Thoughts from Victor Davis Hanson:
I am fortunate for a wonderful graduate education in the PhD program at Stanford, but I learned more about the way the world works in two months of farming (which saved a wretch like me) than in four years of concentrated study.
In short, the world does not work on a nine-month schedule. It does not recognize concepts like tenure. It does not care for words without action. And brilliance is not measured by vocabulary or SAT scores. Wowing a dean, or repartee into a seminar, or clever put-downs of rivals in the faculty lounge don’t translate into running a railroad—or running the country. One Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower is worth three Bill Clintons or Barack Obamas. If that sounds reductionist, simplistic, or anti-intellectual, it is not meant to—but so be it nonetheless.
I’ve never been less impressed with Ivy League degrees than I am now.
To save Bill White the time, mentioning George Bush, either of them, went to Yale does not raise the impression of an Ivy League degree.
Such degrees are not worthless, but they are currently overrated by our political class.
There is an old saying (I heard it as the law of Conway’s Hammer), to wit, “When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail”. All most of these losers have is an Ivy League degree (these days more the result of gaming the admissions process and mastering the byzantine ways of acaademia than anything else), and thus find that every problem, no matter how complicated, can be solved by an academic!
How convenient for them…
Speaking of the surge, Iraqi violence is still going down. Bush finally did his job and Obama hasn’t screwed it up.
Clinton ran a state, a country, and now runs a major foundation. Obama has run a country for a year. Has Hanson ever run anything?
Huh?
Running a state/country/business is important?
During the campaign we were told that Obama’s having never ran so much as a lemonade stand was not an issue of concern.
Can’t you read? He ran a farm.
He ran a farm
He wrote that he farmed, for two months; evidently he spent the rest of his life going to school, teaching, and writing — i.e. the very things he belittles in the excerpt above. If he’s such a big fan of people who run things, why doesn’t he choose to be one?
He didn’t write that he farmed for two months. He wrote that he learned more in two months of farming than he did in four years of school. He’s farmed all his life, except when he was away at school.
You would know that if you read more VDH, Jim. Who knows, it might actually do you some good.
Those aren’t the things he belittles. He criticizes tenure, words without action, and “wowing a dean, or repartee into a seminar, or clever put-downs of rivals in the faculty lounge”. As Rand stated, he’s farmed all his life, as did his father and grandfather before him. A word to the wise “Jim”: Before mindlessly crapping on Vic Hanson, spend some time reading him, or about him. You’ll save yourself some grief in the future.
You would know that if you read more VDH, Jim. Who knows, it might actually do you some good.
As it happens the local paper ran one of his pieces recently. I stopped reading after a few outright falsehoods. Here’s a link to the column in question. Things that stood out:
In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions.
A made-up fact, stated without support.
Apparently, [some in the Obama administration] were thinking a kinder, gentler image would discourage terrorists.
Created from whole cloth.
Accordingly, the self-confessed architect of Sept. 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was promised a civil trial in New York rather than a military tribunal normally accorded to out-of-uniform murderous terrorists.
Like Timothy McVeigh? I do not think the word “normally” means what VDH thinks it means.
But as 2009 ended, we were reminded that radical Islamic terrorists still want to kill us for who we are, and what we represent, rather than any particular thing we do.
Opinion stated as fact.
And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was stopped in flight from Amsterdam before he could blow up an American passenger jet.
As it happens he did not have enough explosives to blow up the jet, whether he was stopped or not.
The Obama administration inherited a $500 billion deficit and expanded it threefold.
The 2009 deficit was forecast to be over 1.7T before Obama swore the oath. Nearly a quarter of fiscal 2009 happened on Bush’s watch. Part of the “expansion” was due to Obama’s decision to stop using the budget gimmicks that Bush did. The Washington Times, of all places, just reported that the Obama administration got 60% of its proposed budget cuts through Congress last year, eliminating programs that Bush had tried unsuccessfully for years to kill, and saving billions.
But America did little during the year’s reprieve to rush into production newly discovered domestic gas and oil fields, to tap existing finds in Alaska, or to license new nuclear plants.
Does VDH actually think that rushing newly discovered U.S. gas and oil fields into production in 2009 would make any difference at all to the price of oil in 2010? Does he have any idea how small those fields are in comparison to the world oil market?
Soon we will wish we had done something concrete in 2009 rather than offering more stale rhetoric about wind and solar power.
Something concrete like $61B of ARRA spending on research and efficiency, plus $4B in home energy savings tax credits? Does VDH have any idea what the government is actually doing?
If his writing is supposed to illustrate the value of a top-notch education, I can see why VDH is more impressed with farming.
