THE INACCURACY IS THE POINT OF THE MATTER:

For today, I'm thinking about how the right to same-sex marriage might emerge from a Constitution understood in a consistently Lockean/Cartesian way.  I'm not taking a stand on any issue for today. 

And I'm not saying that this understanding of our Constitution is complete or accurate.  I am saying that there's a certain individualistic or personal logic that can explain recent Court decisions. 

Alexis de Tocqueville, in the best book on America and the best book on modern liberal (or individualistic, Lockean/Cartesian) democracy, observes that the Americans are Cartesians who've never read a word of Descartes.  The Cartesian method--the radical doubt that produces the conclusion that the only certainty is the self-conscious "I"--is also the democratic method.  The democrats achieves intellectual liberty by methodically or habitually doubting the word--the authority--of other persons.  If I trust what you say, then I'm ruled by you, and I surrender my self-sovereignty. 

 Democratic Cartesianism is full of words like "deconstruct" (good) and "privilege" (bad).  The democratic theorist deconstructs any theory that privileges one person's word over another. So the democratic theorist--say, Whitman or Emerson--preaches nonconformity, or personal resistance to being absorbed into a personal whole greater than oneself.  So to be a democratic "I" is to be liberated from the authority of priests, poets, philosophers, preachers, politicians, (theoretical) physicists, parents, and the personal, judgmental God.  It's also to be liberate from personal claims about what is according to nature. As, say, Whitman explained, American personal freedom is the unlimited, indefinite movement away from nature.

This Cartesianism, for some Americans, is clearest in the Constitution.  Our Constitution treats human as free or wholly detached or self-sufficient persons.  The "I" is not subsumed into some class or category--as a part of religion or race or class or even gender or even country.  The Constitution, of course, can't help but recognize the distinction between citizen and non-citizen, but even that distinction is treated as artificially constructed or not some deep statement about who anyone is.

The Constitution of 1787 is maybe most striking in its silence on God, in its decision not to employ theology politically.  But not only are persons freed from "civil theology"--from the degrading and destructively seductive illusion of being part of a political whole, they are in a way free from biological nature. The Constitution does not recognize the natural division of members of our species into men and women. Americans are understood to be free to consent to be governed by God and even nature, and the idea of consent, of course, dissolves the authority claimed on behalf of God and nature by the word of the philosophers and theologians of the past.

The founding American limit to this democratic Cartesianism or Lockean individualism was federalism.  

POCKETBOOK VS. PURITY:

The state Senate faced strong opposition to its anti-illegal-immigrant bill from the state chamber of commerce, the farm lobby, and local governments.

Their reasons were all different and not very appealing. Clearly, cheap labor with no regulation animated some of the farm and business groups. Farmers couldn't ignore accounts coming out of Georgia and Alabama of crops rotting in the fields. Cities and towns didn't want the extra work hunting down undocumented workers. The chamber feared the state would suffer boycotts and a hurt reputation.

These groups changed the way immigration is discussed in a state that's about as conservative as can be. Rhetoric about civil rights or racial profiling only goes so far here. Concerns about the business climate, agricultural interests, and government mandates gained traction. With all these "white" interests aligned to defeat the bill, even the most conservative politicians took note.

In Mississippi, the lieutenant governor gets to pick the heads of state Senate committees. Conservative Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves appointed a Democrat, Bob Armory, head of the Judiciary Committee and then sent the bill there. Armory never put it up for a vote. In defending the move that killed the bill, Reeves' spokeswoman said the concerns "expressed by the Mississippi Economic Council, Farm Bureau, the Mississippi Poultry Association, and local cities, counties, police chiefs, and sheriffs" weighed heavily.

Missing from that list is anything related to immigrants or their rights. The opposition spoke the language that would win in a conservative state. The victory may be discomforting, but it is a victory nonetheless.

SAITH THE WELLSPRING:

A stone's throw away from the White House, former President George W. Bush said today the world is in an "extraordinary" time for freedom and that the changes of the Arab Spring should be embraced despite the uncertain future that comes with them.

Bush said those who say the dangers of democratic change are too great and that America should be in favor of stability over change are unrealistic.

"In the long run, this foreign-policy approach is not realistic," Bush argued, "It is not realistic to presume that so-called stability enhances our national security. Nor is it within the power of America to indefinitely preserve the old order, which is inherently unstable."

Bush advocated a clear stand. "American's message should ring clear and strong," Bush said. "We stand for freedom -- and for the institutions and habit that make freedom work for everyone."

THERE IS NO SYRIA:

Sherkoh Abbas, a veteran Syrian Kurdish dissident, called on Israel this week to support the break-up of Syria into a series of federal structures based on the country's various ethnicities. [...]

Syrian Kurdish, Druse, Alawite and Sunni Arab federal areas, he suggested, would have no interest in aligning with Iran.

LET'S HOPE THIS STORY ENDS WELL:

Ashima had just begun a two-week climbing expedition this spring at Hueco Tanks, a state park that is a mecca for bouldering enthusiasts, 860 acres of rock masses surrounded by endless desert and sky 30 miles northeast of El Paso.

Three days after she arrived, she stunned the bouldering world by climbing Crown of Aragorn, an exceedingly difficult route that requires climbers to contort their bodies and hang practically upside down by their fingers as they navigate a rock that juts out from the ground at a 45-degree angle.

On the scale of V0 to V16 that governs bouldering, Crown of Aragorn is a V13, a level that only a few female climbers had reached.

None were 10 years old, as she was.

Ashima, a petite girl with pale skin, a toothy smile and a thick fringe of bangs cut in a perfect line across her forehead, is not only the best climber her age in the United States, or maybe anywhere, but her accomplishments have already placed her among the elite in the sport.

