended at a missile shield in eastern Europe if they really have no designs on it?  How is this, as they claim, a security threat or political provocation?  How is that an affront, especially when the International Atomic Energy Agency believes that Iran has (not "will have" but "has") the knowledge to make a nuclear bomb, which is arguably the most significant part of the process. 

But never mind allies who may need protection from a rogue state, we need to make sure Russia doesn’t get its feelings hurt.  The replacement?

Obama said the old plan was scrapped in part because the U.S. has concluded that Iran is less focused on developing the kind of long-range missiles for which the system was originally developed, making the building of an expensive new shield unnecessary.

The replacement system is to link smaller radar systems with a network of sensors and missiles that could be deployed at sea or on land. Some of the weaponry and sensors are ready now, and the rest would be developed over the next 10 years.

The Pentagon contemplates a system of perhaps 40 missiles by 2015, at two or three sites across Europe.

Because after all, 10 years is certainly not enough time for Iran to come up with a delivery system for a nuke, right?  Right? 

And this all begs a couple of questions; if Russia doesn’t like the system that was to be implemented, who’s to say that they’ll like the new one, and will Obama scrap this new idea if the Russians don’t like it? 

Way to mend those fences. 

James Hanley at Positive Liberty reflects on recent experience with lawyers and the law:

Despite the mythology surrounding our adversarial system of justice, it is a terrible way to pursue the truth. I already knew that, but it became ever more clear to me that one of the primary duties of the lawyer is to obscure the truth, to hide and dissemble about all facts that are not conducive to his case.

and

But I think there is a difference in incentives in our occupations. A lawyer, at least in certain fields, can be quite well-rewarded for purposefuly obfuscating the facts. And while for academics it can be rewarding to unintentionally obfuscate the truth, as long as enough others are also fooled, purposefully obscuring it can be treated as a serious offense.

I think Mr Hanley hits on an important point here. In an adversarial system of justice nobody involved is interested in discovering the truth, they are all interested in winning.

Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen has a chapter on Democracy, in which she locates doubting Democracy as something of a third rail in our culture. She writes:

So it is that contemporary democracy has become the only cornerstone considered to be untouchable. Lacking the inquisitorial methods that it condemns, it practices its own brand of intolerance through verbal ostracism. Whoever dares to criticize finds himself either scorned for weak or backward reasoning, or accused of barbarity, relegated to the darkness, and placed in the company of our historic enemies. All of which clearly demonstrates the sacralization of democratic thinking: its adversaries are doomed to ruination, diminshed by moral condemnation, and deprived of the right to take issue. The sacred is precisely that against which contradiction kills the contradictor.

(as an aside, I’m uncertain whether I understand what she’s saying in that last sentence, but I don’t think it consonant with a Christian meaning of sacred.) But getting back to the matter of hand. If the problem with an adversarial system of justice is that it is not optimized to find truth, but instead to provide an arena in which a noetic gladiatorial event transpires. An event not to find any underlying truth, i.e., did he do it, or who is right. It doesn’t help that the playing field itself is uneven, having been set by another gladiatorial event, the jousting for favor of elected officials who themselves are jousting for approval of the electorate. In our short American history, we have had the practice of electing to high office those military leaders who are successful (who run) after a war. While these men very often are very poor Presidents, the reason might be that leading civilians is as similar to leading soldiers as is herding cats and herding dogs. However, one of the main reasons on which their electoral success is based is that the test which they passed, leading men successfully, is seen a better test of their fitness to lead the state than rhetorical brilliance in the public forum, debating skills, or finding a good team to run a campaign.

Democracy, Ms Delsol suggests, is a system designed to optimize happiness. (As another aside, this might explain why a common flawed misreading of happiness as related to pleasure underlies the regretful decisions being made by our nominally democratic government today.) However this raises two important questions. The first is one I’ve asked before, namely, “Is our electoral process one which might reasonably expected to winnow out and discover a good leader?” This is related to Mr Hanley’s observation that our legal system is not one designed of fit to find truth, and that if it does occasionally find truth that discovery is more accidental than not. I’d offer, just as our conflict based judicial process is not one which is designed to find truth, I’d offer neither is our electoral procedure one which is designed to find good leaders. A second question arises from the observation of Ms Delsol’s of what is being optimized that is, “What should in fact be optimized by government?” If you are considering the fitness of various forms of the state and how government might best be constructed, it surely prior to engaging on that enterprise, one should consider what is it that should be maximized by our design?

