A recent NY Times piece by David Brooks that examines why a tiny nation like Norway can manage to be so competitive at the Winter Olympics might be one of the craziest stories I’ve ever read. Un-frickin-believable.
The United States, a nation of 300 million, won nine gold medals this year in the Winter Olympics. Norway, a nation of 4.7 million, also won nine. This was no anomaly. Over the years, Norwegians have won more gold medals in Winter Games, and more Winter Olympics medals over all, than people from any other nation. There must be many reasons for Norway’s excellence, but some of them are probably embedded in the story of Jan Baalsrud…
In other news, I found this piece in the WSJ about Paul Ryan’s dissection of “Obamacare” to be highly insightful – and disturbing.
At his press conference yesterday, Mr. Obama claimed that “my proposal would bring down the cost of health care for millions—families, businesses and the federal government.” He said it is “fully paid for” and “brings down our deficit by up to $1 trillion over the next two decades.” Never before has a vast new entitlement been sold on the basis of fiscal responsibility, and one reason ObamaCare is so unpopular is that Americans understand the contradiction between untold new government subsidies and claims of spending restraint. They know a Big Con when they hear one. Mr. Obama’s fiscal assertions are possible only because of the fraudulent accounting and budget gimmicks that Democrats spent months calibrating. Readers can find the gory details in Mr. Ryan’s pre-emptive rebuttal nearby, though one of the most egregious deceptions is that the bill counts 10 years of taxes but only six years of spending.
Though I’m a bit late to the party, I thought Bill Simmons’ take on the Tiger Woods apology was worth mentioning again, just in case anyone missed his spot-on assessment of the whole debacle.
I thought it was a borderline train wreck. It amazes me that Tiger learned little to nothing from the past two months. The control freak whose life slipped out of control dipped right back into control-freak mode, reading a prepared speech in front of a hand-selected audience of people, taking no questions, talking in clichés and only occasionally seeming human. Everything about it seemed staged. Everything. When the main camera broke down at the nine-minute mark and Tiger had to be shown from the side, I half-expected to see that he was plugged in to the wall.
And, not surprisingly, Christopher Hitchens has an interesting brainstorm around natural disasters and the political systems best-suited to handle them in his latest Slate piece.
Seismology in this decade is already emerging as the most important new department of socioeconomics and politics. The simple recognition that nature is master and that the crust of our planet is highly volatile has been thrown into some relief by the staggering 250,000 butcher’s bill exacted from the people of Haiti by a single terrestrial spasm, and by the relative survival capacity of Chileans even when hit by a quake of superior magnitude. Gone are the boring-headlined stories about the magnitude of the quake and the likely epicenter. The effects of upheavals of the earth can now be quite expertly studied, and even predicted, along a series of intersecting graphs that measure them against demography, income level, and—this is a prediction on my part—the vitality of democratic institutions.
