The Folly of Scientism

Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole

By Austin L. Hughes

When I decided on a scientific career, one of the things that appealed to me about science was the modesty of its practitioners. The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion. This attitude was attractive precisely because it stood in sharp contrast to the arrogance of the philosophers of the positivist tradition, who claimed for science and its practitioners a broad authority with which many practicing scientists themselves were uncomfortable.

The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science. Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth. And this attitude is becoming more widespread among scientists themselves. All too many of my contemporaries in science have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.

Of course, from the very beginning of the modern scientific enterprise, there have been scientists and philosophers who have been so impressed with the ability of the natural sciences to advance knowledge that they have asserted that these sciences are the only valid way of seeking knowledge in any field. A forthright expression of this viewpoint has been made by the chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents. In their 2007 book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, for example, philosophers James Ladyman, Don Ross, and David Spurrett go so far as to entitle a chapter “In Defense of Scientism.”

Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called “natural philosophy.” Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: “I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.”

Government Shutdown Jitters

Even the soundest government, the toughest morale and the most robust society bear only a certain maximum of state activity, state finance and state intervention

BY JR NYQUIST

In a book written in 1944 under the original title of Civitas Humana, the economist Wilhelm Roepke asked, “Has there ever been such lack of character, so little civic courage, so much conformity and cynical opportunism, so many weak knees as in our generation?” In 2013 we can answer in the affirmative; for if Communism was allowed to run rampant after 1917, and National Socialism after 1933, we have added appreciably to the mix with our own variation on the theme. America is collapsing under a regime of regulation and social engineering that has not been fully understood, not even by the so-called conservatives. As a consequence, our national government continues to plunge toward bankruptcy while our society is helpless to do anything. Even attempts by the U.S. House of Representatives are bound to prove futile, especially given the overall media climate.

Every year the federal budget grows and overgrows. Decade after decade the government gets more intrusive. Regulations pile on regulations. The national economy is struggling. At the same time we avert our eyes. As Christopher Lasch once observed, “If the designation of contemporary culture as a culture of narcissism has any merit, it is because that culture tends to favor regressive solutions instead of ‘evolutionary’ solutions….” Lasch believed our problems were driven by social pathologies which he listed as follows: “the emergence of the egalitarian family, so-called; the child’s increasing exposure to other socializing agencies besides the family; and the general effect of modern mass culture in breaking down distinctions between illusions and reality.”

This last item, where the line between reality and illusion has been fudged, helps to explain why the country is able to move forward on false economic principles so readily – as if nothing bad is happening. The fact is, of course, that this advance toward catastrophe is ongoing and inexorable. We are in grave danger, yet we do not act effectively to avert the danger.

“The first and perhaps the worst danger of all,” Roepke warned, “is the overburdening of the nation – something which in itself is already a characteristic feature of the modern interventionist ‘welfare’ state….” This overburdening strikes at the heart of sound economy, financial sense, and lawful order. Bankruptcy from runaway state expenditure occurs in concert with a plethora of evils, and may lead to lawlessness, corruption, societal demoralization and even anarchy. “Even the soundest government,” Roepke continued, “can be burdened only with a certain optimum of activity. If this is over-reached then the balance between the collective organization and the individual is destroyed.”

Machiavelli’s enterprise

The effectual versus the imagined truth

by Harvey Mansfield

Machiavelli's philosophical musings on truth are just was important as his work on politics.

Five hundred years ago, on December 10, 1513, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a letter to a friend in Rome describing one day in his life as an exile from Florence and remarked casually that he had just completed writing The Prince. This momentous book, together with its companion, the Discourses on Livy, neither published until after his death, announces an enterprise affecting all human beings today: the creation of the modern world.

Machiavelli is famous for his infamy, for being “Machiavellian,” but his importance is almost universally underestimated. The extent of his consequence is not appreciated and the size of his ambition is little known. He makes it possible, even easy, to suppose that his ambition is confined to place-hunting with Lorenzo de’ Medici and service as drill-master of the Florentine republic—as if his thought was bounded by his employment opportunities. Of course everyone senses his greatness as a writer, a master of Italian prose with a gift for an acute phrase, often worth citing for effect but almost never actually avowed for use. “I am a Machiavellian” is something one doesn’t hear. But in addition to his insights, which in truth are deliberately exaggerated, he does not receive much respect as a guide to the future. But a guide with foresight is just what Machiavelli is, if one adds that he made the future to which he guides us.

