A thriller lent to me by my supervisor. It was written by Terry Hayes,
a successful screenwriter (most notably, a couple of Mad Max movies).
It's very long, north of 600 pages. But the pages kept turning, so…
The protagonist, "Pilgrim", is a retired American secret agent, skilled in
investigatory techniques and nasty tactics. At the book's start,
however, he is volunteering his talents for the NYPD, checking out an
unusual murder scene in a sleazy Manhattan hotel: the perpetrator
has used acid and other gruesome methods to obliterate the identity of the
victim. And it develops that the murderer has checked out the book
Pilgrim had written years before, written to help the good guys
unravel lurid crimes, but in this case helping the evildoer commit a
near-perfect homicide.
But that's not all. Meanwhile in the Middle East, a dedicated terrorist
called the "Saracen" is unhatching a plot against America,
one that he hopes will make 9/11 look like a
fender-bender.
Hayes takes pains
to give both Pilgrim and the Saracen rich back stories and full
characters. There's also a fully-drawn supporting cast, both heroes and
villains.
(How else are you going to get over 600 pages?) My main quibble: unless
I missed something, much of
the plot turns on a coincidence so unlikely that Charles Dickens might
have avoided it.
Put into the TBR queue based on some recommendation of which I've lost track.
Obtained by UNH's stellar Dimond Library
via the Boston Library Consortium from the O'Neill Library at Boston
College. Thanks to all involved.
Robert Higgs is an economist (Austrian variety),
specializing in economic history. His politics are strict libertarian
anarchist. He is associated with the Independent Institute and
contributes to their blog,
The Beacon. This book
organizes 99 blog posts he made over the span of six years.
Most
are short, each a few minutes reading.
The chapters are organized into six sections. The first, "Politics and
the State", demonstrates Higgs' uncompromising
contempt for the blood-soaked
modern state. He has little patience with even
advocates of small government, contending that even the
classical-liberal state has no justifiable moral authority.
He's not wrong. But I kept wishing that he had
engaged with the argument
made in (for example) Steven Pinker's
The Better Angels of Our
Nature: historically, the rise of the modern state has
been accompanied with a drastic decline in violence, coercion,
and misery. Accident? Coincidence?
Similarly, Higgs' views on American economic history are depressing: a
descent into Leviathan, with no prospect of recovery. (Capitalism is "dead as a dodo
since 1914, if not longer.") Here, I wish he'd taken a longer and
broader view. Certainly it's theoretically
possible for economic liberty to
improve; it's done so in the past, and (in some places), it's done so in
the recent past.
I wish, for example, that Higgs could have explicitly discussed
the work of
Deirdre McCloskey,
another economic historian concerned with how liberty and prosperity
evolve.
After the libertarian red meat, Higgs considers (mostly) recent American
economic history, especially issues revolving around the recent Great
Recession. He is of course critical of government's role in causing and
prolonging the crisis. A key thesis is "regime uncertainty":
especially in the age of Obama, American government has few restraints
guarding against sudden expropriation. How can private entrepreneurs
proceed with confidence if the next (inevitable) crisis kicks off a wave
of legal plunder?
It would be easy to conclude that Higgs is uniformly dour and cranky.
Not true! There's a section of obituaries (including ones for his
parents) that show his generous and compassionate side. There are also
three economic-themed parodies, based on, respectively, "Monster Mash",
"American Pie", and Poe's "The Raven". Funny! (But then I am easily
amused.)
As you might expect from a book constructed out of blog posts, things
can be both disjointed and a tad repetitive. I found it was best to take
things leisurely, reading only a few chapters per sitting.
The ordering remains the same as last week. Why, it's almost as if
nothing is happening!
At the New York Times, Ross Douthat asks the question:
"Who
is Ted Cruz?" The answer is one that a lot of NYT readers
will find comforting: he's a big phony-face. Unlike other politicos
(Douthat specifically names
Rand Paul, Rubio, Sanders, Obama, and Goldwater) …
With Cruz, though, even
the most fervent peroration always feels like a debater’s patter, an
advocate’s brief — compelling enough on the merits, but more of a
command performance than a window into deep conviction.
This doesn’t mean that Cruz’s conservatism isn’t
sincere. But the fact that he seems so much like an actor hitting his
marks fits with the story of how he became Mr. True Conservative
Outsider in the first place. Basically, he spent years trying to make it
in Washington on the insider’s track, and hit a wall because too many of
the insiders didn’t like him — because his
ambition was too naked, his climber’s zeal too palpable. So he
deliberately switched factions, turning the establishment’s personal
disdain into a political asset, and taking his Ivy League talents to the
Tea Party instead.
