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For the Fourth: on liberty — 15 Comments

  1. World Trade Center .. a true construction miracle, a symbol of American strength and motivation! Destroyed by Muslims .. now they are destroying France..

  2. My last visit to New York City was to testify as an expert in a med mal trial at Bronx Supreme Court. It was right out of “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The plaintiff was a parolee who was shot by his parole officer. He was shot in the leg and the wound was mishandled at a City Hospital. As a result, he lost his leg. The defendant was the City Hospital system. The jury of seven, halfway through deliberations, asked the judge to force one juror to bathe as the rest could not stand to be in the jury room with him. The jury awarded the plaintiff a half million dollars, probably as much for the annoyance of the unwashed juror as for my testimony. The lawyer for the plaintiff was ecstatic as most of his cases were criminal defense. He wanted me to come back to take me out to dinner. I never went back.

  3. Building and maintaining. Eric Hoffer insisted that the state of a nation or company could be determined by examining the maintenance logs. But if nothing has been built, there is nothing to maintain.

    Yesterday, Milke Rowe (The Dirty Jobs Guy) ran a story on Fox business channel about the corn processing industry. Who knew how big it is? Who knew how many products depend on corn for their ingredients? Not I. It’s a huge business, and without it, we would be much less well fed as a nation. It has grown up and delivered its products over many, many years. Its continued success depends on careful maintenance of the creative machines they have developed. All of which were described by Mike.

    There are so many other industries, jobs, and
    processes like that, which are out of our sight that directly affect the quality of our lives. They are all there because a need/demand was recognized and filled by men and capital. An intricate, ingenious system that makes our lives better.

    The best thing about it is that it was all made possible by a group of visionary men who gave us the Declaration of Independence on this day in 1776.

    When I think about these things, my heart is filled with gratitude that I was blessed to be born in the Unites States of America.

    It’s a great day. A happy n Fourth of July to all my fellow Americans. Let’s all be thankful for our heritage.

  4. Neo: you are a gifted writer with a big heart: caring for many things and many people, and letting your readers see and feel them as you do.

    Thanks for this; your complex grief at 9/11 is especially poignant and deserves wide and regular sharing. At break of day and at the going down of the sun, we shall remember.

  5. Celebrate the brave-hearted men, especially Thomas Jefferson, who declared themselves on July 4, 1776 against the world’s greatest and only superpower.

    When I was in Charlottesville in the late ’60s as a medical trainee, locals spoke of “Mr. Jefferson”, the founder of the Univ. of Virginia, as if he’d just gone away for the weekend. With respect and awe.
    Now, as a result of media race hysteria, his name seldom comes up anymore. One marginal sin trumps many enduring accomplishments for the Left only if not committed by them. And the rest of us are suckers for being sucked in. The Left can sin like Satan and get away with it.
    Thank you, Mr. Jefferson!

  6. My favorite 4th of July was sailing to Hawaii and watching my young crew shooting off fireworks from the lee rail. 42 years ago today.

  7. JJ…”(corn processing is) a huge business, and without it, we would be much less well fed as a nation.” And there are thousands of such industries and subindustries. Yet politicians and their ‘experts’ do things that will impact these industries without any serious attempt to understand them or their interconnections. Too often, they believe that any overlay of planning (by them) will necessarily make things better.

    Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov served as Deputy Manager of a Stalin-Era Soviet factory, a sawmill. The factory overcame many obstacles, but was ultimately strangled by difficulties in obtaining supplies, particularly raw lumber. Gennady, whose father had been in the lumber trade before the Revolution, was contemptuous of the chaos into which the industry had been reduced by the Soviets:

    “The free and “unplanned” and therefore ostensibly chaotic character of lumber production before the revolution in reality possessed a definite order. As the season approached, hundreds of thousands of forest workers gathered in small artels of loggers, rafters, and floaters, hired themselves out to entrepreneurs through their foremen, and got all the work done. The Bolsheviks, concerned with “putting order” into life and organizing it according to their single scheme, destroyed that order and introduced their own–and arrived at complete chaos in lumbering.”

    As Gennady says:

    “Such in the immutable law. The forceful subordination of life’s variety into a single mold will be avenged by that variety’s becoming nothing but chaos and disorder.”

    I’m afraid we are going to find out the truth of this observation hard way.

  8. @ Owen > “You can have competence or you can cater to identity politics, but you can’t have both.”

    That was a frightening article, because it sets out the choices and consequences so plainly and persuasively.

    It’s somewhat akin to the choices examined by Hayek: you can have socialism or freedom, but not both.

  9. David Foster, thanks for your comment and link to your book review.

    “I’m afraid we are going to find out the truth of this observation hard way.”
    You understand the issue as well as anyone I have read or talked to. Kee trying to educate people. It might help.

  10. David Foster @ 11:06: Thanks, yes, and I am a fan of “ChicagoBoyz.” Agree about fragility and its dependence on, inter alia, closeness of coupling. Maybe there is a rule that as systems grow more complex they implicitly couple more subsystems and the “average closeness” (interdependence? Lack of redundancy?) goes up, thus making the system tend toward greater fragility. IOW if you aren’t competent enough (experienced and canny enough) to keep designing-in more resilience and redundancy, the systems you build will get shakier as they get bigger. Something like that.

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