I had a chance since my previous post about Steven Johnson to check his books out.  I need to read them — they look phenomenal.

And I also had the misfortune of reading another pantload from that braying ninny Thomas Friedman.  You know, I kind of liked The World is Flat, though I pointed out to anyone who would listen at the time I read it that his man-love for China was based on seeing what the Chi-Com tyrants wanted him to see and nothing else.

Well, he hasn’t changed in that regard, and he’s gotten positively bile-raising in his endless glowing tributes to the Chinese.  Not the Chinese people, mind you — the Chinese government, and their enlightenment in spending the money they rob from their mostly grindingly poor populace to fund things like Olympic Games and empty cities and space missions and trains nobody uses.

His article today bloviated on and on about how the Chinese communists are so wise to be spending on electric cars, and how we’ve lost our way because we created the original auto industry and oil industry and we’re not creating the electric car industry.  But he’s missing a couple awfully important points.  First, does he remember the ’80s, when people like him were wetting their pants about the Japanese government picking the big winners?  Or the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, when it was the Soviets?  And second, he does realize that the government didn’t create the auto or oil industries in the US, right?  Well, clearly not.

See, to Tom Friedman, who believes you’re an idiot who needs incredibly smart and important people like him to lead you to wisdom, the intellectual elite must always pick the winners.  Never mind that they’ve failed colossally every time they’ve tried.  His latest obsession about electric cars is because he’s a green zealot, not because he has any evidence that they’ll be a marketplace winner.

Meanwhile, Steven Johnson wants us to watch more TV and play more video games.  Oh, and for the nitwits running our not quite communist government to get out of the way so we can tinker and innovate super-successfully, the way we have here in the US for hundreds of years.

I pray for Steven Johnson to eclipse Tom Friedman in earnings.  Probably won’t happen, though, because Friedman sings the tune so many rich people want to hear:  that they’re geniuses who should control mankind.