The secret to instant wealth is to spot a mass delusion and bet against it. The Tulip Craze. Florida swamp land.
Getting the timing right is tricky, but we are blessed with an overload of mass delusions. You can pick your own favorite. Delusional bubbles have to pop at some point, because the people who are paying for them eventually figure out that they’ve been had.
Willis Eschenbach’s recent guest post at Watts Up With That? on the current state of ‘Climate science’ should be made compulsory reading in every classroom, every university science department, every eco-charity, every environmental NGO and in every branch of government. They won’t like it up ‘em, that’s for sure.
What Eschenbach says is so pure and simple and obvious you’d need to be as dumb as Chris Huhne not to get it:
Most of the debate among liberals and conservatives in the United States is over specific issues, but very little attention is given to the underlying ideals and principles behind these ideologies. We state our case to support or oppose this or that, and we argue with people who disagree, but we almost never bring the argument down to the underlying political attitudes behind our opinions. As such we often misunderstand or mischaracterize each others’ positions, and the result is deep political polarization and a virtual inability to find common ground with one another. I think that a discussion about the fundamental differences between liberalism and conservatism is well worth having.
Utopias in America, from the first Puritan settlements to the communes of the 1960s, share the goal of removal from the heart of civilization to the wilderness in order to establish a new social order. Communities with European roots embraced the equalizing demands and freedoms of the New World’s open frontier, even as the new country claimed the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. Though their inspirations varied—theocracy, millenialism, socialism, theosophism, behaviorism—they all reflected the American dream of a better world, now.
Kafka took some early stabs at writing a novel, but none of them really worked out. In 1903, he started The Child and the City. He abandoned it, and the manuscripts have since disappeared. He tried to collaborate with Max Brod on a work called Richard and Samuel, but that didn’t work out either. The fragment “Wedding Preparations in the Country” was supposed to be much longer than it was, but he gave up on it. Therefore, when talking about Kafka’s novels, we always have to start with Amerika. Although like his other attempts it remains unfinished, enough of it exists for us to recognize it as a novel, and so it is here we begin.
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How did we get here?”
That is a question I have asked myself a thousand times. When I look at the America we live in today and compare it to the America I grew up in 50 years ago, I am heartsick. And I am not alone.
Were there problems 50 years ago? Yes, of course. In particular, there were issues of racism that continued to plague the nation as a result of the scourge of slavery even though it had been abolished 100 years before. Other forms of discrimination also existed and were the subject of continuing reform efforts.
When I was growing up, the dark miasma of the Holocaust was still so pervasive that the famous slogan “Never Forget!” seemed almost irrelevant. How could anyone forget Hitler and his murderous goose-steppers? It was hard to imagine a world where that supreme evil was not remembered as a stern and awful warning. I heard Holocaust survivors insisting that we must never forget, and I thought they were just repeating the obvious. Why did they have to keep on saying it?