In 2008, when she was only 7, she began sending problems -- bouldering lingo for ascending routes -- that some adult climbers could not handle.

On a trip to Hueco in 2010, she climbed a V10 called Power of Silence. The next year, she ascended a V11/12 called Chablanke.

At the American Bouldering Series Youth National Championship in Colorado Springs in March, she easily came in first place, all 4 feet 5 inches and 63 pounds of her.

Before finishing fifth grade, Ashima, who recently turned 11, is redefining what physical tools are required to be an elite climber and showing how a child can hold her own against professional climbers who are adults.

This summer, she will accompany a group of American climbers for an expedition in South Africa, where she will be the only child climber in the bunch.

"She's this adorable little girl who climbs hard and cries when she doesn't send," said Andrew Tower, the editor in chief of Urban Climber magazine. "Her climbing I.Q. is so high, you show her how to do something and she soaks it up really quickly. She understands innately how to move."

It did not take a pro to see that there was something unusual going on at the time Ashima started climbing in 2007, when she was 6.

Her parents, Tsuya and Hisatoshi Shiraishi, had immigrated from Japan in 1978 and settled in a loft in Chelsea. When Ashima, their only child, was 2, they began taking her to Central Park in search of amusement.

One afternoon when Ashima was in kindergarten, they wandered over to Rat Rock, a boulder 15 feet high and 40 feet wide at the south end of the park that is a favorite spot for amateur climbers.

Ashima joined the other climbers and began to scurry up the rock without help, so focused on her climbing that she begged to stay at Rat Rock through the dinner hour. Finally, when it became so dark that Ashima could not see the rock anymore, they went home.

The Shiraishis were mystified. "We didn't even know that climbing was a sport," her father, Hisatoshi Shiraishi, said later.

But he knew that his little girl was good.

NOW WE KNOW WHO YOU CAN CALL A PSYCHOPATH:

WHICH IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND YOUR OWN ANALOGY:

Some claim that Israel today is a Middle Eastern power that threatens its neighbors, and that conservative immigrants and extremists have pushed Israel rightward. Most damaging, they contend, are Israel's policies toward the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, toward the peace process and the Palestinians, and toward the construction of settlements.

Israel may seem like Goliath vis-à-vis the Palestinians, but in a regional context it is David. 

STITCHES:

You can't witness thousands of rabid Kid Rock fans rewarding the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony with a roaring standing ovation and breaking into chants of "DSO! DSO!" without recognizing elitist stereotypes about classical music being put out to pasture. [...]

I had long admired Kid Rock's dedication to Detroit and knew that his decision to donate his services to raise money for the DSO was not out of character. But not being familiar with his collective oeuvre, I had thought of him as little more than a musical cartoon.

I came away from Saturday's concert impressed not only with his off-the-chart energy and showmanship but also his professionalism, the sing-song tunefulness of some of his songs and even his raspy vocals, which were both expressive and consistently in tune.

It would be silly to pretend that Saturday's concert will convert a bunch of Kid Rock fans into DSO ticket buyers. But that's not the point. The fundamental challenge facing orchestras is that the threads that once linked classical music to the broad fabric of civic life and popular culture have been severed. Saturday was about re-stitching a connection.

OR YOU CAN TRY TO DEFEND THE BAKER'S WINDOWS:

An essential part of the free-market argument is "creative destruction," a theory proposed by the great Austrian economist and Harvard University professor Joseph Schumpeter. If you don't understand Schumpeter's insight--expressed most powerfully in his classic 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy--you'll have a hard time understanding why free markets work so well to generate prosperity. Yet creative destruction is a complicated concept, poorly understood by the general public and not always easy to defend. As November nears, the Republican nominee will have to figure out a way to show voters how essential it is to American prosperity.

Schumpeter believed that progress in a capitalist economy requires that the old give way constantly to the new: production technologies in a free economy improve constantly, and new products and services are always on offer. But this creative transformation also has a destructive side, since it makes earlier products and services--and the workers who provided them--obsolete. Today's consumers have little reason to buy an oil lamp instead of a lightbulb, or a Sony Walkman instead of an iPod--which can be bad news for the people who manufacture the oil lamp and the Walkman.

Looking back at the history of Western capitalism, we can see how the discovery of new energy sources, new communications systems, and new financial instruments regularly demolished old ways of doing things. When this happened, the result was typically short-term pain, as certain workers found themselves displaced, and sometimes even what appeared to be economic crises; but there was also substantial long-term gain, as the economy became more efficient and productive. Economists W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm point to transportation as a striking example of the process. "With the arrival of steam power in the nineteenth century, railroads swept across the United States, enlarging markets, reducing shipping costs, building new industries, and providing millions of new productive jobs," they write. Automobiles and airplanes had similar effects. Yet "each new mode of transportation took a toll on existing jobs and industries. In 1900, the peak year for the occupation, the country employed 109,000 carriage and harness makers. In 1910, 238,000 Americans worked as blacksmiths. Today, those jobs are largely obsolete."

Creative destruction can take place not just across sectors of the economy but within particular firms, too. Since the invention of the automobile, many automakers have disappeared, unable to improve their products; those that survived have had to transform themselves radically to stay competitive. Sometimes firms even change their business to stay alive. Think of IBM, which started in 1930 by building calculating machines, shifted to computers in the 1950s, and today is a service company.

Trying to prevent creative destruction brings economic torpor or worse. 

AREN'T THE ONES WHO BOUGHT IT AFTER MORE TROUBLESOME?:

Mike McGrady, a prizewinning reporter for Newsday who to his chagrin was best known as the mastermind of one of the juiciest literary hoaxes in America -- the best-selling collaborative novel "Naked Came the Stranger," whose publication in 1969 made "Peyton Place" look like a church picnic -- died on Sunday in Shelton, Wash. [...]