I’d like to offer a non-intuitive stab at an answer to the second question.  I would offer that the thing which government should optimize is just authority. If I define the just authority of a state that authority which is freely granted by the people, then good government is a “straightforward” min-max problem. Maximize authority with a minimum of coercion. Straightforward is in scare quotes because the solution is almost certainly not crystal clear nor straightforward. In this view, Libertarians have it half right. Minimizing coercion is a key ingredient to government. But they also have it exactly half wrong, in that minimizing state authority is getting it exactly backwards. Authority should in fact be maximized …within the condition that coercion be minimal. A totalitarian state maximizes coercion and authority. In an ideal government, any and every act by the government performed would be seen by its citizens as within the authority they granted. Unlike a minimal authority state, it would also fill the roles expected of the state in accord with the desires of its people. It would be free to do anything it wished because it would not wish to do anything that its people did not desire.

What sorts of tentative suggestions might one make toward a system of government that tries to min/max coercion and authority. Two factors come to mind. One, the subsidiarity arises as a important factor a large state, where large regional and micro-regional differences exist regarding expectations of how far the authority of government and its role extends. If you are trying for a min/max solution the flexibility of local adjustments can find a tighter solution than a single global one. Secondly, the forms of government which are considered normally on the playing field, oligarchy, monarchy, democracy and republic are forms which were developed centuries ago. How might information technologies and the ease of transportation in the modern era permit new forms to be imagined (and tested)?

Contrary to claims by the Obama administration, they don’t actually have the majority of doctors on their side.

Two of every three practicing physicians oppose the medical overhaul plan under consideration in Washington, and hundreds of thousands would think about shutting down their practices or retiring early if it were adopted, a new IBD/TIPP Poll has found.

The poll contradicts the claims of not only the White House, but also doctors’ own lobby — the powerful American Medical Association — both of which suggest the medical profession is behind the proposed overhaul.

Joe Wilson, call your office.  You may have spoken just a bit too soon.

Major findings included:

• Two-thirds, or 65%, of doctors say they oppose the proposed government expansion plan. This contradicts the administration’s claims that doctors are part of an "unprecedented coalition" supporting a medical overhaul.

[…]

• Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.

[…]

• More than seven in 10 doctors, or 71% — the most lopsided response in the poll — answered "no" when asked if they believed "the government can cover 47 million more people and that it will cost less money and the quality of care will be better."

If this passes, rationing, here we come.  The result would be fewer doctors handling more patients; how could you not wind up with rationing? 

And this really should be news to anyone who’s paying attention.  US states as well as other countries with socialized medicine already have this problem

A key reason for the doctor shortages, according to the study, is a "lingering poor practice environment in the state."

In 2006, Massachusetts passed its medical overhaul — minus a public option — similar to what’s being proposed on a national scale now. It hasn’t worked as expected. Costs are higher, with insurance premiums rising 22% faster than in the U.S. as a whole.

"Health spending in Massachusetts is higher than the United States on average and is growing at a faster rate," according to a recent report from the Urban Institute.

Other states with government-run or mandated health insurance systems, including Maine, Tennessee and Hawaii, have been forced to cut back services and coverage.

This experience has been repeated in other countries where a form of nationalized care is common. In particular, many nationalized health systems seem to have trouble finding enough doctors to meet demand.

In Britain, a lack of practicing physicians means the country has had to import thousands of foreign doctors to care for patients in the National Health Service.

"A third of (British) primary care trusts are flying in (general practitioners) from as far away as Lithuania, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Switzerland" because of a doctor shortage, a recent story in the British Daily Mail noted.

British doctors, demoralized by long hours and burdensome rules, simply refuse to see patients at nights and weekends.

Likewise, Canadian physicians who have to deal with the stringent rules and income limits imposed by that country’s national health plan have emigrated in droves to other countries, including the U.S.

So they’ll make up for poor coverage by making you pay more for it, whether directly or via taxes.  Lose-lose.

“We want you to engage honestly on the issues in this debate on healthcare” … “but if you oppose the healthcare bill, you are a racist.”