To see how important Machiavelli was one must first examine how important he meant to be. In theDiscourses he says he has a “natural desire” to “work for those things I believe will bring common benefit to everyone.” A natural desire is in human nature, not just in the humans of Machiavelli’s time, and the beneficiaries will be everyone, all humanity—not just his native country or city. He goes on to say that he has “decided to take a path as yet untrodden by anyone.” He will benefit everyone by taking a new path; he is not just imitating the ancients or contributing to the Renaissance, that rebirth of the ancients, though obviously his new path makes use of the them. In the middle of The Prince he declares: “I depart from the orders of others,” also emphasizing his originality. One soon learns that he departs from the tradition of thought that begins with Greek, or Socratic, philosophy, as well as from the Bible. All this he refers to elsewhere as “my enterprise.”

Orwell’s Big Brother: Merely Fiction?

Orwell’s collectivist world of the future is doubtless a nightmare – but is it merely a dream?

By Murray N. Rothbard

In recent years, many writers have given us their vision of the coming collectivist future. At the turn of the century, neither Edward Bellamy nor H. G. Wells suspected that the collectivist societies of their dreams were so close at hand. As collectivism sprouted following World War I, many keen observers felt that there was a big difference between the idyllic Edens pictured by Bellamy and Wells and the actual conditions of the various “waves of the future.”

Notable among these revised forecasts of the world of the future were Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Both of their future worlds, evil as they were, had saving graces. Huxley’s future was spiritually dead, but at least the masses were happy; Ayn Rand’s dictators were timid, stupid men who permitted a renascent individualist to escape from the strangling collectivist world and begin life anew.

George Orwell’s collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no hope at all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect on the reader is devastating. Orwell’s future is run by a Party whose job is the total exercise of Power, and it goes about its job with diabolic efficiency and ingenuity. The Party represents itself as the embodiment of the principles of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. These principles turn out to be: blind, unquestioning obedience to the Party, and equally blind hatred of any person or group the Party proclaims as its enemy. These emotions are the only ones permitted to anybody; all others, such as personal and family love, are systematically stamped out.

The Anglosphere miracle

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the gathering of the dusk

by Daniel Hannan

There are few words which are used more loosely than the word “Civilization.” What does it mean? It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is Civilization—and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort, and culture. When Civilization reigns, in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people. The traditions of the past are cherished, and the inheritance bequeathed to us by former wise or valiant men becomes a rich estate to be enjoyed and used by all.

—Winston Churchill, 1938

The liberty, the unalienable, indefeasible rights of men, the honor and dignity of human nature, the grandeur and glory of the public, and the universal happiness of individuals, were never so skillfully and successfully consulted as in that most excellent monument of human art, the common law of England.

—John Adams, 1763

When I was four years old, a mob attacked our family farm. There was a back entrance, a footpath into the hills, and my mother led me there by the hand. “We’re going to play a game,” she told me. “If we have to come this way again, we must do it without making a sound.”

My father was having none of it. He had a duty to the farm workers, he said, and wasn’t going to be driven off his own land by hooligans bussed in from the city.

He was suffering, I remember, from one of those diseases that periodically afflict white men in the tropics, and he sat in his dressing-gown, loading his revolver with paper-thin hands.

This was the Peru of General Velasco, whose putsch in 1968 had thrown the country into a state of squalor from which it has only recently recovered. Having nationalized the main industries, Velasco decreed a program of land reform under which farms were broken up and given to his military cronies.

As invariably happens when governments plunder their citizens, groups of agitators decided to take the law into their own hands. It was the same story as in the Spanish Second Republic, or Allende’s Chile: The police, seeing which way the wind was blowing, were reluctant to protect property.

Knowing that no help would come from the authorities, my father and two security guards dispersed the gang with shots as they attempted to burn down the front gates. The danger passed.