Intended to be a work of no redeeming social value and even less literary value, "Naked Came the Stranger" by all appearances succeeded estimably on both counts.

Originally issued by Lyle Stuart, an independent publisher known for subversive titles, the novel was a no-holds-barred chronicle of a suburban woman's sexual liaisons, with each chapter recounting a different escapade:

She has sex with a mobster and sex with a rabbi. She has sex with a hippie and sex with at least one accountant. There is a scene involving a tollbooth, another involving ice cubes and still another featuring a Shetland pony.

The book's cover -- a nude woman seen from behind -- left little to the imagination, as, in its way, did its prose:

"Ernie found what Cervantes and Milton had only sought. He thought the fillings in his teeth would melt."

The purported author was Penelope Ashe, who as the jacket copy told it was a "demure Long Island housewife." In reality, Mr. McGrady had dreamed up the book as ironic commentary on the public's appetite for Jacqueline Susann and her ilk.

For interviews and public appearances, Mr. McGrady conscripted his sister-in-law Billie Young to pose as Mrs. Ashe.

"Naked Came the Stranger," which remains in print, has sold about 400,000 copies, according to its current publisher, Barricade Books, which rereleased it in 2004.

That year, The Village Voice rapturously described the book as being "of such perfectly realized awfulness that it will suck your soul right out of your brainpan and through your mouth, and you will happily let it go."

First published in summer 1969, "Naked Came the Stranger" quickly sold 20,000 copies. Later that summer, Mr. McGrady and his co-conspirators came clean, and news of the book's genesis made headlines round the world. By the end of the year, the novel had spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

"What has always worried me," Mr. McGrady told Newsday in 1990, "are the 20,000 people who bought it before the hoax was exposed."

WHAT'S ESPECIALLY CLEAR...:

A score of Southern California's biggest grape nuts had gathered at the restaurant Melisse in Santa Monica that Friday for a $4,800-a-head vertical tasting of irresistible rarities provided by Kurniawan: Pétrus in a dozen vintages, reaching as far back as 1921, in magnums.

Although Pétrus is now among the most famous wines in the world, it gained its exalted status relatively recently; before World War II, it was virtually unheard of, and finding large-format bottles that had survived from the twenties bordered on miraculous. Paul Wasserman, the son of prominent Burgundy importer Becky Wasserman, is something like wine royalty, but before this event, the oldest Pétrus he had tasted was from 1975.

Nonetheless, two bottles left him scratching his head. The 1947 lacked the unctuousness of right-bank Bordeaux from that legendary vintage, and the 1961 struck him as "very young." He briefly entertained the idea of "possible fakes"--'61 Pétrus in magnum has fetched up to $28,440 at auction--and jotted, in his notes on the '47, "If there's one bottle I have serious doubts about tonight, this is it."

But in the rare-wine world, doubts are endemic; murkiness is built into a product that is concealed by tinted glass and banded wooden cases and opaque provenance and the fog of history. At the same time, the whole apparatus of the rare-wine market is about converting doubt into mystique. Most wealthy collectors want to spend big and drink famous labels, not necessarily ask questions or hear the answers. Guests at tastings don't want to bite the hand that quenches them. Auctioneers may not want to risk losing consignments by nitpicking ambiguous bottles. Winemakers don't like to talk about counterfeiting, for fear of the taint. Also, one thing not high on the FBI's list of investigative priorities: billionaires getting snowed by wine forgers. It's clear to everyone on this rarefied circuit that wine fraud is rampant. It's also clear not many insiders feel an urgency to do anything about it.

IT'S JUST THE RESPONSE TO AN OVEREMPLOYMENT PROBLEM:

For four years, the United States has been grappling with high unemployment and underemployment. While there has been noticeable improvement since the plunge in late 2008-2009, and while there is no longer a crisis of job losses, there is nonetheless a chronic employment problem in the United States.

Why this is the case has been the source of a heated and increasingly imperative debate: is the issue cyclical or structural? Is the problem the result of a particular recession and crisis that began in late 2007 and intensified in 2008-2009, or is it instead a long-term shift in the nature of our economy?

This debate has become increasingly heated, especially because those who claim the problem is cyclical have a tendency to describe those who see the problem as structural as partisan tools of a right-wing agenda that preaches slashing government spending, reducing debt, and balancing budgets in the name of long-term austerity and balance. [...]

The only correlate to the current transition occurred more than a century ago as agriculture became more mechanized, which led to the massive displacement of farmers and helped cause the Great Depression. That began a process that saw tens of millions displaced from farms to the point that fewer than 2 million farmers today produce far more food than 30 million did in1900. Today, the same transition has been occurring in manufacturing, a process that began in the 1970s and which the Internet/stock market bubble of the 1990s and then the housing bubbled of the mid-2000s only partly obscured.

BRINGING THEM INTO GOVERNMENT JUST MAKES THEM EASIER TARGETS:

In an exclusive and rare interview by a member of the so-called Quetta Shura, Motasim told The Associated Press Sunday that a majority of Taliban wants a peace settlement and that there are only "a few" hard-liners in the movement.

"There are two kinds of Taliban. The one type of Taliban who believes that the foreigners want to solve the problem but there is another group and they don't believe, and they are thinking that the foreigners only want to fight," he said by telephone. "I can tell you, though, that the majority of the Taliban and the Taliban leadership want a broad-based government for all Afghan people and an Islamic system like other Islamic countries."

