A new German disease? · Apr 20, 2009
Obamaphilia, that is. And a transient one, argues Claus Christian Malzahn in Spiegel. He explores some of the reasons why Germans oscillate between extremes of love and hate vis-a-vis American presidents:
Indeed, all this love and hate of American presidents is not simple heartfelt interest or true partisanship. Rather it would seem to reveal the basic traits of the authoritarian personality which seeks to project its own aggressions and deficiencies onto others, while preserving its own preternatural innocence and rightness. Can that instinct on the part of Germans serve Obama well in the long run?
When Bush was in the White House, not a day passed in Germany when someone wasn’t making the wildest claims, hurling the vilest insults or spreading the most outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States and his administration. But there was little risk involved in these statements which helped boost the German feelings of superiority and innate self-righteousness.
Americans live in a society which of course celebrates commerce and selfishness — but behind the bluster, a mere inch beneath the surface, there are often huge reservoirs of idealism and selflessness in individual Americans. We Germans, however, live in a world which in ways is much fairer and more organized for the public good. Yet, so many of our experiences from the Thirty Years War onwards have contributed to a hard egotistical core which lurks just beneath the dutiful surface of the national psyche.
Losonczi Agnes: Sorsba fordult történelem · Apr 16, 2009
Balo Gyorgy Fregoli, 2007. július 9.
“A helyzet megjelenítése helyett hadd idézzünk fel egy képet, fantáziakép, de szereplői és az egyes történetek valósak. A hosszan kígyózó százakra, majd százezrekre tehető sorban itt öten állnak egymás mögött a kárpótlási hivatal előtt.
Elől áll a deportált zsidó ember, a haláltábor túlélője. A háború alatt mindenétől megfosztották, családját megölték.
Mögötte a csendőr, aki 1944-ben részt vett a zsidók deportálásában, és ezért a háború után évekig börtönben ült.
A csendőr mögött egy zsidó munkaszolgálatosból lett rendőr áll, aki 1945-ben a csendőrt letartóztatta, később ávós lett, a koncepciós perek idején saját társai megvádolták, megkínozták, börtönbe vetették.
Mögötte áll az az ’56-os forradalmár, aki egy pártembert mentett meg a lincseléstől, a lakásában bújtatta. A forradalom után mégis börtönbüntetést kapott ellenforradalmisága miatt, mert a pártember ellene tanúskodott.
A forradalmár mögött az a pufajkás áll, aki az ellenforradalmárok felszámolásakor ellene tanúskodott, majd katonatisztként a vád szerint baloldali összeesküvésben vett részt, és több év börtönre ítélték, így ő is koncepciós per áldozata lett.”
Losonczi Ágnes Sorsba fordult történelem.
Tax facts (2006) · Apr 15, 2009
Summary: The top ~3% pay half of all taxes. The top quarter pays almost 90%, and the bottom half pays essentially no taxes.
| % of total AGI | % of income taxes | Avg tax rate (%) | |||
| Top 1% | 22 | 40 | 23 | ||
| Top 5% | 37 | 60 | 21 | ||
| Top 10% | 47 | 71 | 19 | ||
| Top 25% | 68 | 86 | 16 | ||
| Top 50% | 87 | 97 | 14 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Top 50% | 87 | 97 | 14 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
| Top 25% | 68 | 86 | 16 | ||
| 2nd quartile (top 26-50%) | 19 | 11 | 7 | ||
| Bottom 50% | 13 | 3 | 3 | ||
Source: IRS
The share of the top 10% has been climbing relentlessly:
Source: CBO via Mark J Perry
Tuning a cello · Mar 08, 2009
Sometimes a 13-year old does it better than a pro. Strange, but true.
Cello tuning from Koen Brader on Vimeo.
Cool · Mar 08, 2009
The Renaissance had a word for it: sprezzatura, the quality of apparent ease that the perfect courtier brought to all his high-wire acts: swordplay, flute-playing, poetry-writing, singing, lovemaking. A later articulation of the same quality: A hundred years ago Vaslav Nijinsky, when asked how he managed his gravity-defying grands jetés, said “I merely leap and pause.”