Not everyone was so lucky. There were land-invasions and confiscations all over the country. The mines and fishing fleets were seized. Foreign investment fled and companies repatriated their employees. The large Anglo-Peruvian community into which I had been born all but disappeared.

Only many years later did it strike me that no one had been especially surprised. There was a weary acceptance that, in South America, property was insecure, the rule of law fragile, and civil government contingent. What you owned might at any moment be snatched away, either with or without official sanction. Regimes came and went, and constitutions were ephemeral.

At the same time it was assumed, by South Americans as well as by expatriates, that such things didn’t happen in the English-speaking world. As I grew up, attending boarding school in the United Kingdom but returning to Peru for most of my vacations, I began to wonder at the contrast.

Sundown in America : The Keynesian State-Wreck Ahead

Sundown in America is well-nigh unavoidable

by David A. Stockman

The median U.S. household income in 2012 was $51,000, but that’s nothing to crow about. That same figure was first reached way back in 1989--- meaning that the living standard of Main Street America has gone nowhere for the last quarter century. Since there was no prior span in U.S. history when real household incomes remained dead-in-the-water for 25 years, it cannot be gainsaid that the great American prosperity machine has stalled out.

Even worse, the bottom of the socio-economic ladder has actually slipped lower and, by some measures, significantly so. The current poverty rate of 15 percent was only 12.8 percent back in 1989; there are now 48 million people on food stamps compared to 18 million then; and more than 16 million children lived poverty households last year or one-third more than a quarter century back.

Likewise, last year the bottom quintile of households struggled to make ends meet on $11,500 annually ----a level 20 percent lower than the $14,000 of constant dollar income the bottom 20 million households had available on average twenty-five years ago. 

Then, again, not all of the vectors have pointed south. Back in 1989 the Dow-Jones index was at 3,000, and by 2012 it was up five-fold to 15,000.  Likewise, the aggregate wealth of the Forbes 400 clocked in at $300 billion back then, and now stands at more than $2 trillion---a gain of 7X.

 And the big gains were not just limited to the 400 billionaires. We have had a share the wealth movement of sorts--- at least among the top rungs of the ladder. By contrast to the plight of the lower ranks, there has been nothing dead-in-the-water about the incomes of the 5 million U.S. households which comprise the top five percent. They enjoyed an average income of $320,000 last year, representing a sprightly 33 percent gain from the $240,000 inflation-adjusted level of 1989.

The same top tier of households had combined net worth of about $10 trillion back at the end of Ronald Reagan’s second term.  And by the beginning of Barrack Obama’s second term that had grown to $50 trillion, meaning that just the $40 trillion gain among the very top 5 percent rung is nearly double the entire current net worth of the remaining 95 percent of American households.

So, no, Sean Hannity need not have fretted about the alleged left-wing disciple of Saul Alinsky and Bill Ayers who ascended to the oval office in early 2009. During Obama’s initial four years, in fact, 95 percent of the entire gain in household income in America was captured by the top 1 percent. 

Some other things were rising smartly during the last quarter century, too. The Pentagon budget was $450 billion in today’s dollars during the year in which the Berlin Wall came tumbling down.

Now we have no industrial state enemies left on the planet: Russia has become a kleptocracy led by a thief who prefers stealing from his own people rather than his neighbors; and China, as the Sneakers and Apple factory of the world, would collapse into economic chaos almost instantly---if it were actually foolish enough to bomb its 4,000 Wal-Mart outlets in America.

Still, facing no serious military threat to the homeland, the defense budget has risen to $650 billion----that is, it has ballooned by more than 40 percent in constant dollars since the Cold War ended 25 year ago. Washington obviously didn’t get the memo, nor did the Harvard “peace” candidate elected in 2008, who promptly re-hired the Bush national security team and then beat his mandate for plough shares into an even mightier sword than the one bequeathed him by the statesman from Yale he replaced.

Toilet Paper Only in the Hereafter

The Hygienically Challenged Crack-Up Boom

by Pater Tenebrarum

Readers may recall that we have reported on the toilet paper shortage in Venezuela before. At the time our suggestion to the Venezuelan authorities was to simply replace toilet paper with the country's currency, the Bolivar, as evidently there is more than enough of that to go around.

