This is by H.W. Brands via LRC:

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion," Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, "but not to his own facts." Samuel Butler, the nineteenth-century English author, wrote that "though God cannot alter the past, historians can."

Whether modifying facts or opinions, historians have been fiddling with history since Herodotus proclaimed his goal of "preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory." Herodotus divorced history from Homeric myth; he consulted written sources, traveled and conducted interviews, and explained to readers what he knew and what he only inferred. But he rarely let informational accuracy get in the way of a good story, and he had a purpose beyond glorifying the past—namely demonstrating the superiority of Greek self-government to Persian despotism.

Subsequent historians followed his lead. Thucydides strove for balance in his treatment of the Peloponnesian War, or said he did; but he admitted to having made up speeches of his heroes based on "what, in my opinion, was called for by each situation." Plutarch was unabashedly moralistic, drawing lessons from the lives of the Greeks and Romans he portrayed in parallel. Julius Caesar justified his conquest of Gaul as a way of legitimating his conquest of the Roman state. The Venerable Bede infused his history of the English church with miracle stories that revealed the hand of God behind the whole development. Edward Gibbon, by contrast, blamed Christianity for undermining the Roman Empire; he concluded his magnum opus acidly: "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion." Karl Marx generalized generously in declaring that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

Even when they aren't motivated by politics or ideology, historians muddle what really happened. They have to: reality is too unruly to fit between the covers of one (or several) volumes. The historian picks facts the way a mountaineer finds a route across a boulder field: one fact leads to another and then another and yet another, allowing the historian to cross the ground in reasonable time. Important boulders are inevitably bypassed; rocks of lesser significance are included on the route for what they lie between.

Histories, moreover, require plots—the networks of causality that distinguish histories from mere chronicles. But causality, beyond the most trivial kind, is nearly impossible to prove. Most of us like to think we are rational, at least some of the time, and perhaps we are. But often rationality is a polite name for rationalization, and the stories we tell ourselves about our motives are simply that: stories. "So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature," Benjamin Franklin observed, "since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do." A. J. P. Taylor put the same point differently. "History is not another name for the past, as many people imply," the British historian explained. "It is the name for stories about the past."

I'm enjoying my wife's current project editing Turgot.

Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–1781)

Here's the latest, cross-posted to blog.Mises.org:

It is this advance and this continual return of capitals which constitute what one must call the circulation of money — that useful and fruitful circulation which gives life to all the labors of society, which maintains movement and life in the body politic, and which is with great reason compared to the circulation of blood in the animal body. For if, by any disorder whatsoever in the sequence of expenditures on the part of the different classes of society, the undertakers [entrepreneurs] cease to get back their advances with the profit they have a right to expect from them, it is evident that they will be obliged to reduce their undertakings; that the amount of labor, the amount of consumption of the fruits of the earth, the amount of production, and the amount of revenue will be reduced in like measure; that poverty will take the place of wealth; and that the common workmen, ceasing to find employment, will fall into the extremest destitution. (Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth)

(See also "Economics in 2 Paragraphs.")

Last Monday evening, Lew Rockwell, from a tip by someone named "Travis," posted this damning quote of Paul Krugman's from a 2002 New York Times editorial:

To fight this recession the Fed needs … soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Krugman. 2002. Calling for a housing bubble. FULL ARTICLE

A nice note/blog post from the author:

My piece Krugman's Intellectual Waterloo has been made today's Daily Article on Mises.org. Check out the hilarious "Krugman-as-Napoleon" image they put together. My thanks to Jeffrey Tucker for selecting it, as well as to nirgrahamUK on the Mises boards and anyone else who passed it on to others.

I consider the Mises Institute web site to be the greatest source for truth and wisdom on the web. So it's an honor to have something I wrote featured on its main page, and it's a kick to see my name in the list of Mises Daily Authors, along with the names of a great many of heroes.

I hope my characterization of Krugman's twisting in the wind will be convincing to people and that this piece will help spread the word regarding the damning quotes that Lew Rockwell and Mark Thornton have discovered. If I could help soften the ground under Krugman's pedestal and cause it to sink just one inch, I would feel I have truly done good in the world.

Please join the assault on neo-Keyneseanism by contributing a comment to the article's entry on the Mises Blog.