Recklessness, abandon, sang-froid, talent: Fifty years ago it was called “cool.” It still is.
Thus WILLARD SPIEGELMAN starts his article What Postwar California Gave to Art, Design and Culture. Niiiice writing.
I am fan of the mid-century esthetic – in music , movies, architecture and design. Of course it was not limited to SoCal, even though LA was one of its centers, where
European émigré artists and intellectuals, having escaped Nazi Germany, had set down roots. New postwar prosperity led people to move west. After a decade of the war effort, industry resumed, offering new materials for civilian products. The stars were aligned. Industrial design, film and television, painting and jazz all bloomed in the desert. A new aesthetic emerged.
U2's "No Line on the Horizon" · Mar 08, 2009
Jim Fusili reviews U2’s latest album, “No Line on the Horizon.” The band continues to be very inventive, even after three decades in the business. Interestingly, just the day before reading this review, I bought “Zooropa” after hearing “Numb” on this fascinating video:
New York 2008 from Vicente Sahuc on Vimeo.
I am a fan of electronica, and Zooropa is quite good.
Ruining charity · Mar 07, 2009
Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote an op-ed in the WSJ about the attempts by left wing activists to extort charities into paying for liberal causes and ignore donor intent. I think liberals should set up their own charities and talk up rich donors and ordinary folks into donating for the causes they hold dear. The snag is, research shows conservatives are more likely to give to charity (liberals love spending other people’s money, as Nicholas Kristof, perhaps inadvertently, suggested). As Arthur Brooks pointed out:
Strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills are the factors that determine how likely one is to give.
Charities help make American life more vibrant and diverse than Europe’s.
What makes Americans give billions each year is not pressure from activists or government mandates. It is a diversity of interests, freely chosen and passionately pursued.
Given conservatives tendency to donate and the – so far sacrosanct – principle of following donor intent, it is understandable that left-wing activists view charities as (1) bastions of much hated individualism, capitalism and consequently conservatism, and (2) a resource to tap for the benefit of their clients and to pay for their fantasies of re-engineering human nature into collectivist mold.
The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy begins its report with the premise that a grant maker “best serves the public good by contributing to a strong participatory democracy that engages all communities.”
Really? What about the foundations founded to save whales or cure heart disease? Do they need to contribute to a participatory democracy? And who decides if a foundation is giving to a “marginalized” community anyway? The idea, put forward in the report, that giving grants to “large cultural or educational institutions” doesn’t benefit minorities is offensive. Black people don’t go to museums? Hispanics don’t go to college?
In a letter to the WSJ editor reader L.C. Grant points out the connection to the overarching left-wing goal of Europeanizing American life:
Regarding Naomi Schaefer Riley’s “Philanthropy and Its Enemies” (op-ed, March 3): Americans give more to charity than do people in almost any other part of the world (as well documented in two books by Arthur C. Brooks), so the assaults on charitable giving and on charitable institutions are hard to fathom in a time of economic crisis. Tampering with a charitable formula that works, and one that is very highly correlated with the happiness of givers, makes little sense. The only explanations for this all have negative consequences: the Europeanization of American charity, the conversion of charity into entitlement, or the emphasis on the perceived fairness of charity instead of real results.
Limiting the tax deductibility of charitable contributions by the rich clearly follows the European social welfare state model. Europeans generally give very little time and money to charity because they pay very high taxes and consider it to be the state’s responsibility to take care of the needy.
For those Americans who feel as heartened by writing a check to the IRS as they do writing a check to their favorite charity, the European approach may be appealing.
Efforts by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the Greenlining Institute can be understood in the context of entitlements and fairness. Forcing charities to allocate a certain percentage of their grants to various minorities (based on race, gender, sexual preference, etc.), in effect, converts discretionary allocation of charitable dollars into entitlement payments to specific groups of victims. The end result, as with limiting the tax deductibility of contributions, will be less dollars given to charity and an unhappier population. Apparently that’s OK, as long as favored groups, including community organizers, receive a larger percentage of a much smaller charitable pie.
