ORIGINAL SIN:

[E]ven his wavering US-backed nemesis, Muhammad Reza Shah, called him "our Demosthenes." An ascetic with an extravagant sense of mission, a lawyerly man who lived by Voltaire's "I may disagree with what you say, but I would defend to the death your right to say it," Mossadegh was, as Christopher de Bellaigue puts it in Patriot of Persia, "a cussed contrarian." Just what he amounted to in his brilliant prickliness, and how his quixotic defiance mirrored the Iranian psyche, remain important questions seven decades after the United States ousted this European-educated constitutionalist and declared its preference for Middle Eastern strongmen. Mossadeghism failed. Iran never found a stable reconciliation of patriotism, democracy, and faith. Its persecution complex, fostered by British contempt and cemented by an Anglo-American coup in 1953, endured. Just as ownership of oil once was the vehicle of Iranian nationalist ambition, so the vexed nuclear program is today under the mullahs who exploited the blowback from 1953.

Such persistent failure and confrontation raise a question: Could it have been otherwise with Iran? An elegiac tone runs through de Bellaigue's rich portrait of Mossadegh. He quotes the ousted prime minister, after the coup, saying, "If I am murdered, it will be more useful for the country and the people than if I stay alive"--and notes that even Mossadegh's "thoughts of death were quintessentially Persian." Martyrdom is a persistent theme in a Shia nation that teems for a month every year with flagellants mourning the Imam Hussein, the Prophet's grandson, slaughtered by the caliph in 680 but recalled with all the ardor of a recent passion. In fact Mossadegh survived for fourteen years in the Shah's nascent police state, first as a nonperson in prison and then confined to his country estate at Ahmadabad. He died at eighty-four, long after the many contemporaries who had fretted over his frailty.

De Bellaigue allows himself to speculate on what might have been:

Mossadegh's Iran would have tilted to the West in foreign affairs, bound by oil to the free world and by wary friendship to the US, but remaining polite to the big neighbor to the north. In home affairs, it would have been democratic to a degree unthinkable in any Middle Eastern country of the time except Israel--a constitutional monarchy in a world of dictatorships, dependencies and uniformed neo-democracies.

If the Wilsonian acquiesence to colonialism after WWI was generally a disaster, this was a specific Realist catastrophe.

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GIVEN SUPPORT FROM 40% OF REPUBLICANS IT WON'T BE REPEALED:

In a survey released on Tuesday by the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, 67 percent of respondents gave a favorable view of President Barack Obama's healthcare reform provision to "expand the existing Medicaid program to cover more low‐income, uninsured adults."

Support for the idea, which would expand coverage to as many as 16 million uninsured Americans, broke sharply along partisan lines. Nearly nine out of 10 survey participants who said they were Democrats and two-thirds of independents backed the expansion. Six out of 10 Republican participants said they opposed it.

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THE WORLD HE MADE:

My friend and the best French econoblogger Alexandre Delaigue wrote this about Milton Friedman after his death. On his 100th birthday, I am translating and reposting it here, with permission. It's the best, most fair-minded evaluation I've seen of his legacy for a popular audience. [...]

So what is it that Friedman brought to the world? In the 1950s, the consensus of economists was to build a synthesis between Keynesianism and neoclassical economics. The idea was that fiscal action and the arbitrage between inflation and unemployment allowed a perfect regulation of the business cycle.

Friedman made two devastating critiques of this consensus. The first was his study of what actually caused the Great Depression in the 1930s. He showed that the real problem was not a lack of overall demand (which fiscal policy could straighten out), but the actions of the Federal reserve which, responding to a normal shock (a stock market crash) led an extremely restrictive monetary policy which led to the devastation of the banking system. This move was imitated in most countries, exacerbating the recession everywhere. Backing his insight with data, Friedman changed the entire perspective on the causes of depressions: they happened because central banks couldn't usefully adjust the money supply. The solution, according to Friedman, was to make sure that, whatever happens, the money supply increases progressively.

If the prescription is disregarded nowadays, the basic principle remains: fundamentally, what causes a recession is too little money chasing too many assets. Therefore, in a recession, the central bank must increase the money supply. It may seem abstract when you put it like that (Krugman's example of the baby-sitting coop can help, here) but it's one of the most important ideas of the 20th century.

Why did the Crash of 1987, which was steeper than that of 1929, not cause a global recession? It's because in the meantime, we had Milton Friedman. Unlike in the 1930s, the Fed massively injected money into the US economy.

Friedman's second critique of the 1950s Keynesian consensus was his forecast that using the Philips curve to regulate economic activity (if there's too much unemployment, there needs to be a little more inflation, and vice versa) would lead to an increase in inflation, since the inflation you needed to "buy" a drop in unemployment would increase continuously. The Stagflation of the 1970s eventually proved him right, and the success of the disinflation policies pursued after him was directly inspired by his work.

Related articles

• Vid: Happy 100th Birthday to Milton Friedman! (reason.com)
• Milton Friedman's Centenary (realclearpolitics.com)
• Which Misses Much: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Happy 100th Birthday To Milton Friedman: A Century Of Freedom And Free Market (ibtimes.com)
• Milton Friedman's Centenary (nationalreview.com)

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THE WAR ON WASTE:

Cigna, a major health insurer of large businesses in Vermont, is on the hook for more than $2 million that it must return to its customers in the state under a provision of the federal health care law.

According to numbers released Thursday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 4,636 Vermonters will receive a rebate -- averaging out to $807 per family.

The rebate is required under a section of the federal Affordable Care Act which requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent (or 85 percent in the large group market which is generally insurance through large employers) on medical care.

If insurance companies do not meet this requirement, they have to refund the portion of the premium that exceeded the 20 or 15 percent limit on things like administrative expenses.

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NO ONE AVOIDS THE eND OF hISTORY:

Are there plausible substitutes for the old ruling ideology?

Such questions occupy the heart of a recent New York Times op-ed piece by Jiang Qing (founder of the Yangming Confucian Academy in Guiyang) and Daniel A. Bell (a prominent Canadian scholar of Chinese politics). They call for a new moral foundation for political rule and everyday life in China. To the surprise of most China watchers, they say, 'Western liberal democracy' has no future in China. Their swipe against Francis Fukuyama and the American foreign policy establishment is backed by a strong preference for Confucian notions of Humane Authority.

Qing and Bell explain that the current revival of Confucianism in China is fuelled by the moral bankruptcy of communism. They presume (or hope) that Confucian values are destined, with Party help, to replace communism as the ruling ideas. Their anticipation underestimates the magnetism of other values. Their silence about the conspicuous consumption of the middle classes and the hyper-rich 'princelings' is typical. Can risky market innovation, profit and self-interested greed of the 'small person' (xiăorén) denounced by Confucius be combined with his teachings on the saintly, scholarly, ascetic 'perfect man' (jūnzĭ)? Or (to take another example) how many Chinese women will be willing to embrace the old Confucian values of chastity, silence, hard work and compliance? Qing and Bell don't say.

Playing the role of court intellectuals, they yearn for a 'progressive' politics of Confucianism. Central to their vision is a strategy for building a new governing institution to replace the leading role of the Party. The sketch includes plans for a tri-cameral legislature. It would comprise a House of Exemplary Persons guided by mandates from heaven; a House of the Nation, whose representatives are imbued with 'wisdom from history and culture'; and an appointed or elected House of the People.

The blueprint seems quixotic. Never mind the clutch of difficulties that would confront legislators when trying, in the much-changed circumstances of the early twenty-first century, to sort out the philosophical and political tangles within key texts such as the Analects. What does it mean to say that authorities should be 'beneficent without great expenditure' or 'majestic without being fierce' (Book 20)? Or that those who govern by means of 'virtue' can be 'compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it' (Book 2)? Of what relevance are these words in resolving bitter conflicts such as last week's events in the Jiangsu city of Quidong, where at least 50,000 citizens defied riot police, stripped shirtless the local mayor, who quickly changed his tune by announcing the shut-down of a pulp mill pipeline which locals feared would pollute the nearby coastline?

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"I WANT TO BE ABLE TO KILL MY GRANDCHILDREN RATHER THAN CARE FOR THEM?":

President Barack Obama again invoked his daughters as reasons to support the abortion industry in a campaign stop in Portland, Oregon, on Tuesday.

"Mr. Romney wants to get rid of funding for Planned Parenthood," the president told nearly 1,000 donors at the Oregon Convention Center. "I think that is a bad idea. I've got two daughters. I want them to control their own health care choices. We're not going backwards; we're going forwards."

The reference echoes a comment he made in 2008 on the campaign trail. "I've got two daughters, 9 years old and 6 years old," he said. "If they make a mistake, I don't want them punished with a baby."

Kind of an odd message unless he's still worried about his furthest Left base.

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ONCE THE COLD WAR ENDED THEY BECAME IRRELEVANT:

First there was the humiliation of private firm G4S managing to rustle up only 6,000 of the 10,000 security guards it was paid nearly half a billion pounds to provide. (We'll just chalk that up to inflation.) Then we learned that authorities lost the keys to Wembley Stadium sometime last week, an admission of incompetence that serves to explain why they never able to catch Benny Hill.

But it's OK. The police have assured everyone that all the relevant locks have been changed (and the new keys have been put on a lanyard). Thus, there's no reason to worry about security - apart from, I would suggest, the fact that these bumbling bobbies are in charge of it.

It is a shame that the police could not lose the keys to the Olympic Stadium instead, especially since it might have afforded the common citizen an opportunity to get in and see Thomas Heatherwick's beautiful cauldron in person. As it turns out, the only good‑looking part of the Olympic Games is hidden away where only ticket-buyers and athletes can experience it live.

You will recall that London was critical of Vancouver's decision to place the Olympic cauldron behind a chain-link fence. Clearly, this criticism stemmed from the fact that the fence was not opaque enough. Now they are showing us how it is done, hiding it inside a stadium.

Regarding the whiny, poor, spoiled tourists who think that a trip to London entitles them to see the Olympic cauldron, London's mayor Boris Johnson does not see what the problem is. "It's going to be visible to everybody who watches it on TV. It's there. I don't think it's a big deal", he said. On that same note, why would anyone want to make love to a woman when you can just find a video of someone else doing it online?

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WHICH IS WHY A UNIVERSAL HSA/CATASTROPHIC PLAN WORKS:

A new issue brief from the National Institute of Health Care Management adds grist to the mill of those who rebelled against the universal insurance mandate. The study showed that in 2009 half the population - fully 150 million people - spent an average of just $236 per person on health care. That was a paltry $36 billion for the entire group out of $1.3 trillion in personal health care expenditures.

On the other side of the use spectrum, however, just five percent of the population - about 30 million people - spent a whopping $623 billion or about half of all personal health care expenditures. That came to nearly $41,000 per patient.

And if one looks at just the top 1 percent of health care "spenders" - those who were often battling life-threatening or crippling illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, cancer or dementia - they averaged over $90,000 per patient per year. These three million people accounted for over 20 percent of the total health care tab.

We're mandating savings accounts, not health care.

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WHICH MISSES MUCH:

Friedman is best remembered among economists for making the case for the central importance of monetary policy in the performance of the economy. No one really disputes that view anymore, which is why in the current economic morass, everyone looks to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for rescue.

One of the favorite debates among experts is what would Friedman would do now. Some say he would reject Bernanke's use of quantitative easing, which they see as sowing the seeds of future inflation. Others say the Fed has repeated the error Friedman blamed for Japan's lost decade by failing to generate sufficient growth of the money supply. But on the value of his theories, there is no dispute.

His influence can be seen in other places too. Friedman was one of the earliest proponents of expanding educational choices, an idea that has led to vouchers and charter schools. He advocated opening up the airline business to competition, which made air travel affordable to the masses.

Floating exchange rates, one of his ideas, are now the norm. He played a key role in abolishing the military draft, which has never come back. The earned income tax credit, which supplements the earnings of lower-income workers, grew out of a Friedman proposal.

If all that weren't enough, free markets and reduced government involvement in the economy have gained adherents around the world, from Chile to China -- unleashing economic progress that has raised living standards and lifted billions of people out of poverty.

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THE AMERICAN CONSENSUS:

Despite the campaign positioning, on the most fundamental international issues, the president and his challenger generally share the same goals, even if they would get there in different ways.

They both would press the battle against Al Qaeda through drones and special operations while drawing down troops in Afghanistan. They both would try to stop Iran's nuclear program through sanctions and negotiations without ruling out a military option. They both would support rebels in Syria while keeping American forces out of the conflict. Even in areas where Mr. Romney has been most critical, like Israel, Russia and China, it is not entirely clear what he would do differently.

It may be, then, that the real test on foreign policy this year is how voters assess the candidates in terms of their leadership, experience, strength and agility. In other words, the argument may come down to who would be more effective pursuing the same aims, who would do better at asserting American will, rallying allies and confronting adversaries, who would find the right blend of diplomacy and assertiveness.

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COMBINE AMERICAN ECONOMIC STRENGTH WITH GLOBAL WEAKNESS...:

 It is an index of fear. Last week, interest rates on 10-year U.S. Treasury bonds fell to 1.4 percent. This was the lowest on record and less than present or expected inflation (generally 2 percent to 3 percent). On 30-year Treasuries, rates have tumbled to 2.5 percent. The investors piling into Treasuries and driving rates down aren't buying risky stocks or using their cash to expand businesses. They're protecting themselves against unknowns. The question is whether the resulting plunge of rates signals something more ominous: renewed recession, deflation or both.

...and strong debt sales and domestic deflation follow.

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WANTED, FOR INSUFFICIENT OBEISANCE TO IDEOLOGY:

In a shocking statement made this morning on FOX News Sunday with Chris Wallace, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said he believes the U.S. Constitution allows states to regulate firearms. In a response to a question about the Second Amendment from Wallace, Scalia said the following:

... there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned some weapons. There were also "locational limitations" on where weapons could be carried. --They had some limitations on the nature of arms that could be borne.

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THANKS, BILL:

It turns out that Judge James Teilborg's harangue of a lawyer from the bench about her allegedly insufficient compassion for the unborn was indeed a sign of what was to come: The Clinton-appointed district court judge in Arizona just did something, well, unprecedented. He upheld Arizona's ban on abortions after 20 weeks, claiming it didn't actually "ban" abortions before viability, it just "regulates" them down to the most grueling emergencies.

Worse, Teilborg even regurgitated the suspect science of "fetal pain," a first in the federal courts, though his decision was based on the contorted "regulation" versus "ban" finding. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the state can only ban abortions after viability, regardless of the rationale, but Teilborg found that Arizona's H.B. 2036 "does not impose a substantial obstacle to previability abortions," because a woman can still get an abortion after 20 weeks if she's about to die or suffer major physical impairment.

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THE PIGOVIAN CONSENSUS:

While the carbon tax plan is drawing attention now, the idea itself is not new in conservative circles.

For example, a 2007 paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, an influential conservative group, argued that a carbon tax would be preferable to other ways of reducing greenhouse gases such as mandatory emission limits.

One of the authors was Kevin Hassett, now an adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney. A spokesman for Hassett said he was unavailable for comment. A Romney campaign spokeswoman said the candidate does not support such a tax, saying it would push jobs overseas.

But Inglis and others like the idea because it would let cleaner forms of energy compete with dirtier forms without the need for the complicated mandates and tax breaks that currently support renewable energy.

It could also supersede pending greenhouse gas regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency -- something the business community and politicians of all stripes are leery of but which the courts say the agency must carry out.

While no current Republican lawmaker is thought to support the plan, other influential Republicans are on board.

"We have to have a system where all forms of energy bear their full costs," President Reagan's former Secretary of State George Shultz said in a recent interview with Stanford University News. Shultz now heads a task force at Stanford that is currently studying the feasibility of a carbon tax.

For Shultz there are many reasons to support such a tax. One is making fossil fuel energy sources absorb costs that are currently borne out by society at large, such as through higher health insurance premiums or Medicare bills caused by pollution-induced diseases.

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THEY'RE ALL OUR ISSUES:

Creating good jobs, reducing corruption in the federal government, and reducing the federal budget deficit score highest when Americans rate 12 issues as priorities for the next president to address. Americans assign much less importance to increasing taxes on wealthy Americans and dealing with environmental concerns.

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DO YOU SUPPOSE THEY CAN REMEMBER THE CASES OF THE LETTERS?:

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THE RETURN TO W'S OWNERSHIP SOCIETY:

As much as he relished the battle against Obama--"European," he repeated, with some gusto--his real fight was for the ideological identity of the Republican Party, and with colleagues who were content to simply criticize the White House. "If you're going to criticize, then you should propose," he told me. A fault line divided the older and more cautious Republican leaders from the younger, more ideological members. Ryan was, and remains, the leader of the attack-and-propose faction.

"I think you're obligated to do that," he said. "People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, 'Just criticize and don't do anything and let's win by default.' That's ridiculous." He said he was "moving ahead without them. They don't want to produce alternatives? That's not going to stop me from producing an alternative."

Ryan's long-range plan was straightforward: to create a detailed alternative to Obama's budget and persuade his party to embrace it. He would start in 2009 and 2010 with House Republicans, the most conservative bloc in the Party. Then, in the months before the Presidential primaries, he would focus on the G.O.P. candidates. If the plan worked, by the fall of 2012 Obama's opponent would be running on Paul Ryan's ideas, and in 2013 a new Republican President would be signing them into law.

Sitting in his office more than three years ago, Ryan could not have foreseen how successful his crusade to reinvent the Republican Party would be. Nearly every important conservative opinion-maker and think tank has rallied around his policies. Nearly every Republican in the House and the Senate has voted in favor of some version of his budget plan. Earlier this year, the G.O.P. Presidential candidates lavished praise on Ryan and his ideas. "I'm very supportive of the Ryan budget plan," Mitt Romney said on March 20th, in Chicago. The following week, while campaigning in Wisconsin, he added, "I think it'd be marvellous if the Senate were to pick up Paul Ryan's budget and adopt it and pass it along to the President."

To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan. [...]

For decades, policy wonks on the Republican fringes had talked about turning Social Security, the government safety-net program for retirees, into a system of private investment accounts. The architect of the movement was Peter Ferrara, a former Harvard Law School student, who, calling it "the craziest idea in the world," sold it, in 1979, to the small-government fundamentalists at the Cato Institute. (Ferrara is now at the Heartland Institute, best known for its denial of climate change.) They evangelized on behalf of the idea for more than two decades, before pushing it into mainstream Republican politics. Bush was the first Republican Presidential nominee to embrace the idea, but it wasn't a priority in his first term, which was dominated by the response to 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

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COMIC GOLD:

[D]uring his trip to Israel, Romney inadvertently praised the individual requirement and universal health care. "[F]or an American abroad, you can't get much closer to the ideals and convictions of my own country than you do in Israel," he said. And according to The New York Times, Romney spoke favorably about the fact that health care makes up a much smaller amount of Israel's gross domestic product compared to the United States:

"Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of the G.D.P. in Israel? Eight percent," he said. "You spend eight percent of G.D.P. on health care. You're a pretty healthy nation. We spend 18 percent of our G.D.P. on health care, 10 percentage points more. That gap, that 10 percent cost, compare that with the size of our military -- our military which is 4 percent, 4 percent. Our gap with Israel is 10 points of G.D.P. We have to find ways -- not just to provide health care to more people, but to find ways to fund and manage our health care costs."

Israel spends less on health care because of a universal health system that requires everyone to have insurance. Every Israeli citizen has the obligation to purchase health care services through one of the country's four HMOs since government officials approved the National Health Insurance Law in 1995. People pay for 40 percent of their HMO's costs through income-related contributions collected through the tax system, and the state pays the remaining 60 percent. 

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7 BILLION PEOPLE WHOSE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IS OBESITY:

For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*

Decision-making was decentralised and leadership ad hoc; there weren't any chiefs. There were sporadic hot-blooded fights between individuals, of course, but there was no organised conflict between groups. Nor were there strong notions of private property and therefore any need for territorial defence. These social norms affected gender roles as well; women were important producers and relatively empowered, and marriages were typically monogamous.

Keeping the playing field level was a matter of survival. These small-scale, nomadic foraging groups didn't stock up much surplus food, and given the high-risk nature of hunting - the fact that on any given day or week you may come back empty-handed - sharing and cooperation were required to ensure everyone got enough to eat. Anyone who made a bid for higher status or attempted to take more than their share would be ridiculed or ostracised for their audacity. Suppressing our primate ancestors' dominance hierarchies by enforcing these egalitarian norms was a central adaptation of human evolution, argues social anthropologist Christopher Boehm. It enhanced cooperation and lowered risk as small, isolated bands of humans spread into new habitats and regions across the world, and was likely crucial to our survival and success.

How, then, did we arrive in the age of institutionalised inequality?  [...]

One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandising individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus - first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance. At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labour allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies. From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold - as when uneven resource-distribution benefited one family more than others - it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages.

It is not hard to imagine how stratification could arise, or that self-aggrandisers would succeed from time to time. But none of these theories quite explain how those aiming to dominate would have overcome egalitarian norms of nearby communities, or why the earliest hierarchical societies would stop enforcing these norms in the first place. Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?

In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments. This was true whether we modelled inequality as a multi-tiered class society, or as what economists call a Pareto wealth distribution (see "Inequality: The physics of our finances") - in which, as with the 1 per cent, the rich get the lion's share.

Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies - exactly what we see as we look back in history.

In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural - or physical - extinction of egalitarian societies.

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UNWATCHABLE:

Locog chairman Lord Coe says seats left empty will 'not be an issue' throughout the Games Link to this video

Soldiers have been drafted in to fill empty seats at the London 2012 Olympics after prime seating at the aquatics centre, gymnastics arena and basketball venue again went unused on the second day of competition.

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PSYCHOLOGY, NOT TECHNOLOGY:

Even though research clearly shows that present electric cars can satisfy the requirements of 95 percent of all trips made in the U.S., many car buyers say electric cars need to travel further per charge before they'll consider buying one. [...]

With battery technology improving, building an electric car with a range of 120 miles per charge within the next few years seems technologically feasible. 

More importantly, with electric car battery prices already dropping faster than analysts previously predicted they would, a larger capacity battery pack capable of 120 miles of range per charge is much more likely than it was even two years ago. 

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WHEN CASH COWS MEET SHEEP RIPE FOR SHEARING:

Most recently, a study published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine found that men whose early-stage prostate cancer is carefully monitored but not treated right away appear to live as long as men whose cancer is immediately operated on, and that they also avoid the troubling side effects of urinary problems and erectile dysfunction. The study isn't definitive, and its findings might not apply to all forms of prostate cancer or to younger men.

The public, though, seems a little doubtful about pronouncements that Americans are over-tested and over-treated, and it's easy to see why. Our very nature tells us that if there's a bad thing in us like cancer, we want it out. Also, insurance companies and the government have been warning that runaway increases in medical costs are unsustainable. This makes patients worry that important medical tests and treatments will be withheld for financial rather than health considerations. What many people fail to realize is that some unnecessary tests and treatments are currently being ordered for a different financial reason: in order to earn doctors money. Many procedures are profit centers for medical providers; in other cases, they are ordered to shield practitioners against possible malpractice suits, rather than because they are medically necessary and appropriate.

The sensitive new technologies that enable doctors to find and diagnose more medical problems have also led them to find, explore and treat things that never would have caused problems, according to Dr. H. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. "We now recognize that we all harbor abnormalities," Welch said in a Times story last year.

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QUALITY IS A HOAX:

Let's be pessimists and say that you decide that only four of them are worth buying again. On future store visits, you'll save $0.75 each time you buy that generic item instead of the name brand version. If you buy these four items each an average of once a month, you're going to be saving $36 a year and you won't notice a difference compared to what you already buy.

Of course, that's a low-end estimate for your family. We use store-brand paper towels, salad dressings, saltine crackers, liquid soap, Kleenexes, and many other items. I would estimate that we save a couple hundred dollars a year simply by focusing on generics.

Many of those items, such as ketchup and applesauce, have identical ingredient lists and nutrition facts labels as name brand versions. As far as we can tell, they're the same product - except that the generic version is substantially cheaper.

There are other items that might not be quite as good as the name brand version, but the quality difference is small enough that it doesn't really matter. Kleenexes are a good example of this. The only time you'll see a difference is if it's going to be an intense use of the item, in which case you just double up on the generic (or, in my case, use a handkerchief). You'll still save money.

In my experience, the big challenge with generics is getting past the mental block that name brands are somehow better.

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AIN'T THAT AMERICA:

Al Salam Polleria's success, as well as its distinction, can be found in its East L.A. location and in its name -- al salaam is Arabic for peace, polleria is Spanish for poultry shop.

It was never their intention to end up in East L.A. But as they would find, it was quite fortunate.

Elrabat-Gabr's father, Safwat Elrabat, emigrated from Egypt, figuring he could fill a niche in Los Angeles by selling fresh poultry killed according to Islamic law, called halal.

How he arrived on this stretch of Whittier Boulevard, a heavily Latino neighborhood, came down to zoning laws that allow the storage and slaughter of live animals. Still, when Elrabat and his brother-in-law opened the shop in 1984, they expected a line of fellow Muslims trailing out the door.

"Yeah, it didn't happen that way," Elrabat-Gabr said.

Instead the local community embraced the new polleria. It still does. Here, there is no culture clash.

It also didn't hurt that Elrabat placed a super-sized white chicken on the roof, like the Michelin Man, a kind of lighthouse beacon welcoming the neighborhood. In fact, local residents began shopping here with such regularity that Elrabat and most of the family quickly learned enough Spanish to know exactly what customers wanted.

Elrabat-Gabr sees strong similarities between the Egyptian and Latin cultures. Both place great importance on family and on respect, she said, and because the Moors controlled parts of Spain for hundreds of years, the languages share similar words.

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IN FICTION, THIS TYPE IS BEST DEPICTED...:

Gaddis's subtitle, An American Life, reminds the reader that George Kennan's intellectual and emotional ambivalences are anything but atypical of America's 20th-century upper-middle class, that they are interesting to us because they explain, to some extent, the class that gave the American Century its character, and that such things are among the deepest sources of American conduct. The most basic factor among them was a sense of superiority to the mass of Americans. Like others of his class, Kennan loved the America of his own reminiscences, imagination, and close acquaintances, while loathing the rest of Americans and the civilization they represented. He recalled lovingly his youth at his family's compound on a Wisconsin lake, and treasured his gentleman's farm in exurban Pennsylvania, as equivalents of Chekov's spiritual communion with the cherry orchard of his doomed character, Ravenskaya. These "stood for certain ideals of decency and courage, and generosity." Kennan's attitude toward the rest of America seems a paraphrase of the Pharisee's prayer in the Temple: "Lord I thank thee that I am not like other Americans...."

Thus when Kennan looked at Hitler's Germany in the 1930s he saw primarily "a great garden, well kept and blooming...populated by clean and healthy people." By the same token, while he recognized that Communism negates the soul--Soviet funerals showed "the meaninglessness of life expounded and argued from the meaninglessness of death"--he nevertheless thought it was better "to sell one's soul...than to let it dry up in its own bitterness and get nothing for it whatsoever."

Lack of soul, or indeed of anything worthy, is what Kennan saw in ordinary Americans. He wished that Americans might "have their toys taken away from them, be spanked, educated, and made to grow up." That would take a "strong central power (far stronger than the present constitution would allow)." Meanwhile, he expressed revulsion at the sight of well-fed, "shapeless, droopy" Americans, getting out of their cars "tired from not walking," "a skin disease of the earth." He told his diary: "I hate democracy; I hate the press.... I hate the 'peepul;' I have become clearly un-American." America was unworthy of him. [...]

In 1947 Kennan became a victim of the Peter Principle. Having become a celebrity, he was promoted out of his competence as a reporting diplomat and into the role of a policymaker, which encouraged him to pontificate, to indulge his prejudices and inner instability.

He began well enough. In the spring of 1947, as the "X" article was being printed, he advised Secretary of State George C. Marshall that containing the Soviets in Europe required relieving the continent's misery, which in turn required massive American economic aid with the sole condition that plans for it be coordinated among Europeans and agreed upon with Americans. The ensuing "Marshall Plan" indeed started the process that Kennan had advocated, of "turning former enemies into allies." But it was downhill from there.

As theoretically sound and similarly influential, but pregnant with trouble, was Kennan's critique of President Truman's pledge of aid to Greece and Turkey. The decision was the first manifestation of the "Truman Doctrine," a promise to intervene in any and every situation where there might be danger of the Soviets gaining any advantage, no matter how small or temporary. Kennan's general point was valid enough: surely no principle of policy applies automatically to any and all circumstances. Indeed, Gaddis reminds us that Kennan's formulation of containment had implied both automaticity and universality, rendering his critique of the Truman Doctrine a refutation of his own words.

Kennan the policymaker argued strenuously for retrenching U.S. commitments. Czechoslovakia should be allowed to fall to the Communists, never mind the sad precedents of 1938-39. Even China, he argued, on which America had placed so many hopes and expended so much blood and treasure, should be permitted to go Red--the sooner the better. To boot, he urged driving the anti-Communist side out of Taiwan. He repeated that the Soviets could not hold onto such conquests, that they would choke on them in the long run. But Gaddis notes that in Kennan's original formulation, containment's virtue consisted substantially of depriving the Soviets of vital psychological satisfaction. Would Communist victories in China and Czechoslovakia not give them that satisfaction? And what would their victories do to us psychologically? Why would Kennan's new version of "containment," which seemed to be about containing America more than the Soviet Union, not dispirit and destroy us instead of them?

