Day: July 8, 2010

Literature rocks

My heavens, this is the sort of thing dreadfully in need of being said (HT Instapundit):

Real life is not like a science experiment . . . . Humans are not purely rational beings. They have phobias, biases and other irrational elements. Ego, hatred and childhood experiences are not something that can be turned into statistics. . . . . [W]orks of literature can help [Obama]. Precisely because they’re not concerned with reducing every event to facts and figures, and because they’re not limited in length and description like policy briefs, they can explore events and people with a thoroughness that factual books and briefs can’t. They describe the world as it really is–and so are essential to making knowledgeable policy decisions.

Or any other kind of decision. The author applies it to Obama as “emotionally detached” and having things go badly for him. Fatuous that, if it’s that which will save this bad presidency. I will ignore the Obama part, if you don’t mind, and welcome the wise words that will lead a decision-maker to do the right thing, or increase his chances of doing it.

He’s puffing a book that makes the point:

This lesson–how great works of literature provide invaluable guidance to understanding events and people–is brilliantly explained in a new book, Grand Strategies, by Charles Hill. In the book, Hill, a . . . former career diplomat who . . . lectures at Yale . . . takes readers on a grand tour through the great pieces of literature, along the way explaining their lessons for policymakers. It’s the perfect primer for the president and his team.

Not quite, though it sounds interesting. The perfect primer would be Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But big-govt. enthusiasts won’t touch it. Leopards and their spots, and all that, you know.

LeBron betrays home town

So the big guy goes south

The decision, made at exactly 8:27 p.m. Chicago time, creates a new Big Three in the NBA and validates Heat President Pat Riley’s bold, grandiose plan to alter the balance of the Eastern Conference. It also rips the guts out of the Cavaliers franchise and its home city.

I disapprove.

Home town is best. He wants to be famous, but what of his personal life? Does he not relish the joy of domesticity, seeing familiar faces of people he grew up with, that and giving to his city? No, and I think he will regret it when he’s old and gray.

Sad about crime in Chicago

The alderman in whose ward the policeman was shot and killed with his own gun yesterday feels “sad” about it.

“I don’t know what to say. It just makes me sad,” said Ald. JoAnn Thompson, 16th, whose ward covers the area around the station. “That one individual does not speak for this whole ward. And I know there’s a lot of crime, but there’s still a lot of good people here, too.”

Not as sad as when a relative — father of her granddaughter’s children — was found in a van (not in her ward) 11 months ago:

Police discovered [Wilfredo] Gines’ body in the back of his Ford Expedition on Saturday night in a college neighborhood in Hammond, Ind., three days after he left his home in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city’s South Side.

Family said Gines, 31, a relative of Chicago Ald. JoAnn Thompson (16th), was going to confront two men he suspected of stealing a car engine he had rebuilt in an auto garage in Chicago Heights.

She has a right to feel sad, but she also has a right to be pissed off — and dying for something that might reduce even a little the rampant antisocial behavior of her constituents.

Blago as case in point

As the Blagojevich trial offers evidence atop evidence of how weird, childish, nasty, irresponsible, venal, vain, and all-’round strange and off-putting is and has been our immediate past governor, as in this just in:

Rod Blagojevich’s corruption trial resumed today with a former aide testifying that the former governor hid in the bathroom or left the office early to avoid discussing certain issues,

we must conclude that it’s time for an in-depth investigation of root causes.

I speak not of Blago’s upbringing, birth order (sibling rank), schooling, previous condition of servitude to bad habits, and over-all life experience but of the slating procedures by the Democratic Party of Cook County, beginning with the all-important question, Who sent him?