President Obama’s tax proposals and the efforts of the NCRP and Greenlining will, without a doubt, reduce charitable contributions and will push us further toward a European social welfare state model, to the detriment of both givers and receivers.
I agree with Brooks (again) · Feb 23, 2009
David Brooks:
The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.
These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.
Pundits and kibbitzers · Feb 15, 2009
I was impressed by an op ed by Eliot Cohen in the WSJ and I will quote liberally from it:
[...] government pays only intermittent attention to talk on the outside. To a remarkable extent, in fact, government talks only to itself.
Officials in the foreign policy and defense worlds go through vast quantities of official data, briefing papers and talking points. They meet urgently with one another. They fly to foreign capitols and back in a few days. They telephone and email incessantly. Every day in the office I spent hours reading a three- to six-inch stack of intelligence, plus all the other cables, messages and memoranda that are the lifeblood of the Department of State. I scanned the press clips, reading an opinion piece rarely, usually when it was written by someone who had a track record for good judgment. By and large, the buzz on the outside was just that — a background noise of which I was dimly aware, unless it was either unusually nasty, or unusually perceptive, which often merely meant that it fit my own views.
Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what’s going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think.
[...] it’s even murkier on the outside. “Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, “We really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there.”
[...]
What, then, is a pundit to do? The best commentary has an impact, less because it offers new ideas (most ideas have been considered, however incompletely, on the inside) than because it clarifies problems or solutions that the insiders have only vaguely or incompletely considered. A tight, well-written, and carefully reasoned examination of a policy problem will bring into focus an issue that the officials have not had the time, or often the literary skill, to capture precisely. That kind of analysis is very much worth reading.
Invariably, a pundit will prescribe solutions. In doing so, he should follow the advice of the late Raymond Aron, the wisest French policy intellectual of modern times: Never criticize a policy unless you can convincingly depict a better course of action. Aron, like many of the greatest commentators on policy, had virtually no experience in government, but great empathy for those in a position to decide. Empathy — the capacity for imagining what it is like to be the other — is an essential quality for the thoughtful pundit. Policy makers, of course, prefer sympathy, which is soothing, unnecessary and often harmful.
[...]
High-quality commentary reaches audiences (including those overseas) who may not affect daily policy making, but whose opinions matter in subtler and longer-term ways. Well done, it sharpens a larger discourse — and besides, it’s more therapeutic than shouting at your television set. A prudent commentator should be modest in his aspirations, conscious of his limitations, and sparing with his exhortations.
Jeb Bush on education · Feb 15, 2009
From yesterday’s WSJ:
What comes through when Mr. Bush is asked about education is how radical his views are. He would toss out the traditional K-to-12 scheme in favor of a credit system, like colleges have.
“It’s not based on seat time,” he says. “It’s whether you accomplished the task. Now we’re like GM in its heyday of mass production. We don’t have a flourishing education system that’s customized. There’s a whole world out there that didn’t exist 10 years ago, which is online learning. We have the ability today to customize learning so we don’t cast young people aside.”
This is where Sweden comes in. “The idea that somehow Sweden would be the land of innovation, where private involvement in what was considered a government activity, is quite shocking to us Americans,” Mr. Bush says. “But they’re way ahead of us. They have a totally voucherized system. The kids come from Baghdad, Somalia — this is in the tougher part of Stockholm — and they’re learning three languages by the time they finish. . . . there’s no reason we can’t have that except we’re stuck in the old way.”
Influential books of the 20th century · Jan 25, 2009
The Times Literary Supplement has a ranking of the most influential books of the second half of the 20th century:
The special relationship gets shaky · Jan 05, 2009
An interesting article in the Times of London about the threats to the special relationship: the relative underperformance of British troops, the lack in the British political elite of the will for vigorous intervention and Obama’s lack of anglophilia.