Cruz critiques often seem to boil down to "Hey, the guy just rubs me the
wrong way."
Since Cruz is the only major-party
candidate left that I can stand,
that's disappointing.
At the NR Corner, Mona Charen provides a brief retelling
of this week's Trump/Cruz imbroglio over their wives. Her sympathies:
"Defend
Heidi Cruz":
Is Trump the political genius that some have been hinting? Who else,
without staff or experience, could rocket to the top of the polls and
remain in that perch month after month despite everything? Maybe it’s
genius, or maybe its shamelessness. The latter can be mistaken for the
former. This week’s new slog in the mud demonstrates one of Trump’s
techniques to perfection — he flings filth at an opponent and then
invites the docile press to conclude that “both sides” are engaged in
unseemly brawling. (This is usually John Kasich’s moment to shake his
head sadly and remind voters that, golly
gee, he would never do such things.)
If you're not a Trumpkin, Ms. Charen will convince you further
that you are correct.
If you are a Trumpkin… well, I'd suggest you read it, but all
evidence says you're pretty immune to such appeals to reason and
decency.
Campus kerfuffles continued among the fragile flowers of some student
populations.
At Emory, various surfaces were chalked with pro-Trump messages.
Even while reading the
most
student-sympathetic report I could find (Newsweek), I got the
distinct impression that the author tried hard to keep a straight face
while writing.
The draft [of a complaint letter being written
by "several student organizations"]
says that those who wrote the chalk messages “attacked
minority and marginalized communities at Emory, creating an environment
in which many students no longer feel safe and welcome…. For some
students, simply seeing the word ‘Trump’ plastered across campus brings
to mind his many offensive quotes and hateful actions.”
“I legitimately feared for my life,” a freshman who identifies as
Latino told The Daily Beast. Another
student told the publication, “Some of us were expecting shootings. We
feared walking alone.”
Scripps College’s student president says she alerted campus police
after “#trump2016” was found scrawled on a dorm room door, calling it
“racist … violence,” according to an email she sent to the campus
community, a copy of which was circulated Saturday on social media.
A disproportionate response, to be sure. Also, I think I would take an
even-money bet that, if the perpetrator is revealed, it will turn out
to be yet another
campus
fake "hate crime".
But to Emory's credit, they do employ at least one sane professor,
Paul H. Rubin, who wrote in the WSJ early last week on a too-neglected
topic:
The
Zero-Sum Worlds of Trump and Sanders:
Mr. Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-trade positions make him
essentially a disciple of mercantilism—a protectionist economic theory
refuted by
Adam Smith
in 1776. Bernie Sanders proudly calls himself a
socialist and advocates vast increases in taxes and
government power. The history of the past century, from
the Soviet Union’s fall to the impending collapse of
Venezuela, amply shows that a socialist economy isn’t only
“rigged”—to borrow one of Mr. Sanders’s favorite words—it
doesn’t work.
Trump and Sanders are also alike in that their followers seem to be
(sorry to repeat myself here) True Believers, in
the
Eric Hoffer sense.
Rolling Stone (in the person of 70-year-old publisher Jann Wenner)
endorsed 68-year-old Hillary Clinton for President.
To its credit, sort of, RS also published a rebuttal by
46-year-old Matt Taibbi
headlined
"Why
Young People Are Right About Hillary Clinton".
Taibbi is pro-Bernie, so being "right about Hillary" also implies
being "a total left-wing idiot". But you can't help but agree with
his naked-empress prose:
Young people don't see the Sanders-Clinton race as a choice between
idealism and incremental progress. The choice they see is between an
honest politician, and one who is so profoundly a part of the problem
that she can't even see it anymore.
I'm old enough to remember the endless sappy
"listen to the wisdom of the
young people"
mantras of the late-sixties. I was a young person then, and
I thought it was stupid at the time. It hasn't gotten any better.
Usually I prefer to watch movies the old-fashioned way: on DVD from
Netflix. But, at loose ends one evening, I decided to scan through the
Amazon Prime offerings, found this Jason Statham movie, and—hey, I like
Jason—decided to check it out.
Surprise number one: screenplay by William Goldman. Mr. Goldman
will turn 85 years young in August, and (let's check
IMDB)
his previous screenplay was in 2003 (Dreamcatcher, not well
reviewed). It is based on his novel Heat, and this is the second
movie version, the first being with Burt Reynolds in 1986.
If you need reminding about William Goldman's screenwriting skills, just
check out the list at the above link.