Gee, I don’t have the time, but I hope that my commenters do to shoot all the fish in Jim’s latest idiocy barrel.
It’s sort of a shame, because it seems like he imbecillically wasted so much time on it.
In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions.
A made-up fact, stated without support.
Are you KIDDING ME?!? Obama, particularly through his Press Secretary Robert “Baghdad Bob” Gibbs, regularly blames Bush for everything from foreign relations foulups to the fiscal calamity to his breakfast table running out of salt (ok, maybe not that last – but we’ve still got 3 years). He does so at every possible opportunity. To call that a “made up fact” is to willingly put your head in a hole, ostrich-like, at the slightest criticism of the current Administration. Good lord you people are tedious.
Apparently, [some in the Obama administration] were thinking a kinder, gentler image would discourage terrorists.
Created from whole cloth.
Ah yes, that couldn’t possibly be the reason behind the KSM trial in NYC.
The man was taken under arms on the battlefield. Under the version of the Geneva Conventions that we’re signatory to, anything we do to him up to and including shooting him as an illegal combatant, is kosher. The simple fact that he’s too valuable of a potential intel resource is the only reason he still draws breath. Thus the only reason to hold a show-trial (and if you doubt that to be its status, just look to Holder’s own admission on it), is to try to project an image.
Of course, a better example would be Obama himself stating earlier this month that his speech in Cairo was one of his “top three initiatives” in the War on Terror. But since I haven’t seen the speech (why bother?), we can stick to the show trial.
Accordingly, the self-confessed architect of Sept. 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was promised a civil trial in New York rather than a military tribunal normally accorded to out-of-uniform murderous terrorists.
Like Timothy McVeigh? I do not think the word “normally” means what VDH thinks it means.
McVeigh was, regrettably, a US Citizen. As such, he was due a trial for treason, as specified directly by the US Constitution, which I repeat applies to US Citizens. KSM is not, and he hardly faces a treason trial. Right now he faces a murder show-trial. He should be facing a war-crimes trial a la Neuremburg, for reasons explained above. Do try to keep up here.
But as 2009 ended, we were reminded that radical Islamic terrorists still want to kill us for who we are, and what we represent, rather than any particular thing we do.
Opinion stated as fact.
Islamists attacked the United States prior to the current war. Note that I do not say “prior to the current hostilities,” as their attacks defined the onset of hostilities. Our refusal to participate – dating back to 1979 when Iran’s current President allegedly participated in an act of war against the US (the Embassy Crisis) – did not reduce the hostilities, it just made the butcher’s bill payable entirely on our side. This is what is known in military circles as “losing.” The fact that they initiated the conflict also lays out the philisophical terms of the battle – they will stop when we are dead, or have submitted to their demands. Otherwise, they either would not have begun in the first place, or would have followed the rules of war (declaration, uniforms, attacking only counterforce targets and sparing countervalue ones, etc).
In short, those we are now fighting hold us and our notions of “just war” in contempt, and are using them as tools to handicap us in our efforts. Better that we should fight the war on our terms, win overwhelmingly (ie, destroy their will to fight), and rebuild their society in such a manner that they will not attack us in the future. It worked with Germany and semi-westernized Japan. It has worked to a great extent in Iraq (zero fatalities among US forces in December 2009). Apply the strategy to the war as a whole and we will win, to the definition of victory above.
And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was stopped in flight from Amsterdam before he could blow up an American passenger jet.
As it happens he did not have enough explosives to blow up the jet, whether he was stopped or not.
I’ll bow to your superior knowledge of chemistry and combustion mechanics – my specialties are not in that field. I will say that the explosive compound used in the Christmas Day attack has been widely reported in the press as being 3 times more potent than TNT, by mass. On the other hand, they’re reporters – what do they know about anything?
The Obama administration inherited a $500 billion deficit and expanded it threefold.
The 2009 deficit was forecast to be over 1.7T before Obama swore the oath. Nearly a quarter of fiscal 2009 happened on Bush’s watch. Part of the “expansion” was due to Obama’s decision to stop using the budget gimmicks that Bush did. The Washington Times, of all places, just reported that the Obama administration got 60% of its proposed budget cuts through Congress last year, eliminating programs that Bush had tried unsuccessfully for years to kill, and saving billions.
Be that as it may, Congress stalled passing a budget for FY09 until late in Obama’s first month in office, after the new Congress was sworn in. That budget bears Obama’s signature. It has the fingerprints of the Pelosi-Obama-Reid trirumvirate all over it. They are responsible for it, for good or for ill. Indeed Jim, why don’t you want your guys to take credit for the budget, the Stimulus, the jobs created and saved? You wanted them; take them, they’re all yours.
As to the cuts, we have in Obama’s own words that what were required cuts could be delivered with a “scalpel,” to the “hatchet” that McCain was characterized as wanting. In point of fact, most polling of late (Q-pac, PPP, Gallup, Rasmussen, CBS and affiliates, Time and affiliates, CNN and affiliates) points to concern over spending among the electorate. Most of us think you need to start the bidding for your budget-pruning tool at a chain saw – and work your way up from there.
As to the war spending – again, it’s all yours. Why not load the troops onto their transports and bring them home, if you’re not willing to do what it takes to win the war? Walk off the battlefields, own the bloodbaths that will occur in Iraq and Afghanistan after our pullout with a shrug (as you did in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos 30-odd years ago), and you’ll have trillions more dollars of monopoly-money debt you can throw at the entitlement programs. Who knows, you may stave off bankruptcy for most of another decade!
But America did little during the year’s reprieve to rush into production newly discovered domestic gas and oil fields, to tap existing finds in Alaska, or to license new nuclear plants.
Does VDH actually think that rushing newly discovered U.S. gas and oil fields into production in 2009 would make any difference at all to the price of oil in 2010? Does he have any idea how small those fields are in comparison to the world oil market?
I can’t speak to what Dr. Hanson thinks, outside of what he’s written. I can say that all my life I’ve heard the environmental establishment, and their mouthpieces in DC, argue against funding new drilling because the resources tapped wouldn’t come online for at least ten years. I’ve heard it a year ago, I’ve heard it five years ago, I’ve heard it ten and twenty years ago. If we’d opened these resources when we’ve discovered them, we might not have had them online within a year – but we wouldn’t need to have them that fast, because earlier discoveries would be online even now. Each discovery may (or may not) be small, but in aggregate they would be enough to give us years of energy independence… independence primarily from our Canadian friends, followed by our Mexican and Venezuelan ones.
(as an aside, I’d personally rather have a greater use of fission wherever possible, with an expansion of the thorium-salt reactor process to eliminate the waste problem. To give credit where it’s due, Harry Reid also championed this notion in 2008. That said, he defunded that research last year. I guess his green street cred outweighed having power available here at home.
Soon we will wish we had done something concrete in 2009 rather than offering more stale rhetoric about wind and solar power.
Something concrete like $61B of ARRA spending on research and efficiency, plus $4B in home energy savings tax credits? Does VDH have any idea what the government is actually doing?
If his writing is supposed to illustrate the value of a top-notch education, I can see why VDH is more impressed with farming.
Jim, it’s obvious you don’t work in research. I do, on a daily basis. You can’t just throw money at a problem and say that fixes it. The motto of the research community should be “Everything is easy for the guy who doesn’t have to do it himself.” To be perfectly blunt, the Government, as such, does no research. It farms it out to people like me (or more often, to graduate and undergrad students that actually do the work for peanuts). And once a breakthrough has happened – then what? After you’ve gotten your laboratory curiousity working and giving results, AND you’ve gotten those results corroborated by someone else, completely unaffiliated with your work… then comes the task of optimizing, commercializing, ironing out the manufacturing bugs, raising capital to put up a plant to make the things (and good luck with THAT these days!), slogging through the environmental-impact studies for said plant (if you’re lucky, and you don’t need one for your fancy new device… which in the case of PV solar, means looking at silica dust, land-use, etc; or in the case of wind farms, means looking at what birds are in your neighborhood and fighting wealthy NIMBY/BANANA acolytes such as the Kennedy clan and Greenpeace off the MA coast), training people or programming robots to perform the work (see also, unions, outsourcing, price of electricity to run your plant, etc)…
My god, no wonder nobody makes anything in America these days!
And if you think farming is easy, you’ve obviously never done that either. What, do you think you just rip open the ground come the spring thaw, pour in some seeds, spread some fertilizer (or cow-shit, if you need to keep your organic creds), and kick back until the travelling combine company swings by for the fall harvest? Because if that’s what you think farming is (and talking to most people who’ve never been within 20 miles of a farm in their lives, it seems that’s the prevailing concept), then respectfully, you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. There’s a reason I do research instead of farming, and I thank whatever dieties I can find on a regular basis that I live in a time where I have other options. Farming sucks. It is the hardest work you can do on this planet – and your open contempt for those who provide you, literally, with your daily bread speaks volumes about you.
Something concrete like $61B of ARRA spending on research and efficiency, plus $4B in home energy savings tax credits? Does VDH have any idea what the government is actually doing?
Does anyone, including government have any idea what government is actually doing? No. That’s one of the problems (or features, depending on your point of view) with large bureaucracies. My viewpoint is that $65 billion, which incidentally turns out to be somewhere above $200 per US citizen, would be better spent by its citizens rather than some nebulous touchie feelie goals like the ones you cite, Jim.