The great leader Hugo Chavez is no longer among the quick. He therefore doesn't have to grapple with the problem anymore – we are assuming that there are no toilet paper shortages in the Hereafter. So one way of getting a decent wipe nowadays if you're a citizen of Venezuela is to follow the great leader of the revolution into the Great Beyond.

Back in May of this year, Venezuela's rulers made the following promise: 

"The revolution will bring the country the equivalent of 50 million rolls of toilet paper. We are going to saturate the market so that our people calm down." 

But wouldn't you know, in spite of their near complete control over the country's economy, the darn capitalists have somehow thwarted them again!

Obviously, the revolution has a lot of work left to do in order to create the socialist Utopia Venezuelans have been assured will be theirs. The Land of Cockaigne, where the roasted chickens will fly into the comrade's mouths unbidden and toilet paper will be abundant – its creation continues to be obstructed by the machinations of evil capitalist hoarders. So the revolutionaries have decided to strike at the root of the problem. 

Bloomberg writes: 

“Venezuela's government is known for its state-must-do-it-all mindset, inherited from late President Hugo Chavez and his radical followers, known as Chavistas. But late last week, the notoriously inefficient government went above and beyond to shine its populist credentials: It stepped right into Venezuelan bathrooms.

On Sept. 20, President Nicolas Maduro and a new economic panel ordered national price regulator Sundecop to “temporarily” seize plants owned by Manufacturas de Papel CA, orManpa, the company that supplies 40 percent of the country’s demand for toilet paper and personal-care paper goods. Their reasoning? To oversee production, because consumers can't seem to find enough rolls of toilet paper. 

(emphasis added)

We hereby predict that the toilet paper shortage is going to get worse. It is not the only thing in short supply in Caracas these days: 

“It's not just bathroom tissue that's lacking: In recent months, food items such as cooking oil and powdered milk have nearly disappeared from store shelves.

What Does It Mean To ‘Punish’ Syria?

No man may know the future; but we may know something of the past beyond reasonable doubt

by Theodore Dalrymple

The President of France, M. François Hollande, has spoken repeatedly of ‘punishing’ Syria. It is not easy to know precisely what he means by this, since he has also stated that the object of such punishment would not be to overthrow a regime whose one object appears to be to remain in power at all costs, among other reasons in order to avoid just punishment (for its extreme brutality is certainly of no recent date). This regime seems also to have no qualms about inflicting death upon the citizenry under its jurisdiction, so a little collateral damage consequent upon symbolic bombing will hardly cause it to change heart. It is difficult, indeed, to see what purpose M. Hollande’s punishment could possibly serve, other than the relief of the virtuous feelings of M. Hollande himself.

To say that the President of France is now viewed with contempt by many of his countrymen is considerably to understate matters. During a televised debate in the last presidential election, M. Hollande made a famous pseudo-extemporaneous speech in which he said emphatically ‘Moi, président, I would do this, moi, président, I would do that, moi, président , I would do the other thing…’ After his election, a satirical television programme changed a vowel and called him Mou président (Soft or feeble president), and that is how most Frenchmen now see him – Mou président.

Perhaps, then, his belligerence towards Syria is best seen as an attempt to prove to his electors that he is a firm and decisive leader in the face of evil. If so it certainly has not worked, quite the contrary, for he has yet to persuade his countrymen that any of their vital interests are at stake or that his proposed strategy would result in benefit rather than harm. They are perhaps aware that theirs is the first country in the world in which massacres were carried out in the name of the Rights of Man. And the fact that France could not possibly do anything without the leadership of the United States, whose decision to act against Syria had not been taken at the time M. Hollande made his own threats, has made him appear even more maladroit, weak and foolish than usual.