Surprise number two: it's not mindless non-stop action. Statham plays
Nick Wild, an actually interesting character. He scrapes by
in Vegas, picking up (very) odd jobs here and there. He dreams of
hitting a big (half-million dollar) jackpot and retiring to seaside
bliss.
His primary task here: avenging the savage beating of a hooker by local
hoodlums. And he's also babysitting a nebbish who wants to frequent the
local casinos without getting robbed.
Never fear: there are a few scenes of action, and Statham's character is
just tragically flawed enough to keep you guessing about the eventual
outcome. It's not a fantastic movie, but good enough to watch if you
don't have anything else in the queue.
PredictWise
dictates no lineup changes this week. All candidates see declining hit
counts, and their rank remains unchanged. And America is still doomed as
doomed can be.
Have you ever wished someone would compile a list of some—let's say
twenty—of the meanest things said about Donald Trump this election
season? You may want to check out a site I am pretty sure I've never
linked to before: Cosmopolitan and the article
"The
20 Meanest Things Said About Donald Trump This Election Season".
Example:
"Donald
Trump, a
carnivorous plant watered with irradiated bat urine, has a
slight polling problem with about
half of the female voting public, who have a 'very
unfavorable' view of him." —Anna MerlanJezebel,
March 2016
What I learned from the list:
Seth Meyers (number 13) no longer seems clever.
Without good writers, he seems about as witty as Cher (number 19).
One of the most nauseating and transparently fake things to come down
the pike in a long time is John Kasich’s nice guy act. Kasich is one of
the most notorious jerks in the history of Washington, DC, which is a
town full of jerks. To paraphrase the Big Lebowski, that places him high
on the list of jerks worldwide.
Wolf provides 2008
police dashcam video of a stop of Kasich's car, together with
Kasich misrepresenting the facts about the stop a few days later.
The Washington Free Beacon conveniently summarizes
"Hillary Clinton's Four Days of Gaffes", complete with sad trombones:
I forget: wasn't she once smart enough to think before speaking?
Didn't she used to make an effort to maintain superficial credibility?
In any case, any skills she may have had in that area seem to be gone.
Honest, I really wanted to like this more than I did. Salad family
trivia: It was the only
Best Picture Oscar nominee we hadn't seen from last year.
It starts out recreating a horrible moment in history: the 1963
Birmingham church bombing that killed four black girls, aged 11-14. And
then a dramatization of Annie Lee Cooper's—Oprah!—failed attempt to register to
vote at the Selma courthouse. (She successfully recites the preamble to
the Constitution. She knows there are 67 county judges in Alabama.
But—oops!—she can't name them. Sorry, Annie.)
Into this steps Martin Luther King Jr. and various less-famous activists
from the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It's decided to use Selma as
a symbol to pressure President Lyndon Johnson and the US Congress to
pass Federal voting rights legislation. Over the period of a few months
this gives rise to a massive
violent confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge,
in addition to the deaths of other protesters.
What's good: the main black actors do an uncanny job of recreating their
characters. David Oyelowo as Dr. King and Carmen Ejogo are especially
good. (In contrast, Tom Wilkinson and Eli Roth are never that convincing
as LBJ and George Wallace, respectively.)
Not so good: the characters tend to sermonize at points when, in real
life, they would be speaking more normally. And the movie takes pretty
unexcusable
liberties
with actual events. It's important to get things right.
PredictWise
has dropped Marco Rubio below our (arbitrary) 2% inclusion criterion.
So: Farewell, Marco. At least for now.
We observe negative readjustments overall for
Google hit counts this week. Trump saw a big
decrease,
but not enough to knock him out of first place. (That would take a yuuge
decrease.) Hill's decline
dropped her into third place, putting Kasich in second. I would not
have expected that.
Despite the decline in hit counts, there was more than enough phoniness
on display this week.
You know what the Kids Today say:
That does not apply to politics.
For those who managed to tune out the past few decades,
the Daily Beast brings
"A
Brief History of Donald Trump’s Get-Rich Schemes". The take-home
point: as with many flim-flammers, his core idea is to make himself rich
by promising, somehow, to make you rich.
Throughout his decades-long business career, Donald Trump has launched a
series of businesses that follow this model, with his presidential
campaign being the latest. But in between founding phony universities
and multi-level-marketing scams, Trump has also fallen victim to many of
his own plainly stupid ideas.
Key detail: suckers customers buying Trump Steaks off QVC later
reviewed them as “extremely greasy” and “tasteless and mealy.” One can
only imagine similar buyer's-remorse reviews for President Trump.
