Book Review: The Hunger Games (2008)

By Joel Farnham

This book should not be taken lightly. This isn’t just another science fiction book. It is THE nightmare scenario for conservatives, and it is a nightmare for liberals because it clearly shows what an unrestrained state does to people. Then again, liberals may be taking notes and licking their chops.

** spoiler alert **

The Hunger Games is the first book in a trilogy created by author Suzanne Collins. Technically, this is in the Science Fiction genre, but it isn't overdone. You don't get starships, ray guns, invisibility or Star Wars-like elements. Instead, you get grace notes which can easily be switched out for our current equivalents.

The enemy in Hunger Games is the state, PANEM. It forces 12 districts to supply two people, a male and a female between the ages of 12 and 18, each year on the appropriately named Reaper Day. These people are called tributes. To add insult to injury, each district MUST celebrate Reaper Day. Attendance at the town square is mandatory, where a Capitol Person picks the tributes. Every person between the ages of 12 and 18 has to put their name in a pot. The names gets pulled out and announced. These tributes are then taken to the capital to be primped, prepped and readied to be thrown into an arena where they fight for survival against each other including the other tribute from their own district. Only the Capitol is immune from this tribute requirement.

This tribute system has been set up to remind the people that their children are the state's. Also, at various times pictures of a thirteen district, which was destroyed, are shown as reminders of what happens to districts that rebel.

Life in most districts is hard. Actual doctors and advanced medicine are only available in the Capitol. Apothecaries (primitive druggists/doctors) are few and far between in the districts. Simple amenities like electricity are strictly controlled and turned on part of each day. Weapons like bows and arrows are outlawed and the districts resemble prisons. Hardy individuals choose to knowingly break the law in order to feed their families. The local authorities look the other way because they buy the foodstuffs from the hunter/gatherers and usually are the best customers. Getting caught hunting and/or even just being outside the fence is punishable by death. Travel to other districts is forbidden upon pain of death. Similar to Russia under Soviet rule.

Technology and refinements are kept at the Capitol. They are never allowed in the districts unless it helps the Capitol. So a newer train might be used to transport the coal to the Capitol, but aren't used to travel between the districts. In comparison, the level of technology in most districts is slightly above Medieval unless you are talking about the screens which are turned on when announcements are made from the Capitol. And the concept of "Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain" is unheard of. So, coal miners can heat their home only if they have enough money to pay for the coal. The coal is the property of the Capitol.

As a reader, you experience this world from Katniss living in it. She is the heroine. Her daily life is one long adventure after another. This is what interests young boys, the adventure and excitement -- it unapologetically has blood, guts, action, and nerve. Conservatives will be interested because it shows what an unchecked State can do to its citizens. Indeed, even if you remove all science fiction elements, this book still holds up as a fictional version of THE nightmare scenario for conservatives. I mean it could really happen here in the United States.

This book also gives hope, because Katniss creates a chink in the state’s armor. How she does it. . . well you will have to read the book.

Read it and ponder.

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Book Review: Death by Liberalism

by Joel Farnham

"Death by Liberalism: The Fatal Outcome of Liberal Policies" chronicles the various unintended consequences and intended consequences of liberalism run amok. J.R Dunn has done a fine job of listing and showing most of the major problems and fatalities caused by following liberal dogma as defined by FDR's New Deal. Some of them are even listed here at Commentarama. He calls it democide. Murder by government.

Dunn covers the range of Automobile Cafe Standards to Ziedler's discovery of DDT. His insight as to the fatalities caused by the adherence to liberal policies is quite keen. He delves extensively into the background of several liberal policies which have killed people.

He definitively identifies the procedure liberals use to pull one over on the unsuspecting public. Proclaim a crisis, real or manufactured. Blow it all out of proportion. Have popular "experts" explain what is wrong with it and how it will impact the public. Liberal politicians then promise to correct the problem and come up with solutions. These solutions ALWAYS take away some freedoms. Freedom of use of a product, freedom from criminal behavior or even outright freedoms listed in the Constitution.

He starts with crime and how liberals have allowed criminals to become victims of society and how actual victims perpetuate society. Another way of putting it. It wasn't the criminal's fault. It was society's fault.