The wish of the leaders of Britain and France to interfere militarily in distant countries consorts ill with their policy of reducing expenditure on the armed forces the better to preserve their ability to keep their populations quiet, or quiescent, by means of government subventions of one kind or another. But even that aside, M. Hollande’s choice of word, punish, seems to me odd and ill-chosen: for one can rightfully punish only those whom one has some constituted authority: and France has not been the mandatory power in Syria since the end of the 1940s. It seems unlikely that the United Nations, given the stance of Russia, will ever give France (or any country else) the supposed legal authority to act against Syria, and therefore if M. Hollande acts at all it will have to be on his own moral authority, of which he has very little.

There is yet more: for as punitive as M. Hollande wants to be towards Syria, over whom he has no jurisdiction, he is as lenient to criminals and delinquents in what the French call the Hexagon, which roughly captures the cartographic shape of their country, for which he does have considerable responsibility. Here his policy is not to imprison malefactors, but to give them the kinds of punishments that, across the Channel, have been proved not to work, neither as deterrents, correctives or – most importantly – as preventives.

California’s New Feudalism Benefits a Few at the Expense of the Multitude

Once famous as a land of opportunity, the Golden State is now awash in inequality, growing poverty, and downward mobility that’s practically medieval

Farmworker Cristina Melendez, 36, and her mother Maria Rosales, 60, working on the vegetable garden outside the mother's apartment in Fresno, Calif. on June 1, 2013. Rosales, now a U.S. citizen, brought Melendez to work in California's fields when the girl was 13, hoping farm work would be a spring board to a better life, but Melendez has yet to find a way out of the cycle of poverty.

by Joel Kotkin

California has been the source of much innovation, from agribusiness and oil to fashion and the digital world. Historically much richer than the rest of the country, it was also the birthplace, along with Levittown, of the mass-produced suburb, freeways, much of our modern entrepreneurial culture, and of course mass entertainment. For most of a century, for both better and worse, California has defined progress, not only for America but for the world.

As late as the 80s, California was democratic in a fundamental sense, a place for outsiders and, increasingly, immigrants—roughly 60 percent of the population was considered middle class. Now, instead of a land of opportunity, California has become increasingly feudal. According to recent census estimates,  the state suffers some of the highest levels of inequality in the country. By some estimates, the state’s level of inequality compares with that of such global models as  the Dominican Republic, Gambia, and the Republic of the Congo.

The Shutdown Is a Sideshow. Debt Is the Threat

An entitlement-driven disaster looms for America, yet Washington persists with its game of Russian roulette

By  NIALL FERGUSON

In the words of a veteran investor, watching the U.S. bond market today is like sitting in a packed theater and smelling smoke. You look around for signs of other nervous sniffers. But everyone else seems oblivious.

Yes, the federal government shut down this week. Yes, we are just two weeks away from the point when the Treasury secretary says he will run out of cash if the debt ceiling isn't raised. Yes, bond king Bill Gross has been on TV warning that a default by the government would be "catastrophic." Yet the yield on a 10-year Treasury note has fallen slightly over the past month (though short-term T-bill rates ticked up this week).

Part of the reason people aren't rushing for the exits is that the comedy they are watching is so horribly fascinating. In his vain attempt to stop the Senate striking out the defunding of ObamaCare from the last version of the continuing resolution, freshman Sen. Ted Cruz managed to quote Doctor Seuss while re-enacting a scene from the classic movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

Meanwhile, President Obama has become the Hamlet of the West Wing: One minute he's for bombing Syria, the next he's not; one minute Larry Summers will succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve, the next he won't; one minute the president is jetting off to Asia, the next he's not. To be in charge, or not to be in charge: that is indeed the question.

According to conventional wisdom, the key to what is going on is a Republican Party increasingly at the mercy of the tea party. I agree that it was politically inept to seek to block ObamaCare by these means. This is not the way to win back the White House and Senate. But responsibility also lies with the president, who has consistently failed to understand that a key function of the head of the executive branch is to twist the arms of legislators on both sides. It was not the tea party that shot down Mr. Summers's nomination as Fed chairman; it was Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the new face of the American left.

Yet, entertaining as all this political drama may seem, the theater itself is indeed burning. For the fiscal position of the federal government is in fact much worse today than is commonly realized. As anyone can see who reads the most recent long-term budget outlook—published last month by the Congressional Budget Office, and almost entirely ignored by the media—the question is not if the United States will default but when and on which of its rapidly spiraling liabilities.