The 2009 deficit was forecast to be over 1.7T before Obama swore the oath.
No, that’s incorrect. For example, a full week before Obama was inaugurated, he made a veto threat to keep Congress from blocking the second half of TARP funds. That’s $350 billion right there (which he signed off on after inauguration). The $1.7 trillion estimate came later when revenue shortfalls became more apparent. We also have the various government bailouts, Stimulus, and a host of small programs like cash for clunkers. I think he easily burned $550-600 billion extra.
Plus we have the long term deficit increases that you can’t blame on Bush as well as the substantial negative consequences from health care change.
Incidentally, I’m surprised at the number of reports of Obama vetoes that appear in the past year. This is just another symptom of a remarkably screwed up presidency and congress. Heh, Obama even had to veto some junk that came out of Congress a couple weeks back (it was a spending extension that turned out superfluous). Still I wonder why the need to both veto and “pocket veto” the bill? Sounds shifty.
Er, I meant “veto threats” not vetoes. The linked one is the first real veto (or is that a pocket veto?). Always a good sign when even Dubya managed to more than four years without vetoing.
Farming sucks. It is the hardest work you can do on this planet – and your open contempt for those who provide you, literally, with your daily bread speaks volumes about you.
Not to mention that running a farm is running a business, something about which the people currently running the country are completely clueless, and it shows in their policies. Which is why unemployment is so high, and likely to continue to be until they are removed from power.
But I guess that Jim is doomed by his nature to continue to beclown himself here.
Ah yes, that couldn’t possibly be the reason behind the KSM trial in NYC.
VDH said that the reason was to discourage terrorists. No terrorist is going to be discouraged by the prospect of getting a civilian trial — most of them aren’t planning to be alive. So it’s no surprise that with everything Obama and Holder have said about the KSM issue, they’ve neversaid anything remotely like the words that VDH puts in their mouths. He’s just making them up.
Each discovery may (or may not) be small, but in aggregate they would be enough to give us years of energy independence
There is no prospect of the U.S. being independent in oil, ever, at current levels of consumption. Our production peaked forty years ago.
More to the point, there is nothing Obama could have done last year in the area of domestic production that would have had the least effect on oil prices today. VDH is blowing smoke.
I will say that the explosive compound used in the Christmas Day attack has been widely reported in the press as being 3 times more potent than TNT, by mass
He did not have much, and even if he’d been lucky enough to depressurize the plane, it could still have landed (as it happens he didn’t even try his bomb until the plane was too low for depressurization to have been a problem). VDH is exaggerating wildly for effect.
McVeigh was, regrettably, a US Citizen
The point is that there have been many terrorists tried in the U.S. in the last 60 years, and until Bush none were tried by military commissions. That’s why it took so long to set the commissions up — they didn’t exist. Yet VDH thinks that trial by military commission is how we “normally” do things.
And if you think farming is easy, you’ve obviously never done that either.
For whatever it’s worth I’ve helped my grandfather and cousin on their ND farms, so I do know how hard it is. Perhaps VDH should stick to farming; he isn’t very good at this thinking/writing business.
My viewpoint is that $65 billion, which incidentally turns out to be somewhere above $200 per US citizen, would be better spent by its citizens rather than some nebulous touchie feelie goals like the ones you cite, Jim.
My point is that there is a big difference between spending $65B and “stale rhetoric”, but VDH seems to think they’re the same thing.
No, that’s incorrect.
Actually, it’s correct — look up the January CBO projection.
I think he easily burned $550-600 billion extra.
The people who keep score say that Obama has reduced the 10-year deficit from where it would have been with a continuation of Bush policies.
The point is: Obama did not triple the deficit in 2009. VDH is, once again, blowing smoke.
Plus we have the long term deficit increases that you can’t blame on Bush
Do tell.
as well as the substantial negative consequences from health care change.
Those “substantial negative consequences” are, according to the CBO, a substantially lower deficit — to the tune of $600B in the second decade. Even the GOP budget committee fact sheet acknowledges that health reform reduces the deficit.
I don’t understand why we have to be non violent cause the violence is gonna come from every angle once they pull off their latest facade of an attack.and its going to come in the form of american versus american in an all out attempt at survival,your neighbor will bust down your door to get your food once the shelves go empty and the power goes out.right now its all of us versus maybe 600+ satanist deceivers in the capitol plus their handlers and cohorts,strength in numbers has won every war and we have the #’s, its the calm before the storm right now but once you”ve been backed into the corner you better come out swingin or your DONE!!