"Hannah gave birth to a son whom she named Samuel, saying,
'Because I asked Yahweh for him.'"

The canceled TV show Kings (which I discovered this week on Hulu.com) has me revisiting the books of Samuel, especially because, while most names map directly (e.g., the shepherd David to David Shepherd, Jonathan of the tribe of Benjamin to Jack Benjamin, Michal to Michelle, the prophet Samuel to Reverend Samuels), King Saul's TV equivalent is named Silas.

Well, apparently Silas is a Greek form of Saul by way of Aramaic. Clever TV writers.

But Hannah's explanation of the name Samuel — "Because I asked Yahweh for him" — confused me. So here's the fascinating tidbit I learn from Wikipedia:

According to 1 Samuel 1:20, Hannah was the mother of Samuel and named him in memory of her requesting a child from God and God listening. Samuel is translated as Heard of God or possibly as a sentence "God has heard" (from 'Shama', heard and 'El', God — with "Shama" as the verb and "El" as the subject).

However, some textual scholars think that the passage originally referred to King Saul, whose name means "asked" and was later changed by an anti-monarchial editor, so that Saul would no longer appear to have a divinely appointed birth.

(via blog.Mises.org)

Here's an update to my previous post on the denotation and connotation of the word

I had read this passage of Mises before (from Human Action, chapter 15: "The Market"), but had somehow failed to notice the irony of an Austrian Jew using this particular term in this particular way:

It is quite common nowadays to deprecate the capitalists and entrepreneurs. A man is prone to sneer at those who are more prosperous than himself. These people, he contends, are richer only because they are less scrupulous than he. If he were not restrained by due consideration for the laws of morality and decency, he would be no less successful than they are. Thus men glory in the aureole of self-complacency and Pharisaic self-righteousness.

Two weeks ago, I "tweeted" the following:

Was Jesus a hologram? Or was he a human possessed by a noncorporeal extraterrestrial called Christ? This was the division within Docetism.

I have to say, studying the ancient heresies is the perfect geek hobby. Better than Star Trek. Similar, in some ways, as my Docetism tweet should illustrate. (By the way, the two varieties of Docetism are called phantasmal and separationist respectively.)

And as with any new obsession, once you start to learn the ins and outs, you start seeing it everywhere. Recently, I've been seeing signs of the heresies in Doonesbury:

(click to enlarge)

This distinction between God and His son smacks of Arianism. I suspect a lot of present-day Christians are Arian heretics without realizing it.

There's also this past Sunday's strip:

(excerpt from this full strip )

All my life, I've heard this observed distinction between the Old Testament God of wrath and the New Testament God of love. Without building an explicit theology from it, many modern Christians — especially religious liberals, I suspect — see the old Jewish God and the new Christian God as different gods. This isn't a new phenomenon. In the 2nd century, Marcion of Sinope, led a very large and influential rival movement to proto-orthodox Christianity. Marcion

argued for the existence of two Gods: Yahweh, who created the material universe, and the Heavenly Father of the New Testament, of which Jesus Christ was the living incarnation. Yahweh was viewed as a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, and whose law, the Mosaic covenant, represented bare natural justice: i.e., an eye for an eye. Jesus was the living incarnation of a different God, a new God of compassion and love, sometimes called the Heavenly Father. The two Gods were thought of as having distinct personalities: Yahweh is petty, cruel and jealous, a tribal God who is only interested in the welfare of the Jews, while the Heavenly Father is a universal God who loves all of humanity, and looks upon His children with mercy and benevolence. This dual-God notion allowed Marcion to reconcile the apparent contradictions between the Old Testament and the tales of Jesus' life and ministry. [Wikipedia]

I mention this "lesser demiurge" of the Marcionites in this earlier blog post of Calvin & Hobbes:

When I was kid in an Episcopal choir school, attending services 2 or 3 times a week, I think I was guilty of both Arianism and Marcionite dualism. I was also guilty of the heresy of Patripassionism, the belief that God the Father was incarnate and suffered on the cross. I guess I've never grokked the Trinity.

I've been looking for PDF scans of old children's picture books. I found a great collection at the Library of Congress. It's not hard to tell why some of these fell out of circulation, like this page from Denslow's Mother Goose: