From The New York Times—two new books, which exhort us to “simplify”:
SIMPLE—Conquering the Crisis of Complexity, by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn
And,
SIMPLER—The Future of Government, By Cass R. Sunstein
Sunstein writes that he pushed for “the use of plain language, reductions in red tape, readable summaries of complex rules, and the elimination of costly, unjustified requirements.”
I wish….
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The New York Times, A Man of His Time. The intro:
The Karl Marx depicted in Jonathan Sperber’s absorbing, meticulously researched biography will be unnervingly familiar to anyone who has had even the most fleeting acquaintance with radical politics. Here is a man never more passionate than when attacking his own side, saddled with perennial money problems and still reliant on his parents for cash, constantly plotting new, world-changing ventures yet having trouble with both deadlines and personal hygiene, living in rooms that some might call bohemian, others plain “slummy,” and who can be maddeningly inconsistent when not lapsing into elaborate flights of theory and unintelligible abstraction.
Still, it comes as a shock to realize that the ultimate leftist, the father of Communism itself, fits a recognizable pattern…If the Marx described by Sperber…were around in 2013, he would be a compulsive blogger, and picking Twitter fights with Andrew Sullivan and Naomi Klein.
Oh, no! Does this mean that there is some blogger out there about to unload a “new world order” on us all?
From The New York Review of Books, a review of Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism, by Cass Sunstein, where the “nanny state” is defended.
I don’t buy the argument, preferring the central argument of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, where, “as a general rule, government cannot legitimately coerce people if its only goal is to protect people from themselves. Mill contended that
the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or mental, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise, or even right.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The Wall Street Journal, a review by Glenn Harlan Reynolds, law professor at the University of Tennessee of Al Gore’s new book.
By Al Gore
(Random House, 558 pages, $30)
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament Source: Los Angeles Review of Books: ”I’ll tell you all my secrets, but I lie about my past.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2013 James Ament From The New York Review of Books, a thought provoking review of two books: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, and Dignity: Its History and Meaning by Michael Rosen.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament From The Wall Street Journal, an excerpt on the review of the book The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date:
The point, according to Samuel Arbesman, an applied mathematician and the author of the delightfully nerdy “The Half-Life of Facts,” is that knowledge—the collection of “accepted facts”—is far less fixed than we assume….
Science, Mr. Arbesman observes, is a “terribly human endeavor.” Knowledge grows but carries with it uncertainty and error; today’s scientific doctrine may become tomorrow’s cautionary tale. What is to be done? The right response, according to Mr. Arbesman, is to embrace change rather than fight it. “Far better than learning facts is learning how to adapt to changing facts,” he says. “Stop memorizing things . . . memories can be outsourced to the cloud.” In other words: In a world of information flux, it isn’t what you know that counts—it is how efficiently you can refresh.
My take: “question everything.”
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament The time is right…from CNN Money, a book review of James C. Scott’s Two Cheers for Anarchism. An excerpt:
Alternately insightful, inciteful, and insulting, Scott makes an idiosyncratically intellectual case that technocratic elites aren’t to be trusted, and insubordination is a virtue to be cherished. Needless to say, Scott is the Sterling Professor of Political Science at Yale.
Where “community organizer” cum political provocateur Saul Alinksy had his Rules for Radicals, Scott effectively offers aphorisms for anarchists. This book is about the subversion of institutional power. In short, it’s Alinsky with tenure.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament Having just returned from a cruise on the Danube River from the Black Sea through Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia and on land to Prague in the Czech Republic, I was fascinated by this Washington Post book review of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe by Anne Applebaum. Much of what I learned on my trip was depressing, especially visiting the House of Terror in Budapest, Hungary and Terezin, in the Czech Republic, a concentration camp used by both the Nazis and the Soviets.
This book would be helpful for understanding the horrors of communist rule in this region from World War II to 1989 when the Iron Curtain came down.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament A review by Florence King (Hat tip: Bookworm Room) with this priceless quote:
If you thought there was nothing new to say about female sexuality, you don’t know Naomi Wolf’s gift for saying nothing new about anything. In her 1991 bestseller, The Beauty Myth, she revealed that attractive women are luckier than homely women. A human shoehorn, she used her subsequent fame to ease herself into the role of political consultant in the 2000 presidential race and reveal that Al Gore has the personality of a tree. She took charge of his wardrobe and revealed his true nature as a resplendent autumnal tree by making him wear socks in warm, earthy colors and teaching him to cross his legs so that they showed.
Now she has uncrossed her own legs and written the life and times of her vagina.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 James Ament 
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