True, the federal deficit has fallen to about 4% of GDP this year from its 10% peak in 2009. The bad news is that, even as discretionary expenditure has been slashed, spending on entitlements has continued to rise—and will rise inexorably in the coming years, driving the deficit back up above 6% by 2038.

A very striking feature of the latest CBO report is how much worse it is than last year's. A year ago, the CBO's extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%. A year ago the debt was supposed to glide down to zero by the 2070s. This year's long-run projection for 2076 is above 200%. In this devastating reassessment, a crucial role is played here by the more realistic growth assumptions used this year.

The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried

Britain is sliding towards an entirely new kind of surveillance society

By John Lanchester

In August, the editor of the Guardian rang me up and asked if I would spend a week in New York, reading the GCHQ files whose UK copy the Guardian was forced to destroy. His suggestion was that it might be worthwhile to look at the material not from a perspective of making news but from that of a novelist with an interest in the way we live now.

I took Alan Rusbridger up on his invitation, after an initial reluctance that was based on two main reasons. The first of them was that I don't share the instinctive sense felt by many on the left that it is always wrong for states to have secrets. I'd put it more strongly than that: democratic states need spies. 

The philosopher Karl Popper, observing the second world war from his academic post in New Zealand, came up with a great title for his major work of political thought: The Open Society and Its Enemies. It is, in its way, a shocking phrase – why would the open society have enemies? (But then, the title of Charles Repington's The First World War, published in 1920, was shocking too, because it implied that there would be another one.)

We do have enemies, though, enemies who are in deadly earnest; enemies who wish you reading this dead, whoever you are, for no other reason than that you belong to a society like this one. We have enemies who are seeking to break into our governments' computers, with the potential to destroy our infrastructure and, literally, make the lights go out; we have enemies who want to kill as many of us, the more innocent the better, as possible, by any means possible, as a deliberate strategy; we have enemies who want to develop nuclear weapons, and thereby vastly raise the stakes for international diplomacy and the threat of terrorism; and we have common-or-garden serious criminals, who also need watching and catching.

Who are the world's craziest rulers?

Dedicated to the tender memory of Saparmurat Niyazov RIP

By Robert Colvile

With the deaths of Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkemenistan – a maniac so megalo- that he renamed the days of the week after himself and his family – and of Kim Jong-un – a golfer so talented that he shot 38 under par on his first ever round, including five holes-in-one – some feared that the golden age of the crazed dictator had gone for good.

But Yahya Jammeh's decision to leave the Commonwealth, and subsequent outlining of his more unpleasant characteristics, has reminded us that there are still some old-fashioned brutes plugging away out there – and, more soberingly, that there are millions of people around the world who have to bear the consequences of their capricious decisions. Here are the leaders most likely to send you scurrying to the emigration queue:

1) Vladimir Putin

A controversial choice, given that the Russian president's chosen persona is "cold-eyed and ruthless" rather than "where are the men in white coats?". But Bad Vlad is showing alarming (or, for the purposes of this list, encouraging) signs of buying into his own publicity. There's the semi-naked calendar shots, the paranoia about foreigners and homosexuals, the diving expedition when he miraculously stumbled across buried treasure. He's a tiger-taming, fire-fighting, judo-champion hardman who plays on Angela Merkel's fear of dogs just because he can. As such, he's certainly earned a place on this list, if only out of fear of what he'd do if he were denied one.

2) Kim Jong-un 

 North Korea's dauphin of derangement loses points for having inherited the world's most terrifying cult of personality, rather than having built it. To date, he has yet to add more than a few individual touches to a regime built around the worship of the Kim family as, effectively, living gods. Still, the fact that the Brilliant Comrade devotes much of his time to having his ex-lover murdered by firing squad in front of Pyongyang's leading pop groups and befriending Dennis Rodman, while also threatening South Korea and the West with nuclear annihilation, speaks of the capacity to be both mockable and terrifying that marks out the all-time greats.