Because Kennan never addressed such questions directly, we may well suspect that his enthusiasm for retrenchment came, not from any understanding of history or principles of statecraft, but instead from his increasing socio-political identification with Americans who believed Soviet advances and American retreats were inherently good. Indeed, to the extent he got involved in policy and politics, he set principles aside. His mind seemed to work on two mutually exclusive levels. For example, he seemed unaware that his statement of diplomatic principles in American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 was identical to the argument of A Foreign Policy for Americans, published in the same year by Robert Taft, whom he loathed socio-politically. In later years, he reacted with outright disbelief when discovering that his views matched those of conservatives.

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(profanity alert)

Singer Brittany Howard has the bearing, power and charisma of a star twice her age, but on stage, she's positively dominant.

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BECAUSE THAT'S WHERE THE MONEY IS:

The average annual pension for Suffolk County cops who have retired since 2007 was US$86,702 (RM274,108), according to figures from the Manhattan Institute, a public policy think tank, against US$37,270 for other county employees, excluding teachers. The county, facing a three-year deficit of US$530 million, declared a fiscal emergency in March.

Traditionally, US voters have backed generous pay and benefits for the cops and firefighters willing to risk their lives to keep citizens safe. That was especially so after the deaths of many emergency workers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.

But as economic conditions have worsened and many local governments have run into severe fiscal problems, that attitude has started to change. Since the 2007 recession, some cities have tried to roll back pension benefits and pay, among the most rigid and, in some cases, highest expenses in municipal budgets.

From New York to California and points in between, cops and firefighters have been drawn into pitched battles over their pay and benefits.

In San Diego and San Jose, California's second and third biggest cities, voters in June overwhelmingly backed sweeping pension reforms. In San Jose, all employees will have to choose between reduced benefits or higher retirement contributions.

In the mid-sized California cities of Stockton and San Bernardino, officials say public safety costs were among the factors that forced both to declare bankruptcy. In Vallejo, a former US Navy town near San Francisco that emerged from a three-year bankruptcy last year, public safety pay and benefits were consuming three-quarters of the city's general fund.

Detroit, plagued with one of the highest crime rates in the country, nonetheless cut pay and healthcare benefits for city workers, including police, by 10 percent just over a week ago, a move the mayor says will save the cash-strapped city US$102 million a year.

A legal challenge by the Detroit Police Officers Association failed, even as union President Joe Duncan publicly complained of what the cuts would mean for Detroit's ability to hire police, noting that the city is "already 50th on the list of pay for the biggest 50 cities in the United States."

St. Louis this month approved an overhaul of the firefighter retirement system that rolls back decades of increases, while Miami officials trying to plug a US$60 million budget gap this week declared "financial urgency," which will let them alter employee contracts. Among the city's proposals: limit overtime for firefighters and require higher health care contributions.

According to an analysis by New York-area newspaper Newsday published last month, police and sheriff's department employees in Nassau and Suffolk counties reached nearly two-thirds of each county's payroll.

"That is why a lot of municipalities are choosing bankruptcy, because it's the only way - other than getting a state control board - of getting out of these salary and pension requirements,'' said the former top official of Suffolk County, Steve Levy.

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DONE BEEN SHOWN:

Missouri, the state that was once considered the nation's ultimate bellwether, looks as though it is likely to be out of reach for President Obama this year, unless there is a significant shift toward him in the final 100 days of the campaign.

A Mason-Dixon poll of the state, released on Saturday, gave Mitt Romney a nine-point lead there. Mr. Romney's nine-point lead matches his advantage from another poll of the state, conducted by the firm We Ask America, which was released earlier this week.

The forecast model now estimates that Mr. Romney has an 88 percent chance of winning Missouri in November. And Missouri has fallen off the list of tipping point states, meaning that it is very unlikely to be a decisive state in determining the winner of the Electoral College. The cases where Mr. Obama wins Missouri are probably those where he is headed toward some sort of near-landslide in the national race, like because of an unexpected rebound in the economy.

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MAKE PERSONAL FINANCE UNIVERSAL AND YOU SERVE THEM AND THE REPUBLIC BETTER:

There are many defenses of algebra and the virtue of learning it. Most of them sound reasonable on first hearing; many of them I once accepted. But the more I examine them, the clearer it seems that they are largely or wholly wrong -- unsupported by research or evidence, or based on wishful logic. [...]

Nor is it clear that the math we learn in the classroom has any relation to the quantitative reasoning we need on the job. John P. Smith III, an educational psychologist at Michigan State University who has studied math education, has found that "mathematical reasoning in workplaces differs markedly from the algorithms taught in school." Even in jobs that rely on so-called STEM credentials -- science, technology, engineering, math -- considerable training occurs after hiring, including the kinds of computations that will be required. Toyota, for example, recently chose to locate a plant in a remote Mississippi county, even though its schools are far from stellar. It works with a nearby community college, which has tailored classes in "machine tool mathematics." 

That sort of collaboration has long undergirded German apprenticeship programs. I fully concur that high-tech knowledge is needed to sustain an advanced industrial economy. But we're deluding ourselves if we believe the solution is largely academic.

A skeptic might argue that, even if our current mathematics education discourages large numbers of students, math itself isn't to blame. Isn't this discipline a critical part of education, providing quantitative tools and honing conceptual abilities that are indispensable -- especially in our high tech age? In fact, we hear it argued that we have a shortage of graduates with STEM credentials.

Of course, people should learn basic numerical skills: decimals, ratios and estimating, sharpened by a good grounding in arithmetic. But a definitive analysis by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce forecasts that in the decade ahead a mere 5 percent of entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra or above. And if there is a shortage of STEM graduates, an equally crucial issue is how many available positions there are for men and women with these skills. A January 2012 analysis from the Georgetown center found 7.5 percent unemployment for engineering graduates and 8.2 percent among computer scientists.

As a wise young man once informed his math teacher, "I'll never need to even know what a polynomial is in real life."

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NOWHERE TO GO BUT DOWN:

Big trouble for Obama: Lessons of presidential reelection history (Abe Katsman, JULY 11, 2012, Times of Israel)

[T]here is a remarkable underlying pattern in American presidential history: While the United States has elected 16 presidents to second terms, in 15 of those cases, the president was reelected by a wider margin than in his first-term election. (The outlier: Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916 by a razor-thin margin in what was essentially a referendum on whether America should enter World War I. His campaign theme: "He kept us out of war." Eleven weeks into his second term, at Wilson's urging, the US declared war against Germany.  Fascinating history, but I digress.)

There is a lesson in that wider-margin-required-for-reelection statistic. Second term presidential candidacies are ultimately a thumbs-up/thumb-down verdict on a president's first term in office. Either the first term has been successful enough to win over even some of those who voted against the president the first time around, or the president loses. The question in the minds of voters -- especially those who did not vote for the incumbent the first time around -- boils down to: "Do I want four more years of this?"

And in the case of President Obama, who won 53% of the vote last time out, it's hard to see what segments of the electorate would be clamoring to answer that question in the affirmative at all, let alone in higher percentages than he received in 2008. His job approval numbers are far below that 53% level already.

Obama's 2008 margin of victory was 7%. Now, let's assume that 2008 Republican voters remain Republican; if just one in 13 Americans who supported Obama switch their vote, he loses. And if he can't repeat the enthusiastic turnout numbers from various demographics he won in 2008, he's in even bigger trouble.

On the way out? President Barack Obama (photo credit: Amos Ben Gershom/ GPO/Flash90)

Ready for some campaign arithmetic? 

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OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

The United Nations indefinitely suspended action on an international arms trade treaty Friday after the United States and several other countries asked for more time.

The decision sparked angry reactions from human rights groups often allied with the Obama administration, who believed a treaty to regulate the export of deadly weapons to rogue regimes was within reach. The UN had spent the entire month of July hammering out a deal, and Friday was the deadline for an agreement on a treaty that has met with the staunch opposition of the National Rifle Association and bipartisan concerns in the Senate.

"This was stunning cowardice by the Obama administration, which at the last minute did an about-face and scuttled progress toward a global arms treaty, just as it reached the finish line," said Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. "It's a staggering abdication of leadership by the world's largest exporter of conventional weapons to pull the plug on the talks just as they were nearing an historic breakthrough that would have required all nations to deny arms export licenses where there was an overriding risk that the weapons would be used to facilitate serious crimes against humanity."

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REFORMING THE SA'UDS:

The visible shift in Indo-Saudi bilateral ties in the diplomatic sphere can be traced to the January 2006 Memorandum of Understanding on combating terrorism (part of the larger "Delhi Declaration") signed by then Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Sa'ud al-Faizal bin Abdul Aziz al-Sa'ud (Press Trust of India [New Delhi], January 25, 2006). The much needed extradition treaty was finally signed in late February 2010, furthering bilateral security cooperation under the auspices of the March, 2010 Riyadh Declaration (Times of India, March 1, 2010). 

Riding in this new wave of counterterrorism cooperation from Saudi Arabia, India is attempting to target other Indian terrorist fugitives currently holed up in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, including former leaders of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) and LeT operatives such as C.A.M. Basheer and Abu Haroon. 

The arrest and deportation of Ansari, who was sent by his LeT handlers to Saudi Arabia on a mission to mobilize resources for the next big attack against India, certainly signals a new phase of Indo-Saudi anti-terrorism cooperation, even though it took months of diplomatic negotiations (with the United States playing an active role) to persuade Saudi authorities to overcome their long standing pro-Pakistan policies. Indeed, the latest policy shift goes against the Kingdom's old ally Pakistan in many ways. Ansari now becomes the third living proof of Pakistan's complicity in the Mumbai attacks, along with Ajmal Kasab and David Headley. It also sends a strong message to Pakistan that the Kingdom is no longer a safe haven or staging point for Islamic extremists who use the country to exploit both Salafist sympathizers and the South Asian diaspora to raise funds and to scout talent for jihad.

India is concerned about Saudi Arabia's largesse towards the Islamic madrassas and charity organizations that have contributed to Salafist-Jihadi extremism in South Asian countries. Saudi Arabia has also been at the center of controversy over its support for Kashmir-centric charities and LeT fronts like Jama'at-ud-Dawa (JuD) in the name of health and educational aid. Even Saudi Arabia's legitimate banking institutions are now being closely watched by authorities in the United States, India and Bangladesh for facilitating transactions and hosting accounts of Indian-centric Pakistan-based terrorist groups and charities.

However, the change of heart on the part of the Saudi authorities is not directly related to U.S. pressure. Saudi Arabia well understands the dynamics of the changing geopolitical atmosphere in the Arab world and India's growing clout in the world stage. It also appreciates the fact that terrorism is a double-edged sword, especially following the August 2009 suicide attack on Prince Muhammad bin Nayef in Jeddah (al-Jazeera [Doha], August 28, 2009). 

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HOW WAS POST-CHRISTIAN EUROPE SUPPOSED TO BE OTHER THAN DARWINIAN?

The economic logic of European integration is now directly confronting nationalistic sentiments in the hearts and souls of Europeans. It's becoming clear that nationalism resonates more deeply. That is the stuff of our patriotic life, fragments from our history that we use to shore up our present and point to our future. To discard them is to discard part of our mental and moral makeup.

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THE TURD BLOSSOMS:

Perched safely on the sidelines, he also dodged the Republican disaster in November 2008. At the center of that debacle, presidential candidate Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) distanced himself from outside political action committees and accepted public financing, a decision that had the effect of limiting what he could spend in his race against Obama. The Democrat turned down public money, revealed himself to be a fundraising dervish, and outspent his opponent by nearly two-to-one. Rove watched carefully. "After seeing their success and recognizing liberal groups and unions would systematically spend hundreds of millions of dollars every cycle," he says, some on the right "decided to create an enduring entity as a counterbalance." Those entities are the Crossroads groups.

Rove's return to the arena coincided with a major campaign-finance ruling by the Supreme Court. It irritates Rove that Obama has succeeded in crafting the conventional wisdom on Citizens United. According to Obama's account, a 5-4 conservative judicial pronouncement liberated a cabal of zillionaires and corporations to launch a hostile takeover of American politics. In his State of the Union Address in January 2010, the president blamed the justices, some of whom were seated before him, for empowering "America's most powerful interests, or worse ... foreign entities" to "bankroll" elections. Television cameras caught Justice Samuel Alito mouthing the words, "Not true."

Rove agrees with Alito. Obama's bit about "foreign entities" giving to campaigns was flat wrong; that remains illegal. Citizens United did clarify that corporations have a First Amendment right to political speech in the form of spending for advocacy. The majority tossed out an important 1990 precedent and invalidated certain legislative restrictions on how and when companies and unions can deploy political dollars. Spending has increased dramatically in the wake of Citizens United, much to the advantage of Republicans, and yet the notion that the ruling sparked a brand new conservative bonanza is misleading. "The left," Rove notes, "pioneered the use of 527s and 501(c)(4)s years ago, spending millions of dollars to influence public opinion and the policy landscape, on issues spanning the environment to the Iraq War. Drawing on their example, Crossroads was being planned before Citizens United, and would exist with or without Citizens United."

A quick look at campaign-finance history illustrates what he means. Secret contributions and sundry other corrupt actions culminating in the Watergate scandal led to reform legislation in the mid-1970s. Before the ink had dried on the new rules, the Supreme Court intervened in 1976, in Buckley v. Valeo, to remind lawmakers that the First Amendment complicates any inclination to limit political expression. The upshot was a problematic system that curbed contributions to candidates in the interest of reducing quid pro quo corruption, but encouraged open-ended expenditures in the name of free speech. Cue the K Street loophole artists.

By the 1990s labor unions and companies had perfected the "soft money" gambit, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to political parties, rather than particular candidates. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as McCain-Feingold, was supposed to wall off soft money. In doing so, the law inadvertently redirected the cash flow to 527s, such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to which conservatives could give unlimited amounts to assail the war record of Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.). Another alternative was the 501(c)(4) social-welfare group devoted to issue advocacy, which did not require the disclosure of donors' names. Six years before Citizens United, the basic technology for an outside-spending arms race was in place.

In 2004 a 527 called America Coming Together led a $200 million initiative, partly financed by Soros and Lewis, to unseat George W. Bush. One reason many forget this liberal financial surge is that it failed; Kerry, a diffident campaigner, lost by 34 electoral votes. Republicans, for their part, didn't fully appreciate the advent of outside groups because they were lulled by Bush's talent for gathering direct-contribution checks with the assistance of "bundlers," the dedicated supporters and lobbyists who aggregate individual donations.

Rove and his consultant friend Ed Gillespie--now a paid senior adviser to the Romney campaign--had warned from the inception of McCain-Feingold that it would lead to problems for Republicans. Borrowing from the chorus of the classic Sonny Curtis song, Gillespie joked that as RNC chair for the 2004 election cycle, he "fought the law, but the law won." In 2009, Rove and Gillespie decided it was time for Republicans to stop whining and turn the tables. [...]

The word that Dowd and many other Rove contributors want amplified is not the tear-the-walls-down Tea Party howl. If there is an establishment Republican alternative to the Tea Partiers, it is embodied by Rove. In October 2010 he used an interview by the Telegraph in London to question Sarah Palin's suitability for the White House. He helped marginalize Christine O'Donnell, the right-wing senatorial aspirant from Delaware with a colorful financial history and a past interest in witchcraft. O'Donnell, Rove told Fox viewers, "does not evince the characteristics of rectitude and truthfulness and sincerity and character that the voters are looking for." She lost in November 2010 to Democrat Chris Coons.

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ONE HOPES, FOR MR. MARTEL'S SAKE...

...that they don't mess up his book.

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JUST BECAUSE THE LAST DOMINOES HAVEN'T FALLEN DOESN'T MEAN THE WoT ISN'T OVER:

Bashar al-Assad's military machine is on the brink of logistical meltdown and collapse, because it lacks petrol and food, and is having problems resupplying its soldiers, according to a Syrian general who has defected to the opposition.

Much has been made of the Syrian military's supposed superiority over the opposition, but General Mohammad Al-Zobi told the Guardian: "The benzine is nearly finished. They are running out of rockets. There is scarcely any bread or water for the soldiers."

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AND THEN THEY WONDER WHY WE DON'T LISTEN TO THEM (profanity alert*):

Boldly striding into this theatre of tensions is Sheila Heti's new book "How Should a Person Be?", which shares many of the same concerns as "Girls." Heti's novel documents the unconventional and difficult friendship between two Canadian women, a young playwright named Sheila and a visual artist named Margaux. As in "Girls," Heti's characters don't spend much of their time talking about men. Instead, they discuss ideas: art, creativity, truth, beauty, freedom. There is intimacy in Heti's book, yes, but also death--spiritual, artistic, emotional. Even more telling, the friendship portrayed in it is a love affair--a platonic one, but a love affair all the same. "I could never find fault in someone for choosing not to be my friend," Margaux tells Sheila early on. "But I was disappointed not to have a girl, after searching high and low."

Heti is said to have based the book on her real-life friendship with the artist Margaux Williamson, and her style is playful and self-conscious--a mishmash of first-person narrative, dialogue in the style of a play, and e-mail messages. It has an unfinished, brazen quality that is both captivating and, sometimes, glib. As James Wood wrote in a review of the book for The New Yorker, Heti seems to insist on a certain kind of superficiality: she reproduces all her characters' most pretentious, cynical, and self-absorbed thoughts. ("We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time," Sheila muses.) But this superficiality is married with seriousness and knowingness. ("I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing--and my life, and my self--into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew," she explains in a passage about creativity and art.) In fact, in focussing so closely on the ostensibly frivolous conversations between (and within) her characters, Heti seems to be questioning the idea of superficiality altogether.

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BETTER CARS FOR HAPPIER PEOPLE:

 In its impartial study, J.D. Power noted that the 2012 Chevrolet Volt was awarded a maximum of five stars for its Overall Performance and Design, Features and Instrument Panel, Style, Performance and Comfort.  [...]

With its win in the compact segment, the 2012 Chevrolet Volt helped Chevrolet win the highest number of segment awards, with the 2012 Avalanche and 2012 Sonic also receiving the top award in the large pickup and subcompact car segments respectively.

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Hear the band perform a career-spanning set at the 2012 Newport Folk Festival, recorded live on Friday, July 27 in Newport, R.I.

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UGLY ENOUGH WITHOUT ONE:

Among the acts of consideration I have to thank my parents for, circumcision ranks very high. I mean no disrespect to the uncircumcised, but who the hell would want to look like that? I take the point that beauty doesn't trump all other considerations - a German court recently ruled that circumcision was criminal bodily harm - but when did anyone look at a foreskin and say, "Now that's what I call a thing of beauty"? And when did anybody who didn't have that unsightly otiosity wish he did? I know there are some out there in crazy.com who rage against what was done to them, but that's zealotry talking - parent hatred, Jew and Muslim hatred, sentimentality about the rights of boy babies and their putzes - not aesthetics.

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DO YOU SUPPOSE THE CABANA BOY EVEN KNOWS...:

For decades, the special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom has been the cornerstone of leadership in the world. [...]

[President Obama] appreciates the importance of an alliance, particularly with a country like Great Britain. From intelligence sharing to political, military and economic cooperation, our two nations have become even closer under the Obama Administration. Both of our nations gain from this relationship.

Unfortunately, Governor Romney is taking a precarious path with respect to our relations with Great Britain and our other European allies. His rhetoric suggests that he would ignore the counsel of our friends around the world. On the key issues of our time, Gov. Romney would split the partnership that this administration, and others before it, worked so hard to build.

In January, he told supporters in New Hampshire that, "I want you to remember when our White House reflected the best of who we are, not the worst of what Europe has become." Gov. Romney has also called European militaries "second-tier," even though many of them have been fighting right beside us in Afghanistan since the beginning.

But it's not just what Governor Romney says; it's also what he promises to do as president. In the Governor's foreign policy proposals, he repeatedly diverges from the path that President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron have forged together.

As Gov. Romney lands in London this week, he would be wise to realize that our European alliances are not something that holds us back. 

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JUST LIE TO US:

What Is the Nocebo Effect? (Joseph Stromberg, 7/23/12, Smithsonian)

Last week, researchers from the Technical University of Munich in Germany published one of the most thorough reviews to date on the nocebo effect. Breaking down 31 empirical studies that involved the phenomenon, they examined the underlying biological mechanisms and the problems it causes for doctors and researchers in clinical practice. Their conclusion: although perplexing, the nocebo effect is surprisingly common and ought to be taken into consideration by medical professionals on an everyday basis.

In many of the experiments they analyzed, the suggestion or expectation of pain brought about significant increases in the amount of negative side effects experienced by participants. For example, in one study, 50 people who suffered from chronic back pain were given a flexibility test. Half were told beforehand that the test might cause some pain, while the others were not. Afterward, the first group reported a significantly higher amount of pain, despite enduring the exact same procedure.

In another experiment, the drug finasteride was administered to help relieve symptoms of prostate disease, and half the participants were told that it could cause erectile dysfunction, while the other half was kept in the dark. Forty-four percent of the first group reported that they'd experienced ED, compared with just 15 percent of the uninformed group.

The nocebo effect might even be powerful enough to kill. In one case study, researchers noted an individual who attempted to commit suicide by swallowing 26 pills. Although they were merely placebo tablets without a biological mechanism to harm the patient even at such a high dose, he experienced dangerously low blood pressure and required injections of fluids to be stabilized, based solely on the belief that the overdose of tablets would be deadly. After it was revealed that they were sugar pills, the symptoms went away quickly.

The researchers suggest that doctors reconsider conventional beliefs about pain management to avoid magnifying painful side effects. It's commonly thought that properly preparing a patient for pain--for example, "this might hurt quite a bit"--is the best way to minimize anxiety, so the patient knows what to expect. But one experiment analyzed showed that the very words used by a doctor before injecting radiographic substances affected the amount of pain experienced. The more frequently the words "sting," "burn," "hurt," "bad" and "pain" were said, the more discomfort felt by patients.

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THE ENTIRE COMPANY WAS BUILT ON THE THEFT OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY...:

The story of Microsoft's lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.

By the dawn of the millennium, the hallways at Microsoft were no longer home to barefoot programmers in Hawaiian shirts working through nights and weekends toward a common goal of excellence; instead, life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success.

In those years Microsoft had stepped up its efforts to cripple competitors, but--because of a series of astonishingly foolish management decisions--the competitors being crippled were often co-workers at Microsoft, instead of other companies. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses--such as e-book and smartphone technology--were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.

That is the portrait of Microsoft depicted in interviews with dozens of current and former executives, as well as in thousands of pages of internal documents and legal records.

"They used to point their finger at IBM and laugh," said Bill Hill, a former Microsoft manager. "Now they've become the thing they despised."

Today, Microsoft stands at a precipice, an all-or-nothing opportunity that may be Ballmer's last chance to demonstrate to Wall Street that he is the right man with the right plan to lead the sprawling enterprise into the future. With Surface, the recently unveiled tablet, Windows 8, Windows Phone 7, Windows Server 2012, and Xbox 720 in the offing, he could be on the verge of proving his strategies--including last year's controversial, $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. But whether these succeed or not, executives say, the Microsoft of old, the nimble player that captured the passions of a generation of techies and software engineers, is dead and gone.

"I see Microsoft as technology's answer to Sears," said Kurt Massey, a former senior marketing manager. "In the 40s, 50s, and 60s, Sears had it nailed. It was top-notch, but now it's just a barren wasteland. And that's Microsoft. The company just isn't cool anymore."

Cool is what tech consumers want. Exhibit A: today the iPhone brings in more revenue than the entirety of Microsoft.

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WHICH IS TO UNDERESTIMATE W AND THE UR AND OVERESTIMATE IKE:

Greatness comes from winning cosmic conflicts like World War II and the Cold War, and at present we are fortunate not to be engaged in any and therefore not to need a great leader. (Remember, in this connection, the wisdom of Calvin Coolidge: "It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man.") In ordinarily messy, disorganized times like these, success in foreign policy means navigating treacherous currents safely, avoiding major mistakes, leaving the country stronger than you found it, and hopefully nudging the world forward a little. By that measure, Obama has done well.

An exception was his naïvely conceived and clumsily executed run at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His rookie flailing set back the peace process (such as it was) and made him look like a doormat. But he learned from his mistakes. And consider the positive side of the ledger.

Ending two wars. He has closed out the war in Iraq on acceptable terms. He is on course to do the same thing in Afghanistan. Ending two wars is a big deal.

Stabilizing relations with Russia. Russia-U.S. relations were in a tailspin when Obama entered office. Thanks to the Russia "reset," they are stable today. Russia could certainly be more cooperative on Iran and Syria, but it is quietly helping us in Afghanistan (where it could instead be a major irritant) and generally not putting bite behind its bark.

Stabilizing relations with China. The administration built enough capital with Beijing to smuggle a prominent dissident out of the country with barely a diplomatic ripple--an extraordinary thing, if you think about it. Hardly less extraordinary is that the administration's "Asia pivot," which is really a move to counterbalance China, is also clicking smoothly into place.

Isolating Iran. Partly thanks to Obama's show of willingness to negotiate, Europe is joining with the U.S. in boycotting Iranian oil, a remarkable show of solidarity behind exceptionally tough sanctions. Sanctions may yet fail, but Obama's patient approach has weakened Iran's position and built a consensus that will make further steps more effective. Oh, and Israel hasn't bombed Iran and Hezbollah hasn't bombed Israel.

Strengthening America's brand. In Europe and most of the rest of the world (Muslim countries being important exceptions), the United States is significantly more favorably regarded than when he took office. That is bankable soft power.

Prosecuting the war on terror. Obama has been so successful at continuing and refining the most effective elements of Bush's counterterrorism policy, while taming its provocative excesses, that Republicans don't even want to raise the issue. Pinch me.

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THE TEMPLATE:

Since the largest portion of our state budget is aid to local governments, we dramatically lowered state aid payments. But our collective-bargaining changes provided a way for state and local governments to more than offset these reductions with savings from pensions and health insurance premium contributions, changes in work rules that allowed bidding out health insurance, reductions in overtime abuses, and overall reform.

These changes saved the hardworking taxpayers more than $1 billion, helped lower property taxes for the first time in 12 years on a median-valued home and turned a budget deficit into a surplus. Wisconsin has a great story to tell about reform.

As I travel to New York City this week to meet with each of the national bond-rating agencies, I am actually looking forward to reporting on our positive progress.

During the past 18 months, we stopped the raid on the transportation and patient compensation funds and dramatically took on the deficit with long-term, structural reforms that allow both state and local governments to balance budgets for years to come. In fact, for the first time in Wisconsin's history, we've set aside money for the rainy day fund in back-to-back fiscal years. In other words, we thought more about the next generation than we did about the next election.

According to a recent Pew Center study, Wisconsin is the only state pension system in the country that is fully funded, and we are one of only seven states that cover retiree health benefit obligations at 25 percent or higher. Last year, Moody's called our budget credit positive.

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THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR:

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AH, THE RACIAL HYGIENE TROPE...:

Israel faces a demographic threat to the Jewish state from its fast-growing Arab population, even without a deluge of African refugees with no religious ties or political loyalties to the country. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that "60,000 infiltrators are liable to become 600,000 and lead to the eradication of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state."

Infiltrators is an unsettling word but mild compared to others' rhetoric. Knesset member Miri Regev of Netanyahu's Likud Party termed the Africans a "cancer in our body" -- and, although she later apologized, a poll found 52 percent of Jewish Israelis agreeing with that ugly sentiment.

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TERRORISM IS NOT UNJUSTIFIED NOR JUSTIFIED BY THE ACT...:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the United States on Wednesday of justifying terrorism against the Syrian government and berated Western nations he said had not condemned attacks that killed top members of Syrian President Bashar Assad's inner circle.

Referring to what he said were comments by US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland indicating such attacks were not surprising given the Syrian government's conduct, Lavrov said, "This is a direct justification of terrorism."

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WHY THE WORKPLACE SHOULD BE MORE LIKE KINDERGARTEN:

 Few of us enjoy jobs that allow an afternoon siesta, but we'd probably all be better off if they did-including our employers.  According to new research, all we'd really need is a solid 10-minute power nap to boost our focus and productivity.

Researchers tested four nap time spans: 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes (and a control group that didn't nap).  They then tested participants across several benefits for three hours after the nap.  Here's a summary of the results:

The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.

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NOTHING WRONG WITH BEING HAUNTED BY THE fALL (profanity alert):

[T]he underpinnings of our discontent are almost uncannily reminiscent of those that marked all our other modern waves of American declinism. Witness an essay by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington written in 1988 for the journal Foreign Affairs on the question "The U.S.--Decline or Renewal?" The proximate crisis of declinist panic then was the October 1987 stock-market crash and the economic rise of Japan. Surveying that era's own blizzard of declinist lit, led by the historian Paul Kennedy's best-selling The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Huntington compiled an inventory of woes that can be found in most of the 2012 sequels: America was losing its competitive edge, piling up trade and fiscal deficits, declining in growth, and falling behind in education, research, and development. And, as Huntington pointed out, the declinist panic of the late eighties was the fifth in a mere three decades--following the "Sputnik moment" of 1957-58, the economic rise of Europe and Japan in the late sixties, the opec oil shock of 1973, and the cornucopia of woes of the later seventies (Watergate, defeat in Vietnam, the Iranian hostage crisis). Since then, the spin-and-dry cycles of morning and mourning in America have repeated themselves like clockwork, with scant variation from the Huntington template. Hardly had Bill Clinton celebrated peace and a booming economy in his 2000 State of the Union valedictory than the tech bubble burst and the market crashed once more, soon to be followed by 9/11 and the long "Why do they hate us?" funk of the American soul.

In the post-World War II years of American might, it is hard to find a sustained period when America was not fretting about its status in the world and its ongoing or potential decline. That includes those golden years apotheosized in Coming Apart, That Used to Be Us, and The Andy Griffith Show, when rising affluence and the Cold War ostensibly unified the country around core values. It's not just Mad Men that has exposed the romantic view of the fifties and early sixties as a golden age to be something of a sham. In her revisionist 2008 excavation of that period, Inventing the "American Way," the historian Wendy Wall shows how America's mid-century political and business Establishments were sufficiently frightened about the prospect of disunity that together they manufactured an American consensus and sold it as a brand, the American Way.

The American Way was promoted in every medium available, from billboards to Superman comics. One representative stunt in 1947 was the Freedom Train, a red-white-and-blue locomotive christened the Spirit of 1776 and charged with barnstorming the nation to exhibit a bounty of historic and patriotic documents. The project was promoted by Harry Truman's attorney general, Tom Clark, financed by major corporations, and packaged by movie and advertising executives. The mission was to demonstrate to one and all that America "was unified, consensual and inclusive"--or, in other words, a nation adhering to "the vital center," a term that would be coined by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1949. The launch was celebrated in Philadelphia to capitalize on the 160th anniversary of the Constitutional Convention, with an Independence Hall jamboree of patriotic songs and speeches broadcast on NBC. But though the train would chug on for sixteen months, it was nearly thrown off-track by one dispute after another. Some of the exhibition documents--including copies of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator--were dumped. The Gettysburg Address survived the cut, but by being paired with an 1865 address by Robert E. Lee. Attempts to permit white and black viewers in the South to mix freely were met with resistance, with the consequence that at a few stops, the Emancipation Proclamation was exhibited to segregated audiences. Even the choice of "freedom" as a rubric was a carefully considered avoidance of the more contentious "democracy."

A decade later, just as Mayberry was being readied for prime time, fears of decline were ratcheting up further. Bipartisan panels of elite leaders convened by the Rockefeller brothers in the late fifties--ranging from liberal stalwarts like Adolf Berle and John Gardner to conservative grandees like Henry Luce and Henry Kissinger--published their collected findings in a 1961 report titled Prospect for America. "The number and the depth of the problems we face suggests that the very life of our free society may be at stake" was the opening sentence. This history has been either forgotten--or willfully blocked out--to such an extent that a period marked by rising civil-rights conflict is now routinely trotted out by some 2012 declinists as a Platonic baseline of American unity, centrism, and fairness against which today's America can be found so sorely wanting. That nostalgia for what never was tells us more about the roots of the current declinist panic than any of the pie charts and graphs used to track America's present statistical erosion.

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OUCH:

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FRACTURE FASTER:

[I]t remains uncertain whether a rebel victory would bring better times, for Syria will have to struggle with the legacy of the regime. Assad and his father have been in power for over 40 years. They both described themselves as secular, but that did not stop them filling key political, military, and economic positions with Alevi Muslims - the same Shiite minority that they belong to.

It's true that some members of the government came from the Sunni or Christian elites, but the center of power stayed firmly in Alevi hands. And the brutality with which they defended this position is likely to have woken a thirst for revenge among the regime's many enemies. Should the Assad regime fall, it is likely that there will be a few nights of bloody reprisals.

Margret Johannsen, political scientist at the University of Hamburg's Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH), says it is very likely that the violence will continue if and when Assad falls. She points out that the country is split along many ethnic and religious lines - a circumstance that will not be changed a successful coup.

If the Assad regime does fall, it would be crunch time for the two major opposition groups - the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the National Coordination Committee (NCC). These two blocs claim that together they control over 90 percent of Assad's opponents, and both have declared they will represent all of them, regardless of ethnic or religious background, if they get to form a new government.

An SNC spokesman - who wishes to remain anonymous - said the council intends to set up a government of national unity. He added that since administrative and government experience would be essential, the SNC would work together with representatives from the old regime - as long as they are not suspected of any crimes.

"We will not make the same mistake as in Iraq, namely allowing society to fracture again," the spokesman added. "We will avoid that mistake. If we keep to this plan, we will be sure of setting up a new government."

But bringing the population to put their trust in a national unity government is such an immense task that it would require no less than a cultural revolution. 

The mistake in Iraq, though noble, was to try to prevent fracture in hopes of instant revolution.

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THANKS, BARRY:

Despite concerted Democratic attacks on his business record, Republican challenger Mitt Romney scores a significant advantage over President Obama when it comes to managing the economy, reducing the federal budget deficit and creating jobs, a national USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

 AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says he fears that Republicans would do to labor unions at a national level what they've sought achieve in the states should Mitt Romney win the presidency and the GOP control Congress come next January.

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SERVING KIDS INSTEAD OF STAFF:

 With a judge's ruling last week in Southern California, a group of parents has become the first in the country to take over their children's failing public school after pulling a "parent trigger."

California enacted this reform as an unprecedented accountability measure in 2010. It allows parents of children in persistently failing schools to force dramatic change through petition drives. If a majority of parents at a school sign a petition, they can close that school, shake up its staff, or convert it to a charter.

At least that's the idea. But implementing the law requires some minimum cooperation from the local school establishment, which in California has resisted parent trigger from day one. That's how the parents of Desert Trails Elementary School ended up in court. [...]

" As Judge Malone ruled, school officials can't disregard a trigger drive simply "because in their judgment, converting the school into a charter school is unwise, inappropriate, or unpopular with District employees or classroom teachers."

The ruling effectively hands Desert Trails to the parents, ordering the district out of their way as the judge says they can "immediately begin the process of soliciting and selecting charter school proposals." This represents a potentially revolutionary power shift. For all the PTA meetings and solemn assurances from superintendents and union leaders that parent input into public schools is sacred, the ability of parents to force change has typically been nil.

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BY THEIR TIMES SHALL YOU KNOW THEM:

Dr Tucker says you can see a marked difference between today and the bad old days when there were no tests for blood doping or drugs such as EPO.

"In the late 1990s and early 2000s if you were going to be competitive and win the Tour de France you would have to be able to cycle between 6.4 and 6.7 watts per kilogram at the end of a day's stage.

"What we are seeing now, in the last three or four years, is that the speed of the front of the peloton [of] men like Bradley Wiggins, Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali, is about 10% down compared to that generation and now the power output at the front is about 6W/kg."

He says that they should actually be getting faster, not slower, because of advances in technology and sports science.

He thinks that what we are seeing now is a human race as opposed to the pharmaceutical races we saw in the past.

"The physiological implications of riding 6.5W/kg are for me, as a physiologist, beyond belief. What they are doing now is physiologically plausible."

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BRILLIANT:

Many people call Carson Letterman by his nickname, "Late Night."

He certainly put on a show on Saturday, this one coming on the mound and ending just before noon. He had an all-star lineup helping him out, but he was in the spotlight.

Letterman pitched a one-hitter with 11 strikeouts to lead the Costa Mesa National Little League Majors Division All-Stars to a 1-0 victory against Costa Mesa American in the first game of the best-of-three series to win the Mayor's Cup.

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PLUS, IT'S INEXPENSIVE AND WICKED EASY TO TAKE CARE OF:

Men: Do you want to project an aura of confidence, strength and overall masculinity? You could experiment with testosterone supplements, or study the swagger of Don Draper during a Mad Men marathon.

Or you could just shave your head.

Three newly published studies "provide consistent evidence that a shaved scalp is associated with dominance," according to Albert Mannes of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, he reports that, at least in U.S. culture, a lack of hair connotes a forceful, assertive personality.

Guys opt for the "shaved style" because "it looks sharp and intimidating," according to a style columnist for the Ask Men website. While "sharp" is in the eye of the beholder, Mannes' research suggests "intimidating" is right on the mark.

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NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

If you spent enough time in the dark ages before they were ubiquitous, you've probably got a sense of the sheer number of physical objects which your phone replaced. But have you ever tried listing all of them? You might be surprised at just how long that list can grow. Here's mine...

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INTERESTING JUST TO NOTE...:

...how much more comfortable he is in his own skin than either of the guys running now.

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INTERESTING JUST TO NOTE...:

...how much more comfortable he is in his own skin than either of the guys running now.

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WHICH IS WHY IT SELLS TICKETS:

The real joke, as Rush might have learned if he'd crammed his posterior into a theater seat before venting, is that The Dark Knight Rises is one of the most deeply conservative movies to come out of Hollywood in years.

Understand, I mean "conservative" in the traditional, more or less honorable sense that Rush and his fellow napalm-eaters have done their best to make obsolete. To a large extent, that's built right into the source material. To much grimmer effect than his rival, Superman--all that sunshine palaver about "the American way," feh--Batman has always been the guardian of a social order against chaos, with a pretty dour view of unbridled license and plenty of pessimism about humanity's prospects for improvement. That may be why the 1960s TV version boomers loved had to be campy, since presenting Batman with his dignity intact would have left Dragnet's Jack Webb looking like some damned hippie-lover. But Christopher Nolan, the director of TDKR and its two predecessors--2005's Batman Begins and 2008's mega-smash The Dark Knight--has hardly been shy about bringing out the saga's implicit political philosophy.

If The Dark Knight ended up as the ultimate pop-culture reflection of George W. Bush's Global War on Terror--and it did, from the way audiences couldn't help seeing Heath Ledger's destruction-bent Joker as Osama bin Laden to Batman's harsh "the ends justify the means" moral ambiguity--the new movie ups the ante, in a way. Lacking even the Joker's twisted charisma, Tom Hardy's Bane is about as far from a Romney stand-in as could be imagined; he's a sullen, lower-depths menace, with a musculature seldom encountered outside Soviet-era sculpture gardens. Though his ultimate plan is to blow up Gotham--c'mon, they all want to blow up Gotham--he means to torment a captive Batman first by turning the city into a stew of every conservative's worst nightmares.

It's not exactly an accident that the first place Bane wreaks havoc is the Stock Exchange. Declaring war on privilege with a rabble-rousing slogan of "Equality!," he incites mobs to throw the rich out of their fancy homes and take over. Moscow-style show trials are held to condemn anyone who objects. It's a pastiche of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, urban rioters, Bolshevik terror, and punk nihilism, incidentally letting Nolan eat his cake and have it too: In practice, anarchy and totalitarianism haven't been known to mix well. The point is that we're seeing all of Batman's fears--not to mention those of his investment-capitalist millionaire alter ego--mashed up to demonic (and demotic) effect.

In other words, those who ought to be most offended by the movie are Occupy Wall Street's 99 percenters and their sympathizers. 

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BUYING STOCK IN MITT:

Related articles

• Obama Trails Romney Again in Battle for Campaign Cash (nytimes.com)

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THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

"If this trend continues, it is possible that future [polar bears] throughout most of their range may be forced to spend increasingly more time on land, perhaps even during the breeding season, and therefore come into contact with brown bears more frequently," the researchers write in results published today (July 23) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Recently, wild hybrids and even second-generation offspring have been documented in the Northern Beaufort Sea of Arctic Canada where the ranges of brown bears and [polar bears] appear to overlap, perhaps as a recent response to climatic changes," they write.

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"INCREASINGLY REMOTE":

House races often don't start getting attention until after Labor Day. But with the presidential contest sucking the air out of the political environment and defining the electoral landscape, House candidates may find they have an even harder time than usual defining themselves and their opponents.

That means the existing trajectory of the fight for the House may be harder and harder to change as Labor Day approaches, creating a growing problem for House Democrats who continue to insist that the House is "in play."

Democratic strategists need a dramatic shift in the House playing field if they are going to have any chance of netting the 25 seats they need to regain a majority in the House of Representatives. And that outcome looks increasingly remote.

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EVEN IF THE PRC HAS DEVOLVED INTO NOTHING BUT A KLEPTOCRACY...:

As the cyanide took effect, Neil Percival Heywood must have looked around at the tacky photos of trees and waterfalls on the mustard-coloured wallpaper and wondered how he ever got involved in the vicious world of Chinese politics.

The dingy room at the Lucky Holiday Hotel - a three-star hilltop resort in the Chinese metropolis of Chongqing where Heywood was found dead on November 15 last year - was a long way from his childhood in a middle-class London suburb and his education at Harrow, the elite private school attended by Winston Churchill and Lord Byron. Although he had become increasingly worried about his involvement with one of China's most powerful political families, and had seen enough to know how they dealt with those who crossed them, he thought it very unlikely they would kill a foreigner.

Heywood could not have imagined that his murder would spark the biggest Chinese political scandal in at least two decades and expose an elite power struggle that has shaken the ruling Communist party to its core. After spending nearly half his 41 years living in China, mostly working as a small-time business consultant and fixer, his death in the secluded, run-down guest house was blamed on "excessive alcohol consumption" by the Chongqing police.

His remains were quickly cremated, without an autopsy, on the authorisation of his family. According to people familiar with the matter, Heywood's Chinese wife Wang Lulu was pressured by the Chongqing authorities to agree to the quick cremation and was so distraught when she arrived in the city that she sent her brother with a British consular official to identify the body. Almost every single staff member at the Lucky Holiday Hotel was replaced over the following month and all current employees have been warned not to discuss the incident with anyone.

Back in the UK, Heywood's sister, elderly mother and friends were told he died of a heart attack, as his father Peter had in 2004 at the age of 63. At a memorial on December 19, in St Mary's Church in Battersea, London, the Heywood family was joined by many of Neil's old Harrovian schoolmates. "At least some of us were puzzled and concerned by the circumstances of Neil's death and the story that he'd died of a heart attack," says one person who attended. "Those of us that knew who he was connected to in China felt something more sinister had happened."

The Lucky Holiday Hotel was a favourite spot for Gu Kailai, wife of Bo Xilai, a member of the elite 25-member politburo of the Communist party and the man who ruled like a king over Chongqing, a city-province with a population of 33 million and a land area the size of Austria. For Heywood, virtually all of his modest success as a business consultant for British companies in China stemmed from his 15-year relationship with the Bo-Gu family and it was Gu Kailai who arranged for him to come to Chongqing and stay at the forlorn, mist-shrouded compound last November. It is here that she is alleged to have murdered him using potassium cyanide, reportedly administered in a drink with the help of a household orderly and bodyguard named Zhang Xiaojun. The government announcement on April 10 of her detention on suspicion of "intentional homicide", and her husband Bo Xilai's suspension from all his posts because of "serious discipline violations", sent shockwaves through Chinese politics.

The death of an obscure British consultant had brought down one of China's most powerful politicians, a man who had been favoured to ascend to the ruling nine-member Communist party politburo standing committee at a once-in-a-decade power transition later this autumn. While Gu and Bo remain in detention awaiting an official verdict, their downfall has also revealed a deep rift among the top echelons of the Communist party and debunked the idea that authoritarian China has managed to institutionalise an orderly succession process in the absence of democracy. But Heywood's suspicious death would have almost definitely remained a mystery and Bo would still be a rising political star if it wasn't for the actions of one man - Bo's once-loyal and fanatical chief of police in Chongqing, Wang Lijun.

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WILL THE LAST ONE OFF THE UNICORN RIDE PLEASE SHUT OFF THE TELEPROMPTER:

As a Democrat and a staunch support of Barack Obama, I am completely disgusted by his campaign. Are we talking about the President of the United States? Are we talking about a principled man who has boosted our ideal for a fair and equitable America? Does this have anything to do with the American people?

1. A harassing campaign

Everybody takes turns to bombard us with e-mails, phone calls to chip in for one reason or the other. Even those of us who asked to only receive selective information.

To that "presidential" harassment one needs to add what the Democratic Party does: strangely enough they only call and e-mail to collect money. Never to tell us what are the important causes for the Party.

Last but not least, the individual candidates do the same: we have not heard from them either for the previous four years.

This creates an impression of frenetic nervousness and not the strength that we expect from the President and incumbent candidate.

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WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED...:

When Walker introduced his so-called budget repair bill in February 2011, he argued that the biggest beneficiaries of his plan would be cities, towns and school districts, which would gain the flexibility to cut costs without having to negotiate every change in compensation or work rules with local unions. His legislation specifically eliminated collective bargaining by government workers for benefits and required greater contributions from them toward pensions.

How local officials employed those changes to cut costs proved revealing. The state's teachers union, Wisconsinites learned, had used its power to collectively bargain for healthcare benefits to demand that local school districts provide coverage through a nonprofit insurer affiliated with the union. Once the state ended bargaining on healthcare, school boards began competitively bidding out their health insurance.

By the opening of the new school year in September, just two months after the budget bill went into effect, 23 districts had rebid their contracts, saving $16 million, or an average of $211 per student. The MacIver Institute, a Madison-based think tank, estimated that if all the state's districts were able to negotiate similar deals once their contracts with the union-affiliated insurer expire, schools could save $186 million.

As mayor of Milwaukee, Barrett employed Walker's reforms before he knew he'd be facing the governor in the recall election. In mid-August 2011, barely a month after the changes went into effect, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the city would save as much as $36 million in its next budget from "healthcare benefit changes it didn't have to negotiate with unions" as a result of the new state legislation. When asked whether Walker's reforms should be credited for the savings, Barrett brushed aside the question and asserted that virtually everyone was in favor of having workers contribute more to their healthcare.

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SELF HATRED TURNED OUTWARD:

At every high school, college and school-safety conference I speak at, I hold up the journals left behind by the killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The audience is shocked at what they learn. Perpetrators of mass murder are usually nothing like our conceptions of them. They are nothing like a vision of pure evil. They are complicated.

Mr. Harris kept a sort of journal for an entire year, focused largely on his plan to blow up his school and mow down survivors with high-powered rifles. Mr. Klebold kept a more traditional journal for two years, spewing a wild array of contradictory teen angst and deep depression, grappling seriously with suicide from the very first page.

Audiences are never surprised by the journal of Mr. Harris. It's hate-hate-hate all the way through. He was a coldblooded psychopath, in the clinical use of that term. He had no empathy, no regard for human suffering or even human life.

Mr. Klebold's journal is the revelation. Ten pages are consumed with drawings of giant fluffy hearts. Some fill entire pages, others dance about in happy clusters, with "I LOVE YOU" stenciled across. He was ferociously angry. He had one primary target for his anger. Not jocks, but himself. What a loathsome creature he found himself. No friends, no love, not a soul who cared about him or what became of his miserable life. None of that is objectively true. But that's what he saw.

It's a common high school malady, taken to extremes. Psychologists have a simple term for this state: depression. That surprises a lot of people. Depressives look sad, but that is the view from the outside. Of course they're sad; they've probably gone their entire day getting berated relentlessly, by the single person in the world whose opinion they hold most dear -- themselves.

Psychologists describe depression as anger turned inward. When that anger is somehow turned around, and projected outward, watch out.

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WHAT ELSE DO THEY HAVE TO OFFER BUT MONEY?:

Unless fundraising picks up, the Obama campaign may enter the season's final stretch confronting hard choices: paring salaries, scaling back advertising or pulling out of swing states in a bid to control costs, these Democrats say.

The campaign of President Obama, shown above last week in Jacksonville, Fla., spent twice as much as that of Mitt Romney last month.

The president spent twice as much as Mr. Romney in June, as his campaign purchased more TV ads, paid more than twice as many employees and spent millions of dollars on public-opinion polls, federal records show.

June was the second month in a row that Mr. Obama's campaign dipped into the red, while the president was outraised by the Romney campaign.

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PRESCIENCE CAN NEVER BE FORGIVEN, IT SHOWS UP YOUR PEERS:

In her opposition to the European single currency and the ERM, history has confirmed a remarkable prescience. Mrs. Thatcher correctly predicted that a single currency could not simultaneously accommodate the likes of Germany and Greece -- countries she specifically named -- and that attempting to reconcile the two would lead to disaster for smaller nations: It will "devastate their inefficient economies," she warned a tentatively pro-euro chancellor, John Major, in 1990. Her staunch opposition within a divided party and her peremptory rejection of the views of those who disagreed with her cost her dearly politically, contributing to her downfall in 1990.

Her unilateral opposition to British involvement with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, too, helped to end her premiership. But on this question, as on so many others, history has been kinder to her than her party was. In 1992, as she was gearing up to give a speech to the Economic Club of New York that recommended Britain leave the ERM, the ERM collapsed and Britain withdrew. This rendered her remarks a victorious post-mortem. By chance, former chancellor Nigel Lawson's memoirs were released at around the same time and were being serialized in the Times. The memoirs contained a passage explaining how Mrs. Thatcher's opposition to the ERM had contributed to her downfall. At the time of her dramatic ouster in 1990, the conventional wisdom had been that her "obstinacy" and unwillingness to accommodate the views of her colleagues on matters European had done her in. Now her "poor judgment" looks like great wisdom.

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BUT FOR 9-11...:

Together with Laura Bush, he spent the July 4th week in Africa, where he helped build a wing on a hospital and refurbish a clinic to detect and treat cervical cancer. His jeans splattered with paint and with a baseball cap shielding his eyes from the sun, the former president said his work on global-health issues is a natural outgrowth of the freedom agenda he championed in Washington, noting with his characteristic bluntness: "One aspect of freedom is for people to be free from disease."

This was Bush's second trip to Africa since leaving office (Laura's third), and his emotional ties to the continent reach back to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that he put in place 10 years ago to help stop the transmission of the AIDS virus from mothers to children. It was transformative for Africa--and for also for Bush, who found a cause that he could take way beyond the White House, one that would become a building block in the next chapter of his life. [...]

The Clinton Global Initiative sets a very high bar for what a former president can accomplish. "He has great respect for the things Clinton does with his global initiative, the way he raises money and funds projects," says Tony Fratto, a former Bush deputy press secretary. "But he wanted to have the [Bush] institute be a laboratory and a platform for ideas in the four areas he considers really critical for the advancement of human progress--freedom, education, global health, and the economy." The interest in Africa, and in AIDS, has become a "family affair," says Fratto, noting that daughter Barbara founded a nonprofit, Global Health Corps, which focuses on Africa.

Bush presided this week over the launch of the institute's first book, The Four Percent Solution, an admittedly aspirational goal where various economists weigh in on what they would do in addition to extending the Bush tax cuts. The institute's programs carry forward Bush's signature proposals--there's a team "thoughtfully assessing, not judging" requests from states asking for waivers from No Child Left Behind. And there are the sports events that Bush holds to honor the servicemen and women wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The W-100" is a three-day mountain-bike ride every spring, and in October, Bush will host the second "Warrior Open," a golf tournament that recognizes the importance of golf as a rehabilitative tool. "It recognizes the war in a way that doesn't excite passion about the merits of his policies," says Pitney.

While unquestionably heartfelt on Bush's part, it avoids any re-opening of a policy debate about the wars on his watch. And that's the point. Freed of the office, Bush appears to be modeling his post-presidency after Bush 2000, the compassionate conservative, the reformer with results, the uniter and not the divider. 

Mark McKinnon, Bush's chief media adviser on that campaign, confirms Bush's return to those themes, describing him as "in a state of grace," grateful for the privilege of having served as president "and happy now to be off the radar screen and quietly doing good, meaningful, and compassionate work."

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WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED...:

To maintain living standards into old age we need roughly 20 times our annual income in financial wealth. If you earn $100,000 at retirement, you need about $2 million beyond what you will receive from Social Security. If you have an income-producing partner and a paid-off house, you need less. This number is startling in light of the stone-cold fact that most people aged 50 to 64 have nothing or next to nothing in retirement accounts and thus will rely solely on Social Security.

Even for those who know their "number" and are prepared for retirement (it happens, rarely), these conversations aren't easy. At dinner one night, a friend told me how much he has in retirement assets and said he didn't think he had saved enough. I mentally calculated his mortality, figured he would die sooner than he predicted, and told him cheerfully that he shouldn't worry. ("Congratulations!") But dying early is not the basis of a retirement plan.

 [...]

My plan calls for a way out that would create guaranteed retirement accounts on top of Social Security. These accounts would be required, professionally managed, come with a guaranteed rate of return and pay out annuities. This is a sensible way to get people to prepare for the future. You don't like mandates? Get real. Just as a voluntary Social Security system would have been a disaster, a voluntary retirement account plan is a disaster.

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Mr. Creamer's book on Ruth, "Babe: The Legend Comes to Life" -- which came out in 1974, the year Hank Aaron broke Ruth's career home run record -- was infused with details, including Ruth's pregame meal: three hot dogs. Roger Angell, writing in The New Yorker, said Ruth had "at last found the biographer he deserves in Robert Creamer," describing his writing as "swift and clear and stamped with a confirming intelligence."

In 1984, Mr. Creamer (pronounced kreemer) followed up with "Stengel: His Life and Times," a comprehensive look at the baseball legend who played for or managed all four major league teams from New York City. Mr. Creamer presented Stengel, who was often portrayed as an idiot savant, as a nuanced personality of wit and intelligence. But he did not neglect the "old perfessor's" knack for squeezing new possibilities out of the English language in a personalized dialect called Stengelese. One gem Mr. Creamer chose: "There comes a time in every man's life at least once, and I've had plenty of them."

Jonathan Yardley, writing in The Washington Post Book World, said the Stengel book was the second-best American sports biography. The best, he said, was the Ruth book.

• Walter Bingham: Robert Creamer was an SI original in more ways than one (sportsillustrated.cnn.com)

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NEVERMIND THIS RULING...:

FROM A HISTORICAL perspective, the ACA followed the path of least resistance to universal health insurance. Through most of the twentieth century, the model that many Democrats favored for health care was a tax-supported national program like Social Security or Medicare. They regarded private health insurance as inefficient and inequitable, and they saw Medicaid as providing only limited access to care. But after years of frustration, congressional Democrats pursued incremental reforms as a stopgap. During the 1980s, they worked with Republicans to extend Medicaid to pregnant women and young children in families with incomes up to 133 percent of the poverty level. These extensions, signed into law by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, began as options for states and were soon revised and became mandates, and the states all complied in expanding coverage. In the early '90s, as a counterproposal to President Bill Clinton's health plan, many prominent Republicans also endorsed a mandate on individuals to purchase health coverage as part of federal legislation to bolster private insurance and make coverage universal.

In short, both elements at issue in the legal challenge to the ACA--the individual mandate and the Medicaid expansion--had a Republican imprimatur. Serious questions had never been raised about their constitutionality. Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the ACA case is that the Court nearly overthrew the entire act on the basis of arguments that Congress had no reason to take seriously when it passed the legislation.

Strictly interpreted, the Court's new limit on the scope of the Commerce clause should not have far-reaching consequences. Bill McCollum, Florida's former attorney general, unintentionally made this point when he said after the decision, "Well, at least it's clear that they can't order you to buy broccoli"--as if anyone had proposed to do that. Under the Commerce clause, according to Roberts as well as the four right-wing justices, the federal government cannot set a minimum requirement for health insurance any more than it can require people to buy vegetables. But by arguing that the ACA's insurance mandate was a novel and radical departure in federal legislation, Roberts and the conservative dissenters appear to concede that their ruling doesn't apply to any other existing legal requirement. In fact, the only recent proposal to mandate purchase of a private product has come from conservatives who want to replace Social Security with a requirement to buy private annuities--an idea safe under Roberts's tax-powers argument. The real worry about his Commerce clause ruling is that it may only be one in a series of new and dubious lines drawn to hem in federal regulatory powers related to the economy, environment, and other concerns.

...the point is that the four justices who'd have been happy to ignore the Constitution to achieve their desired result may on other occasions be joined by the Chief and have a majority, which would give us a Brennan Court of the Right.

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WHAT'S MOST PECULIAR ABOUT IT...:

It's not hard to figure out why the 2012 presidential election is such a downer. The economy looks bleak and global instability is more dangerous than usual, but there's something else: Neither party is running a real politician for president. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney deploys the skills of persuasion and compromise that identify someone suited for politics.

Both are talented in various ways but they know little about braiding disparate sections of society, an essential element in political leadership. We find ourselves watching two uncomfortable men trying to be what they are not. The last time the parties produced such awkwardly inadequate champions was 1976, the year of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

...is that if Mr. Romney were to simply argue that Bain represented the ways in which modern economies have been made more efficient and made everyone more affluent, while Mr. Obama continued his attacks--based on the idea that the economy should create jobs at the expense of efficiency and wealth creation--we'd end up with the most ideologically consequential election since 1912.

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A TRUISM WITHIN A TRUISM:

IT IS NO COINCIDENCE that the same era should have given birth to Darwinism and to the aesthetic cult of decadence. The iron law of Darwinian evolution is that everything that exists strives with all its power to reproduce, to extend life into the future, and that every feature of every creature can be explained as an adaptation toward this end. For the artist to deny any connection with the enterprise of life, then, is to assert his freedom from this universal imperative; to reclaim negatively the autonomy that evolution seems to deny to human beings. It is only because we can freely choose our own ends that we can decide not to live for life, but for some other value that we posit. The artist's decision to produce spiritual offspring rather than physical ones is thus allied to the monk's celibacy and the warrior's death for his country, as gestures that deny the empire of mere life.

