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Dorothy Rabinowitz comments on the urge to blame the U. S.
If the Mumbai terror assault seemed exceptional, and shocking in its targets, it was clear from the Thanksgiving Day reports that we weren’t going to be deprived of the familiar, either. Namely, ruminations, hints, charges of American culpability that regularly accompany catastrophes of this kind.
Soon enough, there was Deepak Chopra, healer, New Age philosopher and digestion guru, advocate of aromatherapy and regular enemas, holding forth on CNN on the meaning of the attacks.
How the ebullient Dr. Chopra had come to be chosen as an authority on terror remains something of a mystery, though the answer may have something to do with his emergence in the recent presidential campaign as a thinker of advanced political views. Also commending him, perhaps, is his well known capacity to cut through all sorts of complexities to make matters simple. No one can fail to grasp the wisdom of a man who has informed us that “If you have happy thoughts, then you make happy molecules.”
In his CNN interview, he was no less clear. What happened in Mumbai, he told the interviewer, was a product of the U.S. war on terrorism, that “our policies, our foreign policies” had alienated the Muslim population, that we had “gone after the wrong people” and inflamed moderates. And “that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay.” …
Melanie Phillips notes a strange wrinkle in the BBC coverage from India.
… For some time, many have argued that an element of anti-Semitism has distorted the way the BBC covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But now, following the Mumbai events, we can perhaps see that anti-Semitism may even be at work in the way the BBC covers foreign news in general. …
Spengler makes the disparity between Chinese and American music education a metaphor for the clash of two civilizations. Pickerhead is not sure what to make of this essay, but it does provide a link to U Tube performances by the pianist Lang Lang.
America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.
It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.
“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.
The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers. …
… American musical education remains the best in the world, the legacy of the European refugees who staffed the great conservatories, and the best Asian musicians come to America to study. Thirty to 40% of students at the top schools are Asian, and another 20 to 30% are Eastern European (or Israeli). There are few Americans or Western Europeans among the best instrumentalists. According to the head of one conservatory, Americans simply don’t have the discipline to practice eight hours a day.
As a practical matter, though, American policy-makers might think about it this way. Until now, the West has tended to dismiss China’s scientists as imitators rather than originators. As a practical matter, China had little incentive to innovate; an emerging economy does not have to re-invent the wheel, or the Volkswagen, for that matter.
This was not true in the remote past, of course. China invented the clock, the magnetic compass, the printing press, geared machines, gunpowder, and the other technologies that began the industrial revolution, long before the West. When it comes time to develop the next generation of anti-missile radar, or electric car batteries, Chinese originality may assert itself once again. Chinese who have mastered the most elevated as well as the most characteristically Western forms of high culture will also think with originality. Anyone who doubts this should watch Lang Lang’s performance of the Mozart C Minor Concerto once again.
Good Contentions post by Peter Wehner on Obama’s choices and what they might portend.
… In the early years of his presidency, for example, Ronald Reagan pursued a tight monetary policy and provided unyielding support for Paul Volcker, then head of the Federal Reserve, despite a nasty recession which saw the unemployment rate exceed 10 percent, Reagan’s approval rating stuck in the mid-30s, and substantial mid-term election losses in 1982. But these policies were vital to wringing inflation out of the system, and they began what was then the longest peacetime economic expansion in our history. A politician less committed to a set of economic principles would have given up in the face of the ferocious criticism President Reagan received.
Mr. Obama’s victory has been compared to Reagan’s, but Obama may turn out to be the anti-Reagan. When he found himself in Hyde Park, he easily adjusted to his surroundings, and when he ran in the Democratic primary, Obama became the hope of the Left. But once he secured the nomination, he transformed himself into a centrist. That trend is continuing in the transition.
Obama’s victory, then, was based largely on his (appealing) personality and ethereal promises of “change,” not on a set of ideas. After having run for President for 21 months, and having been elected four weeks ago, no one can yet articulate what Obama-ism as a political philosophy is. He appears to believe he should be president because of who he is, rather than what he believes. Mr. Obama’s self-assurance seems to derive from his enormously high confidence in himself, rather than confidence anchored in a coherent worldview. …
Jennifer Rubin thought it was cool how Obama hid Eric Holder in plain sight yesterday. Says he won’t be able to do that during confirmation hearings.
In announcing his national security team on Monday, Barack Obama included his Attorney General pick Eric Holder. This is not altogether unusual. After all, counterterrorism and intelligence matters are central responsibilities of the AG. But the politics was also obvious–put Holder in a pack of nominees who are getting praise from far-flung quarters, make the day about “the big personalities” and the rapprochement with Hillary Clinton rather than about Holder. Holder’s statement was one of the briefest and most innocuous–intentionally so, I suspect. And in January the Obama team will certainly push for a hasty confirmation and loudly complain that any extended hearings would “impair national security.”
The Republicans shouldn’t fall for this routine. …
Debra Saunders writes on the sloppy science of some global warming zealots.
… The latest skirmish in the global warming war — barely reported in America — occurred after two bloggers found that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies data wrongly cast this October as the warmest in recorded history. It turns out that the mistake was due to an error that wrongly tapped September temperature records from Russia. Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph of London found the mistake “startling” in light of other contrary climate statistics, including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration findings of 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month.
In an e-mail, Goddard researcher Gavin Schmidt explained, “The incorrect analysis was online for less than 24 hours.” (Thank bloggers Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist, and Canadian computer analyst Steve McIntyre for catching the mistake.) The error occurred because a report “had the wrong month label attached. There is quality control at NOAA and GISS but this particular problem had not been noticed before and the existing QC procedures didn’t catch it. These have now been amended.”
As for the snowfall records and low temperatures cited by Booker, Schmidt chalked them up to “cherry picking” data. He added, “Far more important are the long-term trends.”
Now, honest mistakes happen — even in high-powered, well-funded research facilities. Just last year — again thanks to the vigilance of Watts and McIntyre — Goddard had to reconfigure its findings and recognize 1934 — not 1998, as it had figured — as the hottest year on record in American history.
Alas, it is hard to see Goddard as objective when its director, James Hansen, testified in a London court in September in support of six eco-vandals. A jury then acquitted the six Greenpeace activists on charges of vandalizing a British coal-fired power plant based on the “lawful excuse” defense that their use of force would prevent greater damage to the environment after Hansen predicted the one Kingsnorth plant could push “400 species” into extinction.
Of course, he could be wrong.
Thomas Sowell on the importance of freedom.
Most people on the left are not opposed to freedom. They are just in favor of all sorts of things that are incompatible with freedom.
Freedom ultimately means the right of other people to do things that you do not approve of. Nazis were free to be Nazis under Hitler. It is only when you are able to do things that other people don’t approve that you are free.
One of the most innocent-sounding examples of the left’s many impositions of its vision on others is the widespread requirement by schools and by college admissions committees that students do “community service.” …
Borowitz Report says China purhased naming rights to the U. S. for $1.4 trillion.