Speaking of Trump,
Jonah
Goldberg's G-File
this week is long
and ranty, and revolves around his dismay at the (relatively few)
ordinarily-thoughtful pundits that can find anything nice to say about
Trump.
At times, I sometimes think I’m living in a weird remake of The
Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If you’ve seen any of the umpteen
versions, you know the pattern. Someone you know or love goes to sleep
one night and appears the next day to be the exact same person you
always knew.
Except.
Except they’re different, somehow. They talk funny. They don’t care
about the same things they used to. It’s almost like they became
Canadian overnight — seemingly normal, but off in some way. Even
once-friendly dogs start barking at them. I live in constant fear that I
will run into Kevin Williamson, Charlie Cooke, or Rich Lowry and they
will start telling me that Donald Trump is a serious person because he’s
tapping into this or he’s willing to say that. I imagine my dog suddenly
barking at them uncontrollably. (I don’t worry about this with Ramesh
because Vulcans are immune.)
No matter how you feel about Trump—and by the way there seems to be no middle
ground on him, does there?—I recommend you read the whole thing. So funny,
but also so sad, because so true.
"This is not so much a question so much as it is a compliment. On behalf
of all the American people, I want to thank you for bringing a little
class to the Republican debates," the impersonator said in what sounded
like a fake Brooklyn accent.
I'm sure Kasich was pleased with the authenticity of this compliment,
coming as it did from an impersonator with a fake accent.
I'm sure Kasich's also bemused to be running ahead of Hillary in phony
hit counts.
Her minions are trying their hardest to paint her as an innocent victim
of the VWRC,
for
example:
Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a senior member of 2016
Democrat presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s
campaign, tried on Tuesday to blame her candidate’s pitiful image as an untrustworthy phony and
hypocrite on the typical scapegoat: Fox News.
Poor Governor Granholm. To find the real problem behind Hillary's issues
with honesty, you don't need to look for conspiracies, and you don't
have to wait very long for fresh examples.
For example: while
attacking
Bernie Sanders' (lunatic) ideas on socializing health care:
She said she has “a
little chuckle to myself” when she thinks about the current debates over
health care. “I don’t know,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Where was he when I was
trying to get health care in ’93 and ’94?”
It took the Sanders campaign about 3.4 nanoseconds to rebut:
Let's recycle a quote from an eight-year-old
Slate
article
from Christopher Hitchens, which examined
her classic fabrication about her first-lady Balkan adventures.
The punishment visited on Sen. Hillary Clinton for her flagrant,
hysterical, repetitive, pathological lying about her visit to Bosnia should be much
heavier than it has yet been and should be exacted for much more than
just the lying itself. There are two kinds of deliberate and
premeditated deceit, commonly known as suggestio falsi and
suppressio veri. (Neither of them is covered by the
additionally lying claim of having "misspoken.") The first involves what
seems to be most obvious in the present case: the putting forward of a
bogus or misleading account of events. But the second, and often the
more serious, means that the liar in question has also attempted to bury
or to obscure something that actually is true. Let us examine
how Sen. Clinton has managed to commit both of these offenses to
veracity and decency and how in doing so she has rivaled, if not indeed
surpassed, the disbarred and perjured hack who is her husband and
tutor.
She's an astonishingly inept liar, even for a politician, her history
of lies is long and unbroken. Even more
astonishing, her supporters (mirror images of the Trump apologists)
don't care.
I am not a huge fan of autobiographies, but for some reason I was
curious about this one. I put it on my Christmas list, and Pun Daughter
provided.
I have been a Clapton fan for an official Real Long Time. Could have
been even longer: even though I was aware of Cream in high school, my
musical tastes ran in different directions at that time. But in college,
I was enraptured with Derek and the Dominos, and I've picked up his
albums ever since.
I was also, more vaguely, aware of the trajectory of his personal life:
his initially-unrewarded love for Pattie Harrison, George's wife,
followed by their acrimonious marriage and eventual divorce; his battles
with substance abuse; the loss of his son, Conor, in a horrible
accident; his eventual transformation into a sober family man.
The book fleshes out that story with hideous detail, starting with his
unconventional upbringing: his bio-mom decided not to be in the picture,
so he was raised by grandma, who posed as his mother. He might have been
on track to become a faceless graphic designer, but instead (page 22)
he gets his first guitar. By page 46, he's in the Yardbirds. And on page
65, the graffitists are scrawling "Clapton is God" on train station
walls. So, pretty close to overnight success.
He doesn't mention, I'm pretty sure, any formal guitar training. He just
learns by watching others, and trying to sound like the blues musicians
he admires. Easy peasy!
