krebscycle

I was going to go over some of the distorted lefty narrative in Michael Hudson’s interview about his new book, but I had a hard time getting past this:

[Herman Kahn] was basically a military theorist who wrote a very good book on atomic warfare, saying that some people would survive. He was the model for “Dr. Strangelove”.

Herman Freakin Kahn – and a very good book on atomic warfare! Some differ. For example Noam Chomsky wrote:

At times this pseudo-scientific posing reaches levels that are almost pathological. Consider the phenomenon of Herman Kahn, for example. Kahn has been both denounced as immoral and lauded for his courage. By people who should know better, his On Thermonuclear War has been described “without qualification…[as]…one of the great works of our time” (Stuart Hughes). The fact of the matter is that this is surely one of the emptiest works of our time, as can be seen by applying to it the intellectual standards of any existing discipline, by tracing some of its “well-documented conclusions” to the “objective studies” from which they derive, and by following the line of argument, where detectable. Kahn proposes no theories, no explanations, no factual assumptions that can be tested against their consequences, as do the sciences he is attempting to mimic. He simply suggests a terminology and provides a facade of rationality. When particular policy conclusions are drawn, they are supported only by ex cathedra remarks for which no support is even suggested (e.g., “The civil defense line probably should be drawn somewhere below $5 billion annually” to keep from provoking the Russians—why not $50 billion, or $5.00?). What is more, Kahn is quite aware of this vacuity; in his more judicious moments he claims only that “there is no reason to believe that relatively sophisticated models are more likely to be misleading than the simpler models and analogies frequently used as an aid to judgment.”

Anyways, it’s a continuing revelation to see the world view of modern left wing scholars.  Herman Kahn was a maniac and his book was the definition of the normalization of insanity and crime that the Rand Foundation specialized in at the time when “scholars” would write down differential equations of death rates during world ending nuclear exchanges.