He next shows how liberals managed to ban DDT. How Roe v. Wade is used as a tool for eugenics. How the environmentalists, using the DDT template, have shoved CAFE standards, generic Asbestos removal, freon bans, and Gaia down our collective throats.

This book is very handy in explaining all this and more. I remember living through these various campaigns and not having the whole information. That is, I remember DDT being banned because it killed insects and in turn killed birds. I never knew overuse, and skewed findings were used to achieve the ban. Same with CAFE standards as well as freon. Roe v Wade was always explained to me giving a woman the right to choose.

This is a somewhat of an annoying book. Mr Dunn maintains that liberalism is an outgrowth of Classic Liberalism. This is what is annoying. In other places and times, it is shown that liberalism indeed takes its name from Classic Liberalism, but liberalism is properly an outgrowth of Marxism.

What J.R. Dunn does with this book is totally dispel the notion that maybe the liberals/socialists will change. He demonstrates without a doubt, in my mind at least, that Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, and organizations created by these people and types of people won't change. Plausible deniability is their watchword. Once Obama showed that he is a deeply committed Marxist Ideologue, his protestations, rhetoric and gestures to the contrary should be and must be ignored.

His solutions to liberalism leave something of a foul taste. He doesn't even remark about the Tea Parties. I would feel better about this book if he repudiated some of the solutions as unworthy of Americans. Overthrow to be precise.

This book is a MUST read. I cannot emphasize that enough. It will take you back into recent history. It will expose you to the hidden agenda of FUTURE liberals. Never again will you be duped by Obama and company.

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Never Enough - Americaʼs Limitless Welfare State

By Tennessee Jed

William Voegeli is a visiting scholar at the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College. His articles have appeared in, among others, The L.A. Times and National Review. In his most recent book, “Never Enough,” the author freely admits it is a different book than the one he intended to write. His original thought was to examine what the ideal welfare state might look like from the liberal point of view.

However, after close examination of liberal writings over the past 75 years since the dawn of the “New Deal,” what Voegeli discovered was that no such description exists. It reminded him of the Texas cattle baron who insisted “he never has intended to buy all the land in Texas, only that adjacent to what he already owned.”

As a result, the book becomes an examination of why liberalism, as Voegeli puts it, “lacks a limiting principle” and just what that means for the long standing 80 year dispute between conservatives and liberals over the size and nature of the American Welfare State.

Voegeli provides a wealth of data illustrating the steady growth of welfare spending, even after adjusting for inflation and population growth. He uses the governmentʼs own data by taking the Human Resources “superfunction” and making a couple of minor adjustments to arrive at an extremely close approximation of what should be defined as welfare spending. The growth is steady, slowed only during the Reagan Administration and Gingrich Congress. The size of the American Welfare state is also compared with other countries. While we see we have yet to catch up with some of our European counterparts, that gap is narrowing.

The author continues by looking at the theory underlying this apparent lack of a limiting principle. Many liberals argue that lacking such a principle is actually a virtue in that each perceived “need” is considered on a case by case basis. Voegeli skillfully shows there apparently has never been a case rejected as unecessary. As he points out, FDR promised to experiment with government programs and quickly cast them aside if they failed. History, however, clearly indicates that has not happened.

Conservatives, of course, would like nothing better than to put clear limits on the size of government, including caps on the amount of taxes and spending. Attacks usually come along three lines; libertarianism (anti-liberty is bad,) supply side economics (lower taxes increase revenue more than higher taxes,) and welfare economics (starve the beast.)

Despite slowing growth of the welfare state during Reagan and Gingrich, conservatives have failed to ever get such caps enacted. As Voegeli explains “liberal victories advance liberalism; conservative ʻvictoriesʼ merely postpone liberalism.” He spends an entire chapter detailing his thinking on why this is so. In doing so, Voegeli determines that Americans want some welfare state, but due to our unique character and experiences, we seem unwilling to accept or pay for as much as some of our European counterparts. With liberals unable to convince Americans to pay for all their wants, and conservatives unable to obtain caps, we are left with our present situation. Voegeli seems to indicate the implications of the lack of limiting principle will require a bargain. Liberals agree to caps, and conservatives admit there will be some sort of welfare state. Perhaps then, we could focus more on obtaining efficiencies in what we do spend. The author does not give us a bucket load of suggestions, although he implies means testing might make sense.