Darwin himself recognized that the human instinct to produce and admire art posed a challenge to the law of the survival of the fittest. He addressed the subject obliquely in 1871 in The Descent of Man, the work in which he advanced the idea of sexual selection as a complement to natural selection. Sexual selection was Darwin's ingenious way of explaining features of the natural world that seemed gratuitously wasteful, in a fashion that the parsimony of evolution ought not to have permitted. The classic example is the peacock's tail: why should the bird devote so much of its energy to producing a totally nonfunctional but amazingly decorative tail? It is the kind of natural splendor that, to earlier generations, might have spoken of the generosity of a Creator. The problem plagued Darwin: "The sight of a feather in the peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick."

The discovery of sexual selection solved the problem with brilliant economy. Such displays, Darwin realized, were male animals' ways of competing for the favor of the female. By this logic, the tiniest initial preference of the female for a conspicuous male--a peacock with a patterned tail, an elk with enlarged antlers--sparked a continual competition among males to become even more conspicuous. In every generation, a more beautiful peacock would leave more offspring than a homelier one, thus passing on the genes for beauty to his offspring, who would undergo the same kind of selection.

Animals produce beauty on their bodies; humans can also produce it in their artifacts. The natural inference, then, would be that art is a human form of sexual display, a way for males to impress females with spectacularly redundant creations. There is even an animal precedent for this: the Australian bowerbird, which attracts females by building an incredibly elaborate bower out of grass and twigs, and decorating it with colorful bits and the juice of crushed berries. The bower is a perfect example of an artwork whose explicit purpose is to promote reproduction.

For Darwin, the human sense of beauty was not different in kind from the bird's. "This sense," he remarked in The Descent of Man, "has been declared to be peculiar to man," but "when we behold a male bird elaborately displaying his graceful plumes or splendid colors before the female ... it is impossible to doubt that she admires the beauty of her male partner." Still, Darwin recognized that the human sense of beauty was mediated by "complex ideas and trains of thought," which make it impossible to explain in terms as straightforward as a bird's: "When ... it is said that the lower animals have a sense of beauty, it must not be supposed that such sense is comparable with that of a cultivated man, with his multiform and complex associated ideas."

In particular, Darwin suggests that it is impossible to explain the history or the conventions of any art by the general imperatives of evolution: "Many of the faculties, which have been of inestimable service to man for his progressive advancement, such as the powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, an undefined sense of beauty, a tendency to imitation, and the love of excitement or novelty, could hardly fail to lead to capricious changes of customs and fashions." Such changes are "capricious" in the sense that they are unpredictable from first principles. Put more positively, one might say that any given work of art can be discussed critically and historically, but not deduced from the laws of evolution.

This sensible reticence served both art and science well enough for more than a century after Darwin's death. But with the rise of evolutionary psychology, it was only a matter of time before the attempt was made to explain art in Darwinian terms. After all, if ethics and politics can be explained by game theory and reciprocal altruism, there is no reason why aesthetics should be different: in each case, what appears to be a realm of human autonomy can be reduced to the covert expression of biological imperatives. The first popular effort in this direction was the late Denis Dutton's much-discussed book The Art Instinct, which appeared in 2009.

For Dutton, the exposure of the Darwinian origins of art was meant to build a case against the excesses of postmodernism. If human aesthetic preferences--for representation in visual art, tonality in music, and narrative in literature--are the product of hundreds of generations of evolutionary selection, then it follows that art which rejects those preferences is doomed to irrelevance. In this sense, Dutton's Darwinism was aesthetically conservative: "Darwinian aesthetics," he wrote, "can restore the vital place of beauty, skill, and pleasure as high artistic values." Dutton's argument has recently been reiterated and refined by a number of new books, which do not necessarily share his aesthetic agenda or his artistic cultivation. But their appearance suggests that Darwinian aesthetics--and its more empirical cousin, neuroaesthetics--is growing quickly in confidence and appeal.

ON ITS FACE, the notion that the human instinct to make and appreciate art can be explained by evolution seems true, even a truism. 

Mr. Kirsch has given too much of the game away. Once you acknowledge that sexual selection was just invented as a way around the refusal of Nature to obey Darwinism you're left with nothing but truisms.

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GOING ALL THELMA AND LOUISE ON US:

In January, two fiscal time bombs planted by Congress are due to explode. On Jan. 1, all the Bush tax cuts expire, constituting a $400-billion-plus tax hike in 2013. The next day -- unless Congress agrees on a major deficit-reduction plan -- a fiscal discipline known as sequestration will slash about $100 billion a year from federal spending, divided between defense and nondefense.

Blanket repeal of the tax cuts and across-the-board spending reductions are both pretty bad ideas. Taken together they are a kind of grotesque, automated austerity program. Lawmakers of both parties are desperately seeking ways to evade some of the consequences. Republicans are more focused on sparing the defense budget, and Democrats are pressing to preserve the middle-class tax cuts.

Related articles

• Let Sequestration Happen (nationalinterest.org)
• Is That Supposed to Be a Threat?: (brothersjuddblog.com)
• Senate Democrats Propose Letting All Tax Cuts Expire (nytimes.com)
• Let Sequestration Happen (cato-at-liberty.org)
• Lawmakers signal deep 'fiscal cliff' deadlock in Congress (mercurynews.com)

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THAT'S A THEM PROBLEM:

Researchers from the French government took scans of men's brains during and after sex to monitor changes in their mental activity.

They found that the cerebral cortex, which governs conscious thought, switched off during orgasm.

Two other areas, the cingulate cortex and the amygdala, then sent a message to the rest of the brain telling it to remove all sexual desire, via the release of sleep-inducing chemicals including serotonin and opioids.

The findings may provide men with a helpful excuse to turn off the light and go to sleep, but they are unlikely to be welcomed by their partners who do not experience the same effect.

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NOTHING BUT ASSUMPTIONS:

To be fair to economists, there are two reasons why their forecasts are often likely to be wrong. The first is that humans are not inanimate objects; we change our behaviour and we watch the news. If every economist forecast a recession for 2013 and the predictions were widely publicised, businesses would cancel their investment programmes and consumers would start saving, not spending, for fear of losing their jobs. The recession would occur now, not next year.

Second, the economy is a complex mechanism with many working parts. Economists cannot run real-time experiments in the same way as scientists; operating one version of the economy with high interest rates and another with low rates, as a pharmacologist can offer one patient a new drug and another a placebo. There is no way of isolating the various factors that affect growth.

But there are more fundamental questions about the nature of the subject beyond the failure of economists to make accurate forecasts. Do economists have an accurate model of human motivation? Or do they assume that our motives are entirely mercenary?

In his excellent book, "The Assumptions Economists Make" Jonathan Schlefer tries to go back to first principles. Economists, he writes, "make simplified assumptions about our world, build imaginary economies based on those assumptions - otherwise known as models - and use them to draw practical lessons." This is, as he admits, inevitable; the economy is too complex for any other approach to work. Simplified models can be manipulated mathematically to produce answers to economic problems. But it is easy to get carried away by the elegance of the model, and to forget the short cuts that were taken when the simplified assumptions were made.

Even the most basic assumptions of economics turn out to have exceptions. Take one law that most people can grasp - supply and demand. As supply rises, relative to demand, the price falls; while if demand rises, relative to supply, the price rises. But this is not true for housing; when prices are rising, demand increases as more people want to become homeowners. And it is not true of so-called Veblen goods, luxury items such as designer clothes whose appeal is driven by their higher price.  

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IT'S NOT TORTURE WHEN WE DO IT:

Jose Rodriguez spent more than thirty years with the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually serving as the director of its Counterterrorism Center. He was involved in the Agency's detention-and-interrogation program, which included holding prisoners in black sites and waterboarding them. Rodriguez wrote a book about his career, "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives," which I've written about and discussed in a Q. & A. with Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent (and the subject of a Profile by Lawrence Wright). Rodriguez and I discussed his book and the choices he and the C.I.A. made in e-mail and phone exchanges; questions and answers are collected below, edited for length.

In your book, "Hard Measures," you write, "I cannot tell how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labelled 'torturers' by the President of the United States." That struck me and also confused me a bit. After all, your book argues that practices generally regarded as torture are necessary, and you express pride in carrying them out. Was the problem that the President used the word "torture"? Or just that he spoke openly about something you felt ought to be kept secret?

The practices the C.I.A. used were not torture. If that is the way they are "generally regarded" then the general impression is wrong. That is one of the reasons I wrote "Hard Measures." The techniques we employed were sometimes harsh, but fell well short of what is torture. My problem with what the President said had nothing to do with secrecy--it had everything to do with the fact that he, too, mischaracterized what was done by C.I.A. officers. These actions were undertaken at the request of his predecessor, judged to be legal and not torture by the Department of Justice, and briefed to appropriate members of Congress.

So if everybody else defined something as torture, but we don't, they're wrong and we're right? Does that come across as defining away torture? And why do you think that the word "torture" matters so much? If waterboarding is something that's regarded as abhorrent in a lot of the world, why does the label matter so much?

Well, because torture is illegal. Over the summer of 2002, when we knew we had to do something different to get information out of Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured a few months earlier, we worked with our lawyers to make sure that we came up with techniques that were within the law. These techniques were vetted with the Department of Justice and the White House--with the policy people and the leadership people at the White House. Then, on August 1, 2002, we received a binding legal opinion in writing from the Justice Department that said waterboarding and nine other techniques we wanted to implement were not torture. We then went to the White House and asked the N.S.C. to give us policy approval to proceed, and for the President to direct us to proceed. And they did. A month later, when the Congress came back to town, we briefed the leadership of the House and Senate committees on intelligence, both Democrats and Republicans. They had no objection.

You say it's not torture because torture would be illegal, but you were told this was legal, even though it's a technique that in the past has been called torture and that a lot of the world calls torture?

The waterboarding that our critics and many others who do not know or do not understand--the waterboarding that they refer to is torture. They're talking the waterboarding that was used by the Japanese in World War Two, for example, or by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, or even by the Spanish in the Inquisition, which was torture. But our waterboarding technique was different. It came from a U.S. program called S.E.R.E., a military training program, and under that program, tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen have been waterboarded.

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IT'S NOT TERRORISM WHEN WE DO IT:

There were a handful of Jewish resistance groups, but the Etzel was the only one actively fighting the British. The other groups did not want to divert British resources from fighting the Nazis. "The British at that time were worse than the Germans," my grandfather says. "If a ship of Jews managed to get past the Germans, the British would turn them around and send them back." Despite the violence of the Arab revolt, it was the British who truly stood in the way of establishing a Jewish state, making them the main strategic target.

At first, he was not involved in substantial operations, but after a few years of intermittent participation in the group, he took on a more active role, raiding British weapons store-houses, building explosives, and securing funds through any means possible. He was given the code name "Chaim Toit," combining the Hebrew word for life with the Yiddish word for death, during an explosives training course in 1943. He opened up a front store on 83 Hertzel Street, and went to work assembling grenades and other weapons in the backroom.

Around the start of 1945, his commander Eitan Livni (father of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni) approached him with a task. The Etzel, he explained, had found a family living over on Bashan Street that was willing to shelter a wounded or wanted soldier in their house, and a hiding place needed to be built for such an eventuality. The apartment, he was told, was small, and an elderly grandmother was ailing in the second room. "Keep the door closed, because if you disturb the suffering old woman she is bound to die," Livni told him.

When he knocked on the apartment door, a cheerful woman with thick glasses answered, baby in arms, and let them in. Careful not to disturb the dying old woman in the next room, my grandfather and his friend Shlomo scouted the apartment out for a suitable hiding place. The house, they discovered, was built in such a way that left ample space between the ceiling and the roof. They could build a faux laundry closet in the corner and put a ladder inside leading to the rafters, which they would reinforce to allow a fugitive to hide for a few days. The plan was perfect, and they went to work.

One day, as they were working, a wind blew open the door to the sick old lady's room. Before its occupant could shut it, my grandfather caught a glimpse of a bearded figure, and his heart skipped a beat. He would have recognized that face anywhere. Even though he'd only seen him once, giving a speech years earlier, he knew it was Menachem Begin, the leader of the Etzel and, at that time, a wanted fugitive from the British. Instead of delight, however, my grandfather was overcome with trepidation at learning a secret he was clearly not meant to know.

Begin, realizing he had been "discovered," decided it was no use keeping the door closed and invited the two Etzel men into his room for tea, taking the opportunity to get some information on the outside world. My grandfather earned his favor by finding him a short-wave radio to keep abreast of the news from the outside.

Not long after meeting Begin, my grandfather's partner-in-crime at the weapons factory was captured by the British. My grandfather quickly closed the store and relocated to Jerusalem. There he began a new role scouting out possible British targets and determining whether they were penetrable. Among them was the King David Hotel, the luxury building that housed both the British military headquarters and various foreign dignitaries, who would dance along with wealthy Arabs at "La Regance," the hotel's café and lounge. A wanted man, my grandfather had to disguise himself carefully before scouting the area.

The plan was hatched one day when he noticed a truck making a delivery for the café. Every day at noon, Arabs would bring vegetables, food, and canisters of milk to the kitchen. The milk canisters, he thought, would be perfect containers for explosives, but he wasn't sure if the kitchen had an easy connection to the café, which was right below the military headquarters in the hotel's southern wing.

To find out for sure, he'd have to go into enemy territory. Dressed as Arabs, he and a friend, accompanied by two Etzel women, walked right into the café one Friday night. Though the hotel was heavily guarded, and arrest by the British could mean prison, torture, or even hanging, my grandfather had to be sure of his plan. At one point, the ladies were sent to the bathroom, and my grandfather went wandering down the "wrong" hall. At the end of a lengthy corridor, a large Sudanese guard opened a door and boomed a menacing "What are you doing here?" at my grandfather. He replied that he was looking for his friend in the women's bathroom, to which the guard gruffly escorted him, where his date was conveniently waiting for him. The story checked out, and the guard let them go. But my grandfather had already gotten what he needed: He spied a kitchen in the doorway from which the guard emerged. The plan would work.

My grandfather went to work training the operatives who would carry out the operation. On July 22, 1946, 250 kg of TNT in seven milk crates placed along the support columns in the basement went off, demolishing the Southern wing of the hotel and killing 91 people along with it.

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AND HOW MANY OF THE CURRENT RECORDS ARE THE PRODUCT OF PEDs?:

[S]ome scientists say sporting records are starting to flatline and one day will become near impossible to beat without drugs, gene splicing or futuristic technology.

The men's long-jump world record was set in 1991, the men's pole vault record remains unbroken since 1994 and short-distance swimming's achievements have actually reversed since the drag-reducing bodysuit was banned in 2010.

"In all sports, what you see is a levelling off," says Steve Haake, director of Sheffield Hallam University's Centre for Sports Engineering Research.

Records continue to be broken in many sports, but the margins are getting smaller and smaller, he explained.

Geoffroy Berthelot with the INSEP sports institute in Paris looked at a history of Olympic records since the modern Games began in 1896.

He calculates that athletes have reached 99 per cent of what is possible within the limits of natural human physiology.

By 2027, half of all 147 sporting events studied will have reached their estimated limits and will not be improved upon by more than 0.05 per cent after that, according to Berthelot's mathematical estimate.

"Sports performances are reaching a physiological plateau," he said.

Reza Noubary of Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania projects that the men's 100-metre sprint, seen as the benchmark measure of human acceleration and speed, can only have a top time of 9.4 seconds.

The "data suggests that human speed increases are decelerating and will eventually stop completely," said Noubary.

But, he cautioned, this prediction is based only on mathematics.

Related articles

• The physics of running (physicsworld.com)
• Have we broken Olympic records for the last time? (io9.com)

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ISN'T THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION...:

After Jerry Seinfeld broke down the classic skit on the MLB Network recently, NPR's Mike Pesca wound up with a peculiar email in his inbox.

It was a link to an American Sign Language (ASL) version of the skit, sent by a friend. It was amazing, Pesca says.

"There are parts where you don't really understand what's going on, but if you know the routine, you can pretty much tell what they're talking about," Pesca tells Weekend Edition Sunday guest host Linda Wertheimer.

"Then there are certain instances where you know exactly what they're saying [and] it gets huge laughs from the audience," he says.

The fact that the routine survives without spoken words is a testament to its brilliance, Pesca says. "It's math. It really is musical, and it works really well."

...inevitably going to be even funnier when you throw in deafness?

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THE BA'ATHWATER WITH BABY:

 Its fall will obviously transform Syria, a country that has lived under the boot-heel of that clan for four decades. But it will also radically affect the wider region. Syria, which borders Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Israel, does not keep itself to itself. As one former Obama official says: "Syria won't implode; it will explode." Put simply, the battle for Syria is a battle for the entire Middle East.

Take the most probable consequence of Assad's removal, a round of revenge killings perpetrated by Syria's Sunni majority on Assad's Alawite community and their Christian allies. They will be seeking vengeance, not only for the thousands slain in the current uprising, but for a history of brutality that includes the slaughter of up to 20,000 in Hama in 1982, the last time an Assad faced popular protest.

If that kind of sectarian violence erupts, don't expect it to stay confined to Syria. Even if the killing does not spill over the borders, then Syrians themselves will, joining the 125,000 who have already fled as refugees. And that's without Syria becoming the site of an all-out proxy war, with Saudi Arabia backing the rebels and Iran lining up behind the pro-Assad forces.

The west will not stay aloof for long. (Some say it is already involved, tacitly backing Saudi and Qatari arms shipments to the rebels.) Strikingly, the talk in the last 48 hours has shifted from direct intervention "" for which there were few takers "" to an international peacekeeping force to be dispatched after Assad's exit. Former CIA official Bruce Reidel, who led President Obama's 2010 review of US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan, today proposed just such a force, noting the paradox that one of its first tasks would "be to protect the Alawite community and its allies from vengeance". 

Did we learn nothing in Iraq?  Purge prevents the need for Surge.

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THE AGE OF REASON THAT THE ANGLOSPHERE AVOIDED:

One witness, a British subject, wrote this description of a Festival of Reason held in the French countryside:

A delegate arrives some days in advance, accompanied by a goddess, if the town itself cannot supply a suitable one. She is attired in a Roman tunic of white satin, usually taken from a theatrical wardrobe, and wears a red cap trimmed with oak leaves. Her left arm rests on a plough, in her right hand she holds a lance.. . . .Installed on an altar. . .she addresses the people who in return pay her homage. . . .Wherever possible a priest is procured to abjure his Faith in public and to declare that Christianity is nothing but a fraud. The festival ends with a bonfire in which prayer-books, saints' images, confessionals, and other pieces of church furniture are burnt. Most of those present stand looking on in silence, struck dumb with horror and amazement; others, either drunk or paid. . .dance around. . .

To complete their hold over the nation, the Jacobins eliminated elections and established the first modern dictatorship; the first police state. "The Republic," Danton said, "was established fifty years before opinion was ready for it. . .free elections would be incompatible with its maintenance."

They commenced a reign of terror that they believed was the only way to eliminate with lightning speed the forces of selfishness and corruption, i.e., the Church (among others). The Jacobin's guiding principle was expressed by Saint-Just: "Until the will of the sovereign people represses the monarchist minority and reigns by the right of conquest. . . .You have to punish not only the traitors but also the different; you have to punish whoever is passive in the Republic and does nothing for it. . . .Those who cannot be ruled by justice must be ruled by the sword."

Tens of thousands were arrested on mere suspicion. The accused were found guilty in groups. Presenting defense arguments was not permitted and prisoners were forbidden to speak in their own behalf. At least 30,000, most of whom were innocent, lost their lives at the guillotine.

In an infamous episode in the Vendée, the executioners decided the guillotine was too slow (though they managed to kill tens of thousands) and over 2,000 victims - Catholic counter-revolutionaries - were summarily drowned. The ex-Oratorian student Joseph Fouché massacred thousands at Lyons. Historian R.R. Palmer observes, "Those men inflicted death with a holy glee!"

The result of their reconstruction of society based on ideological abstractions: two-hundred years of political and social instability and unrest. Ten years after the storming of the Bastille, France had been ruled by six different governments. Since 1799, a dictator, two emperors, two kings, a rump Vichy government, and five republics have governed the nation.

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BROTHERHOOD OF THE STRONG:

Brian Shaw; Strongmen; Weightlifters; World's Strongest Man; Arnold Strongman Classic; Arnold Schwarzenegger; Derek Poundstone

The giant of Fort Lupton was born, like a cowbird's chick, to parents of ordinary size. His father, Jay Shaw, a lineman for a local power company, was six feet tall; his mother, Bonnie, was an inch or so shorter. At the age of three months, Brian weighed seventeen pounds. At two years, he could grab his Sit 'n Spin and toss it nearly across the room. In photographs of his grade-school classes, he always looked out of place, his grinning, elephant-eared face floating like a parade balloon above the other kids in line. They used to pile on his back during recess, his mother told me--not because they didn't like him but because they wanted to see how many of them he could carry. "I just think Brian has been blessed," she said. "He has been blessed with size."

Fort Lupton is a city of eight thousand on the dry plains north of Denver. In a bigger place, Shaw might have been corralled into peewee football at eight or nine, and found his way among other oversized boys. But the local teams were lousy and, aside from a few Punt, Pass & Kick contests--which he won with discouraging ease--Shaw stuck to basketball. By seventh grade, he was six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds. When he went in for a dunk on his hoop at home, he snapped off the pole, leaving a jagged stump in the driveway. By his late teens, his bulk had become a menace. One player knocked himself out running into Shaw's chest; another met with his elbow coming down with a rebound, and was carried off with a broken nose and shattered facial bones. "It was bad," Shaw told me. "One guy, we dove for a ball together, and I literally broke his back. It wasn't that I was a dirty player. I wasn't even trying to do it hard."

Like other very large men, Shaw has a surprisingly sweet nature. His voice is higher and smaller than you'd expect, and he tends to inflect it with question marks. His face has the bulbous charm of a potato carving. "He's almost overly friendly," Terry Todd, a former champion weight lifter and an instructor at the University of Texas, told me. "It's like he thinks that if he's not you'll be frightened of him and run away." At six feet eight and four hundred and thirty pounds, Shaw has such a massive build that most men don't bother trying to measure up. His torso is three feet wide at the shoulders; his biceps are nearly two feet around. His neck is thicker than other men's thighs. "I know I'm big," he told me. "I've been big my whole life. I've never had to prove how tough I am."

In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was twenty-three, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master's program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. "This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest," he told me. "I was so much stronger than all of them." One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.

Inch was an early-twentieth-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made of cast iron, weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than twenty thousand dollars in today's currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than fifty years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. "A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won't lift it," Sorin told me. "A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs." It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. "He was just standing there with a blank look on his face," Sorin said. "It was, like, What's so very hard about this?"

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AND ON THE 8TH DAY, GOD MADE THE B-3:

Beneath his black turban, above his long white beard, Dr. Lonnie Smith's eyes grew large and his grin wide earlier this month at Manhattan's Jazz Standard. It was his 70th birthday, which he celebrated by doing what he's done for nearly a half-century: Building and then deconstructing hard-swinging grooves; reveling in the sonic possibilities of a Hammond B-3 organ; surprising listeners and bandmates with sudden rhythmic and dynamic shifts; and easing into ballads with disarming sweetness and absorbing soul. The listeners who packed the room traced Mr. Smith's moods, growing silent at some points and erupting with applause and even laughter at others. [...]

He found his true calling at a local music store where he'd sit until closing time most afternoons, he said. "One day the owner, Art Kubera, asked what I was doing. I told him, 'Sir, if I had an instrument, I could make a living.'" In particular, he coveted a Hammond B-3 organ. That evening he went home with the organ in the back of his brother's pickup truck, a gift from Kubera. "But I still had to figure out how to play that beast," he said.

He was a quick study, and his career ascended just as fast. Within months, he was performing in local clubs. He sat in one night at the Pine Grill with members of organist Jack McDuff's group, which featured Mr. Benson. He and Mr. Benson felt an instant connection. Around that same time, he passed up a chance to record with guitarist Grant Green, a heady opportunity for any young musician. "I hadn't been playing a good year then," he said. "I wasn't ready."

Several months later, when Mr. Benson needed an organist, Mr. Smith jumped at the chance. He played on Mr. Benson's 1966 Columbia debut; Mr. Benson returned the favor on "Finger Lickin' Good." Even then, Mr. Smith's playing sounded radical. "I really was thinking Jimmy Smith," he said of his early hero, "but it just always came out different."

Both he and Mr. Benson attained greater visibility after playing on "Alligator Boogaloo," alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson's 1967 surprise hit album for Blue Note. "The groove in that group was so automatic," Mr. Smith said. "It felt like we'd been doing it forever." Between 1968 and 1970, he had four successful Blue Note releases of his own.

Mr. Smith, who won't discuss precisely what his turban signifies, easily grows animated in conversation about nearly anything else and exudes a childlike wonder. He's the same way onstage. Drummer Herlin Riley, who played on Mr. Smith's brilliant 2009 CD "Rise Up!" said, "Lonnie's playing is so free, it liberates you if you can let go."

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JUST ANOTHER REVOLUTION THAT ATE ITS OWN:

Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father.

But daughters depend on dads as well. One study by Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona found that about one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood. This dramatic divide was narrowed a bit when Ellis controlled for parents' socioeconomic background--but only by a few percentage points. The research on this topic suggests that girls raised by single mothers are less likely to be supervised, more likely to engage in early sex, and to end up pregnant compared with girls raised by their own married parents.

It's true that poorer families are more likely to be headed by single mothers. But even factoring out class shows a clear difference. Research by the Economic Mobility Project at Pew suggests that children from intact families are also more likely to rise up the income ladder if they were raised in a low-income family, and less likely to fall into poverty if they were raised in a wealthy family. For instance, according to Pew's analysis, 54 percent of today's young adults who grew up in an intact two-parent home in the top-third of household income have remained in the top-third as adults, compared with just 37 percent of today's young adults who grew up in a wealthy (top-third) but divorced family.

Why is this? Single mothers, even from wealthier families, have less time. They are less likely to be able to monitor their kids. They do not have a partner who can relieve them when they are tired or frustrated or angry with their kids. This isn't just a question of taking kids to the array of pampered extracurricular activities that many affluent, two-parent families turn to; it's about the ways in which two sets of hands, ears, and eyes generally make parenting easier. 

This recognition that it is easier to parent, and that kids are more likely to thrive, in a two-parent home might  be one reason why the divorce bug seems to be on the wane in progressive enclaves like Park Slope and Seattle, according to the New York Times. After the turmoil of the divorce revolution of the 1970s and early 1980s, a marriage mindset has reasserted itself among college-educated Americans. (Barack and Michelle Obama embody the new mindset; Newt Gingrich and his three wives embody the '70s mindset.) Today, college-educated Americans are divorcing less, steering clear of nonmarital childbearing, and enjoying relatively high-quality marriages. By contrast, as I recently pointed out in When Marriage Disappears, Americans without college degrees are divorcing at high rates, witnessing dramatic increases in nonmarital childbearing, and seeing their marital quality deteriorate.

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DO THE INTELLECTUALS EVER ACTUALLY READ "ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM"?:

A new book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered in the Obamacrats) (Encounter), by David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, affords an occasion to revisit the issue: Do contemporary American conservatives scapegoat intellectuals and teachers? If so, they can claim an all-American pedigree.

William F. Buckley Jr. began his career in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, which lambasted his professors for their godlessness and socialism. Past and present American intellectuals on the right generally disdain economic or social analyses of political dislocations. They attribute socialism's appeal, for example, not to the condition of society but to the influence of nefarious professors and subversive writers.

Or consider feminism. Have women entered the work force and--as some conservatives say--abandoned the family? Does that have to do with the realities of war, say, in which men leave their jobs and women replace them? Or with the imperative of supporting a family when one paycheck no longer suffices? "A superficial explanation through economic changes is to be avoided," wrote Richard M. Weaver in one of the ur-texts of American conservatism. "The economic cause is a cause that has a cause," he declared in his 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. "The ultimate reason lies in the world picture, for once woman has been degraded in that picture--and putting her on a level with the male is more truly a degradation than an elevation--she is more at the mercy of economic circumstances."

To their suspicion of economic analyses of social issues, American conservatives add a suspicion of intellectuals as elitists. The aristocratic Buckley famously remarked that he would prefer to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. To Buckley, a random collection of Bostonians would prove wiser than liberal, overeducated professors. This position drew upon several features of an American ethos that prizes equality, no-nonsense religion, business, practicality, and self-help, all of which Richard Hofstadter analyzed in his classic work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963).

Buckley was hardly alone in deriding intellectuals as out-of-touch elitists, an attitude that can easily slide into a wholesale denunciation of knowledge and education itself. What does schooling bring aside from an undermining of Christian truths?

That mind-set came to a head in the 1925 Scopes trial, in which a Tennessee high-school teacher was charged with teaching evolution. William Jennings Bryan, the special prosecutor, saw the issue as religion versus the intellectuals, whom he dubbed a "scientific soviet." The "little irresponsible oligarchy of self-styled 'intellectuals,'" he said, forces science and rationalism on solid Christian folk. "Parents have a right to say that no teacher paid by their money shall rob their children of faith in God and send them back to their homes, skeptical, infidels, or agnostics, or atheists."

For Hofstadter, the Scopes trial "greatly quickened the pulse of anti-intellectualism. For the first time in the 20th century, intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies." Hofstadter also noted--remember, he was writing in the early 1960s--that for many today, the evolution controversy is "as remote as the Homeric era."