But Motasim chastised the West, singling out the United States and Britain, for failing to bolster the moderates within the fundamentalist Islamic movement by refusing to recognize the Taliban as a political identity and backtracking on promises __ all of which he said strengthens the hard-liners and weakens moderates like himself.

He lamented Sunday's assassination in Kabul of Arsala Rahmani, a member of the Afghan government-appointed peace council who was active in trying to set up formal talks with insurgents. Rahmani served as deputy minister of higher education in the former Taliban regime but later reconciled with the current Afghan government.

"He was a nationalist. We respected him," Motasim said.

REDISTRIBUTING TAX MONEY TO THE RICH:

Sitting in the cab of a $350,000 John Deere tractor pulling a $150,000 Deere corn planter, Greg Carson embodies modern American agriculture. It's capital-intensive, high-tech, efficient -- and now immensely profitable. Looking for a bright spot in the U.S. economy? The farm belt is it. [...]

American agriculture transcends the Midwest farm belt. It also includes fruit and vegetable producers, poultry operators and cattle ranchers. But most of these others, dairy farmers excepted, are largely unsubsidized. Meanwhile, subsidies going mostly to grain and cotton now average about $12 billion annually, reports the Agriculture Department.

Begun in the Great Depression, these subsidies could once be justified as cushioning farming's enduring insecurities: bad weather, big shifts in supply and demand, crop infestations. But most industries now face comparable uncertainties from new technologies, global markets and erratic business cycles. Congress is writing a new farm bill and is struggling with how much to trim subsidies. But why should prosperous grain farmers and absentee owners receive special treatment and windfalls? The proper level of subsidies is simple: zero. 

YET PEOPLE ARE SURPRISED THAT HE IS NO ONE AND BELIEVES NOTHING?:

Barack Obama's relationship with his mother was complicated. She called him Barry or Bar (sounds like bear). She pushed him to be serious and to look at people with empathy. He always felt protective of her, according to his memoir. He describes a scene in which she told him that she intended to marry Lolo Soetoro and that, after the marriage, they would all live in Indonesia. As Obama recalls it, he turned to her and asked, "But do you love him?" -- a question that made her chin tremble. It was, at the least, precocious. At the time he was only 31 / 2. But it was also in keeping with one of the themes that weaves through his dealings with his mother over the years -- that she was naive and idealistic, sometimes too good for her own good. In the journal that his New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, kept during their time together in the early 1980s, Cook wrote, "Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life -- she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat."

Ann once joked that she had children with a Kenyan and an Indonesian so that the kids would not have light skin and get sunburns. She herself looked like a Kansas schoolmarm, she noted, which made it easy for her to sail through Customs during her foreign comings and goings. Barry, the hapa Kenyan, and his little sister Maya, the hapa Indonesian, could never say the same. The mother and her two children struggled to find their identities, but in very different ways. Ann found hers through her work and travels, a lifestyle that, among other things, meant she and her son were apart for most of his adolescence, he in Honolulu with his grandparents, she in Indonesia. The search for identity was more psychological for her children, something that Maya said her mother must have understood but never fully acknowledged. In her career, Ann was idealistic but not naive. If she at times came across as naive to her children, it was in the role of a mother not wanting her children to suffer.

SHADOWY EDIFICE:

At the heart of the mystery is the Quran. Muslims believe it to have been transmitted orally by Muhammad before being written down and collected under the Caliph Uthman, who reigned from 644 to 656. The Quran, as well as celebrating the divine in nature with veiled allusions to historical places and events, makes reference to stories contained in the Old and New Testaments and to theological ideas in Gnostic and other heretical texts. No less important, the Quran is the foremost source for Muhammad's life.

"Compared to the bogs and quicksand of other sources for the life of the Prophet," says Mr. Holland, "the book of his revelations does authentically appear to offer us something precious: something almost like solid ground." For the historian, however, this is more of a problem than a solution. The text is short on details of places and persons: There is only one reference to Mecca, four to Muhammad himself. Mr. Holland explains that, "unlike the Bible, which name-checks any number of conveniently datable rulers--from Cyrus to Augustus--the Quran betrays what is, to any historian, a most regrettable lack of interest in geopolitics. Those who are named in its pages tend to be angels, demons or prophets. . . . The focus of the Quran is fixed implacably, not on the personal but on the divine."

Mr. Holland finds that much of the Quranic imagery associated with Muhammad's Qurayshite opponents--generally referred to as idolators--does not tally with the Quran's supposedly Arabian provenance. For example, the idolators are condemned for slitting the ears of their livestock or exempting certain cattle from having to carry a load. Such details are puzzling, as Mr. Holland shows: "Mecca, a place notoriously dry and barren, is not, most agronomists would agree, an obvious spot for cattle ranching--just as the volcanic dust that constitutes its soil is signally unsuited to making 'grain grow, and vines, fresh vegetation . . . fruit and fodder,' " as mentioned in the Quran.

When elucidating the occasions when Muhammad is supposed to have received his divine messages, later Muslim chroniclers, including Muhammad's earliest biographers, filled gaps in the Quranic narrative, supplying the missing details from the vast corpus of hadiths. These reports were orally transmitted over many generations before being written down in various collections, several of which acquired canonical status.

Some early Muslim authorities expressed doubts about the historical value of the hadiths, as do scholars raised in the rigorous traditions of modern textual criticism. The problem, however, is that the edifice of hadiths--including those from which the narrative of the prophet's life was constructed some two centuries after his death--now constitute the sunna, the prophet's exemplary custom, which forms the foundations of Islamic law and practice. To abandon the hadiths, the liberal scholar Fazlur Rahman argued in 1965, would be to open up a "yawning chasm of fourteen centuries" between the time of the prophet and today's believers.