“This healthcare bill will not raise taxes or deficits at all” … but Mr Wilson is “officially” reprimanded for accusing the “One” of lying and an apology is demanded (although it was already tendered within hours of the speech) … this in a bill the CBO flat out says will raise spending and for a bill which specifically includes new taxes.

We’re not going to have any death-panels … We want this instead. It’s not a panel, it’s a formula.

So, let’s attempt some more rational discussions on healthcare. Hopefully, some progressives will be able, unlike the President, to engage in actual debate that isn’t accompanied by poisoning the well.

An eminent not-so-directly politically connected (Nobel winning) economist has an interesting offering here. He concludes:

Why is it that although the average age of onset of disabilities has been delayed by ten years, and that these disabilities have become milder than they used to be, the share of GDP spent on health is rising? One factor is the increase in the proportion of the population that is elderly. However, such changes in age structure account for a minor part of rising expenditures, on the order of 10 percent.

The main factor is that the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6—for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent. This is not a new trend. Between 1875 and 1995, the share of family income spent on food, clothing, and shelter declined from 87 percent to just 30 percent, despite the fact that we eat more food, own more clothes, and have better and larger homes today than we had in 1875. All of this has been made possible by the growth in the productivity of traditional commodities. In the last quarter of the 19th century, it took 1,700 hours of labor to purchase the annual food supply for a family. Today it requires just 260 hours, and it is likely that by 2040, a family’s food supply will be purchased with about 160 hours of labor.¹²

Consequently, there is no need to suppress the demand for healthcare. Expenditures on healthcare are driven by demand, which is spurred by income and by advances in biotechnology that make health interventions increasingly effective. Just as electricity and manufacturing were the industries that stimulated the growth of the rest of the economy at the beginning of the 20th century, healthcare is the growth industry of the 21st century. It is a leading sector, which means that expenditures on healthcare will pull forward a wide array of other industries including manufacturing, education, financial services, communications, and construction. [Ed: Emphasis mine]

So, my argument all along has been that if you want to increase the availability of healthcare and to increase the quality you need to encourage and advance ways of making the healthcare product we consume today an easier and more available commodity. That will take a radical restructuring and a heavy reliance on automation which is not available today. Entrenching the current system in heavier and ever more layers of bureaucratic burdens is exactly the wrong way to go about reshaping healthcare for the future. Regulation is not the means by which innovation is found. The only innovation heavy regulation and control achieves are innovative ways to get around said innovations.

All of the industrial commodities and consumable items today which have been reduced in price over the past decades have achieved their price reduction via automation. From the humble tractor to automated robotic lines and CAD/CAM processes. Computer automation and information technology are going to be a big part of the innovations that we will need in order for the price to drop by an order of magnitude or more. We are famously told that since the mid-80s the capabilities of biotechnology have been increasing exponentially faster than our computing power (Moore’s Law). Much of the computer industry derived its innovations from very small scale startups and single individuals. Yet it is impossible to imagine a single individual or small group in today’s regulatory environment getting a new drug, therapy, or diagnostic device to market. If it is impossible to imagine … it won’t happen. If Congress gets its hands on managing (and likely micro-managing) healthcare for the nation, innovation will require an act of Congress.

Congress can fix healthcare. By taking its hands off, letting go. By simply burning the as many regulations as it can and lighting the a fire of innovation into the field. Put cost and accountability and choice in the hands of the consumer. Release restrictions and let the market reward successful innovation.

The Tree of Liberty. Don’t Tread on Me.

The left today sees these as threatening. They only see the tree of liberty in the context of Jefferson’s quote about the blood of patriots. They see the NRA connections of the right combined with that quote and trees in abundance on poster as tantamount to assault, i.e., a direct armed threat in the legal sense. However that is not really tenable.

When one puts this symbolism in a historical context the threat to the established Democratic party rule is purely electoral. Look at the results of a little historical research. In David Hackett Fisher’s book Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America’s Founding Ideas one finds copious examples of liberty trees, bells, snakes and the like … which are to be now found in the tea party posters. They are not hinting at violence but instead are unconsciously (and likely consciously in some cases) tapping the collective visual signs and symbols of our American heritage. While these symbols trace to the revolutionary period, which understandably makes the party in power nervous. They are not exclusively from that period, nor were (historically) used to tie back to that era. That it is to say they are no long primarily tied to revolution and overthrow but are in fact national symbols tied to freedom and liberty. To restate, they are primarily American symbols of freedom and liberty.