No longer. Tennessee just passed a law protecting teachers who want to challenge evolution--and global warming. As one of the bill's supporters stated, the teaching of evolution was "extremely unbalanced." In other words, it was taught as true. The old battles are not over; indeed, the situation seems to be getting worse. For conservatives, conventional morality and religion are waning. Sexuality no longer seems contained or constrained. Men are marrying men. What's next? Interspecies marriage?

If the ills of modernity are intensifying, conservatives know why. They rarely mention hyperconsumerism or advertising or a rigidifying class structure--the byproducts of advanced capitalism. Rather, they dwell on the presumably corrosive ideas of the educated, especially the professoriate.

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AMERICA IS TOO DECENT TO BE NATIVIST:

A 9-year-old boy with a massive tumor was whisked from a dangerous neighborhood in Mexico in an armored vehicle by U.S. agents and taken across the border for treatment in New Mexico, his family said.

The boy and his parents were snatched Thursday from the gang-infested neighborhood in Ciudad Juarez -- one of the deadliest cities in the world -- after members of a New Mexico Baptist church saw him near an orphanage and sought help. [...]

Si Budagher, pastor of First Baptist Church of Rio Rancho, N.M., said church members spotted the boy while doing missionary work and felt compelled to help him.

"He just came up to us and offered to carry groceries," Budagher said. "The Lord put him in front of us."

Church members only recently resumed missionary work in the border city after suspending visits due to the violence between competing drug cartels. The violence has claimed thousands of lives.

Denise Gutierrez, a victim assistance coordinator for Homeland Security Investigations, said she felt compelled to help as soon as she saw photos of Jose.

"I refused to believe that there was nothing we could do for this boy," she said.

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HOW ABOUT SAYING THIS INSTEAD...:

Sir Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to the UN, said the Government was "appalled by the decision to block a resolution at bringing and end to the bloodshed in Syria".

Russia and China, he said, "are failing in their responsibilities as permanent members, they are failing the people of Syria," adding that 14,000 Syrians had died since the two powers first used their veto last October.

"The effect of their actions is to protect a brutal regime. "

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IT'S COSMETIC SURGERY:

A new study shows that prostate cancer surgery, which often leaves men impotent or incontinent, does not appear to save the lives of men with early-stage disease, who account for most cases, and many of these men would do just as well to choose no treatment at all.

The findings were based on the largest-ever clinical trial comparing surgical removal of the prostate with a strategy known as "watchful waiting." They add to growing concerns that prostate cancer detection and treatment efforts over the past 25 years, particularly in the United States, have been woefully misguided, rendering millions of men impotent, incontinent and saddled with fear about a disease that was unlikely ever to kill them in the first place. About 100,000 to 120,000 radical prostatectomy surgeries are performed in the United States each year.

"I think this is game-changing," said Dr. Leonard Marks, a professor of urology at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study. "What this study does is call attention to the fact that there are a lot of prostate cancers that are diagnosed today that are not dangerous."

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THANKS, W:

The government says it has already made a profit on the emergency funds injected into banks at the time of the financial-industry bailout, and the Fed has fully recouped money spent on acquiring toxic assets from troubled companies.

The Treasury, which invested $245 billion in more than 700 banks, has so far collected $264.7 billion from its bank programs.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, meanwhile, has fully recouped $72.7 billion in loans that were used to buy toxic assets, and has reaped gains of over $5.2 billion so far.

In coming months, the government is expected to sell or be repaid on securities with a total face value of roughly $29 billion, according to government officials and investors. The assets are likely to generate more than $10 billion for taxpayers. The government had purchased some of the securities below face value.

By stepping up its efforts and telegraphing that it aims to conduct bulk sales, the government may risk driving down prices. But prices for auctions in recent weeks have been strong, and many hedge funds and other investors have built large piles of cash to invest in these kinds of assets.

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THEY CAN GO HIGHER (via The Mother Judd)

With disposable income, however, the world changed. I realized that the pleasure of reading books was amazingly enhanced by the pleasure of owning books. I liked seeing around me books I had already read; I found it gratifying that my encounter with a book continued even after I'd finished reading it.

But above all there was the delight of anticipation. I snapped up books that intrigued me, that I thought would be good reads, that got great reviews. Alas, I was like a kid whose eyes are too big for his stomach: I kept helping myself to more than I could possibly finish. It didn't help that the older I got, the less time there was for pleasure reading. Or that my ability to acquire books faster than ever -- hello, 1-Click! -- didn't come with the ability to read them any faster.

Ah, if only I could read books as fast as I acquire them! Even half as fast would be a blessing. Even a quarter as fast.

In my life, books increasingly seem to play the role of those falling geometric shapes in Tetris. [...]

I suppose it's time I faced reality: I'll never catch up on my must-read list. How can I, when they keep publishing books I'm so impatient to read?

William F. Buckley Jr. once described the experience of entering a well-appointed home in which something seemed out of order. It took him a few moments to realize the problem: There were no books. It was jarring, Buckley wrote, to be confronted with the fact that there are people in whose lives books play no role whatsoever.

In my life, by contrast, books increasingly seem to play the role of those falling geometric shapes in Tetris. That's the classic video game in which you either clear out the shapes efficiently as they fall, or they stack up so high that no space is left -- and you lose.

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LORD, SAVE US FROM DRIVERS:

Most highways in major metropolitan areas operate under congested conditions during much of the day. Yet highways are designed around standards based on higher free-flow travel speeds that call for wider but fewer lanes. Driverless cars don't need the same wide lanes, which would allow highway authorities to reconfigure roads to allow travel speeds to be raised during peak travel periods. All that is needed would be illuminated lane dividers that can increase the number of lanes available. Driverless cars could take advantage of the extra lane capacity to reduce congestion and delays.

Another design flaw is that highways have been built in terms of width and thickness to accommodate both cars and trucks. The smaller volume of trucks should be handled with one or two wide lanes with a road surface about a foot thick, to withstand trucks' weight and axle pressure. But the much larger volume of cars--which apply much less axle pressure that damages pavement--need more and narrower lanes that are only a few inches thick.

Building highways that separate cars and trucks by directing them to lanes with the appropriate thickness would save taxpayers a bundle. It would also favor the technology of driverless cars because they would not have to distinguish between cars and trucks and to adjust speeds and positions accordingly.

Traffic management also suffers from obsolete technology that could hinder implementing the driverless car. On local streets, signal timing contributes to hundreds of millions of vehicle hours of annual delay because it is based on out-of-date historical data that inaccurately measure relative traffic volumes at intersections. Without signals based on real-time traffic flows, driverless vehicles may not be able to accurately align their speeds with them.

The future also holds the promise of new communications technologies that could let road authorities use electronic tolls to charge motorists for their contribution to congestion, based on actual traffic conditions, and thus encourage them to travel during off-peak periods, use alternate routes, or switch to public transit. Driverless cars would significantly help motorists respond to congestion tolls because their technology can balance the cost of a toll with its travel time savings to optimize motorists' route choices.

The driverless car represents one of the most amazing breakthroughs in safety and quality of life in recent history.

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AND ABOUT TIME:

Credit the Clash's Joe Strummer for getting this album in motion. Joe told reggae pioneer Jimmy Cliff that he should one day work with Rancid frontman Tim Armstrong, and the result is a refreshing return to form. Armstrong loved Cliff's early work, back to the heyday of "The Harder They Come" soundtrack, so he and Cliff set out with vintage studio gear (including the organ from the soundtrack sessions) to create "Rebirth," arguably Cliff's best work since then. 

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DID ANYONE BESIDES THE rEALISTS, THE PRC, AND PUTIN THINK HE COULD SURVIVE THE DEMAND FOR SELF-DETERMINATION?

On Wednesday, an apparent suicide bomber in Damascus attacked a meeting of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's war cabinet, killing Daoud Rajha, Syria's defense minister, and Asef Shawkat, who was the President's brother-in-law. The attack was the most striking in a series of signs that Syria's uprising has tipped into a full-blown civil war, as the Red Cross has now labelled it, with the war's momentum now favoring the rebels. (The intelligence and access required for an attack to succeed against a crisis-cabinet meeting suggests that the rebels are running sources inside Assad's security apparatus.) Other recent signals include sustained fighting around Damascus; the reported withdrawal of Syrian forces from the Golan Heights to combat the revolt; the spread of persistent violence to most of the country's provinces, drawing in virtually every unit of the Syrian security services; and significant, accelerating defections of diplomats and military officers.

Assad is finished.

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WE'RE WITH TRACY'S GOD:

Asked if he regretted getting out of the car that night or owning a gun, Zimmerman said no. Asked if he would do anything differently, Zimmerman said no a third time, and added that Trayvon's death was "God's plan." [...]

In a statement after the show, Tracy Martin, Trayvon's father, said: "We must worship a different God, because there's no way my God would have wanted George Zimmerman to kill my son."

---

Early in this show, fellow guest Tim O'Brien joked that the Ontario-based Great Lake Swimmers "had better get started" if they hoped to make it to the show on time. They didn't actually swim - but it was still great to have the Toronto band on an episode of Mountain Stage recorded on the shore of Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Minn. Fronted by singer and songwriter Tony Dekker, the group's evocative, folk-pop sound has earned praise from the likes of Robert Plant, Bela Fleck, and Feist. The album Lost Channels was recorded in various locations in the Thousand Islands area along the Saint Lawrence River.

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WHAT DOES IT MATTER WHETHER YOU BLOW OFF A CLASS OR A VIDEO?:

With less fanfare, there is something else going on: the marriage of in-person teaching and online instruction in building-block courses such as statistics, intro physics and basic economics. In these hybrids, students meet the teacher perhaps once a week for an hour; the rest of the learning is done online.

"There's been a convergence of the power of the software with knowledge we've gained from cognitive sciences about how people learn," says William Kirwan, chancellor of the University of Maryland, which has 12,000 students enrolled in 40 or so of these hybrid courses. "And there is the potential for cost savings. We have got to find lower-cost ways of delivering high-quality education."

Some praise technology in the classroom as a cure-all; others label it a sure way to destroy all that is good in education. There have been lots of assertions, but little evidence. Until now.

In a carefully crafted, foundation-funded experiment that has received less attention than it deserves, Ithaka S+R, a higher-education think tank, enticed 605 undergraduates at six public-university campuses in New York and Maryland to agree to be assigned randomly to one of two courses. Half took a conventional introductory statistics course that met three hours a week. The other half took a computer-assisted course that met once a week and relied on an interactive, online statistics course developed by Carnegie Mellon University's Online Learning Initiative.

To compare outcomes, researchers had students take a standardized statistics test and a final exam that had some of the same questions.

The statistically sound result: Students in the online course did just as well as those who took the conventional course. No better, no worse.

"The most important single result of our study: It calls into question the position of the skeptic who says, 'I don't want to try this because it will hurt my students,' " says one of the study's architects, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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IT'S JUST PROTESTANTS VS INDULGENCES:

Following the last European summit in Brussels there was much talk of defeat for Chancellor Merkel by what was described as a "new Latin Alliance" of Italy and Spain backed by France.

Many Germans protested that too much had been conceded by their government - and it might not be too far-fetched to see this as just the latest Protestant criticism of the Latin approach to matters monetary, which has deep roots in German culture, shaped by religious belief.

Churchgoing has been in decline in Germany as elsewhere as secularisation has spread, but religious ideas still shape the way Germans talk and think about money. The German word for debt - schuld - is the same as the word for "guilt" or "sin".

Talk of thrift and responsible budgeting comes instinctively to Angela Merkel, daughter of a Protestant pastor.

Merkel's frequent assertion that "there is no alternative" to austerity policies (while reminiscent to Britons of Margaret Thatcher) has been likened to the famous stubborn statement by German Reformation leader Martin Luther: "Here I stand. I can do no other".

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THE NOOSE TIGHTENS:

Wednesday's attack killed Defense Minister Dawoud Rajha, the highest-ranking Christian in the regime; Assef Shawkat, the president's brother-in-law and deputy commander of the military; and Hassan Turkmani, military adviser to the foreign minister.

Their deaths were seen as a major blow to Assad's regime, which has been beset by defections since the uprising began.

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WHICH DOESN'T REQUIRE MORE WORKERS, JUST MORE EFFICIENT WORK:

It is now four years after the wheels fell off our financial system. The government has tried every gimmick to revive the economy: fiscal stimulus, monetary easing, loan write-downs, foreclosure modifications--all duds. It seems like no one remembers how an economy creates jobs anymore. The right answer, in fact the only answer, for jobs and better living standards, is productivity.

Economists define productivity as output per worker hour. But ramping up the output of trolleys or 8-track tapes won't increase living standards. It is not just technical efficiency that matters, it is also effectiveness--that is, producing what the economy really needs and consumers will pay for.

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NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO (via Bruno Behrend):

General Motors is joining the sharing economy.

General Motors announced that its OnStar subscribers can now rent out their idle vehicles through the RelayRides car sharing service, leveraging OnStar connectivity already active in their vehicles to potentially earn money to offset the cost of owning a vehicle.

RelayRides' renters can unlock reserved OnStar-enabled cars by using their smart phones.

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IS THERE ANY BAD SEQUESTRATION?:

Fertilizing the ocean with iron could help reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, according to newly released findings of a research cruise. Why? In a word, diatoms.

A hunger for iron rules the microscopic sea life of the Southern Ocean surrounding ice-covered Antarctica. Cut off from most continental dirt and dust, the plankton, diatoms and other life that make up the broad bottom of the food chain there can't get enough iron to grow. And that's why some scientists think that artificially fertilizing such waters with the metal could promote blooms that suck CO2 out of the air. Then, when these microscopic creatures die, they would sink to the bottom of the ocean and take the carbon with them.

Such blooms occur naturally, of course, so the first part of the hypothesis is not controversial. What remained questionable until now is whether such blooms in fact sequestered much carbon or if it was being quickly recycled back into the atmosphere. The problem for scientists is that oceanic waters tend to mix, which makes monitoring and delineating an experiment in the ocean challenging.

The solution, devised by biological oceanographer Victor Smetacek of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany and his colleagues, was to use an eddy. Such swirling currents can be remarkably self-contained. In fact, the new research to be published in Nature on July 19 shows that less than 10 percent of the eddy's waters mixed with the surrounding ocean.

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THE WORLD THAT W MADE:

The report predicted an izdihar (blossoming) of fundamental rights and freedoms, based in part on a survey of Arab culture - its folk songs, novels, poetry, and siras (life stories). Its affirmation that Arabs do not want to be left out of history's drive toward democracy helped set the mental climate that seeded the Arab Spring in 2011.

In the face of stereotypes about Arabs not being ready for liberty, the scholars stated a simple truth: "The individual is free only in a free society within a free nation."

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THAT HYPERINFLATION IS ALWAYS JUST AROUND THE CORNER...:

The consumer price index was unchanged for the month, the Labor Department reported this morning. That includes a 1.4% drop in the cost of energy and a 0.2% rise in food prices. The rest of the index, known as the core inflation rate, rose 0.2%. Core inflation for the last 12 months was 2.2%, the department said.

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THE OTHER OPEN BORDERS CANDIDATE:

On the heels of a recent poll showing a dip in support for President Obama among Latino voters, the Romney campaign is out with a new Spanish-language ad pledging the candidate's commitment to finding a long-term, bipartisan solution to the nation's immigration challenges.

"As president, Mitt Romney will work with Republicans and Democrats to fix our immigration system, which is broken," says Craig Romney, Mitt Romney's son, in the ad, entitled "Nation of Immigrants."

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NOT THAT THEY CAN HELP EITHER GROUP:

During a meeting of the association's health committee here Saturday, health care experts said that the system must shift its focus from treating illness to preventative care and that doctors should be allowed to spend more time with the sickest patients. Jeffrey Brenner, executive director of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers in New Jersey, told the committee that he and other primary care doctors see how the current system makes it financially tempting for them to focus on minor illnesses.

"Ironically, in my office I make more money when I treat head colds than complex patients. I can charge slightly more treating a complex patient, but in seeing head colds I can treat more patients," Brenner said. "That doesn't make any sense. We have a distortion in the marketplace in health care."

Brenner said the overall delivery model for health care, as distinguished from pharmaceuticals and medical devices, remains stuck in the last century.

"In the past 100 years, our country has become wealthy because we are innovative," Brenner said. "Health care is not innovative. Health care has not changed in 100 years."

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WHICH MAY BE WHY FRANK MILLER DID SUCH GOOD WORK WITH HIM:

Imagine that you are a child billionaire, orphaned in a mugging that goes terribly wrong. You decide to devote yourself to making sure that no one else will suffer as you did. But how? Do you open a series of outreach centres, hire probation workers, sponsor rehabilitation schemes? Or do you put on a rubber suit and prowl the streets at night, clobbering members of the underclass until they promise to stop breaking the law?

The answer goes to the heart of Batman's most terrible secret - not his true identity as Bruce Wayne, playboy industrialist, but the fact that he's secretly, wonderfully Right-wing. And it's a secret that is now being exposed by one of the year's biggest movies. In The Dark Knight Rises, British director Christopher Nolan explicitly casts Batman as the plutocrats' champion, forced to defend his city against the impoverished victims of depression and globalisation. 

The ostensible villain may be Tom Hardy's hulking, monstrous Bane, but the uprising he inspires is essentially Occupy Gotham City, if the "99 Per Cent" used shotguns rather than megaphones.

For some, it may come as a surprise that the Caped Crusader turns out to be a Caped Conservative. But Nolan's played these tricks before. In his previous Batman film, The Dark Knight, he confronted the people of Gotham with a terrorist threat - Heath Ledger's Joker - that, like al-Qaeda, could not be predicted or reasoned with. In the process, Batman wrestled with the same quandaries as President Bush. Can it be right to torture a prisoner to obtain vital information? The film's answer, like the president's, was an unequivocal yes. Can total electronic surveillance be justified to catch one or two bad apples? In this case, Nolan's answer was more liberal: Batman hands control of his all-powerful spying device to that unwavering moral arbiter Morgan Freeman, the closest thing to St Augustine that our fallen age can muster.

You could say that Nolan is just reading things into the character. Yet it's not just that Batman is a standing reproof to the liberality of the justice system, forced to pick up the pieces when lily-livered judges and incompetent guards release the bad guys to kill again. From the moment of his creation, as the comic-book writer and superhero historian Grant Morrison argues, "Batman was the ultimate capitalist hero... a millionaire who vented his childlike fury on the criminal classes of the lower orders" in his "obsessive, impossible quest to punch crime into extinction, one b------ at a time".

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SEEMS LIKE JUST YESTERDAY YOU WERE PRETENDING THEY ARE PEOPLE:

Fining companies for malpractice is not enough. Fraud and incompetence undermines the whole market system. And it damages real people, like the pensioners robbed of interest by the low Libor number and cities like Baltimore that lost millions on interest-rate swaps.

Wrongdoing should be investigated: not by regulators, or panels of posturing politicians, or costly and long-winded public inquiries--but by the police and the Serious Fraud Office. And if it turns out that junior executives acted fraudulently and senior executives let them, or if regulators and politicians actually encouraged it, offenders should face fines and long-term disqualification.

Where fines are levied, it is generally on corporations rather than individuals, which means that shareholders and customers (and indeed taxpayers) end up paying instead of those actually responsible.

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ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

[A] provocative new report by Winfried Häuser, Ernil Hansen, and Paul Enck in the journal of the German Medical Association suggests that the side effects of some drugs, and the discomfort of certain medical procedures, may be inadvertently intensified by doctors and nurses trying to keep patients fully informed of the consequences of their medical care. The culprit behind this phenomenon is the nocebo effect.

You can think of the nocebo effect as the evil twin of the placebo effect -- the body's healing response to the act of taking a pill or receiving medical care, even if the pill itself is inert. The most familiar example of the placebo effect is what happens in trials of experimental drugs. One group of volunteers is randomly assigned to take the drug in question; another group is assigned to take placebo -- a fake drug designed to look just like the real one. Neither the volunteers nor the staff know which group is which. If the drug group improves significantly more than the placebo group, the drug is judged to be effective. This kind of test -- the double-blind, placebo-controlled trial -- has been the gold standard of drug development in medicine for half a century.

In real life, gauging the effectiveness of a new medication is not quite that easy. In 2009, I wrote a widely-circulated article in Wired magazine about a mysterious increase in placebo effects in trials in recent years that is making it harder for Big Pharma to bring new drugs to market. I explored some of the reasons that might be happening in the article.

A placebo, you might say, is an ersatz drug that makes you feel better, while a nocebo is a fake drug that makes you feel worse. Of course, in both cases, it's not the pill that's doing the work; it's your own body, responding to the social context in which you take the pill. If a skilled doctor with kindly bedside manner tells you that drug X will reduce the inflammation of a minor injury, it often will -- even if the drug itself is nothing but a capsule full of lactose, milk sugar. One of the astonishing things we've discovered about the placebo effect in recent years is how wide a range of ailments can be ameliorated by it, at least temporarily -- from chronic pain, to high blood pressure, to inflammation, to depression and anxiety, to sexual dysfunction, to the nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that the nocebo effect is equally capable of making you feel more miserable, in a similarly broad range of ways.

One of the most interesting findings in the new report from Germany is about the underappreciated -- and under-studied -- role of nocebo effects in clinical trials.

If you tell a group of trial volunteers that they're testing a new drug that may relieve the pain of migraines, a significant number of volunteers will experience pain relief after taking the drug -- even if they've been randomly assigned to the placebo group and are receiving nothing but sugar pills. The placebo effect in action.

But here's where it gets interesting.  If you tell the volunteers that the side effects of this new medicine may include dry mouth, tingling in the hands and feet, and slight dizziness, some volunteers will experience precisely these side effects -- in both groups. In fact, some volunteers who are taking nothing but sugar pills will be made so uncomfortable by these symptoms that they will choose to drop out of the trial early.

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WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE END UP, IT'S JUST A MATTER OF WHICH PARTY GETS CREDIT:

The federal government spends more than $500 billion a year on policies designed to help individuals acquire or build assets. The three most expensive of these policies--the mortgage interest deduction, the property tax deduction, and preferential rates on capital gains and dividends--together deliver 45 percent of their benefits to households with average income exceeding $1 million. "Put another way," concludes a report commissioned by the Federal Reserve, "the poorest fifth of Americans get, on average, $3 in benefits from these policies, while the wealthiest one percent enjoy, on average, $57,673."

What if we re-crafted our wealth accumulation policies so that they primarily helped average Americans build assets? Nothing could be more American. It's what the Homestead Act did. It's what the GI Bill did. And here's another example of how it could be done for the next generation of Americans.

Every child born in the U.S. gets a Social Security number. Going forward, every child should get at the same time what could be called an American Stakeholder Account. Parents, grandparents, and anyone else who cared to could contribute funds to a child's stakeholder account, as could children themselves. Children whose families qualify for the federal child tax credit would have up to $500 added to their accounts each year by the government. Contributions from all sources would be capped at $2,000 per year.

When an account holder reached eighteen, he or she could begin withdrawing a portion of the accumulating funds, but only for the purpose of pursuing post-secondary education and training. At age twenty-five, the account holder could use a portion toward buying a first home or starting a business. But a substantial remainder would be earmarked for retirement.

Now let's add another important feature. Throughout their working lives, members of the next generation of Americans would be required to contribute 4 percent of their earned income to their stakeholder accounts. Their employers would have the option of contributing another 2 percent. Low- and middle-income households would be eligible for up to $500 per year in government matching funds. Upon retirement, the balance built up in these accounts would be automatically converted into an annuity--a stream of monthly benefits that would flow for the rest of the account holder's life.

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THE ONLY THREATS ARE INTERNAL:

For Netanyahu, the coalition deal was a way both to hobble the opposition and give him more leeway in formulating a new military draft law. In February, Israel's Supreme Court struck down the current draft regulation, called the Tal Law, which excuses haredi Orthodox from universal mandatory military service for Israeli Jews. The court ordered that a new law be enacted by Aug. 1 or else all Israeli Jews would be subject to the draft.

Netanyahu's other coalition partners include haredi Orthodox parties that oppose drafting large numbers of haredi men or subjecting them to national service. 

The debate over the new draft law has roiled Israel in recent weeks. Many Israelis long have resented what they see as the free ride given to haredi Israelis, who are not required to serve in the army but are still eligible for state welfare benefits.

In the end it was Kadima that quit the government in protest over proposed reforms that it said did not go far enough.

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THERE IS NO SYRIA:

Prior to the establishment of the modern state of Syria under a French protectorate following the First World War, the term Syria denoted the entire Levant, including Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon. However, Lawrence in his work especially singled out the Syrian cities of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo when describing the political issues of Syria. He also focused on the Yarmuk Valley, running along today's Syrian-Jordan border; Hauran, a volcanic plateau and people in today's Southwestern Syria; and Daraa, also located in Southwestern Syria, which he saw as "the critical centre of Syria in all ages."

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AT THE INTERSECTION OF IDEOLOGY AND REALITY LIES DEFLATION:

The inflation rate has been falling steadily since last year. Prices rose just 1.7 percent between June 2011 and June 2012--below the Fed's 2 percent inflation target. "Core" inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, has been remarkably stable; prices rose 2.2 percent between June 2011 and June 2012.

This isn't what we inflation hawks expected. For example, in late 2009 economists Bob Murphy and David Henderson made a bet about inflation between then and 2013. Murphy, the hawk, bet that a year-over-year price increase of more than 10 percent would occur before January 2013. It's theoretically possible that Murphy will be vindicated by a last-minute inflation surge over the next six months, but I doubt even Murphy is expecting to win the bet at this point.

When the world fails to behave the way you expected, that's a good reason to (in Ayn Rand's words) check your premises. Personally, I've become much more sympathetic to the market monetarist views of people like Scott Sumner over the last year. Sumner was one of the few observers who understood in 2009 that monetary policy was too tight. We should have listened to him in 2009, and we should be listening to him today.

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NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer.

The software could help developers working on many modern tasks: for example, designing a new recommendation engine using social network connections. In order to make effective recommendations--"your friends liked this movie, so here is another movie that you haven't seen yet, but you will probably like"--the software has to be able to analyze the connections between the members of a social network. This type of task is called graph computation, and it is increasingly common. But working with large-scale data sets (such as online social networks) usually requires the processing horsepower of many computers clustered together, such as those offered by Amazon's cloud-based EC2 service.

The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers.

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THE CHOICE BETWEEN JOBS AND WEALTH:

Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. There's no real evidence that, when he's off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides.

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, to being about capitalism, which Romney represents. [...]

As Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute has said again and again, it's not enough to say that capitalism will make you money. You can't fight what is essentially a moral critique with economics.

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He's going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we've seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues.

Let's face it, he's not a heroic entrepreneur. He's an efficiency expert. It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape.

That's his selling point: rigor and productivity. If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he'll thrive. 

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GOOD, GOOD LEROY BROWN:

His series featured amateur investigator Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, who would unravel local mysteries with the help of his encyclopedic knowledge of facts great and small. The books, first published in the early 1960s, became staples in classrooms and libraries nationwide. They were translated into 12 languages and sold millions of copies worldwide.

"Thanks to Donald, generations of children have learned to read and solve mysteries alongside Encyclopedia Brown, one of the most iconic characters in children's literature," said Don Weisberg, president of Penguin Young Readers Group, which publishes Sobol's books.

The Encyclopedia Brown books also featured Brown's friend and detective partner, the tough and athletic Sally Kimball. John Sobol said his dad was ahead of his times in creating a strong female character.

"That was groundbreaking back in 1963, when the series was first published," the son said.

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hISTORY ENDS EVERYWHERE:

Fifty years ago, during the proxy war between Egypt and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, President Kennedy told the Saudis that internal reforms were the best way to ensure the regime's survival. In the ensuing years, many viewed Kennedy's statement as absurd; they believed Riyadh would continue to rule with an iron fist, and that the Saudi people would never rise up and demand their freedom.

This conventional wisdom overlooked the universal principle that all people long to be free and control their destiny. And although the Saudi monarchy has remained in power for the last 50 years, the reasons for its success are disappearing. The Saudi people now have access to outside information and media outlets, they have the ability to mass communicate, they no longer accept the subservient role of women, and, thanks to the Arab Spring, they realize they have the power to effect change.

After seeing the downfall of autocrats in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and Libya, the Saudis have also realized that an iron fist will no longer be enough to maintain power, and they have started making incremental reforms. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al-Saud put it bluntly when he said, "The revolution that took place around us was a wake-up call. No one will say it, but it was the catalyst."

Saudi Arabia held local elections in 2011, and announced that women would be allowed to participate in all elections beginning in 2015. Leaders who are open to reform have recently been promoted in the Saudi hierarchy. Other hopeful signs include the addition of women as voting members of the Shura Council, and a new mortgage law passed this month after a ten-year delay. The law will allow more lower- and middle-class Saudis to become homeowners, and this growing middle-class will continue to demand even more change.

The move to send female athletes to the Olympics is one of the most drastic changes yet. While the decision may have come in response to international pressure, its consequences will be long-lasting. The Saudis are implicitly recognizing the rights and value of women, and that women have been playing sports for years, despite the country's lack of physical education for girls and a ban on official female athletic competition (that may not survive for long).

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WAITING AND WATCHING:

It didn't take the scout long to spot a nuance in the delivery of Oklahoma City RedHawks left-hander Brett Oberholtzer. Before Oberholtzer let go of the ball when throwing a pitch in the second inning in a recent game against the New Orleans Zephyrs, the scout was expecting to see a curveball.