From there on,
Clapton's life is pretty much the "sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll" cliché;
he's much more successful at the third than the first two. His
relationship with Pattie is agonizing: an untold love for his best
friend's wife, eventually winning her hand, and nearly immediately
cheating on her, even impregnating other women, followed by a long and
bitter dissolution of their marriage. Yeesh! I'm thinking: this story
would make the worst romantic comedy ever.
Even worse is Clapton's abusive relationship with substances. After some
dabbling, there's a quick descent into heroin. After he shakes that,
there's booze. Finally, he gets away from that too. And he even manages
to stop smoking (page 256). There are plenty stories
of bad/pathetic behavior and close shaves with disaster.
Now, when listening to him on the iPod, I tend to classify the music as
coming from his Heroin Era, his Booze Period, or his Clean Time.
On page 243 he notes: "Bad choices were my specialty…" I think just about any
reader paying the slightest bit of attention has to chuckle at that.
"Eric, you finally noticed?"
So we're fortunate that he survived all that, and managed to make
good-to-great music throughout. I have his next album pre-ordered
on Amazon.
The
PredictWise
punters had all but written off Kasich and Cruz, but they're back again
this week, baby! With 3% and 5% probabilities, respectively, so don't
break out the party hats and confetti quite yet. Still.
In our standings, the Donald ramps up his yuuuge lead:
Obviously, Mitt Romney drove Trump's hit counts through
the roof with his massively-hyped
speech.
For example:
Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are
as worthless as a degree from Trump University.
Not bad, coming from a guy who always seems to be saying
(in
Jonah
Goldberg's
memorable characterization): What do I have to do to put you in this BMW
today?
But in Mitt's defense, the vibe I get from Trump is much more downscale:
he's the guy at the weed-infested used car lot trying to push me into
a Ford Fiesta with 100K miles on it.
Hillary won most Super Tuesday primary states, usually acknowledged
to be driven by her African-American supporters. Her clever soundbite:
voter anti-fraud measures being
"a
blast from the Jim Crow past."
West said that Hillary’s references to Jim Crow policies are “her
attempt to be fake and phony, and try to mobilize people who want her to
vote.”
West is a Sanders supporter, but he's right about this anyway.
Everyone "knows" that the mood of the American voter is alienated and
irritated. But that seems to have been accompanied
by
extreme
gullibility:
An imitation New York Times article is making the rounds on social
media, duping readers into believing Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has
backed Bernie Sanders’s Democratic presidential campaign ahead of Super
Tuesday.
With respect to gullibility: "As of late Monday evening, the imitation
story had 50,000 shares, 15,000 of them on Facebook, the Times added."
Hypothesis: We're experiencing
a secular version of the maxim Chesterton
(never quite)
said: "A man who won’t believe in God will believe in anything."
The article was apparently constructed via
Clone Zone,
a site that "lets you create your own version of popular websites",
mimicking their look-n-feel, while dropping in your own content.
Invaluable for spoofs! (Also, criminal fraud! But I digress.)
I got into reading Jon Ronson on a long-ago recommendation from
Shawn
Macomber.
My takes on previous Ronson books are
here
and
here.
Both those are from 2006, which means it's been way too long since I
read him. I was not disappointed: Ronson continues to be a wonderful
and insightful writer.
His topic here is (generally speaking) various forms of mental disorder,
which won't surprise readers of his previous work. How do we sort out
people who are genuinely brain-broken from those who just have
unconventional beliefs, or even delusional ones? On a more practical
note, how do we find those likely to commit violence on others, and what
do we do once we find them?
Although Ronson explores all sorts of oddness here—some of it
hilarious—his concentration, implied by the title, is psychopathy.
Especially the "test": Robert Hare's
checklist
of items that can be used to score people to see how psychopathetic they
are.
Ronson is open-minded, self-deprecating, and pretty honest for a
journalist. He develops relationships with his sources/targets, and
displays an uncanny ability to get them to open up, even when it's
glaringly obvious that they are kind of/extremely nuts.
If you have ever uttered the phrase "inmates running the asylum" as a
metaphor, you'll probably be happy to read about the more-or-less real
thing here. Scientologists play a role, and Ronson treats them as fairly
as possible.
Ronson really doesn't have a thesis to prove, but I found myself a
little more convinced that the psychiatric field contains a few good
folks trying to do honest work, but also way too many loons, who
misdiagnose, over-diagnose, and (above all) overmedicate. (I said the
book was hilarious, but the penultimate chapter, "The Avoidable Death
of Rebecca Riley", is totally sobering in this regard.)
Disclaimers:
Unquoted opinions expressed herein are solely those of the
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