Years of Poems and Spirits

Read Jeffrey Goldberg’s profile on Brent Scowcroft.

Some quotes:
Scowcroft is a protégé of Henry Kissinger.

Like Kissinger, he is a purveyor of a “realist” approach to foreign policy: the idea that America should be guided by strategic self-interest, and that moral considerations are secondary at best.

Scowcroft said, he would not let his feelings about good and evil dictate the advice he gave the President.

Lewis, Scowcroft said, fed a feeling in the White House that the United States must assert itself. “It’s that idea that we’ve got to hit somebody hard,” Scowcroft said. “And Bernard Lewis says, ‘I believe that one of the things you’ve got to do to Arabs is hit them between the eyes with a big stick. They respect power.’ ”

“The real anomaly in the Administration is Cheney,” Scowcroft said. “I consider Cheney a good friend—I’ve known him for thirty years. But Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.”

According to friends of the elder Bush, the estrangement of his son and his best friend has been an abiding source of unhappiness, not only for Bush but for Barbara Bush as well. George Bush, the forty-first President, has tried several times to arrange meetings between his son. (One example of politics, personal connections and family gang interact)

When Scowcroft published his Wall Street Journal article, Rice telephoned him, according to several people with knowledge of the call. “She said, ‘How could you do this to us?’ ” a Scowcroft friend recalled. (Condi Rice is the Jose Padilla of the neo-cons: a mutated niche player parlayed into a large significance)

“I’m a realist in the sense that I’m a cynic about human nature.” (Recall the offensive realism by John J. Mearsheimer)

Scowcroft said he was influenced first and foremost by Hans Morgenthau, who witnessed his gentile neigbhors voting Hilter into power.

I have heard the saying that stock picking is as good as flipping coins. Now a book, reviewed in the New Yorker, is saying “Expert Political Judgment” is just as scientific as stock picking.

Book reviewed, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It?”. The article is by Louis Menad, Dec. 5, 2005 issue.

Book review on the New Yorker. Book name: “The Man Who Knew Too Much”

Turing had a lot in common with Maynard Keynes: gay, went to Cambridge, elected Fellows of King’s College, spectacularly brilliant in their own fields.

Turing died after being disclosed as and subsequently punished for being gay. He actually revealed the secret himself after being con-ed by a stud he picked up from the street. Suicide linked to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

He created the first chess game program. But that was before the invention of computer, operating system, compiler and programming language.

Talking about raw brain power.