As a historian of late antiquity Mr. Holland can afford to ignore such inhibitions. He fills the "yawning chasm" of our knowledge with evidence culled from a much wider variety of sources--Zoroastrian and Persian, Jewish and Roman, Christian and Gnostic--than are usually considered by specialists. Without discarding the role of supernatural agencies altogether, he contextualizes them within the broader framework of the beliefs about religion, politics, power and authority that characterized the world of late antiquity.

Mr. Holland admits that his answers are "unashamedly provisional," but he traces a broad arc that connects the rise of Islam with the religious themes that accompanied the decline of the imperial systems of Rome, Byzantium and Persia. His conclusions may be tentative, but they are convincing. His book is elegantly written and refreshingly free from specialist jargon. Marshaling its resources with dexterity, it is a veritable tour de force.

In a view that Mr. Holland takes forward from Wansbrough and his disciples, Islam was born not in the deserts of Arabia but in the borders of Syria-Palestine, a region that had long been devastated by plagues and wars--the usual precursors of apocalyptic scenarios and millennial hopes. 

FACE LIKE THE GUGGENHEIM:

Messier than We Started Nothing, Sounds from Nowheresville is closer to the punk scene that originally brought White and Jules De Martino together. While it's probably not what fans of The Ting Tings' cleaner, poppier sound expected, it suits the duo's attitudes. White and De Martino discuss their eclectic sophomore album in today's episode of World Cafe.

HEAVEN GETS RHYTHM:

The M.G.'s were the house band for STAX records and Dunn can be heard on a number of tracks including Otis Redding's 'Respect' and Albert King's 'Born Under A Bad Sign'.

The bassist had been in the Japanese city to play a series of concerts as part of a STAX show, featuring Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd, and had played two gigs on Saturday night. Cropper posted on his Facebook page that Dunn had died in his sleep this morning (May 13).

He wrote: Today I lost my best friend, the world has lost the best guy and bass player to ever live. Duck Dunn died in his sleep Sunday morning in Tokyo Japan after finishing 2 shows at the Blue Note Night Club.

AMORPHOUSNESS IS THE BEST STRATEGY:

[W]hen pressed on how, exactly, his strategy would differ from Mr. Obama's, Mr. Romney had a hard time responding. The economic sanctions Mr. Obama has imposed have been far more crippling to the Iranian economy than anything President Bush did between the public revelation of Iran's nuclear enrichment facilities in 2003 and the end of Mr. Bush's term in early 2009. Covert action has been stepped up, too. Mr. Bolton has called efforts to negotiate with Iran "delusional," but other advisers -- mostly those who dealt with the issue during the Bush administration -- say they are a critical step in holding together the European allies and, if conflict looms, proving to Russia and China that every effort was made to come to a peaceful resolution. Several e-mails to the campaign asking for Mr. Romney's position on the talks yielded no response.

"There are two very different worldviews in this campaign," said one adviser who aligns more often with Mr. Bolton. "But as in any campaign, there are outer circles, inner circles and inner-inner circles, and I'm not sure that anyone knows if the candidate has a strong view of his own on this." Another adviser, saying he would be "cashiered" if the campaign caught him talking to a reporter without approval, said the real answer was that "Romney doesn't want to really engage these issues until he is in office" and for now was "just happy to leave the impression that when Obama says he'll stop an Iranian bomb he doesn't mean it, and Mitt does."

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS BEING ONE REASON ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

As the star of Only Fools and Horses and Open All Hours, Sir David Jason is responsible for some of the most amusing moments on television. The comic actor says many of them would, however, never make it to the screen these days because of a growing "political correctness" that is killing comedy.

"We seem to have lost our British sense of humour," he tells Mandrake. "It's a great shame. We have to be so careful nowadays, we've lost a lot of humour by people being frightened of getting to near touchy subjects. It's a great loss to comedy."

WHO?:

John Bellingham dressed fastidiously. On the day that he committed murder, he wore exactly what the fashion magazine Le Beau Monde advised for a gentleman's morning wear in 1812 -- a chocolate broadcloth coat, clay-coloured denim breeches and calf-length boots, the whole set off by a waspish black-and-yellow waistcoat. By contrast, his victim, clad in the equivalent of a business suit -- blue coat and dark twill trousers -- was almost ­anonymous.

But Spencer Perceval had no need for display. Not only was he prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, but, thanks to the insanity of George III and the loyal support of a majority of MPs, he had achieved a unique degree of political power. And when Bellingham confronted him in the lobby of the House of Commons on Monday 11 May, and fired a bullet into his chest from close range, Perceval also experienced the unique distinction of becoming the only British prime minister in history to be assassinated.

Other than an occasional reference in footnotes and pub quizzes, this startling crime has passed into oblivion, dismissed as the act of a lone gunman who, although generally thought to be 'deranged', was quickly tried, found guilty and hanged on the ­Monday following the murder. More surprisingly, Perceval also disappeared from view, remembered only by specialist historians for his ferocious oppression of the Luddites -- he made it a capital offence to break a machine -- Catholics, and political reformers. Yet for a democracy that since 2001 has cocooned its political leaders in security for fear of assassination, the circumstances of a prime minister's murder should be of consuming interest.

HELPING THEM IN OFF OF THE LEDGE:

The basic idea of the Carnegie proposal is to create a "firewall" between Iran's civilian nuclear program, which it could pursue, and a military bomb-making program, which it couldn't. Along with separating permissible from impermissible, the Carnegie authors propose special procedures for dual-use technologies that are near the dividing line.

A big selling point for the Iranians is that this approach is based on the pledge by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that Iran won't build nuclear weapons. Khamenei's most explicit statement came on state television in February: "Iran is not after nuclear weapons because the Islamic Republic, logically, religiously and theoretically, considers the possession of nuclear weapons a grave sin and believes the proliferation of such weapons is senseless, destructive and dangerous."

President Obama sent a back-channel communication to Khamenei in March that his fatwa banning nuclear weapons would be a good starting point for negotiations. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivered the message when he met Khamenei on March 29. Undersecretary of State Wendy Sherman reiterated Obama's theme during the first round of negotiations with the Iranians in Istanbul on April 14.

THE CERTAINTY PRINCIPLE:

A paper called "Power, Distress, and Compassion: Turning a Blind Eye to the Suffering of Others" describes a study put together by a team of social psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, a few years ago. Graduate assistants managed to collect 118 undergraduates, most of them under the age of 21. The kids agreed to participate in the experiment because they were given $15 or class credit for a psychology requirement. A skeptic might point out that the sample of participants was thus skewed from the start, unnaturally weighted toward either kids who badly need $15 or psych majors. And all of them, by definition, were the kinds of kids who want to go to college at Berkeley. Almost half of the participants were Asian American; only 3.5 percent were African American. Caucasians made up less than 30 percent.

The group the researchers studied is not, in other words, a demographic cross section of humanity. It's not a ride through Walt Disney's "It's a Small World." It has no claim to the randomness that sampling requires. It is therefore an odd gang from which to extract truths about human behavior. Indeed, speaking as a former resident, I can attest that human behavior in Berkeley, California, is unlike human behavior anywhere else in the world. But the method by which these human truths were drawn was even less plausible. The setting the researchers constructed for their experiment was exquisite in its artificiality. To see how powerful people react in real life, the professors began by giving the kids a questionnaire asking them how powerful they felt. ("Agree or disagree: I think I have a great deal of power.") The students were then divided into pairs and seated facing each other, two feet apart. Each student had a video camera trained on him and was wired to an electrocardiogram through receptors taped to his torso. 

Then the students told each other traumatic stories from their personal experience, lasting no more than five minutes. The stories were supposed to be upsetting, or "emotionally evocative." 

After many regression analyses and much hierarchical linear modeling, the professors discovered that their conclusion matched their hypothesis: The "powerful" students--that is, the students who said on the questionnaire that they were feeling powerful that morning--showed less dramatic reactions to the stories than other students. Or, as the professors put it: "Our data suggest that social power attenuates emotional reactions to those who suffer." 

I told you it was boring. It was also preposterous, at least as an experiment designed to test a hypothesis. The questionable assumptions fairly cry out from where they're buried. Just for starters, can a questionnaire asking a college sophomore how powerful he feels tell us whether he's powerful? Researchers never measured the elements that made an "emotionally evocative story"; the stories were rated by grad-student coders whose own feelings of powerfulness were unrecorded. And underlying the endeavor was the silliest buried assumption of them all, that the way a college kid reacts in a psych lab while he's wired to a machine and jabbered at by a stranger has some--any--relation to how "rich and powerful" people (Edsall's phrase) live their lives. 

If such a study claimed to prove a different conclusion, and presumed to tell us that rich and powerful people were more compassionate than those with less wealth and lower social standing, we could expect our psychopundits to approach it with more of the skepticism that journalists are so famous for. But skepticism would put a psychopundit out of a job, and so the violations of logic and common sense simply ramify. Among the studies that constitute the recent "academic critique of the right," one used participants--more than 65 percent of them female--solicited over Craigslist; another recruited participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk website. Neither sample could possibly represent any group other than itself. 

The samples are even odder when you consider that Edsall and his fellow psychopundits construed these studies, which were about the rich and powerful, to show how conservatives and Republicans behave. In most of the studies, Asian Americans made up nearly 50 percent or more of the participants. But Asian Americans are the most liberal ethnic group in America--"the only group," Gallup says, "that has a higher proportion of [self-identified] liberals than conservatives." 

That the "rich and powerful" are identical to conservatives and Republicans--Edsall's assumption--is a hoary idea dear to many Democrats and essential to their self-image as the opponents of privilege. It persists even though many of the plushest and most powerful institutions of American life are in the hands of liberal Democrats: public and private universities, government bureaucra-cies, nonprofit foundations, movie studios, television networks, museums, newspapers and magazines, Silicon Valley .  .  . Among the fabled "1 percent," according to Gallup, the number of self-identified Republicans is only slightly greater than the number of Democrats. As Christopher Caldwell has pointed out in these pages, political donations from 19 of the 20 richest ZIP codes in the United States go overwhelmingly to Democrats, by a ratio of four to one or more. Democrats are the party of what Democrats used to call the superrich. Only Democrats seem not to realize this.

OF COURSE, WHAT'S REALLY INCONVENIENT....:

 If anti-science means challenging the scientific consensus of one's own epoch, then all the great scientists of the past have been anti-science. As the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has demonstrated, every scientific revolution begins by overturning the dominant scientific paradigm of its time. According to Kuhn, those who adhere to the old paradigm never actually change their minds. Instead, they (and their Republican brains) simply die off, making place for the followers of the new paradigm, who will cling with Republican brain tenacity to the new scientific creed.

Needless to say, this is not the popular image of how scientists behave, but one main purpose of Kuhn's ground-breaking work was to shatter the unsophisticated ideas about science and the scientific method that are prevalent in our pop culture, and to which Chris Mooney appeals in his book. A willingness to change your mind because the facts have changed may be an admirable quality, but, fortunately for us all, this is not how real scientists have behaved.

