Any Given Doomsday

There's no scientific risk analysis going on here.

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Jonah’s eggheadery reaches a new extreme on today’s rambly Ruminant, which may leave you dreaming of the end times. After beginning with some brief thoughts on Biden’s document escapade and when it’s appropriate for the government to declassify information, he turns to a melange of nerdishly complicated questions. Is it the end of the world as we know it? How did the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists blind us with science? Do Irving Kristol’s objections to capitalism have merit? And are Cheez-Its the ultimate snack food?

Show Notes:

– Jonah “moderates” the Dispatch Podcast

– The Economist’s The Intelligence podcast

– Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Secrecy

– The Remnant with Bruce Caldwell

– Irving Kristol: “When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness”

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Comments (35)
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  1. April

    Terrific, interesting podcast! Well done Jonah.

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  2. Aaron H Frank

    The people who really know how close we are to atomic doom are chemists not physicists and definitely not theoretical physicists.

    The person who figured out Iran was amassing enriched uranium for bombs and not less enriched uranium for civilian use was a Dept. of Energy chemist. They're the ones who know how to use the equipment that can analyze soil samples.

    It was also DOE chemists who analyzed the nuclear material after the end of the cold war and the Soviet Union.

    And those folks are suspiciously absent for the Union of Concerned Scientist.

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  3. Randall Briggs

    Jonah: The Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30-Years War. The 100-Years War was over control of English-held lands in France.

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    The Bell Tower

    The entire appeal of The Remnant is the absence of formality. The honesty and scattered nuggets of wisdom cast off from (forgive me, I know you loathe the compliments) a brilliant mind are the point. The solo Remnants are the best Remnants because they are uniquely absent of any formality or polish, like almost every other podcast. I vote no belts.

    I can’t think of anything precisely like the Doomsday Clock (it requires capital letters!) that achieved similar success but the shift from Global Warming to Climate Change is a good example of re-branding the same message under a different headline for the purpose of renewing hysteria.

    The opposite of climate change is climate stasis and such a thing is scientifically impossible. What the progressive left means by fighting climate change is to fight man’s impact on the climate at all, which is equally absurd and the same message that was once wrapped up in Peak Oil or Overpopulation. There are some sincere scientists behind all this who are merely noting the potential dangers of mass fossil fuel consumption and suggesting we look to diversify our energy footprint but those reasonable positions are crowded out by the usual suspects with the same old objectives: hostility to American consumption.

    This is one of the things Irving Kristol was referring to in that excellent essay. The point of contention I have is with the the third “promise” of capitalism:

    “…and that the free exercise of such individual virtue would aggregate into a just society.”

    Whether or not that is an actual promise, it is an unsustainable one. The character of capitalism, like the character of democracy, is entirely dependent upon the character of the people who make up the community who comprise it. I would imagine that the apocryphal pirate island of Libertatia did not have the same Protestant virtues of late 1700’s New England, for example.

    The founders well understood this and often repeated how the character of a republic was dependent upon the virtue of the people, whatever the noble sentiments of its government. Hamilton, for example, arguing against a Bill of Rights said:

    “What is the liberty of the press? Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable and from this I infer that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government. And here, after all, as is intimated upon another occasion, must we seek for the only solid basis of our rights.”

    Freedom without virtue is just corruption but there is no form of government ever devised that can force virtue upon the masses. They may be forced to abide certain virtues but they can never be forced to adopt them.

    I sometimes believe that Sulla, Caesar himself and Octavian believed they were trying to put the republican virtues back in the Roman bottle but once those virtues dissipated in a cloud of licentious wealth and idle foolishness, it was an impossible task.

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    1. Aaron H Frank

      Climate change in one form or another has been going on at least since the 70s so not quite so long as the Doomsday Clock. Back then it was another ice age.

      Paul Ehrlich has been making his predictions since the 50s so he is very close.

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  5. TallCon

    Are we ever going to get a Drive Time Remnant again?

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    Ryan McKenzie

    It’s weird, but my favorite Remnant shows tend to be Jonah on his solo days. I love to follow his stream of consciousness for an hour.

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      The Bell Tower

      Exactly.

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    Ben Connelly

    Also, just wanted to say that all of the parts where you kept saying to people to feel free to skip were the parts I was listening really intently! I definitely don’t want to skip that stuff! Maybe if I’d read Hayek and Kristol too many times already I would, but is that even possible?

    Heck, I’ve heard you tell the story about the Who maybe five times now and it gets me every time.

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    Terry Sweany

    This is a great episode with Jonah at the height of his powers. He continues to produce quality and weighty downloadable content, easily distinguishable from the typical banal punditry which saturates the genre. The marvelous Mr. Goldberg, here again, ventilates the ideas of conservatism - or to use the correct term classical liberalism - and highlights the great titans who helped shape the contours of this enduring ideology. I still find it amusing hearing him punctuate the show with self-conscious observations about the podcasts’s production, or to catch the latest in an ongoing taxonomy of physical exhaustions encountered just before recording. I can only hope he is able to appreciate how much he is appreciated, even if we are just a remnant.

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  9. Dave in Tenn

    Groundhog Day is definitely in the running as a successful PR gimmick, although it probably hasn't stopped anyone from having kids.

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    Ben Connelly

    I’m not sure an opening table of contents (so to speak) is a good fit for the Ruminant. It would detract from the “never underestimate the element of surprise” quality of this discursive ramble. The solo Remnant is my favorite podcast all week. I look forward to it. Nothing is more relaxing than listening to a half-rant, half-meander on Hayek and Dewey and nationalism and Mussolini and Trump and Biden on a Sunday afternoon. Listening to Advisory Opinions is work! Sometimes EconTalk is hard work! But the Remnant is fun!

    The image I have in my head, Jonah, of you sitting in a dark room early in the morning, distracted by dogs, undercaffeinated and overtired, suddenly thinking of something (“oh! I almost forgot to mention…”) fit with the “voice of one crying out in the wilderness” vibe that I think you’re going for.

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