We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be

From Food and Syria's failure By Spengler

What might emerge from the Arab world two or three generations from now is beyond anyone's capacity to foresee. As individuals, Arabs are as talented and productive as anyone on earth. For the time being they are caught in the maelstrom of a failing culture. The social engineers of the neither the American left nor right will ''get them right,” in Undersecretary Burns' grammatically challenged expression.

Gates is right: the existing political structures will not hold. As he told David Ignatius, ''I think we should be alert to the fact that outcomes are not predetermined, and that it's not necessarily the case that everything has a happy ending ... We are in dark territory and nobody knows what the outcome will be.'' As I said of Egypt in my February 2 essay: we do not know what kind of state will follow Basher Assad. We only know that it will be a failed state.

Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans

From Donald Sensing's Sense of Events.

When I was assigned to the Army Operations Center in the early 1990s at HQDA, the chief of staff was Gen. Carl Vuono. He sometimes found occasion during our briefings to him about current and planned operations to hammer home a point: "Hope is not a method and wishes are not plans."

Don't tell me what you hope will happen, don't tell me what you wish you could do, he repeated. "Give me a plan that makes it happen."

Take pride in the pleasures of the intellect

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts. Page 219.

So what is to be done? Is all lost? Not at all, but the salvation lies not with the government bodies but with individualswith hundreds and thousands of men and women who decide that this diseased concept of democracy shall not prevail. Whenever I talk in this way — and I have been doing so for more than thirty years — somebody is sure to protest that I am proposing the establishment and recruitment of an intellectual elite. My reply is enthusiastic agreement: that is precisely what I am doing. What is an elite? Is it not a body which values the best above that which is less good? Your country has never hesitated to let it be known that it leads the world in certain respects. You do not insist that your national standard of living should be that of your humblest citizens. You do not inhibit scientific research lest some less fortunate country should feel left out and protest that your scientists are elitist. Your moral standards as expressed by your politicians are the wonder of less ethically grandiose folk; I have always thought your invincible morality was a heritage from the Pilgrim Fathers, who were so unremittingly moral that the Old World couldn’t stand them for another minute and kicked them out. You do not conceal the fact that you are the wonder of the world. But in matters of intellect you are strangely unwilling to assert yourselves. Although many of the world’s leading intellectuals are citizens of the United States, you do not, as a nation, take pride in the pleasures of the intellect, enjoyed for their own sake, as adjuncts of the truly good, well-rounded life.

I wish you would give it a try.

The Phrase Finder

The Phrase Finder - a neat little site for finding the origins and meanigns of common idioms, phrases, morals, etc.

I suspect that they hate me

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. From the Reading essay, page 216.

I do not myself use a word processor, because I am what it is now the fashion to call a technomoron. I have no skill with machines. I fear them, and because I cannot help attributing human qualities to them, I suspect that they hate me and will kill me if they can.

What the ideal is

Inflation or Unemployment? by Megan McArdle. Emphasis added.

More to the point, this rather begs the question of what the ideal is. You could define "full employment" as a situation in which everyone who wants a job has one. But on any level of economic organization above the size of a small village, this will not be true. At any given time, there will be what economists call "frictional unemployment", which reflects the fact that it takes a little time to find a job after you've entered the labor force. As long as companies are constantly creating and destroying jobs, the ideal level of unemployment is not zero.

To me, full employment is probably best defined as the situation where everyone's going to get a job in a relatively comfortable period of time--not instantly, but pretty briskly. The time to find a job will vary with skill and income level (in my full employment world, we understand that a laid-off marketing executive is going to take longer to find another job than someone who works retail for $9 an hour, because it takes longer to find work that suits specialized skills).

Over time, I'd say full employment will probably correspond pretty closely with what Milton Friedman and the monetarists called "the non-inflation accelerating rate of unemployment", or NAIRU. NAIRU could be 4%, but it's not particularly likely to be--and it's even less likely to stay at 4%. NAIRU changes along with changes in the economy and the labor force. Equilibrium unemployment rates are very low when most men are unskilled labor who can pick up new jobs very easily--and need to, because they can never save up enough of a cash cushion to see them through an extended job search. They will be higher when jobs are more specialized, when people are rich enough not to have to take whatever's offered, and when there are regulatory barriers to hiring and firing.

They pranced and cavorted in coy prose

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts. From the Reading lecture, page 214.

An astonishing number of those who can read and write think that they do so rather well. I spent twenty years as a journalist, and I met all kinds of men and women who prided themselves on what they called their “communication skills’’; they would tell you, with an unconvincing show of modesty, that they thought they could write “a pretty good letter.” It was my duty as as editor to deal with their pretty good letters, and I never ceased to be astonished at how badly people expressed themselves who did well in the world as lawyers, doctors, engineers, and the like. When they were angry they seemed unable to focus their anger; they roared like lions, and like lions they roared on no identifiable note. When they wished to express grief they fell into cliché and trivialized their sincere feeling by the awful prose in which they expressed it. When they were soliciting money for charity, they pranced and cavorted in coy prose, or else they tried to make the reader’s flesh creep with tales of horrors that may have been true but did not sound true. I used to wonder what made them write as they did, and whenever I was able to find out I discovered that it was because of the dreadful prose they read and the way they read it. They admired cheap stuff, they imitated cheap stuff, and they appeared to have no understanding of how they cheapened their own minds and their powers of expression by so doing.

But clerisy is a mild term

I am reading a collection of essays and speeches by Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart.

There are two lectures, Reading and Writing, which he delivered as part of Yale University's Tanner lecture series. Filled with marvellous quotes and thoughts. Page 233.

Its first chapter was titled A Call to the Clerisy, and it said rather the sort of thing I have been saying in this lecture. It proposed that an educated class should recognize itself in North America, and take into its own hands the literary influence which had been pretty much abandoned to the universities and the academic critics. By an educated class I certainly did not mean people of substantial means with university degrees; I meant anybody who knew how to use a public library and did so with zeal and devotion. I expressed no enmity toward the academic critics but I did say that I thought their professionalism and the need they had to establish personal reputations made them less-thanperfect guides for the public at large. I called for the rise and self-recognition of a group of readers whom I defined as “those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books but do not live by books.” And to that group, the members of which are to be found everywhere, I applied the almost forgotten word clerisy.

[snip]

But clerisy is a mild term, one might almost say a Trollopian term. It could not frighten the most neurotic banker. And the clerisy do not want to take anything from anybody; they merely want to recover what was their own in those distant days before so much of our intellectual life was abandoned to the universities. They want to have a say in the world of books. They want the world of books, through them, to have its influence in the national life — social and political. To return, somewhat apologetically, to Matthew Arnold, they want the history of the human spirit to have its influence in the history of our own times.

The limerick is furtive

Limerick is furtive
by Morris Bishop

The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep him in close quarantine
Or he sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.

But we have lost touch with those intellectuals

From Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning Was the Command Line, page 53.

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.