Of course, simply challenging the dominant scientific paradigm of the day does not necessarily make you a great scientist. It may simply make you a crackpot. Every inventor of a perpetual motion machine, for example, is trying to disprove Lord Kelvin's laws of thermodynamics, just as today's creationists are intent on disproving Darwin. Surely we are entitled to call such crackpots anti-science, aren't we?

This is certainly tempting, but there is a serious problem with classifying all crackpots as anti-science. More than once in the history of science, the crackpot of one generation has been hailed as a visionary by the next. Indeed, during the seminal period marked by a major paradigm shift, it is often impossible to distinguish the pseudo-scientific crackpot from the genuine scientific revolutionary.

If anti-science means challenging the scientific consensus of one's own epoch, then all the great scientists of the past have been anti-science.

Take the example of Johannes Kepler, who was both. During his lifetime, Kepler was courted by the high and mighty for his mastery of the arcane pseudo-science of astrology. It is hard to get more anti-science than that. Yet today Kepler is honored as one of the most important contributors to the advance of modern astronomy, though, even in this respect, Kepler remained a bit of a crackpot. To understand his ambiguous role, we must first go back to Copernicus and his great scientific revolution.

When Copernicus made his daring conjecture placing the sun at the center of the then known universe, he had only half-dispelled the old Ptolemaic paradigm. Copernicus made the earth revolve around the sun, along with the other planets, but he could not shake off the Platonic fixation with perfect circles that had been embodied in the Ptolemaic system. In Copernicus's new astronomy, the earth and planets might revolve around the sun, but they still had to revolve in perfect circles. The reason for this seemed quite obvious at the time. Because there was an infinite number of different oval shapes, God, the designer of the universe, had no reason to pick one particular oval shape over another. He would have needed to resort to a process that involved arbitrary choice, for example, by going "eeny, meeny, miny, moe" among the possible elliptical orbits. But for Copernicus, just as for Einstein, God did not play dice. Therefore, God would stick to perfect circles, since this was the only rational choice He could make.

Kepler disagreed. It was not that he thought God played dice, any more than Copernicus did. There was still an intelligent design behind the orbit of the planets, but it was not quite as obvious as everyone had supposed. Going back again to Plato, Kepler discovered that the key to deciphering the mystery of the cosmos lay not in perfect circles, but in three-dimensional polyhedrons known as Platonic solids: The octahedron, the icosahedron, the dodecahedron, the tetrahedron, and the cube. These were the ideal models that God had relied upon in laying down the orbits of the then known planets.

You don't have to understand anything about polyhedrons in order to sense that there was something a bit crackpot in Kepler's reasoning. After all, we are taught that scientists are supposed to look at empirical evidence, not attempt to fathom the inner workings of the mind of God. Yet historians of science recognize that Kepler's far-fetched theorizing marked an enormous breakthrough. Having broken the spell of the perfect circle, the path was now open to permitting the planets to revolve around the sun in different ellipses. Modern astronomy was finally up and running, thanks to Kepler's crackpot polyhedrons.

More than once in the history of science, the crackpot of one generation has been hailed as a visionary by the next.

The importance of this step cannot be overestimated. Before Kepler, the Copernican revolution seemed doomed to failure. This was not simply because the Church opposed it, but because it flunked the first challenge that a new scientific theory must face in order to gain general acceptance: It must explain and predict observable phenomena better than its rival. When it came to predicting eclipses and other signal astronomical data, however, the old Ptolemaic system, with its elaborate multitude of epicycles, did a better job than the Copernican model. If good scientists are supposed to change their minds when confronted with evidence that goes against their own theory, then the proponents of the Copernican system should have changed theirs. But they didn't. Like Darwin, they held on tenaciously to their preferred model, despite the scientific evidence against it.

In short, the so-called Republican brain, with its deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence, has played an indispensable role in the making of modern science, long before the emergence of the Grand Old Party in 1856. This fact, however, has been obscured for most of us because of the way in which we learn science in our classrooms.

MINISTRY OF NOISE:

The Ministry of Defence has confirmed a device which can be used as a "sonic weapon" will be deployed in London during the Olympics.

The American-made Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) can be used to send verbal warnings over a long distance or emit a beam of pain-inducing tones. [...]

The piercing beam of sound emitted by the device is highly directional. Some versions of the LRAD are capable of producing deafening sound levels of 150 decibels at one metre. [...]

It has been successfully used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates.

MAKING DEATH MEANINGFUL:

Jemima Layzell, who went to Taunton School in Somerset, had told her parents she wanted her body to help save others in the event of her death. The teenager collapsed at home in Horton, Somerset, and died in hospital on March 14.

Her heart has gone to a five-year-old boy, a 14-year-old was given her lungs and her liver helped two boys, aged 10 months and five. Two people received her kidneys, a man was given her pancreas and her small bowel went to a boy, three.

Jemima, who aspired to become an author, also donated eye tissue which will restore two people's sight.

TH E MARK OF AN ENDANGERED INCUMBENT...:

President Obama's campaign website added "clean coal" to a list of energy priorities late this week, days after Republican lawmakers noted the omission and a federal inmate received about 40 percent of the vote against Obama in the Democratic primary in coal-heavy West Virginia.

Previously, the campaign's website highlighted "fuel efficiency" on a list of seven energy priorities, but it has been replaced by "clean coal" and the site now touts Obama's "10-year goal to develop and deploy cost-effective clean coal technology."

THE CONQUEST:

By the end of the 19th century, traditional biomass fuels (wood, charcoal, and straw, which together dominated energy use for millennia) were reduced to a small fraction of overall energy supply as coal became the principal fuel. The shift away from coal to hydrocarbons (crude oil and natural gas) began slowly before 1900 in the United States and Russia, and it accelerated only after World War II. By 1970, crude oil supplied 46 percent of the world's energy and its shares were 43 percent in the United States and 50 percent in Europe. There is no mystery about what will come next: Rising consumption of natural gas will eventually make it not only more important than crude oil but the single-most important fossil fuel.

