URLs du Jour


[Amazon Link]


    Where the 1619 articles go wrong is in a persistent and off-key theme: an effort to prove that slavery "is the country's very origin," that slavery is the source of "nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional," and that, in Hannah-Jones's [one of the "1619" essayists] words, the founders "used" "racist ideology" "at the nation's founding." In this, the Times steps beyond history and into political polemic—one based on a falsehood and that in an essential way, repudiates the work of countless people of all races, including those Hannah-Jones celebrates, who have believed that what makes America "exceptional" is the proposition that all men are created equal. 



    I find the Amazon Product du Jour amusing, but I wonder if anyone outside a Certain Age Range will get it. Here is an explanation, sorry.


    […] one important technological development over the last decade has been “geo-engineering.” The idea here is to change other things in the atmosphere that are easier to change than the amount of carbon used. Consider what we learned from the June 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in the Philippines. That eruption poured 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Over the next two years, the effect of that one eruption was to reduce the earth’s temperature by about 1 degree Fahrenheit. That might not sound like much but it’s actually over half the 1.4 degree warming that has happened over the last century. What if every year we could put sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere so as to permanently prevent the earth from warming? In their 2009 book Superfreakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner point out that if we could get just 34 gallons per minute of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere (which translates to about 100,000 tons per year), that would reverse warming in the high Arctic and reduce it in much of the Northern Hemisphere. Why focus on such high latitude areas? Because, note Levitt and Dubner, “high-latitude areas are four times more sensitive to climate change than the equator.” How would you get the SO2 into the atmosphere. Levitt and Dubner cite the thinking of Nathan Myhrvold, at one time the chief technology officer for Microsoft. Mrhrvold argues that if we had a big enough hose, we could do it.




    Is it possible for, say, Robert Francis O’Rourke? The Dave Matthews Band of Democratic presidential candidates put this into writing: “This country was founded on racism, has persisted through racism, and is racist today.” If by patriotism we mean simply to indicate love of country, would it be unfair to ask: How could a man of conscience love such a country? O’Rourke here is neither writing about the state nor any particular administration nor any of our nation’s many episodic failures to live up to its own ideals, but about the nation per se.



  • In her column, Veronique de Rugy proposes A Truly Populist Social Security Reform. Specifically, how to deal with the whole "going broke" thing, which pols in both parties are diligently trying to ignore?

    We must rethink the system entirely, root and branch. The current universal age-based system requires relatively high taxes and spreads the benefits thinly across everyone. Considering that much of the support for Social Security comes from people who incorrectly assume it's mostly helping poor Americans — economists have shown that Social Security is a regressive system that mostly benefits higher-income Americans — we need reform that truly targets people who can't help themselves. Such a reformed program would provide better and larger benefits to fewer recipients and, in turn, require less revenue and lower taxes.

