What if instead of this, Matthew Yglesias, at the end of a post commenting on Hilter's notable highway construction and punctual public transportation," conceded" that,"on the other hand, millions of Jews got themselves killed in Hitler's various schemes."

Yeah. We'd be revolted. Awfully creative with sentence structure, that Matthew Yglesias.

But I suppose it's okay to not only brush off the deaths of millions of halocaust victims, but to actually implicate them in their own deaths, so long as you do so en route to defending an anti-capitalist philosophy.

Readers of Liberty and Power may remember that I had a much more negative assessment of the recent annual conference of the Organization of American Historians in Boston.

All too often, the papers, comments, and discussion at the OAH seemed unable to break free from the iron triangle of race, class, gender or were constrained by stale quasi post-modernist jargon and priorities. As a result, much of the"discourse" had a formulaic and lifeless quality. As I mentioned, the result was often a strange disconnect with the"real world" and its concerns.

Why the difference? Part of the answer is that the participants at the Policy History Conference came from a variety of fields including political science and economics. This created an incentive for people to check their discipline's jargon at the door.

Frankly, the research into primary documents and thoughtul analysis by some of the"untrained" and younger political scientists would outclass the work of many experienced historians. A case in point was Ann-Marie Szymanski's wonderful paper on the history of private policing (more on this later for L and P readers).

Another reason the comparative superiority of the Policy History Conference was that the focus was on policy history. This served out to screen out possible participants who were inclined to the arcane and trendy.

Most of the credit, however, is due to the careful planning of the organizers, most especially Don Critchlow. They seem to have made an extra effort to seek out panelists who are pushing back intellectual frontiers but, thankfully, have not yet been cowed or constrained by academic fads or code words.

Ron Bailey, the Science Editor of Reason Magazine, has an excellent review of Paul Ehrlich's new book, written with his wife, Anne, One With Ninevah in the May 20th Wall Street Journal, entitled"What Doom Will Look Like This Time Around."'

Ehrlich has an unbroken record since 1968 of being wrong about all of his predictions of"Doom and Gloom," He is, of course, a hero of the Environmetnalist movement and has received numerous awards including a MacArthur"genius" Prize. He predicted, for example, famine in the 1970s, while world food production has tripled since then. In the 1990s he lost a famous bet with the geographer Julian Simon since the world was not running out of a number of natural resources and minerals as preidicted by Ehrlich.

To read the article click here.

Okay, so here's a hypothetical scenario. Let's say you live in a state that's been through hard times. The federal government comes to you and tells you,"Price no object." They're going to send you whatever you need to get yourself back on track. For the first three months, the government doles out $8.2 billion in contracts. An additional $10.5 billion is coming this summer. It's the biggest news in urban renewal since LBJ's War on Poverty. And the whole thing is going to be paid by the taxpayers. You don't have to put in one dime! Unless of course you are a taxpayer.

Actually, because your particular state has been subject to really hard times, it's not HUD (the Department of Housing and Urban Development)—with its mere $2.3 billion in available"funding opportunities" for"affordable housing"—that's assisting you. It's not even the State Department. Nah. This is for a really big job, something for which only the Department of Defense does the actual contracting, with its"emphasis on big corporations producing quality results subject to bureaucratic auditing," as Jim Dobbins ("recently retired ... US envoy to postwar Afghanistan") puts it.

So what can your state look forward to? Here's just a sampling: 7000 vehicles (a mix of SUVs, four-wheel drives, and passenger sedans). 459 Color TVs. 359 VCR/DVD players. 13,000 firefighter outfits. Hundreds of firefighter vehicles. And small things, like: 185,000 thumbtacks, 71,222 metal whistles, 9,620 desk chairs, 5,400 traffic cones, and so forth. And let's not forget $5.6 billion for electric generators, $4.3 billion for water and sewer projects, and $1 billion for roads and transportation networks.

Oh, and, since we don't want to leave the State Department out of the loop, it too will have a role to play. It's going to send you another $50 million to teach the residents of your state how to run elections (hopefully this will not entail any leftover hanging chads).