Whether or not you agree with all Voegeli says, I will go so far as to say it should be a must read for Democrats, liberals, Republicans, conservatives and independent alike. I believe he does a fantastic job of laying out the history and theory of our political differences. The charts alone are worth the price of admission. Perhaps one of our bloggers will do a follow up article to either agree or disagree.

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Book Review: The Looming Tower

Last night we had the first Commentarama Book Club. We read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, a book about the creation of Al Qaeda. You should read this book. It’s truly eye-opening.

Written by Lawrence Wright, a journalist who spent years teaching in Egypt, The Looming Tower tells the story of the birth of Al Qaeda up through the events of 9/11. To write the book, Wright conducted hundreds of interviews in the United States, Europe and throughout the Middle East. . . and it shows. The Looming Tower contains a wealth of information, much of which you have never heard before. Indeed, this is a gripping story with amazing revelations.

The book begins with the story of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian educator and the intellectual founder of what we consider militant Islam. And right out of the gate, the book smacks you with some fascinating information. Qutb, who would lay the foundations for the struggles that followed, wasn’t radical when he lived in Egypt. . . he became radical when he came to Fort Collins, Colorado to study. Much of Qutb’s motivation, by the way, appears to be a twisted response to an inability to relate to women -- a hang-up that has driven many of history’s crackpots and serial killers.

From there, the book takes you through Nasser’s rule in Egypt and how he and the Muslim Brotherhood became enemies. Interestingly, this introduces a repeating theme throughout the book as various governments try to exploit the radical fundamentalists, only to find that they ultimately lose control of these movements. Indeed, if there is one lesson to be taken from this book, it is that these radical movements would be nothing more than minor nuisances if it weren’t for regional governments trying to exploit them.

From Egypt, we move to the Afghan war. The war against the Soviets in Afghanistan became a holy war, with the faithful pouring into Afghanistan to defeat the atheist Soviets. Critically, most of these fighters came to Afghanistan because they were encouraged to go by their governments. Regional governments used the Afghan war as a way to dump their troublemakers, hoping they would all get themselves killed. But they weren’t killed, and this left an army of malcontents, with combat experience, who would soon find themselves without a home. They were a ripe for recruiting by the terrorists.

This is where we meet Osama Bin Laden. He spent several years in Afghanistan and became a hero with many followers. After the war, he returned to Saudi Arabia, where his family is quite wealthy. Interestingly, he is not. He was worth only about seven million dollars at the time and he relied on a stipend from his family to pay his bills.

When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden went to the Saudis and promised to bring his Afghan followers to the peninsula to defend the Kingdom. They turned him down and instead called the Americans. Indeed, the Saudis viewed Bin Laden as insane for thinking that 70,000 Afghan could stand up to Saddam’s million man modern Army. Bin Laden viewed this as an insult and become incensed about the presence of American troops. Soon, he and the Saudi royal family were at war. . . though the Saudis refused to put an end to him.

Bin Laden moved to Sudan, where he and Al Qaeda turned themselves into a terrorist organization. At this point, we learn some fascinating facts that you will not have heard before. Bin Laden is not a very good businessman. He goes broke. He’s a bit of a moron. His deep religious convictions simply mirror what other people have written, and he doesn’t seem to really believe them or follow them.

We also learn that many of the acts attributed to Al Qaeda weren’t really theirs. They just took credit for them. There are surprises about how small Al Qaeda is as an organization, and how ineffective. They are also not very good terrorists. In Egypt and Algeria, Bin Laden's advice for the terrorist to kill indiscriminately turns the public against them and leads to security service crack downs that all but wiped out those radical movements. One terrorist forgets his gun in the car, another falls asleep and misses the attack. Their first attempt to attack an American ship fails when they overload their boat and it sinks. And so on. Not to mention that these guys sing like songbirds when they get caught, and that’s not even counting the several who get upset at Bin Laden and head straight to American embassies to sell their knowledge.

