Last week was a confirming week for me.
* The leading conservative full professor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, said in the Saturday (3-4) Wall Street Journal that out going president Larry Summers was kicked out for being a coward and backing down on his statement about biology and woman. He didn’t add my point that for a Jew to be a schlemiel in the upper-crust latent-anti-Semitic environment of Harvard is fatal.
* There were two articles, one in Salon and one in the Economist kissing the rebuilding of New Orleans goodbye. Their analysis is different than mine, but the same conclusion. Interesting point is that whatever parts of New Orleans were vital would have been rebuilt by now, driven by commercial vitality, as was the case in Kobe, San Francisco and Chicago after disasters.
* Nicolas Sarkozy is quoted by Chris Caldwell as standing for the following principles: "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."
Doesn’t that sound like me? I make some version of all those points three or four times a week. I am delighted that the French are being exposed to deep philosophic thought: the primacy of commerce and the values of commerce.
* Tony Blair has changed his views on global warming: "I would say probably I'm changing my thinking about this in the past two or three years. I think if we are going to get action on this, we have got to start from the brutal honesty about the politics of how we deal with it. The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem."
I only read about Blair’s change recently. He is no longer the darling of the enviros. I also love the recent (today’s 3-6 Wall Street Journal letters) public attacks on the UN enviro panel for the statements of its disgraceful chair and its refusal to take seriously expert criticism of its CO2 input data. The global warming enviros are on the run.