"He slows his delivery down," said the scout, who was watching from a seat behind the plate at Zephyr Field. "You can pick up the breaking ball when he slows his delivery down. It's not quite the same delivery he has on his fastball."

The Zephyrs' Donnie Murphy hit Oberholtzer's next curveball for a hard double to left.

Henceforth, the scout will be identified as Scout. He agreed to be accompanied to a game under the condition that his name and big-league organization not be revealed. [...]

Scout said he might see a particular team play 10 games in a season. Because a player can go through stretches of unusual success or failure, a scout has to wary of forming the wrong impression.

"If you're in at the wrong time, it can really make a difference," Scout said. "A month ago, Wade LeBlanc was different from a week ago. He made some adjustments."

On June 10, LeBlanc, a left-handed pitcher, was knocked out in the fourth inning in a start for the Zephyrs. He was effective in his next three starts, and the Marlins called him up as a reliever. In his first three appearances for Miami, he pitched 4 2/3 scoreless innings.

For each position player, Scout assigns grades on five tools -- throwing arm, fielding ability, speed, hitting ability and power. The scale is 20 to 80; 50 is average.

"The two things that you wait on the longest are power and speed," Scout said.

Zephyrs outfielder Kevin Mattison is an 80 runner, he said. "People will keep giving him opportunities," he said. Oklahoma City first baseman Mike Hessman, because of exceptional power, has had opportunities in the majors and might get more, Scout said. At age 34, Hessman leads the PCL in homers at 27 through Saturday.

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"AND THEIR ERRORS":

The story of how the Mormons came was this: Headed home from a job-hunting trip to Blackfoot, Idaho, while changing planes in Salt Lake City, my father suffered a breakdown in the terminal. His haunted mind attacked itself, nearly paralyzing him at the gate. He pulled himself together and boarded his flight, where he found himself seated beside a handsome young couple that radiated serenity and calm. They sensed his despair and started talking to him about their church, the center of their lives, and about their belief that the family is eternal, a permanently bonded sacred unit. (One reason he listened to them, he later told me, is that there had just been a terrible flood in Idaho--the deadly Teton Dam disaster--and he'd heard stories of how thousands of Mormons had immediately dropped what they were doing and convoyed in from states across the West to perform acts of cleanup and reclamation.) The next morning, in his bed at home, he woke up thrashing from a nightmare. My mother threatened to leave him; she'd had enough. Flashing back to the couple on the plane, he opened the phone book, found a number, dialed it, and said he needed help. This minute. Now.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints must have been used to fielding such distress calls. They dispatched a rescue party instantly: another couple, retired, in their seventies. Within an hour, they were at my father's side. They talked to him all morning behind closed doors and convinced him to go to church with them that Sunday. The service soothed him, lightening his mood. My mother saw this, grew hopeful, and didn't leave him. The bicycle-riding missionaries showed up a few nights later.

"Dear Heavenly Father," their prayers began. They sat hip to hip on our sagging, old blue sofa and milky beads of talcum-powder sweat ran down their temples and their cheeks. They blessed our family, our home. They blessed the lemonade. They asked that we hear their message with open minds. On the first night, they showed us a movie about a boy, Joseph Smith, who, one day in 1820, prayed in the woods behind his parents' farm and found himself face to face with God and Jesus. The lessons that followed described what happened next, from Smith's translation of a golden scripture that he found buried in a hillside, to the trials of his early disciples. Seeking peace to practice their new faith, they traveled west from settlement to settlement, harassed by mobs of brutal vigilantes who finally murdered Smith in Illinois. His people stayed strong, though. Under a brave new leader, Brigham Young, they undertook a 1,000-mile trek that brought them to Utah, their Zion in the wilderness.

The missionaries kept coming for six weeks, always at night, always hungry for our cookies. On Sundays, they sat next to us at services, one on each side of us, like gate posts. And then it was time; they told us we were ready. Standing in a pool of waist-deep water, dressed in white robes, we held our hands together as if to pray, let the missionaries clasp our wrists, leaned back, leaned back farther, and joined the Mormon Church.

 

LAST WINTER, I SAT drinking coffee in my living room, watching Mitt Romney speak on television after narrowly winning the Michigan primary. The speech was standard Republican stuff, all about shrinking the federal government and restoring American greatness, but I wasn't concentrating on Romney's rhetoric. I was examining his face, his manner, and trying--if such a thing is possible--to peer into his soul. I was trying to see the Mormon in him.

My motives were personal, not political. I'd never been a good Mormon, as you'll soon learn (indeed, I'm not a Mormon at all these days), but the talk of religion spurred by Romney's run had aroused in me feelings of surprising intensity. Attacks on Mormonism by liberal wits and their unlikely partners in ridicule, conservative evangelical Christians, instantly filled me with resentment, particularly when they made mention of "magic underwear" and other supposedly spooky, cultish aspects of Mormon doctrine and theology. On the other hand, legitimate reminders of the Church hierarchy's decisive support for Proposition 8, the California gay marriage ban, disgusted me. Deeper, trickier emotions surfaced whenever I came across the media's favorite visual emblem of the faith: a young male missionary in a shirt and tie with a black plastic name-badge pinned to his vest pocket. The image suggested that Mormons were squares and robots, a naïve, brainwashed army of the out-of-touch. That hurt a bit. It also tugged me back to a sad, frightened moment in my youth when these figures of fun were all my family had.

As for Romney himself, the man, the person, I empathized with him and his predicament. He no more stood for Mormonism than I did, but he was often presumed to stand for it by journalists who knew little about his faith, let alone the culture surrounding it, other than that some Americans distrusted it and certain others despised it outright. When a writer for The New York Times, Charles Blow, urged Romney to "stick that in your magic underwear!" I half hoped that Romney would lose his banker's cool and tell the bigoted anti-Mormon twits to stick something else somewhere else, until it hurt. I further hoped he'd sit his critics down and thoughtfully explain that Mormonism is more than a ceremonial endeavor; it constitutes our country's longest experiment with communitarian idealism, promoting an ethic of frontier-era burden-sharing that has been lost in contemporary America, with increasingly dire social consequences. Instead, Romney showed restraint, which disappointed me. I no longer practiced Mormonism, true, but it was still a part of me, apparently, and a bigger part than I'd appreciated.

Sometimes a person doesn't know what he's made of until strangers try to tear it down. [...]

I never served my Mormon mission. Decision time came when I was 17, the year I left Mormonism altogether and began my college education rather than postponing it to proselytize. The disenchantments of the bus tour had savaged my testimony but spared my spirit, allowing me to rebuild my faith around elemental principles of love and forgiveness, charity and sharing. What finally separated me from the Church was a loss of nerve, not a crisis of belief. My time in the ward had shown me at close range that God doesn't work in mysterious ways at all, but by enlisting assistants on the ground. I saw sick people healed through the laying on of hands, not suddenly and magically, but gradually, from the comfort that comes of feeling the group's concern. I'd heard inspired messages spoken in common English, sometimes from my own excited lips. This proximity to the sacred scared me off. Too much responsibility, it felt like. Too much pressure to side with the miraculous, which places demands on a busy, modern person. You sit down on a plane beside a gloomy lawyer who's cursing himself under his breath, and instead of ignoring him and reading a book, you have to ask his name and offer solace.

My stated excuse for sneaking away from Mormonism was skepticism about its doctrines, but I'd learned that most Mormons don't grasp all the teachings of Joseph Smith--nor do they credit all the ones they do grasp. After the bus trip to Eden, holy Missouri never came up again in conversation. As for the future temple in Independence, I found out that the spot where Smith said it would rise belonged to a Mormon splinter sect with a U.S. membership of about 1,000. The "sacred underwear"? It was underwear. Everyone wears it, so why not make it sacred? Why not make everything sacred? It is, in some ways. And most sacred of all are people, not wondrous stories, whose job is to help people feel their sacredness. Sometimes the stories don't work, or they stop working. Forget about them; find others. Revise. Refocus. A church is the people in it, and their errors. The errors they make while striving to get things right.

But I didn't have the patience, or the humility. I wasn't a son of stubborn pioneers. I was the son of the lawyer on the plane who'd suffered the breakdown I thought I could avoid. 

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IS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE A THREAT?:

Sen. Patty Murray (Credit: Elaine Thompson) (CBS News) With Congress preparing to tackle a series of controversial tax and budget issues this fall, Democrat Sen. Patty Murray is warning Republicans that Democrats are not planning to stand down in the ongoing battle over extending Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy.

Murray, speaking to the Brookings Institute Monday, warned Republicans that she and others in her party are prepared to let tax cuts for all Americans expire if Republicans don't work with them on a deal to end Bush-era tax cuts for wealthy Americans. [...]

In addition to the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts, January 1, 2013 marks the day when $1.2 trillion worth of budget cuts spread across domestic and defense programs begin to go into effect unless Congress can reach a deal to offset them. Those automatic "sequester" cuts, spread over 10 years, are the result of the failure of the congressional "super committee" to reach an agreement to reduce the deficit as mandated by the deal last August to raise the debt ceiling. Also set to expire January 1 are some unemployment benefits and a deferment of payment cuts to Medicare physicians.

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...AND CHEAPER...:

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The first, and least foreseen, development since 2008, is that America is rapidly turning from a consumer into a producer nation. On economic grounds, its expanding energy horizons are manna from heaven. When Mr Obama was elected, the US was importing almost two-thirds of its oil. That number is down to below almost half and falling. In 2008, King Coal still dominated US electricity production. Last month natural gas supplanted coal as the largest source of US power supply.

So dramatic are America's finds, analysts talk of the US turning into the world's new Saudi Arabia by 2020, with up to 15m barrels a day of liquid energy production (against the desert kingdom's 11m b/d this year). Most of the credit goes to private sector innovators, who took their cue from the high oil prices in the last decade to devise ways of tapping previously uneconomic underground reserves of "tight oil" and shale gas. And some of it is down to plain luck. Far from reaching its final frontier, America has discovered new ones under the ground.

The second is political. Even without a deep recession and the subsequent weak recovery, America's new energy abundance would have altered the mood. But the combination of the two has killed off talk of tackling climate change (barring Mr Obama's brief aside to Rolling Stone). In 2008, John McCain, the Republican candidate, had a cap-and-trade plan to curb carbon emissions. In 2012, Mr Romney avoids the subject altogether.

Both positions capture the temper of their times. So too does Mr Obama's altered language. Fate has offered him a windfall. According to IHS Cera, the energy research group, hydraulic fracturing alone has created 600,000 jobs in the US - almost exactly as many employees as have been shed by state and local governments since 2009. Think of how much worse the jobs picture would be without the energy boom.

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HE'S ONLY BLACK ON JOB APPLICATIONS:

Have blacks been giving President Obama a pass on his shortcomings? That's the argument of Columbia University professor Fredrick C. Harris's new book, The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics. Harris takes an unvarnished, unflinching--and some would say unflattering--look at the current state of black politics in America through the lens of Obama's ascendancy to the White House.

The book is bound to be controversial, particularly in the black community, where any criticism of President Obama--especially from a black author--is deemed heresy at best and blasphemous at worst. But this tendency by blacks to go easy on the president over his shortcomings is essentially at the core of this book.

The "ticket" in the title of the book is what gained Obama admission to the White House; the "price" is what it cost blacks in terms of being able to move their political, economic, and criminal justice agendas forward. The core of Harris's argument is that, while Obama's win was (and still is) a source of great pride for blacks, it's much more symbolic than substantive; that he has done no more to address core concerns and issues facing black Americans than any other Democratic president before him, and, indeed, for a number of reasons falling under the umbrella of political expediency, has done far less.

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IT'S NOT PIG & WOLF, BUT IT'LL DO:

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JUNK EITHER WAY:

Sundial 1965 was taken late on Tuesday or early on Wednesday from the garden at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire.

As yet it is not known whether the 22in (56cm) sundial, which is made up of two interlocking bronze crescents, was stolen by someone wanting to sell it as a work of art or for its scrap value.

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THE WAR ON MARRIAGE IS NOT WAGED ON OUR OWN:

Jessica Schairer has so much in common with her boss, Chris Faulkner, that a visitor to the day care center they run might get them confused.

They are both friendly white women from modest Midwestern backgrounds who left for college with conventional hopes of marriage, motherhood and career. They both have children in elementary school. They pass their days in similar ways: juggling toddlers, coaching teachers and swapping small secrets that mark them as friends. They even got tattoos together. Though Ms. Faulkner, as the boss, earns more money, the difference is a gap, not a chasm.

But a friendship that evokes parity by day becomes a study of inequality at night and a testament to the way family structure deepens class divides. Ms. Faulkner is married and living on two paychecks, while Ms. Schairer is raising her children by herself. That gives the Faulkner family a profound advantage in income and nurturing time, and makes their children statistically more likely to finish college, find good jobs and form stable marriages.

Ms. Faulkner goes home to a trim subdivision and weekends crowded with children's events. Ms. Schairer's rent consumes more than half her income, and she scrapes by on food stamps.

"I see Chris's kids -- they're in swimming and karate and baseball and Boy Scouts, and it seems like it's always her or her husband who's able to make it there," Ms. Schairer said. "That's something I wish I could do for my kids. But number one, that stuff costs a lot of money and, two, I just don't have the time."

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns -- as opposed to changes in individual earnings -- may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

"It is the privileged Americans who are marrying, and marrying helps them stay privileged," said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.

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WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE'RE HEADED...:

Unfortunately, Medicaid has some of the worst features of single-payer systems. Typically, a single-payer system will bargain down medical prices, thus adding to affordability, but at the risk of having long lines of patients waiting for care. As it stands now, though, the low reimbursement rates of Medicaid already lead to long lines, or an inability to find a good doctor altogether, while the higher reimbursement rates of Medicare and private insurance keep health care costs high.

Along another possible path, the subsidized private insurance market -- a central feature of the new law -- will gradually displace Medicaid. And, eventually, another feature of the law will grow more important: the excise tax on employer-supplied health insurance, which will cover increasing numbers of employer-based plans over time. This could be accompanied by a gradual migration out of workplace-based coverage. Over time, the system might evolve toward means-tested private insurance vouchers, with the insurance sold on exchanges rather than tied to employment.

That would have the unfortunate effect of channeling people into what will be the most expensive segment of health care coverage. That's because the new law offers insurance subsidies to eligible incomes up to 400 percent of the current poverty line, a fiscal burden that would be unsustainable if it replaced Medicaid, which, with all its problems, is now the cheapest way to provide basic insurance coverage.

There is one way this might work: by limiting the subsidies for insurance. Note that the law itself mandates cuts if those subsidies exceed a certain percentage of gross domestic product by 2018. Most likely, the reform could not stop there, because the insurance cost burden for many Americans would feel intolerably high without the subsidies.

The next step, therefore, would lower costs by limiting the mandate to covering catastrophic conditions. Yet a further step would remove the mandate for noncatastrophic coverage, thus giving people more control over how much they want to spend on health care versus other priorities.

We would then have government-subsidized and mandated catastrophic insurance, and a freer market for other health care expenditures. We might even return to a health savings account approach on the noncatastrophic side.

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THE WONDER OF WONDERLAND:

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AND THEY'RE OFF...:

Because of his autism, Robert probably didn't know that he was lost. If he heard people coming through the woods, he might well have taken cover from them, thinking it was a game of hide-and-seek. Or he might not have wanted to be found by a stranger, even one calling out his name. This made efforts to locate him extremely difficult, and it's how Robert managed to elude what would soon become one of the largest search-and-rescue operations in Virginia history.

WHEN HE DISAPPEARED that day, Robert began an unlikely adventure that placed him at the center of the newest concern in the search-and-rescue (SAR) world: lost autistic children. Why autistic kids have the tendency to run off is not known, but the urge is strong in half of all children diagnosed with the disorder. [...]

Once Robert Wood was off and running, he was quickly lost, too. Dashing up and over trenches, through thickets of mountain laurel and briars, he caught spiderwebs in the face and picked up ticks and chiggers as he ran. The forest floor was littered with large trees, branches, and piles of deadfall caused by recent hurricanes and tropical storms. Robert likely moved from one thing that provoked his curiosity to the next--boulders to climb, trees to examine, the allure of a train-whistle blast. If it weren't for the profusion of copperheads, black snakes, and corn snakes, it would have been the ideal place to play paintball or hide-and-seek.

Over the age of four, normal children recognize that they are lost and will look for their parents. Their spatial maps are flawed, but they will devise strategies to get found. "The biggest difference," according to SAR expert Robert Koester, is that nonautistic kids are "a lot less likely to be evasive. Once they get hungry or cold, they will call out to searchers."

But Robert doesn't feel pain the way normal children do. He could sprain an ankle or suffer cold and dampness without complaint. The pangs of hunger wouldn't make him cry. He'd harbor no fear of the dark or the bogeyman and wouldn't dread solitude, so he wouldn't get panicky at dusk.

He is also in possession of a healthy dose of determination. One educator called him "a very tough kid," "a very resilient kid," and "resourceful, in his own way."

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After working briefly in the deepest gold mine in South Africa, Whalley joined a team of geologists in Tanganyika employed by the maverick Canadian millionaire Jack Williamson, who was challenging De Beers' monopoly of the African diamond trade. Tiring of plodding around five-mile squares prospecting for diamond pipes, he persuaded Williamson to allow him to continue his work on foot along the exact route of Speke's historic journey to Lake Victoria in the early 1860s. In many villages he walked through, no white man had been seen since Speke's time (years later, in recognition of this feat, Whalley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society).

He was then recruited by the Tanganyikan government as a game warden just as independence approached in 1961 and its wildlife service faced an upsurge in poaching.

One of his first tasks was to look after a young woman, Jane Goodall, who had arrived from England to study chimpanzees. He drew her attention at Gombe Stream to the way one chimp was using blades of grass to "fish" for termites in their mounds . Indeed, Whalley soon won such a reputation as an expert wildlife observer that he was asked to escort celebrated visitors around the country's game reserves, among them Hemingway, the explorer Wilfred Thesiger and film stars such as John Wayne, James Stewart and Elsa Martinelli.

He was entrusted too with battling poachers and once, when escorting Prince Bernhardt of the Netherlands, who had just launched the World Wildlife Fund, they came across three Dutch missionaries illegally shooting game. When the unshaven Prince remonstrated with them, one said: "Who do you think you are? Prince Bernhardt?" "As a matter of fact, I am," he replied -- and ordered that they should be deported the next day.

Having befriended George and Joy Adamson, Whalley took a similarly stern line when Mrs Adamson, at his invitation, arrived to release into the wild in the Serengeti the three orphaned cubs of Elsa the lioness. She brought with her a rifle and proceeded to shoot game to feed the cubs. Telling her that this was no way to teach them to fend for themselves, Whalley confiscated her gun and was rewarded by her reference to him in her book Living Free as "an obnoxious game warden" (although she sent him an affectionately signed copy).

In 1962 Whalley was struck down with bilharzia. Obliged to return to England, he flew to Bombay with a Swedish doctor so that they could drive back overland via Iran and Iraq, where Whalley was arrested for bribing his way into the country with Scotch and cigarettes. After four days in a Baghdad prison, they were told they had 12 hours to reach the Jordanian border or they would be put on trial.

On his arrival in England Whalley weighed seven stone, and was rushed to the London School of Tropical Medicine. It was suggested that he should regain his fitness by working at the Outward Bound School in the Lake District, where he soon became a much-respected instructor and met his wife Judy. Then, after some years teaching PE at Bedales, in 1971 Whalley emigrated with his family to Australia, where for the next three decades he became a much loved teacher at some of the country's leading schools, ending (1984-99) at Pembroke in Adelaide.

In the 1980s he began taking groups of Pembroke pupils into the desert north of Adelaide, and it was there that he became increasingly involved with Aboriginal communities, particularly one centred on the former railway town of Marree. On his retirement in 1999 he began teaching Aboriginal children at Marree school, telling them the stories their parents had forgotten and bringing alive for them an awareness of the natural world around them.

He was known for his affinity with the camels introduced to that region by 19th-century Afghan railway builders, for his storytelling and playful humour, and for teaching both his white and Aboriginal pupils to make teddy bears, more than 4,500 of which have now been given as a source of comfort to those in need, from cancer patients to impoverished children as far away as Haiti and Zimbabwe.

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TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

According to the Roberts opinion, the healthcare mandate is really a tax incurred when an individual fails to purchase health insurance. While legal scholars tussle over whether taxing inactivity is a new doctrine, taxpayers are already facing such impositions with every break in the code they don't take advantage of.

Consider the home mortgage tax deduction: Everyone who doesn't own a home is paying more taxes than they otherwise would to subsidize all the homeowners enjoying their break. The same goes for the "charitable" deductions, by which we all pay more than we otherwise would to cover everything from the country's churches to its super PACs, and the child tax credit, effectively a tax on those of us without progeny. Every deduction that you don't take advantage of is essentially a tax on your inactivity. We don't complain about that because many, though not all - I'm looking at you, mortgage deduction - of those tax breaks serve a social function we value.

Taxes are often used as a vehicle to encourage or discourage various kinds of behaviors, and tax reformers - including the next president, whoever he is - should learn from healthcare's lessons about what kind of incentives to adopt. In the case of the healthcare tax/mandate, the idea is that getting everyone health insurance is going to save us all money in the long run, same as giving parents a tax break and subsiding civil society do-gooders. All of this contributes to a happy, growing society.

The key policy distinction between healthcare and home mortgage tax breaks, however, is that there is evidence that purchasing health insurance benefits the public - which no longer has to subsidize your emergency room visits - while subsidies for housing seem to have far fewer (and indeed many worse) consequences. If tax reform is discussed next year, it will be about controlling wild corporate lobbying and messy deals, but it will also be about how Congress can maximize the good tax breaks while eliminating the bad ones.

Economists tell us that the best tax regimes penalize negative actions - like not having healthcare insurance or buying cigarettes - while keeping the burden light on positive actions, like earning income or purchasing necessities. The healthcare tax isn't quite a traditional consumption tax, but it comes from a similar impulse to tax bad things rather than good ones. As Mankiw puts it in a manifesto favoring these taxes [PDF], "individuals can be charged for the external costs they impose on others." It could be an argument for the Obamacare mandate.

These kinds of taxes aren't necessarily politically popular; they often target both entrenched interests and the populace at large. The best-known examples are the gas tax, which exists, and the carbon tax, a broader tax on fossil fuels that, in the U.S. at least, is but a flicker in the imagination of policy wonks. The Democrats' aborted effort to create a cap-and-trade system to fight air pollution in 2009 was essentially a roundabout way of implementing a tax on pollution, but it failed in a gridlocked Congress, while facing intense opposition from the energy industry.

But in the future, consumption taxes are likely to be more popular than either jacked-up income tax rates or massive cuts to social spending. 

We are all Pigovians now.

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NOTHING BUT APPEASEMENT:

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OTHER THAN THE MANDATE, DEATH PANELS WERE THE BEST PART OF THE BILL:

Health care outside of Medicare follows a similar pattern, with research showing that the majority of U.S. spending also highly concentrated on a small group of high-cost patients. These typically include people with one or more chronic conditions, such as diabetes, high cholesterol, arthritis and cancer, said Steven B. Cohen, a director at the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The majority of that spending is unavoidable, but research shows a large portion isn't. Of the $2.5 trillion the U.S. spent on health care in 2009, $765 billion was waste, according to a study by the Institute of Medicine, an independent body that advises the federal government on health policy. That includes $210 billion on unnecessary services.

Health-policy experts say another way to tackle that problem is to give patients a better sense of their survival odds once they get really sick. Some are pushing for private insurers and hospitals to release data that would help them create better statistics on how long patients survived after long hospitalizations or with particular ailments.

"If you knew to say, 'I'd like to see how the last people who were relatively similar to my mother did,' think how important that would be," said Joanne Lynn, a director at the Altarum Institute, a nonprofit health-systems research organization, who has worked for the agency that runs Medicare and Medicaid. "Right now, the doctors are going on hunches."

Many experts say the key is to get patients to plan with doctors and their family for how much care they want when they approach the end of their life. Medicare doesn't currently reimburse doctors for visits devoted to that since the change was labeled a "death panel" and struck from the health-overhaul law. The cultural aversion to talking about your own death also hinders such planning.

"In this death-panels nonsense we have lost the ability to talk about a very important matter," said Donald Berwick, a pediatrician who ran Medicare and Medicaid until last year.

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LESS MONEY, LESS CHOICE, MORE MARKET FORCE:

[I]n the context of the current election, "Priceless"proves most useful in explaining why our private health care markets don't work properly and how to fix them. Because of federal tax law, health insurance provided by an employer is tax-free. This, Mr. Goodman, notes, has "favored third-party insurance against individual self-insurance." Because health insurance is tax-free and wages are taxed at the marginal rate, employees have an incentive to put as many dollars of benefits as possible into health insurance. This has led to the notion of "ideal heath insurance," which Mr. Goodman says is insurance "with no deductible or co-payment, making medical care essentially free at the point of delivery."

But if health insurance pays for all of a patient's health expenses, the patient has an incentive "to overuse the system, essentially consuming health care until the last amount obtained has a value that approaches zero." If patients aren't paying more of their health expenses with their own money, "they're not likely to shop around for the best buy."

When patients don't shop around, health care "providers will not compete for patients based on price. They will have no economic incentive to keep costs low the way producers do in other markets." Rather, with an insurance company - i.e., a third-party payer - paying their bills, "the incentive of providers will be to maximize against the payment formulas in order to enhance their incomes."

That, in turn, incentivizes insurance companies to interfere with the doctor-patient relationship in an effort to restrain the amount of care that is used. Ideally, they are able to eliminate primarily unnecessary care. In practice, they go after low-hanging fruit that may or may be not be necessary care. In the process, insurance companies anger both doctors and patients.

To get out of this mess, Mr. Goodman says no change in public policy is "more important than giving patients more control over health care dollars." But will Republicans follow this principle? Mitt Romney does not inspire confidence. He wants to give individuals the same tax break for health insurance that employees get for buying it through their employer. That only will encourage individuals to buy more insurance than they need, putting more of their dollars under the control of a third-party insurer. In short, it will only exacerbate the problems with the current system.

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ALONG THE AXIS OF GOOD:

Polish officials unveiled a statue of former President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II on Saturday, honoring two men widely credited in this Eastern European country with helping to topple communism 23 years ago.

The statue was unveiled in Gdansk, the birthplace of Lech Walesa's Solidarity movement, in the presence of about 120 former Solidarity activists, many of whom were imprisoned in the 1980s for their roles in organizing or taking part in strikes against the communist regime.

The bronze statue, erected in the lush seaside President Ronald Reagan Park, is a slightly larger-than-life rendering of the two late leaders. It was inspired by an Associated Press photograph taken in 1987 on John Paul's second pontifical visit to the U.S.

People look at a new statue of ...

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BREAKING THE LABOR MOVEMENT FIXED INFLATION TOO:

[M]r. Shultz is confident that if we get the policies right again, America can regain its footing: "When Ronald Reagan took office, inflation was in the teens, the prime rate was in the 20s, and the economy was going nowhere. We still had the remnants of wage and price controls, particularly in oil and gas. And Jimmy Carter said we were in 'malaise.' It was a bad time. I'm convinced the economy can be turned around because I watched Ronald Reagan do it."

"It took long-term thinking," Mr. Shultz emphasizes. "I'll give you an example. [Reagan] knew and we all advised him you can't have a decent economy with the kind of inflation we've got. . . . The political people would come in and say 'You've got to be careful, Mr. President. There's gonna be a recession [if the Federal Reserve tightens the money supply]. You're gonna lose seats in the midterm election.'

"And he basically said, 'If not us who? If not now when?' And he held a political umbrella over [Fed Chairman] Paul Volcker, and Paul did what needed to be done. And by late '82 early '83, inflation was under control, the tax changes that he made were kicking in, and the economy took off. But it took a politician with an ability to take a short-term hit in order to get the long-run results that we needed."

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YOU GONNA ARGUE?

Yesterday we published the all-time top 50 tenor saxophone recordings as chosen by an elite group of artists and critics. Today we turn the floor over to Mr. Sonny Rollins, who knows a thing or two about tenor.

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Los Angeles-based Mariachi El Bronx started out as a punk band called The Bronx, but that was before its members discovered a collective love for Mexican folk music. The group fell hard for mariachi, and when faced with playing an acoustic punk rock set for a TV show, they decided to fully embrace that new direction and start a Mexican-flavored side project. Since that fateful day, there have been two eponymous Mariachi El Bronx albums, and a third LP is in the works.

Related articles

• Mariachi El Bronx: Tiny Desk Concert (wnyc.org)

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THERE IS NO ZION FOR JEWS TO DEFEND:

Proposals to draft ultra-Orthodox men into the Israeli army, ending an exemption that has lasted for 64 years, are bitterly dividing prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu's coalition government ahead of a crucial debate on Monday.

A new bill allowing the draft is due to be submitted for its first reading in the Knesset, following a ruling by the country's supreme court that the Tal Law, exempting Haredi Jews from military service, was unconstitutional. That law is due to expire on 1 August, but what will replace it has become the subject of ferocious argument over one of the most sensitive issues in Israeli society.

As Netanyahu faced a weekend of crisis talks with his deputy and political rival, Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, senior government sources conceded that their chances of reaching a solution to save their coalition were slim. 

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EVENTUALLY, HE ONLY TOOK TIME:

Joseph Mitchell was born in 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, where his father was a farmer who traded in cotton and tobacco. He began submitting newspaper stories as a student at the University of North Carolina, and moved to New York in 1929 with the idea of writing about politics. He got a job as a "district man" on the Herald Tribune, "hoofing after dime-a-dozen murders" in Brooklyn and Harlem. The latter, especially, left a deep impression. "Until I came to New York City," Mitchell would write in an introduction to My Ears Are Bent (1938), a collection of his early newspaper stories, "I had never lived in a town with a population of more than 2,699, and I was alternately delighted and frightened out of my wits by what I saw at night in Harlem." By the time his stint there was over, Mitchell was "so fascinated by the melodrama of the metropolis at night" that he forgot his ambition to be a political reporter.

Instead, he went to sea, working on a freighter shipping heavy machinery to Leningrad. Returning to New York, Mitchell found a job at the World-Telegram, writing features and interviews. He wrote about strippers, Eleanor Roosevelt, lady prize-fighters, Noël Coward, pickpockets, Tallulah Bankhead and George Bernard Shaw, and he began contributing short pieces to the New Yorker, which had been founded by Harold Ross in 1925. Mitchell joined the staff in 1938, and the magazine immediately gave him two great gifts.

The first was a form. The profile - a portrait of an individual drawn from interviews, observations and background research - is now a journalistic commonplace, but in the 1930s it was an innovation, conceived and developed at the New Yorker by Ross and writers such as Alva Johnston, Meyer Berger and St Clair McKelway. The profile, according to Ross, showed that it was possible "to write history about living people". Mitchell would become its greatest exponent.

The second gift was time. Released from the ticking-clock schedules of newspaper reporting, Mitchell now had the freedom to immerse himself in his stories, spending weeks or even months with his subjects, watching and listening. "There was this anomaly," he would say, much later. "You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won't be true. Inside a fact is another fact, and inside that is another fact. You've got to get to the true facts. When I got [to the New Yorker], I said to myself I don't give a damn what happens, I am going to take my time."

Mitchell on Gould is just awesome psychodrama. Was he writing about himself to begin with, or did he too stop writing out of guilt at exposing his subject?

Related articles

• Joseph Mitchell: mysterious chronicler of the margins of New York (guardian.co.uk)

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"WE'RE NOT LEGENDARY":

Handwritten, the band's fourth studio album (and their first with Mercury Records), will be released on July 24. While in town to perform at the Fine Line Music Cafe, frontman Brian Fallon stopped by The Current studios to talk with Mary Lucia about the difference between performing at venues and music festivals, busking on the street and, of course, Bruce Springsteen.

Songs performed: "45," "American Slang" and "Here's Lookin at You Kid."

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• [MP3] The Gaslight Anthem - "You Got Lucky" (laststopwonderland.com)
• Song Exclusive: The Gaslight Anthem, '45' (rollingstone.com)
• The Gaslight Anthem Cover The Who For Live On Letterman Encore (wcbsfm.cbslocal.com)

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LET'S CALL IT...:

When Cynthia Craig was diagnosed with postpartum depression eight years ago, she told her family doctor she felt anxious about motherhood. She wondered whether she had made a catastrophic mistake by quitting her job, whether she could cope with the long, lonely hours stay-at-home mothers face -- and even whether she should have had children.

"Anxiety is something I have always had, especially during times of change," said Craig, 40, who lives in Scotland, Ontario. "But I was never worried about the level of anxiety, and it never prevented me from leaving the house, driving, socializing or even speaking in front of people."

Her doctor referred her to an anxiety clinic, where a nurse asked Craig dozens of yes-or-no questions -- are you afraid of snakes? do you hear voices? do you vomit from anxiety? -- and made a diagnosis. "She said, 'Let's call it Generalised Anxiety Disorder with a touch of social phobia,'" Craig said.

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PARTISAN HACKERY AIN'T ROCKET SCIENCE:

Rice's forceful and surprisingly partisan 13-minute address -- audio of which has been obtained by BuzzFeed -- won her two standing ovations from the gathering of big-money donors and GOP elite. It was widely considered the highlight of the weekend, several people present told BuzzFeed.

The standout performance took several people in Romney's orbit by surprise. One surrogate said he was surprised by the red meat rhetoric employed by Rice, who has largely eschewed the political arena in recent years, devoting her time instead to an academic career at Stanford.

"She's either very worried about a socialist threat to America, or she wants to be Vice President," the surrogate said.

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In 1970, preschool teachers asked Marin County, Calif., psychologist Judith Wallerstein how to deal with a rash of children who couldn't sleep, cried constantly or were too aggressive with playmates. The common denominator, the teachers said, was that the parents were divorcing.

Dr. Wallerstein looked for research on the issue and, finding nothing useful, decided to conduct her own. She launched what would become a 25-year investigation, producing alarming findings that made her, a long-married grandmother of five, a polarizing figure in a contentious national debate. [...]

When Dr. Wallerstein began looking at the effects of divorce, she thought the children's difficulties would be fleeting. Instead, she found that for half of the 131 children she studied, time did not heal their wounds but allowed them to fester, creating "worried, under-achieving, self-deprecating and sometimes angry young men and women" who, not surprisingly, struggled considerably with romantic relationships.

In light of this delayed effect, Dr. Wallerstein came to a controversial conclusion: If parents could swallow their misery, they should stay together for their kids.

"What in many instances may be the best thing for the parents may by no means be the best thing for the children," she told Newsday in 1994. "It is a real moral problem."

She wrote about the consequences of divorce in several books, including "Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce" (1989) and "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" (2000). Co-authored by Sandra Blakeslee, the books made headlines, put Dr. Wallerstein on talk shows and magazine covers and became bestsellers.

Related articles

• RIP Dr. Judith Wallerstein: Children of Divorce Lose Their Voice (psychologytoday.com)
• Judith S. Wallerstein, Psychologist Who Analyzed Divorce, Dies at 90 (nytimes.com)
• Judith Wallerstein, psychologist who spoke against divorce, dies at 90 (sacbee.com)
• Judith Wallerstein: She Helped Parents and Children Through the Pain of Divorce (aarp.org)

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HE UNWITTINGLY, THEY WITTINGLY:

"We revolutionaries, who aimed to create a new society, 'the broadest democracy of the workers', had unwittingly, with our own hands, constructed the most terrifying state machine conceivable: and when, with revulsion, we realised this truth, this machine, driven by our friends and comrades, turned on us and crushed us." The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge's assessment of the role that he and his comrades played in building the machine that would destroy them is striking in its candour. Virtually all of his friends who managed to survive the dictatorship that was installed in the revolution of October 1917 blamed the totalitarian repression that ensued on factors - the Russian civil war, foreign intervention, Russian backwardness - for which the Bolshevik regime was not responsible.

Refusing to acknowledge his part in constructing and using the machinery of repression, Leon Trotsky pinned most of the blame on Joseph Stalin - a single human being. Here, Serge was more clear-sighted. Trotsky, he wrote, "refused to admit that in the terrible Kronstadt episode of 1921 the responsibilities of the Bolshevik central committee had been simply enormous, that the subsequent repression had been needlessly barbarous, and that the establishment of the Cheka (later the GPU) with its techniques of secret inquisition had been a grievous error on the part of the revolutionary leadership, and one incompatible with any socialist philosophy". [...]

Though he does not put himself at the centre of this extraordinary story, the strand that links everything together is Serge himself - a courageous and generous man who was loyal to his vision of how revolution could usher in a new era in human history. In moral terms, there can be no doubt that he was on a higher plane than the Bolshevik leaders.

At the same time, possibly for that very reason, Serge was consistently deluded about how the revolution would develop. Lenin and Trotsky knew that revolution is by nature a ruthlessly violent and inherently undemocratic business. Without firing squads, mass imprisonment, the use of family members as hostages (a technique pioneered by Trotsky to secure the loyalty of the Red Army in the civil war) and the routine use of torture by the Cheka, the Soviet regime would have been overthrown soon after it came to power."

Had Gorbachev realized that glasnost would unleash the Sergian insight--that the Revolution was rotten from the start--he never would have allowed it.

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THE BLOCK IS PSYCHIATRIC, NOT PHYSICAL:

The arguments against an electric car are growing fewer. A vehicle in development by ECOmove - a consortium of Danish car builders - has unveiled a car that can travel 500 miles without refueling. Once a sticking point for electric vehicles, distance could be ticked off the list of grievances the driving populace has with electrics. Fuel prices have moved drivers to turn to hybrid and clean diesel but advances in electric technology could signal the rise of electrics as a space for entrepreneurs and established companies alike.

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LIKE GAYER TREKKIES:

Dale Fjordbotten is a proud "My Little Pony" fan, with the shiny blue body suit and yellow lightning bolt, blue wings and blue tail to prove it.

Like many "Bronies" -- boys and men who like the cartoon "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic"-- the 25-year-old college student turned out over the weekend for "BronyCon Summer 2012" at the Meadowlands Exposition Center, which drew 4,000 men, women, boys and girls, many in colorful wigs and costumes.

"I thought about what people would say. 'It's creepy. It's weird. It's a ... show for little girls,'" said Fjordbotten, from Staten Island, N.Y. "It's just a great show ... the story line, the plot, the beautiful animation."

Bronies say they're a misunderstood lot who've gotten a bad rap from the media. They're all about the show, friendship, love and tolerance, and they have no bad intentions, they say.

"I discovered that there's nothing to be ashamed of being a Brony," said 19-year-old James Penna of Mastic in Long Island, N.Y. "People are into what they're into."

Outside the convention center, young men danced and sang along with songs from My Little Pony cartoon that blasted from loud speakers as a video screen on a large truck showed the show's characters. One observer said it almost felt like a Grateful Dead concert.

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• Grown Men Dressed As My Little Ponies?! Yes, It's BronyCon 2012 (glamour.com)

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W SHOULD HAVE DONE IT IN '04, BUT IT'S NEVER TOO LATE:

Matt Drudge is reporting the Romney campaign's narrowed their choices for Vice President down to a carefully vetted handful, and that the front runner is none other than former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. 

Matt Drudge reports a VP announcement will happen in the "coming weeks," but for now the Romney campaign has a list of a handful of choices, and Rice is at the top. If true, pundits will point to Romney's big Park City donor retreat as the turning point for Rice. She gave a speech on American foreign policy that wowed everyone there. At the time, Politico said Rice's speech "was praised by several attendees. It, too, focused on foreign policy, and she chastised the president -- sometimes by name -- for failing to lead on the global stage." Two guests who declined to be named described Rice's speech to ABC News, saying it was "an 'impassioned plea' for the country to 'stand up and take charge.'" 

Ann Romney was the first to leak that a woman was part of the potential VP list, but Condoleezza Rice wasn't even on our radar then. 

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The Very Best's official debut, Warm Heart of Africa, cemented the then-trio's position at the forefront of a new phase in the development of African-rooted music. It included cameos from hip time-zone trippers Ezra Koenig and M.I.A., and complemented the nearly psychedelic explorations of bands like Animal Collective.

Out July 17, MTMTMK is an altogether different effort, both catchier and more intense. Its songs, with lyrics written by Mwamwaya in English and the Malawian national language, Chewa, revel in the power of African sounds to shape a vision as wide as the world. (The Very Best has fun doing this: Check out the video for "Yoshua Alikuti," which parodies Lil Wayne's "A Milli," was filmed in Nairobi, and highlights a song protesting the regime of the now-deceased Malawian president Bingu wa Mutharika.) Mwamwaya's beefy wail communicates passion, humor and conviction, no matter what language he's using at the moment.

MTMTMK features many highly danceable earworms that could start any party and sound great on the radio. Renowned musical ambassadors K'Naan, Baaba Maal and Amadou & Mariam all make appearances. "Rumbae" even includes a hook which resulted from collaborations with "Dynamite" hitmaker Taio Cruz. Yet the focus and craft Hugo and Mwamwaya bring to MTMTMK only makes the music richer: "Rudeboy" and "We OK" (co-written with Bruno Mars) revive the spirit of new-wave genre-busters like The English Beat, whose pretty choruses were wrapped around sharp-edged stories of cultural collision and change.

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HE'S GOT THE LOOK:

Mitt Romney isn't going to win the African-American vote over President Obama this November. Knowing that, it would have been understandable if Romney declined the NAACP's invitation to visit Houston on Wednesday and address the group's annual convention. The prospect of speaking to a crowd that overwhelmingly supports your opponent is not only politically risky; it's personally intimidating. In such settings, and under such an intense microscope, one small misstep can snowball into a news-dominating disaster. The Romney campaign, known for being risk-averse, easily could have determined the risks outweighed the rewards and avoided the event, opting instead to have their candidate address the conference via video message.

But Romney showed up. With the critical eyes of the political world resting squarely upon him, Romney marched defiantly into the lion's den and delivered a speech that was direct, assertive and dispassionate. Undaunted, the man seeking to unseat the nation's first African-American president stood calmly before a group of his most fervent supporters and informed them that he, not Obama, is the one they've been waiting for.

"If you want a president who will make things better in the African American community, you are looking at him," Romney told the crowd, pausing for added emphasis. As scattered boos echoed throughout the audience, Romney offered an unscripted -- and uncharacteristic -- display of bravado. "You take a look," he nodded.

The reaction to the speech from the Left reminds of Michael Halberstam's novel, The Wanting of Levine, where, if memory serves, the Jewish nominee is served feces at a dinner with an NAACP-type organization but is the first Democrat to refuse to eat it.  Folks seem mostly upset that Mitt didn't grovel and gobble.

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THE WISDOM OF THE DEMOS:

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WHINGEING DETACHED FROM REALITY:

[A]t the very moment anti-tax protesters were emerging as the most powerful force in American politics, handing Republicans landslide control of the U.S. House, the data show that people were sending the smallest portion of their income to the federal government since 1979.

During Obama's first year in office, the average tax rate paid by all households fell to 17.4 percent, down from 19.9 percent in 2007, according to the CBO. The 2009 rate was significantly lower than the previous low of 19.4 percent in 2003 and well below the 30-year average of 21 percent.

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THE GENUINE HOUSING CRISIS IS THE SHORTAGE:

The U.S. finally has moved beyond attention-grabbing predictions from housing "experts" that housing is bottoming. The numbers are now convincing.

Nearly seven years after the housing bubble burst, most indexes of house prices are bending up. "We finally saw some rising home prices," S&P's David Blitzer said a few weeks ago as he reported the first monthly increase in the slow-moving S&P/Case-Shiller house-price data after seven months of declines.

Nearly 10% more existing homes were sold in May than in the same month a year earlier, many purchased by investors who plan to rent them for now and sell them later, an important sign of an inflection point. In something of a surprise, the inventory of existing homes for sale has fallen close to the normal level of six months' worth despite all the foreclosed homes that lenders own. The fraction of homes that are vacant is at its lowest level since 2006.

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CLIMATE CHANGES:

Measurements stretching back to 138BC prove that the Earth is slowly cooling due to changes in the distance between the Earth and the sun.

["Professor Dr. Jan Esper's group at the Institute of Geography at JGU used tree-ring density measurements from sub-fossil pine trees originating from Finnish Lapland to produce a reconstruction reaching back to 138 BC."]

The finding may force scientists to rethink current theories of the impact of global warming.

It is the first time that researchers have been able to accurately measure trends in global temperature over the last two millennia.

Over that time, the world has been getting cooler - and previous estimates, used as the basis for current climate science, are wrong. 

Their findings demonstrate that this trend involves a cooling of -0.3°C per millennium due to gradual changes to the position of the sun and an increase in the distance between the Earth and the sun. 

'This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant,' says Esper, 'however, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1°C. 

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THERE IS NO SYRIA:

Syria is predominantly Sunni Arab, with substantial rebellious Sunni communities throughout the country. Assad, who depends upon his Shiite Alawite minority (roughly 10%-15% of the population) for his military muscle, does not have the manpower for a multiple-front counterinsurgency.

A coordinated, CIA-led effort to pour anti-tank, antiaircraft, and anti-personnel weaponry through gaping holes in the regime's border security wouldn't be hard. The regime's lack of manpower and Syria's geography--low-rising mountains, arid steppes and forbidding deserts--would likely make it vulnerable to the opposition, if the opposition had enough firepower. [...]

This Syrian action would not be a massive undertaking. Even when the CIA ramped up its aid to Afghan anti-Soviet forces in 1986-87, the numbers involved (overseas and in Washington) were small, at roughly two dozen. An aggressive operation in Syria would probably require more CIA manpower than that, but likely still fewer than 50 U.S. officers working with allied services.

Most importantly, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has irreversibly broken with Assad. He has allowed the Syrian opposition increasing freedom of maneuver over the border, including the shipment of small amounts of weaponry. Mr. Erdogan may not require much White House suasion to support a larger, American-led paramilitary program, but he'll want to know whether Mr. Obama is "all in." In Jordan, where the CIA has its most intimate Arab liaison relationship and King Abdullah (with Saudi backing) has turned against Damascus, the U.S. would find a helpful partner.

And Iraqi Kurdistan, always eager for more U.S. officials on its soil, would likely give the CIA considerable leeway provided Washington promised to stand by the Kurds in any dispute with Baghdad and Tehran. Given the Kurds' concern about American staying power, this is a significant hurdle. Iraqi Kurds don't want their Syrian brothers, who have so far been hammered less than Syria's rebelling Sunni Arabs, to invite the wrath of Damascus if they lack the weaponry to defend themselves.

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HAWK BOX:

Doc Cheatham, though best known as one of jazz's most enduring trumpeters, doubled on soprano saxophone at the start of his career. I once asked him why he didn't keep up with the instrument, and he told me, "The 1920s wasn't the time for the sax--seemed like nobody was playing it back then." The first great saxophonist was Coleman Hawkins, a musician from Missouri only a year older than Cheatham. At the time Hawkins made his first recording, at age 16 in 1921, there was no role model for him on the instrument. Yet by the time he recorded his landmark solo on "Body and Soul" 17 years later, Hawkins had altered the landscape of jazz and American vernacular music. He had almost single-handedly transformed the sax from an orphan horn into the very symbol of jazz itself.

And that wasn't even the half of it: "Classic Coleman Hawkins Sessions 1922-1947," a new boxed set from Mosaic Records, shows that Hawkins's greatest accomplishment was in perfecting the very concept of harmonic improvisation. The first great improvisers had shown that solo improvisations could be played with drama, personality and even a kind of movie-star charisma. But Hawkins took it a step further: Finding that playing variations on a song's melody could get you only so far, he also improvised on the chord changes.

With harmonic progression as his starting point, Hawkins showed how he could extend an improvisation almost indefinitely. Not only were all saxophonists in his debt, but so were Art Tatum, Django Reinhardt and nearly every musician of the 1940s and '50s. Not until the '60s did jazzmen begin to look beyond chord changes for inspiration.

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FROM FIRST TO WORST:

Though pollsters at each organization caution that the margins of error are substantial when looking at subgroups such as this, each poll shows erosion within that margin of error for Obama with these working-class white men. The new Quinnipiac poll shows Obama attracting just 29 percent of non-college white men, down from 32 percent in their most recent national survey in April, according to figures provided by Douglas Schwartz, April Radocchio and Ralph Hansen of Quinnipiac. The ABC/Washington Post survey found Obama drawing just 28 percent of non-college white men, down from 34 percent in their May survey, according to figures provided by ABC Pollster Gary Langer. Romney drew 56 percent of the non-college white men in Quinnipiac and 65 percent in the ABC/Washington Post survey.

No one expects Obama to win these blue-collar men, who are now among the most reliably Republican segments of the electorate. But even so, these numbers, if sustained through Election Day, would represent a modern nadir for Democrats. Since 1980, the worst performance for any Democratic nominee among these working-class white men was the 31 percent Walter Mondale managed against Ronald Reagan in 1984; the meager 39 percent Obama drew in 2008 was actually the party's best showing over that period.

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AFTER ALL...:

Could it be that Mitt Romney is correct from a strategic point of view to tell us little about what he'd do as president?

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ONE INNOVATION AFTER ANOTHER:

Yesterday GE officially opened a sprawling, $100 million battery factory in Schenectady, New York, with a dramatic battery-powered show of lights, music, and pyrotechnics. The factory, which will eventually employ 450 people, makes a new kind of battery--based on sodium and nickel. GE says the technology, which is more durable and charges more quickly than lead-acid batteries, will make off-grid power generation more efficient and help utilities integrate power from a wide range of sources, including intermittent ones such as wind and solar power.

While GE will have strong competition for new grid battery technologies from companies such as Aquion Energy and Liquid Metal Battery, the manufacturing giant clearly has high ambitions for its technology, recently forming a new business unit to commercialize the battery technology. Indeed, at the factory opening, the company announced an additional $70 million investment to increase its capacity to help meet a backlog of orders. "The cost of electricity over time is going to go down because [GE's battery] is going to give utilities the ability to use a multitude of different technologies at the same time," GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told a group of reporters at the plant opening.

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STARTING WHERE YOU WANT TO FINISH:

Reduced mobility largely reflects two shifts in the nature of economic activity.

The first is that the mix of jobs offered in different parts of America has become more uniform. The authors compute an index of occupational segregation, which compares the composition of employment in individual places with the national profile. Over time, their figures show, employment in individual markets has come to resemble more closely that in the nation as a whole.

This homogenisation reflects the rising importance of "non-tradable" work. As the name suggests, non-tradable goods and services are not traded across long distances. Californian dentists tend not to clean Floridian teeth; every city has its own dentists. Cars, by contrast, are tradable, so not every state has its own car plant. Recent research by Michael Spence and Sandile Hlatshwayo of New York University's Stern School of Business found that 98% of employment growth between 1990 and 2008 occurred in non-tradable industries. Education and health-care jobs now account for 15% of employment, up from less than 10% in 1990. With more of the country's employment mix present in each state, it is less necessary to move to find work.

Yet a more uniform job distribution alone cannot account for falling mobility. As Messrs Kaplan and Schulhofer-Wohl point out, mobility has fallen for manufacturers, where jobs are more dispersed, as well as for service-sector workers. What is more, if workers know that they can find jobs they want in different places, they may become more willing to move for other reasons--to be by the coast, for example, or to savour a particular music scene. Yet survey data reveal that moves for these other reasons have not risen. The authors suggest another force is also reducing migration: the plummeting cost of information.

Young workers in particular used to have to move to gather information: to see whether they could stand a Boston winter, say, or cared enough about the Californian climate to pay Californian rents. In recent decades, however, it has become much easier to learn about places without moving house. Deregulated airlines and innovative online-travel services have slashed travel costs, allowing people to visit and assess different markets without moving. The web makes it vastly easier to study every aspect of a potential new home, from the quality of its apartment stock to the surliness of its baristas, all without leaving home. Falling mobility isn't simply caused by labour-market homogenisation, the authors argue, but also by greater efficiency. People are able to find the right job in the ideal city in fewer hops than before.

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LIKE LIBERAL ACTIVISTS BEFORE THEM, THEY ONLY CARE ABOUT RESULTS, NOT THE TEXT:

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LITTLE TO BE GAINED BUT KNOWLEDGE REGARDING WHETHER TREATMENT US USEFUL:

Doctors try to give survival odds based on a tumor's appearance and size, but often that is just an educated guess.

But Ms. Caton had a new option, something that became possible only in this new genetic age. She could have a genetic test of her tumor that could reveal her prognosis with uncanny precision. The test identifies one of two gene patterns in eye melanomas. Almost everyone in Class 1 -- roughly half of patients -- is cured when the tumor is removed. As for those in Class 2, 70 to 80 percent will die within five years. Their cancers will re-emerge as growths in the liver. For them, there is no cure and no way to slow the disease.

No test has ever been so accurate in predicting cancer outcomes, researchers said.

The data from studies of the test are "unbelievably impressive," said Dr. Michael Birrer, an ovarian cancer specialist at Massachusetts General Hospital. "I would die to have something like that in ovarian cancer."

While for now the ocular melanoma test is in a class by itself, cancer researchers say it is a taste of what may be coming as they continue to investigate the genes of cancer cells. Similar tests, not always as definitive but nonetheless able to give prognostic information, are under development or starting to be used for other cancers, like cancers of the blood.

Having a prognosis allows people to plan their lives, but most do not want to know if they have a gene for an incurable, fatal illness, like Huntington's disease or early onset Alzheimer's.

The eye test raises a similar choice, with an added twist. This is not a test offered to healthy people, but to patients who have just gotten the news that they have cancer. The results will either give them reassurance that they will survive the cancer -- or near certainty that they will die from it.

Can patients in the throes of getting this terrifying news really make an informed choice about whether they want the test? Are they able to understand at such a fraught time that, for now at least, there is nothing that can save them if they get the bad prognosis?

Some doctors do not offer the test, reasoning that there is little to be gained.

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MAKE HIM TREASURY SECRETARY:

In a speech to the Associated Builders and Contractors legislative conference in Washington on Tuesday, Portman said that the debate ought to be focused on comprehensive tax reform rather than on the Bush-era tax cuts.

The speech came as President Obama, speaking at a campaign event in Iowa, renewed his call for Congress to extend the tax cuts on income of $250,000 and less.

"Look, I think we ought to reform the whole tax code," Portman said, according to a transcript of the speech. "We shouldn't be debating whether to deal with the current code by allowing it to be extended or not. We should have a president who shows leadership and comes to Congress and says: 'You know what? We need to reform this whole tax code.' "

He also told the crowd: "The tax code is now nine times longer than the Bible, and not nearly as interesting."

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THERE'S ONLY ONE SAFE HAVEN:

Companies around the world are on track to increase their investments in the U.S. during 2012, according to a report Thursday by the United Nations. [...]

[T]he U.S.--the world's most popular destination for capital--is becoming more appealing relative to other economies. Foreign investment into China--the second-most-popular destination--grew around 8% in 2011 from the previous year, to $124 billion, compared with the U.S.'s 15% gain.

"The prospects for the U.S. are much better," says James Zhan, team leader of UNCTAD's World Investment Report. "The U.S. economy is still much better than other developed economies, so it's still attractive. We have seen a lot of FDI also into the manufacturing sector."

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NEVERMIND THAT NAME RECOGNITION FOR BAIN IS PROBABLY STILL UNDER 40%....:

For all the attention paid to the effectiveness of President Obama's Bain-themed attacks, it's remarkable how Obama has been stuck right around 47 percent for a very long time.  As the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza documented, the president's team has handily outspent Romney and his allied super PACs, pouring in $91 million into eight swing states in an early spending barrage intended to make Romney seem an unacceptable challenger.  But for all that effort, the numbers haven't moved much at all: The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll out today shows the race deadlocked at 47 percent. Yesterday's USA Today/Gallup swing state poll showed Obama statistically tied with Romney, the exact same result the survey showed one month ago. 

 The phrase "corporate raider" has a particular meaning in the world of finance. Here's the definition on Investopedia:

"An investor who buys a large number of shares in a corporation whose assets appear to be undervalued. The large share purchase would give the corporate raider significant voting rights, which could then be used to push changes in the company's leadership  and management. This would increase share value and thus generate a massive return for the raider."

In other words, this is generally an adversarial stance, in which an investor sees an undervalued asset and forces management to spin off assets, take the company private or break it up.

 In a previous life, The Fact Checker covered renowned corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and his ilk. We also have closely studied Bain Capital and can find no examples that come close to this situation; its deals were done in close association with management. Indeed, Bain generally held onto its investments for four or five years, in contrast to the quick bust-em-ups of real corporate raiders. So calling Romney a "corporate raider" is a real stretch.

 So how does the Obama campaign justify this phrase? It cites a single Reuters story from last August, about a campaign stop in New Hampshire, written by a stringer. Buried in the article is a reference to Romney as a "former corporate raider."

 "Reuters typically refers to Romney as a 'former private equity executive' or something along those lines," said Ros Krasny, the Boston bureau chief.  "Of the hundreds of times we have referenced Romney over the past year or more, honestly, that example from [the stringer] must have just slipped through the net -- 10 months ago.

 A better source for Romney's behavior as an investor might be someone who actually worked on Wall Street, such as former Obama auto czar Steven Rattner. "Bain Capital is not now, nor has it ever been, some kind of Gordon Gekko-like, fire-breathing corporate raider that slashed and burned companies, immolating jobs wherever they appear in its path," Rattner wrote in Politico this year.

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STOLE THAT MOVE FROM WILLY WONKA:

Rob Vito stood at the front of a hotel conference room in Phoenix one day last August, a custom Kevlar vest strapped over his blue dress shirt. Vito is a large man, and the shiny black suit of armor strained to cover his belly. But he wasn't concerned about fashion, or even looking good. He had a point to make, and wanted to make it with flair.

He raised a carbon-fiber hockey stick over his head, looked out over the 150 or so members of the Professional Hockey Athletic Trainers Society gathered before him and challenged any one of them to whack him with it.

A murmur went through the crowd. People looked at each other. These were professional trainers, and they knew what a shot to the gut could do to a man. But Vito had just spent 10 minutes telling anyone in shouting distance that Kevlar is a miracle material capable of stopping a .44 caliber bullet. Finally, two members of the Edmonton Oilers training staff took the bait.

"Are you serious?" one of them asked from the middle of the room.

"Dead serious," Vito replied, waving the stick as if to taunt them. "I want you to hit me with this hockey stick as hard as you can."

One of the men stepped up and hit Vito with a tepid cross-check. Vito didn't flinch. "Come on," he barked. "Harder." The trainer obliged, hitting Vito so hard the stick nearly snapped in two. Vito's belly shook and quaked as he doubled over. The crowd gasped. But after hamming it up a moment, Vito stood up and roared with laughter.