The book also explains how Bin Laden’s people overcame the Islamic prohibition on suicide by drawing a false distinction between dying in the killing of infidels and dying in any other fashion. This leads to some very disturbing discussions of various Al Qaeda attacks. Wright is not particularly graphic, but he gives enough of a picture that you will be angered and repulsed by what these bastards have done.

The book, by the way, doesn’t sugar coat anything. Take for example, the discussion of the Taliban who murder and rape their way through the country, who sodomize little boys because there aren’t any women around, who take sledge hammers to priceless works of art, and who mutilate and torture zoo animals.

The book soon turns incredibly frustrating, as Wright discusses the American efforts to catch Bin Laden. Several times, he was offered to us, and we blew it:

• Bin Laden wore out his welcome in Sudan and the Sudanese offered him to the Americans. The Americans didn’t want him. Despite the fact that the Egyptian security services knew all about him, and the Americans had been warned about his intentions, the Americans simply saw him as a minor nuisance. So they told Sudan to throw him out of the country (the Sudanese robbed him on the way out).

• When Bin Laden got to Afghanistan, the Taliban didn’t want him. They viewed him as too much trouble. But the Taliban were being financed by the Saudis and the Pakistani security services, in the hopes of ending the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal and of offsetting Iran’s influence. The Saudis had been unwilling to eliminate him or take him back, so they told the Taliban to keep him quiet.

But when Osama didn’t stay quiet, the Saudis finally decided to rid themselves of Bin Laden, and the Taliban agreed. But then Clinton fired the cruise missiles at Bin Laden and at Sudan, despite warnings that this would only make the situation worse. The effect was (1) to blow up a harmless civilian pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, (2) to miss every single Al Qaeda leader, (3) to give Bin Laden some dud cruise missiles that he could sell to the Chinese to replenish his fortune, and (4) to make Bin Laden an Islamic hero. After that, the Taliban changed their minds and decided not to give him up. 9/11 followed.

It is also amazing how much information “the government” had, which they could not put together because the agencies wouldn’t share it. Wright makes an excellent case that the government had more than enough information to stop 9/11, but couldn’t stop infighting long enough to do it. This part alone is well worth the read.

The sections on the American government, by the way, are very consistent with my experience working for the federal government some years ago -- interagency squabbling, the right hand refusing to talk to the left hand, bureaucratic turf wars, vendettas against productive employees, bizarre rules that interfere with any sort of useful action, and general incompetence. This will be eye-opening to anyone who thinks our government consists of dedicated professionals.

You will also read about other insane decisions, like when the CIA hired a Muslim who they immediately discovered was a traitor. Despite this discovery, they brought him to the United States under CIA protection and let him join the Army. From there, and from his later job with a defense contractor, he provided secrets to Al Qaeda and he wrote the Al Qaeda manual on terrorism based on what our military taught him. He actually spent months in Afghanistan establishing terrorist training camps while he worked for our government. . . the government accepted his claim that his absences were because he was buying rugs in Pakistan.

Finally, it was interesting to read that Bin Laden’s intent with 9/11 was not just to kill civilians, but to draw the United States into a ground war in Afghanistan, the Graveyard of Empires, where they could “bleed” us. Thus, it seems that we have played right into his hands. . . as we apparently have several times.

Do I recommend The Looming Tower? Absolutely. The writing style is good. It is easy to read and it flows. The names are difficult because we’re not accustomed to them, but Wright always gives you little reminders of who these guys are which makes it easy to follow -- though a chart would have been nice. Still, the information presented is invaluable for understanding what is going on in the Middle East and for understanding the shortcomings of our government and our policies.

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Book Review: Outliers (2008)

By the Boiler Room Elves

Lately, some of the Elves have been hitting the books. We Elves like easy-to-read books filled with shocking information. Ok, really we like books with very plain covers. Hence, we're fans of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink) and we just got around to reading his latest work Outliers. We liked this a lot. Gladwell, a former writer for the Washington Post and the New Yorker, has an easy style that goes down like spiked eggnog, and the information presented in Outliers is truly eye opening.

Outliers is about the secret of high level success. As Americans we’re usually told that "if you're willing to work hard, you can achieve anything and have all the success you want." Gladwell says that’s not true, and he points out repeatedly just how much success depends on luck or environment or culture.

*** SPOILERS ****

According to Gladwell, success results from a combination of luck and what he calls the “10,000 hour rule.” Gladwell claims that it takes the right environment to nurture a talent and that, even in the right environment, it then takes about 10,000 hours of practice in a particular endeavor before a person can truly shape their talent. To support this, he points out how Bill Gates spent 10,000 hours programming before he achieved his success. He finds that the Beatles spent 10,000 hours playing live in Hamburg before returning to England to strike it big. And so on.

He also discusses the influence of luck on success. For that, he first tackles sports. Everyone knows what it takes to become a world class athlete, no? Natural talent! Actually, no! Gladwell took a look at the world of professional hockey in Canada (the best of the best of the best, SIR!) and he discovered something interesting. He found that the vast majority of Canada’s best professional hockey players had birthdays in the first few months of the year. Why would this matter?

In Canada, youth hockey leagues cut off eligibility based on age on December 31st. Thus, if you are born on January 1, you will be lumped into a league with kids who can be as much as 364 days younger than you. When it comes times to determine which players should be placed on the “elite” teams, this age difference gives the older children a tremendous advantage, seeing as how the difference of nearly one year can be very dramatic at that age. A year of growth can really matter at age 8 or 9.

Once these bigger kids are selected for the elite teams, they get more ice time, better coaching, and are simply pushed harder. Over time, this builds up a greater and greater advantage for these kids over the children born later in the year. Eventually, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as these children go on to become the cream of the crop. Thus, it wasn’t talent that got them to where they ended up, it was the luck of the draw -- they were born at the right time to get all of the advantages the system gives. The kids born later in the year were not necessarily less talented, they were just born at the wrong time. Tough luck.

Gladwell next compares IQ to success. Unlike hockey, which is ultimately a team sport, IQ and what you do with it is a game for one -- it’s up to you to make the world your puffy, curly slipper. So is success the result of intellectual talent or something else? According to Gladwell, it’s about environment.

In the 1920's, researchers tested schoolchildren all over the country until they found almost 1,500 kids who qualified as "genius" on the IQ scale. The researchers intended to track them through their lives, convinced that they would become the doctors, philosophers, elves, and leaders of their generation. Not so much. Turns out, as adults they fell roughly into three groups: 20% were "successful"; 60% were average; and 20% were, well, not exactly what the researcher had hoped for (let's just say that Boiler Room Elves they were not.) Yet, they all had the same innate talent. So what gives? What made the difference? Environment.

The top group tended to have parents who graduated from college; the bottom group tended to have parents who dropped out of high school. The top group came from communities that challenged them and put their IQ to use, the bottom group didn’t. That was the real dividing line. It wasn’t pure talent that was the deciding factor for success, it was being lucky enough to be born into a family and community that made you use it.

This leads to an interesting discussion at the end of the book about the American school system. Why do children from other cultures consistently outscore American kids on all sorts of tests, particularly math. (Square root of a candy cane? Anyone? Anyone?) One potential culprit is our lengthy summer vacation, practiced basically nowhere else in the world. Gladwell discusses the findings of a researcher who examined test scores of schoolchildren in Baltimore, where they test at the beginning and end of the school year.

These kids were grouped into three socioeconomic groups: poor, middle class, and rich. Guess what he found? All the kids across all social classes learned roughly the same amount over the school year. In other words, their test scores went up by the same amount during the year. In fact, the poor group often learned more over the year than the wealthy group.

But something changed over the summer. The kids from wealthier families continued to improve over each summer, gaining anywhere from 10 to 15 points as a group during each of the years tracked. But poor kids lost ground almost every summer. Over 5 years, that meant that the upper class group got 50+ points better than the poor kids just because of what they did over the summers. Thus, Gladwell concludes that school isn’t failing our kids, summer vacation is.

What could account for this difference? Gladwell points out that wealthier families are more likely to send their kids to camp, to keep their kids reading, and to force them to be engaged and thinking. The poor families in which the kids might be on their own all day while their parents work don't have the same stimulus to nudge them along. But even the kids who did the best on the tests fell behind compared to the kids from other countries who did not get these long vacations. So how do we improve education? You drop the summer vacations and keep kids working. But good luck getting Americans to agree to giving up summer vacations - it's just not in our culture.

The book is an easy and interesting read. Gladwell uses many more examples that we haven’t touched upon. The Elves have enjoyed it very much and have been passing it around the Boiler Room. If you want to have your eyes opened to a different take on what it takes to be successful, pull on your stripy PJ's and give him a read.

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Book Review: Grand Old Party - A History of the Republicans

by Pittsburgh Enigma

Author: Lewis L. Gould
Genre: Political History

Grand Old Party provides a history of the Republican Party, from its origin in 1854 to the present day and the first election of George W. Bush. While the book focuses primarily on presidential elections, it also covers congressional and state Republicans who had an important influence on the party at the given time. An analysis of the changing philosphy of the party through its history is also presented. The book is organized around major eras in American History, including the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Teddy Roosevelt years, the Wilson Years, Roosevelt and the New Deal, the Cold War, Nixon and Watergate, Reagan, and the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994. All of this makes for not only a good political history but a good American history as well.

While Grand Old Party is for the most part easy to read, it is long--about 500 densely written pages (not including the "notes" section) -- so one should keep that in mind before starting. There are also political and party terms that are often assumed to be already known to the reader. For example, the author jumps right in talking about the process of delegates balloting for a presidential candidate without first explaining how that process works.

The coverage of presidential elections includes not only the candidates and who they run against, but what the make-up of the country's population was at the time and how critical it was in building coalitions that enabled certain candidates to win. For example, in the Civil War era the Republicans largely held the North while Democrats held the South. Trends in party politics would almost turn this fact upside down in later years. In reading about the presidential elections early in the party, one can compare those events to modern events and draw some interesting conclusions.

For one thing, partisanship was rampant. The conventional wisdom seems to be that presidential politics was never so "ugly and divisive" as it is today, but in fact it frequently was. In the election of 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican) won an electoral victory over Samuel J. Tilden (Democrat), but Tilden led in the popular vote. Sound familiar? Another example of conventional wisdom is that a Republican candidate who is "too conservative" (as opposed to being more centrist) can't win elections, and then Barry Goldwater is presented as the example. But when we read about Barry Goldwater's candidacy, we discover that he didn't lose because he was too conservative but because he was just a really bad candidate himself and ran a bad campaign. Sound like someone who just lost an election in 2008?

The analysis of the evolution of the Republican Party's philosophy is interesting, because it shows just how different the party is today compared to what it stood for in 1854. What started as a party that promoted national power to end slavery and preserve the Union (and to consequently limit the rights of the states) is now a party that stands for a less powerful federal government and a strong support of states' rights. A party that was once isolationist is now the party that is known for its stand on strong national security. A party that supported protectionism and tariffs on foreign goods for much of its early history is now the party of free trade.

It is worth noting that a certain amount of bias can be detected in the book. The author states from the outset that he is a Democrat. This comes as no surprise when one discovers that the author has written not one but two books on Ladybird Johnson. But that aside, the author insists that he attempts to present the material in an unbiased way, and this is for the most part true. The bias tends to creep through on the more modern history of the party. For example, the author can't help pointing out that certain prominent Republicans such as Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and Phil Gramm avoided entering the military during the Vietnam War even though they encouraged military intervention (e.g. the Gulf War) later in their careers. The criticism seems to come out of nowhere. But when the subject of Senator Ted Kennedy comes up, there is only a passing reference to a drowning woman who just happened to be a passenger in his car.

Despite the occasional bias, I think this book is an excellent read for anyone who wants to better understand how the Republican Party got its start and how it has evolved over the last 154 years into a major component of the two-party system in American politics.

(Editor’s Note: Commentarama has its own article on the history of the Republican Party. Check it out if you get the chance, you might be surprised.)

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