Perhaps most important of all, the military alliance between Britain and America – which has cemented the political alliance since the First World War – is beginning to crack. I am told that a report circulating at the highest level in the Ministry of Defence concludes that there are now serious doubts in Washington about the effectiveness of the British Armed Forces. Senior military figures are said to have been surprised, and shocked, by feedback that arrived in Whitehall last month. Described as “highly sensitive”, it raised questions about the worth of the UK contribution to US-led operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. “It showed that the Americans don’t value us much,” one source told me. “Britain’s military ability is no longer rated as highly as we thought it was.”
The message has filtered across to the Foreign Office, too. At a diplomatic as well as a military level, concerns have been raised about the quality of British troops and equipment. Too often, the Americans complain, they have had to ride to the rescue of the Brits, rather than being able to rely on them as equal partners. There are question marks in Washington about Britain’s political commitment to military engagement: Mr Brown will not be forgiven if he fails to send substantial numbers of troops to support an Obama surge in Afghanistan.
“The US generals think the Brits need to be taken down a peg or two – that we have not performed well in Basra and Helmand province – and that has trickled up to the Pentagon,” says a Foreign Office insider. “It’s not terminal but it’s an important warning to us that if we are going to trade on our military partnership we are going to have to raise our game.”
King of California · Jan 03, 2009
Just watched this Sundance-indie movie, in which a mentally disturbed dad (Michael Douglas) and his precocious daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) discover each other during a frantic treasure hunt outside of LA.
The cinematography is stunning, particularly when enjoyed in 24fps Blue-ray on a large screen.
Vaclav Klaus, bete noire · Jan 03, 2009
Le Monde published a scathing non-interview with Vaclav Klaus. Why non-interview:
- “ Un entretien pour Le Monde ? Non.
- “??”
- “Non, n’insistez pas. Vous êtes de gauche, et si fanatiquement proeuropéen.”
That portrait that emerges is — no doubt unintentionally — that of a vigorous free marketeer, a lucid critic of the excess of the eurocracy and a courageous dissident. The flavor of the article is similar to descriptions of Nixon in the US press ( sans Watergate for the time being), that is, an intelligent man despised by the bien pensant elite and who is consumed by his rage and other demons.
Arokasok Top 20 · Jan 01, 2009
Arokasok Top 20 is a tongue in cheek list of the Hungarian public personalities (largely media types) responsible for the poisonous atmosphere that has engulfed Hungary since the fall of the Berlin wall almost 20 years ago. This list is an equal opportunity offender.
Four ways to spend money and other tidbits · Dec 21, 2008
I quoted earlier from comments on Jane Galt (Meghan McArdle)‘s post, and here is the entire thread (so that I don’t lose it should it ever become unavailable on the internet).
Grand Strategy · Dec 21, 2008
With academic programs in international relations too narrowly specialized, a new Grand Strategy course at Yale is getting famous as successful in fostering intellectual discipline and opening doors in Washington for its graduates.
Giving others' money · Dec 20, 2008
Conservatives give more of their own money, liberals love to give others’ money away.
Nicholas Kristof has an op-ed in the NYT on this topic.
Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.
The upshot is that Democrats, who speak passionately about the hungry and homeless, personally fork over less money to charity than Republicans — the ones who try to cut health insurance for children.
I blogged about this earlier after I heard an interview with Brooks on public radio. It is worth repeating some of his points:
Strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills are the factors that determine how likely one is to give.
It’s also worth repeating Milton Friedman’s immortal words on the four ways of spending.
On Photography · Nov 16, 2008
Excerpt:
“Balance is the enemy of art.” Richard Eyre
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” Ansel Adams
“The limits of your language are the limits of your world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
Click here to read more ...
2008 Presidential Election: 52% vs 46% · Nov 07, 2008
Results breakdown in one minute (refresh to rerun the animation):
By county 2008 vs 2004, showing clear Democratic inroads in previous GOP territory:
By state 2008 through 1992:
From the WSJ, NY Times and Wikipedia.