There is so much more information now available on all these wonderful Marshall Plan-like projects for your state. Montana? New York? No.

Iraq.

As Bob Port tells us in the NY Daily News, however, there has been a"lack of full transparency" on this wonderful crony capitalist project, which

breeds trouble and favors political influence, according to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group. Last year, the center had to file 73 Freedom of Information Act requests to unearth a list of Afghanistan and Iraqi contractors. The effort revealed confusion about what the government was buying, discrepancies in numbers and a general lack of accountability, said Bill Allison, the center's managing editor.

Who needs accountability when you're not a fiscal conservative? But if you were one, like a good Small Government Republican, you'd be opposed to all this, right!? It's only Big Government Democrats who favor Big Government Initiatives. Right?

Let's ask the Republican administration of George W. Bush.

Oh, and for those who believe that the only way to Marshall Resources for Big Forward Looking Projects like this is with Big Government Initiatives, well... it just ain't so.

Gerard Baker has a satirical pice in the Financial Times of May 19th. It is listed as an article dated March 27th, 2026, in which Alan Greenspan celebrates his 100th birthday and appoinment to an 11th term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

A quote attributed to Greenspan is indicative of how the Chairman can appear to be all things to all people, and remains the great obfuscator:

"There is proliferating evidence that centenarian policymaking is producing markedly salutary benefits on the long-run performance of the global economy. This transformation in the work-leisure balance of the superannuated is occurring without serious impairment to productivity levels and is significantly enhancing the prospects for intergenerational knowledge transfers,"

In the comments section of my prior post there is supposed to be a link to a NYT Magazine article. The article in question is a piece by Susan Sontag on the Abu Ghraib pictures. Normally, Sontag is too over the top for me, but this piece is about right. What's most interesting is her discussion of the way in which digital technology and the net has changed the kinds of things soldiers can do. They are, as she says, as much tourists as warriors. Combined with a culture of "shamelessness" and an internet to spread them and the green light from above, you get these pictures. And they won't go away. There will be more of them, speaking the reality of what's happening there.

This seems a particularly appropriate example of where Orwell got it so wrong. Rather than technology leading to the centralization and monopolization of information, particularly during war, it has led to the precise opposite. Technology has been democratized by being so cheap, and as a result, information flows from thousands and millions of points. The role of blogs in circumventing the major media, for both the left and the right, is one example, and the Abu Ghraib pictures are another. Though Sontag doesn't go quite this far, one way to view this whole sequence of events is fairly positive - the truth is coming out and the pressure of those pictures on our involvement there cannot be put back in the tube. Technology will continue to put limits on what the state can do and will continue to force open that which has been closed. The pictures of Saddam's torture have long existed, and now it's "our" turn.

Maybe next we'll see what goes on inside prisons in the US too. They could use some sunlight.

More books and movies about Hitler, while the crimes of Stalin, far greater, are relatively ignored by the media.

Check out "The Nazi Seduction".

Chalabi, Chalabi, Chalabi. All Chalabi, All the Time. It's all over the news and even here.

I have to admit that I simply collapsed with laughter when I read this passage from today's NY Times editorial, entitled"Friends Like This":

Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and the warm welcome American troops could expect from liberated Iraqis. They responded in kind, picturing Mr. Chalabi — who has lived most of his life outside Iraq and who was convicted in absentia in Jordan for bank fraud — as exactly the kind of secular Shiite to lead a new, democratic Iraq. Now reality has come crashing down on both sides, and the friendship has crumbled along with self-delusion. ... Lately, Mr. Chalabi — who has no genuine political base — has concluded that anti-Americanism is the key to political popularity. ... Many people in the Bush administration have been growing angry at the way Mr. Chalabi keeps biting the hand that fed him so well for so long.

"Biting the hand that fed him." HA! That is, quite possibly, an encapsulation of the whole history of US foreign policy: Putting money and material in the hands of people who come back to bite the hand, and several other aspects of the American anatomy, that feeds them. From Hussein himself to the mujahideen in Afghanistan ... this country has a remarkable track record. Let's see what new"friend" the US will climb into bed with in the coming months.