3) Isaias Afewerki

Afewerki, right, with fellow charmer Omar al-Bashir of Sudan

Eritrea's first and only president might not be a household name, but since winning independence in 1991 he's done his best to build his own low-budget version of North Korea, pursuing a policy of complete self-reliance. His People's Front for Democracy and Justice is not just the ruling party, but the only legal political entity, with the country managing the remarkable feat of ranking even lower for freedom of the press than Kim Jong-un's. As for the great leader himself, he's such a true believer in Maoist ideology that – according to Wikileaks – he berated the Chinese for their shameful compromises with the market.

Just because it’s a phony crisis doesn’t mean it can’t be made even phonier

Shutdown Simulacrum 

By Mark Steyn

Way back in January, when it emerged that Beyoncé had treated us to the first ever lip-synched national anthem at a presidential inauguration, I suggested in this space that this strange pseudo-performance embodied the decay of America’s political institutions from the real thing into mere simulacrum. But that applies to government “crises,” too — such as the Obamacare “rollout,” the debt “ceiling,” and the federal “shutdown,” to name only the three current railroad tracks to which the virtuous damsel of Big Government has been simultaneously tied by evil mustache-twirling Republicans.

This week’s “shutdown” of government, for example, suffers (at least for those of us curious to see it reduced to Somali levels) from the awkward fact that the overwhelming majority of the government is not shut down at all. Indeed, much of it cannot be shut down. Which is the real problem facing America. “Mandatory spending” (Social Security, Medicare, et al.) is authorized in perpetuity — or, at any rate, until total societal collapse. If you throw in the interest payments on the debt, that means two-thirds of the federal budget is beyond the control of Congress’s so-called federal budget process. That’s why you’re reading government “shutdown” stories about the PandaCam at the Washington Zoo and the First Lady’s ghost-Tweeters being furloughed.

What Is An American?

Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

By J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur 

De Crevecoeur was born in France, educated in England, and came to America in 1754. He published his famous “Letters of An American Farmer” in 1781 and 1782, of which “What is an American?” was letter three.

I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when he first lands on this continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride, when he views the chain of settlements which embellishes these extended shores. When he says to himself, this is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess. Here he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner, and traces in their works the embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which flourish in Europe. Here he beholds fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was wild, woody, and uncultivated! What a train of pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest; it is a prospect which must inspire a good citizen with the most heartfelt pleasure. The difficulty consists in the manner of viewing so extensive a scene. He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury.

The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary

Man will not be sane unless Political Correctness is slain

by John C Wright

In Robert Heinlein’s famed ‘Future History’ he constructed an elaborate timeline of thing to come, to provide a structure for his short stories.

Looking forward from the year 1940, when the timeline was first formed, it was reasonable, even conservative guesswork to predict the moonlanding by the 1980’s, since the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers had been forty years earlier. Heinlein’s Luna City founded in 1990 a decade or so later, with colonies on Mars and Venus by 2000. Compare: a submersible ironclad was written up as a science romance by Jules Verne in 1869, based on the steam-powered ‘diving boat’ of Robert Fulton, developed in 1801. In 1954 the first atomic-powered diesel submarine—all three boats were named Nautilus—put to sea. The gap between Verne’s dream and Rickover’s reality was eight decades, about the time separating Heinlein’s writing of “Menace from Earth” and its projected date.

Looking back from the year 2010, however the dates seem remarkably optimistic and compressed. We have not even mounted a manned expedition to Mars as yet, and no return manned trips to the Moon are on the drawing boards.

One prediction that was remarkably prescient, however, was the advent of “The Crazy Years” described as “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.”

He optimistically predicts a recovery from the Crazy Years, the opening of a new frontier in space, and a return to nineteenth-century economy. Full maturity of the human race is achieved by a science of social relations “based on the negative basic statements of semantics.” Those of you who are A.E. van Vogt fans will recognize our old friends, general semantics and Null-A logic cropping up here. Van Vogt, like Heinlein, told tales of a future time when the Non-Aristotlean logic or “Null-A” training would give rise to a race of supermen, fully integrated and fully mature human beings, free of barbarism and neuroses.