If Democrats today are nervous at the thought of liberty and freedom, that is a depressing and unfortunate turn of events. That 30% of this country is so enamoured of statist solutions that ideas of liberty and personal independence scares them.

The November 12th tea party is an political opportunity for those who might capitalize on it. The size of the gatherings alone indicate a large groundswell support. The Democratic party has been long tied to bigger and more intrusive government. The GOP has paid lip service and one might argue recently paid heavily at the polls for their hypocrisy in that matter regarding smaller government. Democrats have argued that people pay lip service themselves to liberty but “really want” the comfortable entitlements that they promote. Yet the tea party movement and the GOP electoral defeats in 2008 might indicate that this is not the case. There are a goodly number of people that really want less from the Feds. It remains to be seen if any number GOP candidates with both seize this opportunity in campaign rhetoric and more importantly follow through once in office.

I had been working on a lengthy post responding to the President’s health care speech and then ran across this column by Shikha Dalmia that makes my case better than I could so I’ll just encourage you to read it instead.

The The Notorious ŒV offers a bland suggestion that the left remains sympathetic to keeping The Unlearned Lessons Of the Twentieth Century yet unlearned. Having finished the class (except for a final paper which I plan to write this weekend) now I have the chance to return to reading Chantal Delsol’s two books that have been translated into English (the first linked above). The second, which actually was published first, is titled Icarus Fallen: The Search for Meaning in a Uncertain World. In the forward by the series editor, an surprising fact is asserted. The secular left and liberalism has had a little known assault which has been highly successful in the debate between left and right in the field of translation. They have managed to give the impression that outside of the Anglo-American world leftist thinkers are the dominant default. In turn, the Continent has been assailed in the main by liberal authors from the Americas, badly skewing our impressions of the status of the other. He gives a list of about a dozen or so French, South American, Italian, and German conservative thinkers and writers, each heard in their language but not translated. Chantal Delsol is another of these individuals. The editor notes the obvious, that one would have considered a distinguished influential woman political scientist/political philosopher (and in a field in which women are not just a little rare) would be a thing that feminists would celebrate. Yet, because her political philosophy is not left leaning … wham. No translations. No celebrations. No recognition (except perhaps a tacit nod to hypocrisy).

Ms Delsol is writing about the failed aspirations of the majority in the last century. She terms our age late modernity to strike a chord with late antiquity. For the last two centuries the progressive vision has been to stamp out poverty, injustice, war, disease and arrive at a radiant future. Even today, the left wing in American thinks that, yes, if only we pass this next reform (healthcare) then there will be no people dying for lack of care in America. There are two results to that sort of thinking. First, since, even if that passes, people will still be dying, injustice, poverty and disease will remain … yet another major reform will be critically required. And second eventually many will become disillusioned. Ms Delsol begins her book with an image of an Icarus who actually manages to survive. And asks, “he falls back into the labyrinth, where he finds himself horribly bruised but still alive. And let us try to imagine what goes on in his life after having thought himself capable of attaining the sun, the supreme good. How will he get over his disappointment?”

There are some who think that the mistakes of the past century to solve those problems were technical. That Icarus just “didn’t” get it right, like the hopey/changey Obamanoids who think that just if “smart people” get to make the right “wonky” decisions then the sun will be attained. Asymmetrical information problems are not the least of their errors. The problems go deeper. Others are less optimistic, instead having an existential crises. Having rejected the foundational beliefs of the prior age and embarking on ambitious projects to save the world, finding that it is not a tenable project, leaves many in the late modernity grasping for alternatives.

In the upcoming weeks, one of the recurring themes will be to raise and discuss the points and arguments raised by Ms Delsol in her two books noted above, starting with Icarus Fallen. I’d encourage you to get them from a library and skim or read them yourselves (of failing that, tip me a few dimes and buy it with the provided links). It would at the very least enliven the discussion.

But good examples of what, exactly?

From Mike Ramirez (click for a larger version):