Wednesday, March 16, 2011

RE ENTREPRENEURS NEEDING SAVING IN LIBYA

On a related note, there must not be quite enough new entrepreneurs needing saving in Libya to unleash the forces of freedom and justice in that terrible conflict.

Perhaps this is a conflict best left to the Muslim world, no?

RE GEN PETRAEUS' REPORT NYT EDITORIAL

Why, really, would any regime in its right mind want to expend huge resources taking, or then holding, part of Afghanistan?

Has anyone bothered to look at what that place looks like?

It is a desert and mountainous waste land. What is that land good for to us here?

Farming minerals, trade route?

The British at least had a rational account of the need to occupy and control the Middle East.

I doubt whether anyone has a good explanation that holds water either strategically or from a resource basis, for why we are over there.

You have to go back to people like the Romans, who usually asked questions like, 'What is this campaign for?', re whether to take, and then hold, some piece of adjoining real estate from its erstwhile occupants.

Since it is just a buffer area (not a lot of rewarding agricultural commercial or mineral uses for it), why should Americans, rather than strictly natives, take or hold it?

In a world like this, it may some day soon appear to have seemed like an insight, back now, to have kept some scarce financial and economic powder dry.

RE OPINIONATOR THE RISE OF THE WEST ARENSON

'Civil War too long seen as a two way conflict.'

He is fundamentally wrong about this. Although there was gradually developing a 'West', ultimately also as a sectional or multi sectional identity, that was not yet importantly what was going on around the 1850s.

It helps to read eg Nevins' account,

rather than snippets like this.

Monday, March 14, 2011

the menu and The Literary Gourmet Just Ducky curried

One might have guessed that I would do something like this. I never had duck in an Indian restaurant.....

I was influenced, back in the mid 70s, in London, by Madhur Jaffrey, who wrote a very good book on Indian cooking, I believe I had An Invitation To Indian Cooking.

There was a good 'student' Indian restaurant, back then, I believe on Charlotte Street, called The Natraj. Of course the city was filled with them.

I have consulted other books since, but this was a good early one for me.

Duck needs a lot of sauce, and rice, to cut the fat which roils around the roasting pan.

Thus, leftover roast duck, curry.

I used various dry frozen ground spices for this little number, cumin, garam masala, cardamom;plus Muir Glen garlic roast garlic tomato sauce, leftover red chard.

RE ANOTHER INSIDE JOB KRUGMAN NYT EDITORIAL THURSTON

He is onto something here, outside the little bailiwick of economics proper.

Thurston had said in Boca way back in 06, "Who do you think they will bail out, you or me?"

That was a comment on 'big' 'property rights',

not the kind the Constitution talked about, over two centuries ago now, and quite dated really, but the new big ones.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

RE JULY 2010 POWER STRUGGLE TERM SEARCHES

Readers might go back and look at prior years' posts, on certain topics. 'Terms search' seems to be limited to current year (?).

I referred to this book back in July 2010.

THE BEGINNING OF TALKS ABOUT 'SPECIALIZATION' WAS:

http://geraldmeaders.blogspot.com/2010/07/specialization.html

ALSO IN JULY 2010.

RE HISTORY ELECTRIC POWER ENRON ETC ETC

See this now dated book, for some history on electric power and politics, American style: POWER STRUGGLE: THE HUNDRED-YEAR WAR OVER ELECTRICITY

FEW BOOKS HAVE BEEN WRITTEN ON THIS HISTORY APPARENTLY. Wonder why?

RE NAGEL ON BROOKS THE SOCIAL ANIMAL AND THE APPEAL TO UNCONSCIOUS FORCES

Coincidentally, because of forces I described in previous posts re compartmentalization and anti intellectualism,

one can end up with a rather 'intellectual' pundit going 'against the grain', A REBOURS, so to speak, as Nagel's article shows re Brooks' new book The Social Animal (which I haven't read):

'Brooks is out to expose the superficiality of an overly

rational view of human nature, but there is more

than one kind of superficiality.'

This article is connected, as I see it, with my topic, just yesterday,

and today, Nagel gives us a very contemporary example of what I was referring to.

A subrational account of human nature and behavior is in part derived from, and can easily dovetail into, an anti intellectual social and more importantly political stance,

albeit surrounded by various specialized and compartmentalized social, as well as so-called exact, scientific fields and 'findings'.