Seen from this perspective, American shale gas production must be viewed as only one, albeit a major, component of gas's global rise. In 1970, natural gas supplied 18 percent of global commercial energy and that share rose to about 24 percent by 2010 (with the EU share going from less than 8 percent to 26 percent), while the worldwide crude oil share fell from 46 percent to 34 percent (and in the EU from 50 percent to 38 percent). Natural gas's rise has been slowed recently by China's extraordinarily high coal extraction rates, but these cannot be repeated in the future (the country is already a large importer of coal). Natural gas will thus continue its conquest of global and national energy supplies, with five factors behind the rise--discoveries of new large fields, diffusion of shale gas production, expansion of LNG exports, high prices of crude oil, and unrivaled efficiency of gas converters.

New giant gas fields have been discovered in such previously unpromising places as the Mediterranean off Israel's shores and deep Atlantic waters offshore near Brazil. There are extensive deposits of gas-bearing shales in Europe (particularly in Poland) and enormous resources in Asia. Recent reductions in the cost of gas liquefaction coupled with increased sizes of LNG tankers (they now rival the size of ships carrying crude oil) made LNG into a trade equivalent of oil: It can now be transported to consumers on any continent, bought without restrictive long-term contracts, and delivered at increasingly affordable prices. The totals speak for themselves: Global LNG trade rose roughly eightfold between 1980 and 2010, and it now accounts for 30 percent of the worldwide natural gas trade.

Little has to be said about high oil prices (the price spread between liquid and gaseous hydrocarbons has reached an unprecedented level), but the conversion efficiencies achievable by furnaces and turbines burning natural gas are not sufficiently appreciated. New, super-efficient household gas furnaces convert up to 97 percent of the fuel into heat; combined-cycle generation (using the waste heat from a gas turbine to raise steam and generate more electricity in an associated steam turbine) now produces electricity with 60 percent efficiency (and 70 percent will be possible in the future).

REPRESENTING ICELAND:

QUIDDITCH WAS INVENTED at Vermont's Middlebury College in 2005, when a group of buddies--fans of J.K. Rowling, of course--got tired of playing bocce and decided to improvise something more exciting that involved brooms and bath-towel capes. They drew up a loose Quidditch rulebook and encouraged other students at tony schools to play.

In 2007, a reporter from USA Today covered "the first inter-collegiate Quidditch match." Never mind that this was just a scrimmage between the Middlebury guys and some of their high school friends at Vassar. Within months of the story's appearance, the intramural sport had magically spread from campus to campus. With an organizing committee at its helm, it attracted more teams and volunteer administrators and fresh coverage every year--"a remarkable ascension," declared Time magazine in 2010. The height of the mania quickly became the annual World Cup, held each fall and open to any teams registered with the Bedford Hills, New York-based International Quidditch Association.

Two months before the World Cup, this magazine's editorial director asked if I was interested in recruiting a team. Why he asked me I wasn't sure. I certainly wasn't a Potterhead, as fans call themselves. I'd never bought a pewter wand, like my nephew, or a co-branded plush toy, like my niece. I'd never visited the Wizarding World theme park in Orlando, and I certainly hadn't taken sides with Stephen King, who has maintained that the Harry Potter books will last "not just for the decade but for the ages." For that matter, I hadn't taken sides against Yale scholar Harold Bloom, who believed, conversely, that "Rowling's mind is so governed by clichés and dead metaphors that she has no other style of writing." As to the world-shaping powers of Rowling, I was happily agnostic. I hadn't read any of the books and fell asleep when the movies were screened on planes.

The more I Googled around, however, the more Quidditch piqued my interest. I imagined writing something snarky, maybe poking fun at how Quidditch started out as a decidedly preppy sport, heedless of Rowling's Quidditch Through the Ages, which suggests the game be played on "deserted moorland far from Muggle habitations." Or I'd lampoon its comical misfires: before settling on a tennis ball in a sock, for example, some teams had tried using a remote-controlled helicopter for the snitch.

As for the sport itself, it just seemed like a hoot. A bit of rough and tumble, not a terrible amount of running, harmless competitors. If I gathered some fit New Yorkers, we'd surely have a blast and maybe even win a few games. Injuries were the last thing on my mind.

A week after I contacted the International Quidditch Association, one of the founders--Alex Benepe, now 25 and commissioner of the IQA--e-mailed to say a spot had opened. I was bummed when he strongly suggested that we register as Division 2. Weren't we--whoever we would turn out to be--all-star material? He assured me we'd have challenges enough, playing the likes of Syracuse, Duke, and other teams that had actually been practicing for a year. Also, he wanted to know, since we would be replacing a team of New Zealanders, was there any way we could field an international squad? I told him to register us as Iceland--Hrund's homeland and one of the rare countries in the Northern Hemisphere not already represented--and we were off to the races.

Or not. We made a big recruitment push via e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook and through an announcement on Outside's website, but we struggled to sign players.

"Come, win glory!" I said. No! came the replies.

"The more you tell me about this, the less interested I am," said my brother-in-law. No one showed up to the open tryouts in Central Park two weeks later, which happened to take place during a freak snowstorm, and the OMPIQWCT's only practice session, in Central Park a week before the World Cup, enticed just five strangers and acquaintances.

Our confidence grew nonetheless.

"They're history majors and competitors in the Science Cup and stuff," said Josh. "We're big and old and intimidating."

FROM THE ANNALS OF GREAT BAND NAMES: