Miscellany

The semester's just about over; I've got two stacks of finals to grade, and the take-home finals in my other course are due tomorrow. In theory, that gives me almost a month of free time - my summer course doesn't begin until week three of summer semester - but the next two weeks are sprinkled with committee meetings, SP presentations, etc.

In the last week or so I've gotten a number of interesting books in the mail. (At the moment, I've received more books this year than I've read, so I'm not going to order anything more for a while.) Among the prizes are Theodore Sturgeon's The Ultimate Egoist, volume one (out of ten!) of his collected stories, and the sixtieth-year reissue of von Neumann and Morgenstern's Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. The Sturgeon looks pretty good, although there's only one title - "Helix the Cat" - that I recognize. (I was hoping for "Microcosmic God" or "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff", but they'll be in later volumes, which I will be buying.) Von Neumann is my pick for greatest mathematician of the twentieth century. (I'm a little hesitant there, since I'm not very familiar with the history of analysis in that century, but I don't see anyone else with such broad contributions to the field - functional analysis, mathematical logic, and quantum theory, to name three - not to mention being among the founders of computer science and game theory.) I'm looking forward to reading both books.

I just finished reading Mad, Bad and Dangerous, by Christopher Frayling, a history of the depiction of scientists in the movies. It was pretty interesting, and I'll be reviewing it soon.

Betrayal

Thomas Sowell has been recommended to me, on occasion, as a clear and thoughtful spokesman for modern conservatism. I have one of his books in my library, though I have done no more than glance at it.

In a recent opinion column, Thomas Sowell wrote the following:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Words fail me. I mean that literally. I have been struggling to come up with something witty, something incisive, something coherent to express the fury with which that comment fills me. I have contemplated the satiric, the grave, even the obscene; nothing suitable has come to me.

I say this: that which could be "saved" of this country by a military coup... would not be this country. It would be a shambling hulk, an Alzheimer's nation; it would not be the United States in anything but name.