Here we have Brooks, with, so to speak (no doubt an exaggeration and falsification to some extent), a subrational Hobbesian body, enchained within and by a Lockean moral and intellectual soul and political system.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

RE INTELLECTUAL PROFESSIONAL COMPARTMENTALIZATION SPECIALIZATION AND ANTI INTELLECTUALISM

One would not necessarily have seen these phenomena as being connected; in fact, the tendency may have been to see such a connection as counter intuitive; but it turns out that they apparently are.

The ways in which this has come to be so can be fleshed out, but it may take me some few entries to try to articulate some of them.

the menu and The Literary Gourmet Just Ducky

Whole Roast Long Island duckling, with potatoes, onions, red wine, Thyme, capers, garlic cloves, mild Greek pepperoncinis are de riguer, etc., etc.,

I consulted Anne Willan's Regional French Cooking; Callea, Burgundy Gastronomie; but did not slavishly follow them,

and also took a glance at a fine old hardback book, The Literary Gourmet, a book I especially recommend, the entry called Forbidden Fruit, inspired by de Maupassant, I believe,

with a French recipe from 19th Century, 'Duck, American style'. I used a little leftover smoked bacon and pork sausage fat......

Field greens vinaigrette,
steamed red chard,
organic chocolate chip cookies.

RE THE BLOBBAL SITUATION Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ca?

This is looking more and more to me like a

Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ca?

moment.

Friday, March 11, 2011

MOST UNFORTUNATELY

Most unfortunately, the rational individual self interest of Adam Smith, etc., leads,

a couple of hundred years later,

to the 'rational self interest', and individualism, of Ayn Rand, etc.

Call it pedigree.

Cyber Warfare Say What BBC article

China cyber-warfare capability a 'formidable concern'

RE DUMBING DEFICITS DOWN

He has some points.

What would real 'hard thinking' about America's real, and bigger, problems look like?

Would it be just economic tweaking, here and there, as has been the history for a long time now?

It used to be that the fast growing economies of Asia were viewed as a mere isolated aberration, ostensibly isolated 'free riders', 'beggar thy neighbor' regimes, not likely to go anywhere big in the global economic marketplace of ideas.

In recent years they have been called mercantilist economic powerhouses.

They can flaunt so called enlightened democratic ideals with impunity. They don't have to 'lie low and bide their time' anymore, as Joseph Nye the other day put it on the BBC website.

Why is that? Perhaps their time has come, albeit unacknowledged so far by most, including Nye.

How did the political economic and military misperception subsist for so long, until really too late to change course in terms of industrial or commercial or trade or investment policy?

Terms search verious terms.

RE L S LOWRY LIFE DRAWINGS

These are drawings on the reverse of the figure at bottom. They are faint, and this image is digitally altered by a powerful scanner program to bring out features barely or not visible to the naked eye.

Term search L S Lowry for other details regarding this drawing, including watermark, and paintings with related figures.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

RE JOSEPH NYE BBC editorial

'China miscalculated by deviating from the smart strategy

of a rising power...proceed cautiously and "skilfully keep a

low profile".'

Or did they?

Bide time, gaining strength, while the others lose it.....

Smart strategy, to have them for a trading partner since

mid 70s.

Maybe China believes that time is now growing short.

Who can say that they are wrong? Certainly Nye

apparently.

Term search various terms.

RE 20 STATES PROPOSING COLLEGE STUDENTS CARRY GUNS ECHOES OF THE 50S

In the wake of some mass murderer events over the decades, one can see how some well intentioned people believe this type of legislation would help rather than hurt the peacefulness and safety of campuses.

Unfortunately, I strongly doubt that the results would be at all as hoped.

One would be likely to see numerous violent episodes, not much greater safety, and greatly enhanced militarism and divisiveness, on campuses and off.

I am reminded, Echoes Of The Fifties, to paraphrase DK's recent topic on the 1950s, but I am thinking of the 1850s, and of passages in Nevins, Ordeal, Volume 2, the passages recounting events leading up to the Civil War, in the Territory of Kansas in, I believe, 1856.

They were all advised to come well armed, and they did.

(BUT YOU ALSO HAVE TO RECALL, or be made aware, THAT EVEN FEDERAL CONGRESSMEN BACK THEN WENT AROUND THE CAPITOL ARMED, AND FREQUENTLY REFERRED TO USE OF THEIR WEAPONS TO MAKE A RHETORICAL POINT IN THE HOUSE OR SENATE. That was how it was then.)