"Is that all you've got?" he asked the trainer. "No wonder you guys lose so much."

The room erupted with laughter, but the trainers from Edmonton were all business. They placed an order for Vito's Kevlar pads on the spot.

Vito has been taking a lot of orders lately. He's the charismatic CEO of Unequal Technologies, a Philadelphia company that manufactures military-grade Kevlar padding for sports equipment. Since 2010, Vito has been touting Kevlar as the best shock-suppression material in the world and boasting that his patented "EXO Skeleton CRT" -- CRT for "concussion reduction technology" -- absorbs as much as a quarter of the force a player takes to the head or chest, significantly reducing the risk of injury.

"If Kevlar can stop a bullet, it can damn sure stop a blitz," Vito told Wired.

Over the past year, his pitch has convinced more than 20 NFL and NHL teams to use his pads in their equipment. Two dozen professional players are using EXO Skeleton CRT pads in their helmets, and more than 100 are wearing it in shoulder pads, elbow pads and other gear. As the NHL and NFL grapple with an epidemic of concussions, Kevlar-reinforced helmets are increasingly viewed as a magic bullet. The technology is proving particularly attractive to players who have sustained head trauma and desperately want to keep playing. And later this summer, Vito plans to take his product mainstream, unveiling a multi-million dollar advertising campaign aimed at the hundreds of thousands of youth league players around the U.S.

But in the rush to make their players unbreakable, pro teams aren't asking many questions of Vito beyond how quickly he can do the job. Neurologists intimately familiar with sports-related concussions warn that there is no scientific evidence that Kevlar can reduce the risk of head trauma. Worse, they fear the pads could make the problem worse by masking symptoms. The leagues have yet to independently test the effects of Kevlar, and neurologists - including one who has treated many concussed NFL and NHL players -- expressed surprise when told it was being installed in helmets.

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THEY'RE ALL HEEL:

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BEING BERNIE WOULD BE BETTER:

Some dream of running with the bulls in Pamplona.

Others, like CBS Sports broadcaster Lesley Visser, dream of running with the sausages in Miller Park.

We don't know if Visser  is bullish about a Pamplona run, but we do know she is relishing her role in the sausage race Friday at Miller Park in the wurst way.

"I'm going to be one of the racing sausages!" Visser said in an e-mail. "Yes, do you have your breath back? Staggering for me."

Last January Visser was the keynote speaker at the annual Red Smith Banquet in Appleton. Brewers general manager Doug Melvin was on the dais with Visser and the two got to talking about, as Visser put it, "the giddy glory of the sausages." Melvin said maybe there was a date that would work out.

Friday is Visser's dog day. 

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TIME IS ON HIS SIDE:

[T]he main schools of intellectual thought in China have one thing in common - their leading thinkers have often spent time in Western universities.

That means that for Westerners, who may struggle with China's very different language or food, Chinese policy debates are split along strikingly familiar lines.

Zhang counts himself on the classically liberal "right" wing. He supports free markets and political reform.

"I would love to see the country become more similar in its general system to that of the UK or United States," he says.

This camp - sometimes called China's New Right - have been most successful in economics. They influenced China's liberalisation in the 1980s and since.

"They often studied economics in places like Chicago or Oxford University," says Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations, author of What does China think?

"They came of age in the 1980s, a time when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and they became firm believers in the power of the market."

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OF COURSE, THOSE WITH SUPERIOR ART AND SCIENCE...:

Underdogs, Gladwell wrote, win far more often than you might think; and they do so particularly when they replace ability with effort and figure out new ways to play the game. [...]

Little Brown has just announced that next year it will publish Gladwell's new book, "David and Goliath," on, as he says, the "art and science of the underdog."

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THE PARTY'S OVER:

The End Of China's Economic Miracle : China has prospered From double-digit growth--but the bubble is about to burst. (Minxin Pei, 7/09/12, Newsweek)

To put it differently, if not starkly, the recent deceleration means the end of the so-called Chinese economic miracle. The era of rapid economic growth driven by investments and exports is over for China.

To many veteran China watchers, China's economic slow-down is all but inevitable. For the past decade, liberal economists, international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, and China's major trading partners have been urging China to change its state-led development model that has relied excessively on fixed- asset investment and export for growth, at the expense of household consumption. They have repeatedly warned that channeling resources to projects favored by the state would crowd out the private sector and waste precious capital, while squeezing the income for average households and reducing their capacity for consumption. In addition, such a strategy was almost certain to raise trade tensions with the West since rapid growth in investment, by creating industrial overcapacity, would force Chinese companies to dump their excess production on the global markets.

Sadly, for many years, such warnings fell on deaf ears in Beijing. Giddy with the apparent success of the much-touted "Chinese model" and unwilling to undertake the reforms that would make growth more balanced and sustainable, Chinese leaders paid mostly lip-service to rebalancing the Chinese economy. Macroeconomic indicators for the past decade show worsening domestic imbalances, with investment rates consistently in excess of 40 percent of GDP since 2004 and household consumption falling to around 35 percent of GDP in the same period, the lowest for a major economy (by comparison, household consumption accounts for 70 percent of GDP in the U.S.). In the meantime, China's external imbalances, reflected mainly in huge trade surpluses, have grown as well. In 2007 and 2008, China's trade surpluses reached an astonishing 8 to 9 percent of GDP. In the last three years, as Western demand for Chinese goods fell and labor and material costs rose, China's trade surpluses have dropped below 2 percent of GDP.

The deterioration in growth could not have come at a worse time for Beijing. The ruling Chinese Communist Party is in the middle of a leadership transition. Contrary to the popular perception of a decisive leadership, the jockeying for power inside this political oligarchy typically paralyzes policymaking. Outgoing leaders may want to revive economic growth at any cost in order to strengthen their hands in picking successors and save their reputations. But incoming leaders fear that their predecessors' policy may lead to wasteful investments and a build-up of bad loans in the banking sector, a financial mess they do not want to inherit.

A significant part of the problem with the Chinese economy today originated in Beijing's outsized stimulus package in 2009-2010. In response to the global financial crisis in late 2008, the Chinese government stimulated the economy with 4 trillion yuan ($600 billion) in fiscal spending and about 12 trillion yuan ($1.9 trillion) in new bank lending. Altogether, the injection of 16 trillion yuan into the economy, equivalent to 35 percent of GDP over two years, lifted the Chinese economy and earned Beijing plaudits around the world at the time. But most of the money went into fixed- asset investments and real estate, fueling a property bubble, causing inflation, and creating a mountain of bad loans in the banks. In the meantime, Chinese households did not benefit. Their consumption level has barely budged.

Because of the botched stimulus package four years ago, China today faces an excruciating choice. It can certainly make the same mistake again by using a combination of fiscal spending and government-directed loans to inflate growth through more investments. Such a strategy would provide enormous relief to state-owned enterprises (SOEs), local governments, and well-connected real-estate developers sitting on unsold property. SOEs can use the free money from Beijing to expand their empires, local governments can build more white elephants, and real-estate developers can roll over old debts and avoid liquidation. The costs of this option are obvious. While growth in the short term can be raised artificially, it is bound to crash again. Worse still, China's financial system will be saddled with even more nonperforming loans. At present, the government's total debts, both explicit and implicit, are estimated to be around 70 to 80 percent of GDP. As a middle-income country with a per capita of $5,000 but a rapidly aging population, China does not have much room to take on more sovereign debt.

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TOO NORMAL FOR THE JOB:

 It took Rob Portman five years to graduate from Dartmouth College. He switched majors twice, and he was rarely a habitué of Baker Memorial Library. Instead, Portman was a devoted outdoorsman. He spent hours on the slopes and even more on the water. For the skinny, long-haired teenager from Cincinnati, the Connecticut River's strong currents were a refreshing diversion from Ivy League academia. The river's rapids were also a training course. By 1977, Portman's third year, he and some friends won a grant to kayak the entire length of the Rio Grande, from its source in southern Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. They packed their bags, left Hanover, N.H., and headed west. For the next six months, Portman paddled, huddled with locals in off-the-grid Texas towns, and generally lived the life of a frugal nomad. He also perfected his Spanish, which he still speaks fluently. Portman eventually graduated in 1979 with a bachelor's degree in anthropology, but as he told me earlier this year, his best times were on a boat.

Portman, now a freshman Republican senator from Ohio, returned to the Connecticut River this past Saturday. He spent much of the day in a canoe, gliding past his old haunts. The official reason for the summer visit to his alma mater was familial: His 17-year-old daughter, Sally, was taking a tour of the school, one of four colleges she visited over the weekend. Yet this afternoon on the river was more than a jaunt down memory lane. It was, as ever, a fresh-air escape, this time from another sort of stuffiness: the vice-presidential sweepstakes. 

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WE USED TO REDISTRIBUTE WEALTH VIA JOBS:

The role of the duel forces of capital and technology is to make us more productive, to allow us to do things that labor alone can't do, or to do them more efficiently. And they've done a good job. Since 1975, in the US manufacturing sector, hours worked have fallen by 30% (blue line, left axis) while output has risen by 170% (red line, right axis).

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TEXT, HISTORY, STRUCTURE:

Philosophically, to grossly oversimplify, Originalists hew closely to the meaning of constitutional and statutory provisions as understood when written into law, while Living Constitutionalists believe our founding document must adapt with the times and accommodate contemporary developments, while remaining true to its spirit.

In baseball terms, Originalists are National Leaguers who insist on the tradition of pitchers picking up a bat, while Living Constitutionalists prefer the American League and its designated-hitter rule, which complies more fully with the current slugging-happy zeitgeist.

Yet, as Originalists came to dominate the conversation, at least in constitutional terms, a new school of liberal legal thinking began to emerge. After all, folks like Amar and Balkin reasoned, if legal conservatives could unearth and embrace, say, the rationale underlying passage of the Second Amendment in the service of enforcing gun owners' rights, why couldn't legal liberals do the same for, say, the Fourteenth Amendment and affirmative action?

"That's a ground on which political liberals can proudly stand," Amar says, "precisely because nearly every patch of constitutional text came from four generational spurts in which [members of] the prevailing group were the liberal nationalist egalitarians of their day: the Founders, the Reconstruction Republicans, the early twentieth-century progressives, and the 1960s racial reformers."

Amar, in particular, revived the spirit of liberal Justice Hugo Black, one of the original Originalists, albeit from the Left, in an effort to reclaim text-faithful interpretations from the conservatives.

This tendency was on fine display in the ObamaCare debate, where Amar--fictionally standing in for Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who argued the case before the Court on behalf of the administration--urged the justices to consult the Constitution's "text, its history, and its structure as glossed by subsequent practice and precedent." Responding to the conservative argument that a mandate to purchase health insurance could result in a mandate to eat broccoli, Amar cited an older mandate to buy... muskets: "The Militia Act of 1792 had a similar mandate, obliging Founding-era Americans to privately procure muskets, ammo, pouches, and so on," Amar observed. "George Washington signed onto that law. And no one at the time said that mandates such as this were somehow intrinsically improper regulatory tools."

Similarly, Elhauge, in a Daily Beast piece entitled "Don't Blame Verrilli for Supreme Court Stumble," urged legal liberals to more "squarely attack the challengers' framing of the case," citing a 1790 law "requiring shipowners to buy medical insurance for seamen" and a 1798 statute "requiring seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves." Root the arguments in precedent, Elhauge contended, and you might just convince a few of the swing justices.

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THE fEDERALISTS WON, NOT THE FEDERALISTS:

Alexis De Tocqueville once said that the limits placed on the central power in the new world are different from the limits placed on national power in the old world. In the New World, the national government has jurisdiction in certain specific areas. It is prohibited by law and custom from transgressing the boundaries of its jurisdiction. In that sense its power is severely limited. But within those boundaries it is sovereign and almost completely beyond challenge. If something such as war or taxing power  is deemed a 'federal matter,' challenges to that power, for example the Whiskey Rebellion, were historically rare and suppressed mercilessly when they did occur.

On the other hand, Tocqueville says, the Old World functioned quite differently. The monarchs tended to be in constant conflict with other political powers regarding proper jurisdiction. The crown and the aristocracy and the colonies and provinces were engaged in an eternal game of tug of war, with each citing their own interpretation of law and custom to attempt to limit the jurisdiction of the others. Tocqueville observed that the limits to the powers of the central government in that case were largely imposed by the practical limits of enforcement. 

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GOOD ENOUGH FOR EUROPE:

Europe is burning coal at the fastest pace since 2006, as surging imports from U.S. producers such as Arch Coal Inc. (ACI) (ACI) helped cut prices 26 percent in a year and benefited European power companies including EON AG.

Demand for coal, the dirtiest fuel for making electricity, grew 3.3 percent last year in Europe while sales of less- polluting natural gas fell 2.1 percent, the steepest drop since 2009, according to a BP Plc report. Germany's EON and RWE AG (RWE), the biggest utilities in Europe's largest power market, are considering shutting unprofitable gas-fired plants even as Chancellor Angela Merkel promotes gas to replace nuclear energy.

Europe's higher coal use defies its policies to penalize carbon emissions and is based on profit margins climbing to a two-and-a-half year high for coal-burning power stations, data compiled by Bloomberg Industries show. Cheaper coal was made possible partly by a 49 percent jump in first-quarter imports from the U.S., Energy Information Administration data show.

"Coal will continue to remain on the money in Europe because it's more competitive to burn than gas," said Trevor Sikorski, an analyst at Barclays Plc in London. "More and more of the coal to Europe will come from the U.S. where just the opposite is happening."

Thanks to the explosion of shale drilling, natural gas futures have fallen about 34 percent in 12 months in New York, pushing utilities to combust more gas and rely less on coal.

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THE SA'UDS CHOOSE SIDES:

Last week, Saudi Arabia deported an Indian accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people, including six Americans. At the same time, news came that Riyadh is likely to deport another accused terrorist to India in the next few weeks.

The shift in Saudi policy toward India is part of the kingdom's broader foreign policy makeover since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, analysts say.

"This deportation is really a first, and it signals Saudi Arabia's changing attitude toward India as much as it also signals the internal changes in Saudi society," said K.C. Singh, a former Indian diplomat. "It coincides with India aligning itself with American interests and India's cautious distancing from Iran."

Saudi Arabia also gives India a gateway to the entire Arab region, where it has little influence, compared with Pakistan. Saudi Arabia can assist India in its quest for energy in the region, improve its access to trading partners and help it address radicalism among Indian Muslims who migrate to the Middle East for lucrative work.

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SO IT'S NO DIFFERENT THAN THE REST OF MEDICINE:

The extraordinarily popular DSM-III was revised in 1987. But, by the late 80s, enough new data had been accumulated that a new version was needed. Dr Allen Frances, then chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine in the US, was chosen to head the DSM-IV task force. The six-year effort involved over 1000 individuals, required extensive review of existing research and field trials of any changes before being published in 1994. But today Frances wonders whether these measures were enough. Rates of mental illness, particularly ADHD and autism, have skyrocketed since the 1990s and Frances believes that the DSM-IV - which has become one of the most widely used texts in psychiatry - is party to blame.

Instead of inadequately treating those who most need assistance, he wonders, are we now spending time and resources treating those who don't need help at all?

THERE HAVE BEEN SEVERAL studies showing rapid increases in diagnoses worldwide, explains Frances, now an emeritus professor at Duke. A 2010 study reported in Psychological Medicine, for example, followed a cohort from Dunedin, New Zealand, and found that half reported at least one anxiety disorder by the age of 32.

A similar study done by Frances' colleagues at Duke University, epidemiologists E. Jane Costello and Adrian Angold, and published in 2011 in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, tested young people for symptoms several times between the ages of 9 and 21. They found that 83% of participants had met criteria for a disorder by 21.

"Either the criteria are way too loose and we're including people who have the normal aches and pains of growing up," says Frances, "or everyone's real sick."

Frances outlines the rapid cycling of diagnostic fads in psychiatry, his own view being that while labels and labellers may change, human nature doesn't. 

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hISTORY ENDS EVERYWHERE:

The problem facing the Party now is that different aspects of this model seem to be running out of steam. China's economic growth, for example, has been fuelled by export and investment. Enormous quantities of money have been shifted from private wealth, particularly savings, to large, mostly State-owned enterprises, in an effort to cushion the impact of market liberalization. This has avoided the economic catastrophe that happened after the Russian "shock therapy", but also created a new class of officials and SOE managers that grew tremendously wealthy off graft and corruption. As a result, Chinese household wealth remains relatively low, and the nearly non-existent social safety net further reduced incentives to spend. As the ongoing economic malaise in the United States and Europe dampens demand for Chinese products, it is clear that further growth needs to be fuelled by increase in domestic consumption.

Also, China is faced by economic challenges it created itself, in terms of inflationary pressure on commodities, but also matters such as environmental pollution. The voracious appetite of the Chinese economic machine has raised commodity prices across the board, causing inflation inside the country. The increasing use of cars causes traffic gridlock and severe environmental pollution in the larger cities, which themselves grow at breakneck pace. Growing meat consumption is straining Chinese agriculture. The speed at which new infrastructure is constructed, and the concomitant corruption, has led to quality and safety issues. There are significant amounts of bad investments, aimed at artificially boosting GDP numbers and local employment.

Most importantly, maintaining high levels of growth itself is becoming more difficult. While China's double-digit performance is hailed as an economic miracle, it is easy to forget that China started from an extremely low base, which was to no small extent caused by the disastrous economic policies that were implemented between 1949 and 1979. Enormous gains could be made with simple measures, such as permitting farmers to sell some of their surplus produce on open markets, introducing financial incentive systems into enterprises and permitting foreign trade. The establishment of basic legal and regulatory structures went relatively rapidly in the beginning, but there's a difference between recognizing the necessity of a patent system to incentivize innovative activities, and dealing with the enormous technological and legal complexities that operating a patent system in the twenty-first century entails. Also, the external conditions for Chinese growth were beneficial. Particularly after the end of the Cold War, the new impetus for international trade enabled China to grow swiftly through exports to the developed world, which at that time had the capacity to absorb this influx of cheaper goods. Now, China will need new consumers to support further growth of their manufacturing capacity, either at home or abroad. In other words, the low-hanging fruits for China's economic development have been picked, and further economic development will become more arduous and less susceptible to centralized policy-making.

At the same time, the political model advocated by Deng is showing cracks as well. First and foremost, the next generation of leaders will be the first not to have been hand-picked by revolutionary Communists. Hu Jintao's ascendancy was marked as Deng ensured a place for him on the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 1992, as the second youngest member ever. Hu had come to Deng's eye because of his managerial skills, but also his determined actions in putting down an uprising in Tibet, where he was party secretary, a few months before the Tiananmen incident. This new generation lacks that blessing, and the resulting political strife. Second, Deng's model of collective leadership is threatened by economic diversification. In the Nineties it was possible to have the rising tides lift all boats, as the economy was much more homogenous, meaning that simpler policies could have broader effects. Now, economic policymaking, by necessity, is becoming more of a balancing exercise between different interests. China's goal to move up the value chain, for example, is now pushing lower value-added manufacturing into other Asian countries. However, these tend to be labour-intensive industries, and their departure may have a significant impact on employment. Inflation is an ever-present threat, with strong political repercussions in a country where most people rely on personal savings for pensions, in the absence of a stronger social safety net.

As a result, Chinese society is rapidly becoming more pluralized, as far as economic interests go, but this pluralisation is not reflected in politics. The enormous popularity of the recently ousted Bo Xilai, indicates that Chinese citizens might welcome a more open political debate. However, pluralized politics would strike against the very notion of collective leadership. Third, Deng advocated control over the public debate in order to maintain social stability. The Internet, however, has vastly increased the potential for citizens to communicate and organize outside of the official purview, raising the stakes in the control game. The Chinese government itself has spent enormous resources in policing the Internet, but has increasingly made websites and other service providers responsible for content inspection. This in turn greatly inhibits the development of commercial Internet activities, and may be a brake on further economic development. Development is a complex affair, and it may be true that the recipes that brought China to the position where it is now, may effectively be hindering its future path, something that is called the "middle income trap".

Resistance to democracy, capitalism and protestantism is not avoidance.

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MARRIAGE TIPS FROM THE BROTHERS JUDD:

So, it turns out that when The Wife announces she's taking the kids to the Cape to visit her parents for 5 days, one of these is not on the acceptable response list:

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HE'S NOT A GUY YOU COULD EVER SAY UNDERSTOOD POLITICS...:

Four years ago, Obama used themes of hope and change to suggest that he could bring a new politics to Washington. He was open to the idea that, as he sometimes put it, the solutions to the country's problems were somewhere between the rhetoric and visions of both parties. His goal, he said, was to help guide the country, through his leadership, to that imagined golden mean while sticking to his principles.

Today, the battle-scarred president who has met almost uniform resistance from the Republicans sees the world differently, or so it seems from the way he talked in Ohio and Pennsylvania. At nearly every stop, he made it clear that he sees November in the starkest of terms and that there can be but one winner.

...but it's hard to believe he genuinely sees any difference between himself and Mitt.

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THE FULL VS THE EMPTY:

[M]ost conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don't depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.

Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy -- versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

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ALL JUST FOOTNOTES TO HUME:

But can't the new atheists simply help themselves to the premise that science is the only source of knowledge? We might wonder on what basis they could: surely it is not a claim of science that science is the only source of knowledge. But this, as we will see, is only one way in which extreme naturalism threatens to be its own worst enemy.

In the third part of the book, Plantinga turns to the question of whether in fact theism might be in concord with contemporary science, rather than in conflict. After looking at, and giving a fairly weak endorsement to, some arguments in support of intelligent design and fine-tuning, Plantinga argues that in fact the theistic worldview is as a whole deeply consonant with the goals and successes of contemporary science.

This is because theism holds, as atheistic naturalism denies, that God has created us in his image, as rational beings. But as rational, yet finite, beings, we are truth-seekers, and for the theist it makes perfectly good sense to think that God has also created a world that is available to us to know: "God created both us and our world in such a way that there is a certain fit or match between the world and our cognitive faculties."

Plantinga then identifies a number of features of our world, and our cognitive relationship to that world, that are much more likely, and make much more sense, on a theistic than on an atheistic picture: the reliability and regularity of nature, and its working in accordance with law; the role of mathematics in the understanding of nature; the possibility of induction; the appropriateness of theoretical virtues such as simplicity; and even the empirical nature of science, which Plantinga argues is underwritten by the contingency of divine creation. In all these respects modern science is deeply compatible with theism, a fact that renders unsurprising the further fact that all the great founders of modern science were theists, working from a deeply Christian background.

So the conflict between science and religion is, Plantinga shows, largely bogus (and I have only scratched the surface of his arguments here). But things are even worse from the standpoint of naturalism, for on the naturalist account, there is no good reason to think that our cognitive faculties are truth-tracking. After all, it is not because those faculties contribute to true beliefs that they are selected for in the Darwinian account; it is because they are likely to contribute to survival.

Can the naturalist expect, as the theist clearly can, that her cognitive faculties are reliable, i.e., that they lead to true beliefs? Since natural selection does not select for truth, or truth-tracking faculties, but for other unrelated properties, we have no reason to expect so given naturalism. Of course, we have very good reason to think our beliefs are reliable; so this claim should not bother most people. And non-naturalistic theists will believe that even if evolution is true, God has overseen evolution with a view to the reliability of our cognitive faculties. The naturalist cannot rely on any such claim.

But since the inability to rely on cognitive faculties as reliably truth-tracking is a defeater for any belief whatsoever, it is a defeater also for naturalism; accordingly naturalism turns out, on Plantinga's argument, to be self-defeating, and cannot be rationally accepted.

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WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

For the past 50 years, this expensive process of smashing beams of particles has yielded an embarrassingly large zoo of hundreds of subatomic particles, which can be tediously reassembled like a jigsaw puzzle called the Standard Model of particles. More than 20 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to physicists who have pieced together parts of the Standard Model. All the particles of the Standard Model had been found, except the last, central piece of the jigsaw puzzle--the Higgs boson. That is why so much was resting on finding the Higgs particle. (If it had not been found, many physicists, I imagine, would have had a heart attack.)

The press has dubbed the Higgs boson the "God particle," a nickname that makes many physicists cringe. But there is some logic to it. According to the Bible, God set the universe into motion as he proclaimed "Let there be light!" In physics, the universe started off with a cosmic explosion, the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago, which sent the stars and galaxies hurtling in all directions. But the key question is left unanswered: Why did it bang? The big-bang theory says nothing about how and why it banged in the first place.

To put it another way, what was the match that set off the initial cosmic explosion? What put the "bang" in the Big Bang? In quantum physics, it was a Higgs-like particle that sparked the cosmic explosion. In other words, everything we see around us, including galaxies, stars, planets and us, owes its existence to the Higgs boson.

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MORE WEALTH, LESS WORK:

[W]aiting in the wings for when we get our economic policies in order are a mounting number of stunning discoveries, inventions and technological breakthroughs that could set off a burst of growth and wealth creation as big as any in living memory.

The fracking technology that is making available vast new sources of recoverable oil and natural gas in North America is one such breakthrough. But all across the commercial and industrial landscape, there are exciting developments:

• Nanoculture: One of the truths of tech is that revolutions take longer than predicted, but they arrive sooner than we are prepared for them. That is the case with nanotechnology, the hot new science story of a decade ago.

Though it has largely disappeared from the front pages, nanotech is only now coming into its own. Breakthrough medicines; genetic research; new materials such as graphene (a lattice-sheet form of carbon used for everything from filters to computer chips); molecular electronics (extreme miniaturization, thus super-small sensors and other devices); and quantum computing (small, superfast supercomputers) have all been announced in recent months. Indeed, the range of emerging applications for nano materials is so wide-ranging and important that, together, they suggest an impending turning point in high tech as important as silicon and integrated circuitry were half a century ago.

• Cloud Crowd: In the world of information technology, the big story these days is the shift of data management from largely in-house computing centers to rented, easily scalable computing and storage from anonymous servers located somewhere out in the Internet. Much of this shift, driven by leading providers such as Amazon, is already well under way, rapidly driving down costs and making information management much more affordable both for industry and, increasingly, consumers.

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WHERE THE DUCKS ARE:

Some of the once-euphoric Iowans who inspired the nation to embrace Barack Obama in 2008 are experiencing a deep-seated buyer's remorse over their role in delivering the White House to a candidate they think has let them down.

Take longtime Democrat Debbie Smith. Four years ago, she wore the Obama T-shirts, went to his rallies, made her first campaign contribution and caucused for the first time.

"I wish to have my vote back," said Smith, 51, a small business owner from Clive. "I feel completely responsible, and I feel like I need to tell people this."

A sense of betrayal shows up in Iowa polling conducted by rival Mitt Romney's campaign, said its pollster, Neil Newhouse.

It's a discomfiting hurdle for Obama in a state he professes to have strong emotional ties with, that he won by a landslide four years ago, and that could prove pivotal this year for him or for Romney. [...]

It's a fusillade of campaigning in a state that was not high on team Romney's target list for the general election just a few months ago. After all, Obama won Iowa in 2008 by a decisive 9.54 percentage points. Today, the race in Iowa is too close to call, a rolling average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com shows.

When polling showed Obama struggling here, and when his re-election campaign started dumping money and its top stars into the Hawkeye State, the Republican campaign didn't need any more clues that Iowa is up for grabs.

"We know how to hunt where the ducks are," said Romney political director Rich Beeson in an interview at the campaign's national headquarters in Boston.

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LEFT IS RIGHT:

'Reform yourselves, and ye will grow out of your debt." So goes Germany's unwritten mantra for the European crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel is urging Greece, Spain, Italy and the rest to shape up their economies and pay down their obligations--and withholding German money until they do.

The Berlin road to economic righteousness is no mere sermonizing. Germany itself has gone down it and grown stronger. Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, was German chancellor from 1998 to 2005, and during his second term his government lowered taxes, revamped unemployment benefits and streamlined labor laws. Mr. Schröder's shakedown of the welfare state--dubbed Agenda 2010 when it was launched in 2003--has been credited with insulating Germany against the debt mess that would later befall Southern Europe. [...]

Circumstance forced economic reform onto Gerhard Schröder's agenda as chancellor. When he took office in 1998, Germany's unemployment rate was 11% and economic growth was close to nil.

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FREELOADERS...:

Each year the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awards about 200,000 patents to inventors. Last year a Stanford student built a camera that lets users change what's in focus after snapping a shot; Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers invented a tiny, foldable car; and a patent was awarded for devising a metal that is as strong as steel but can be molded like plastic.

Some of these patents are just cool. Others may turn out to have enormous economic value: This year, Microsoft (MSFT) paid $1.1 billion to buy AOL's (AOL) patent portfolio, which comes to about $1.2 million per patent. All of the patents above have one thing in common: They represent the work of immigrants to the U.S.

Which is why policy makers should flag a recent study that found more than three-quarters of patents from America's top ten patent-producing universities, including MIT, Stanford, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were the result of breakthroughs by immigrants.

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HE LOVED THEM SO MUCH....

The great thing was to do it yourself--just the nudge of a lighted punk to a fuse, a small commitment that seemed so insignificant, and yet the result was so decisive and visible...the sudden puff of a colored ball emerging from the long tube of a Roman candle, the quick rush and fading hiss of a rocket, the popping busyness of lawn fountains that smoked and sputtered and sent the family cat scurrying under the porch. Anyone could do it. Fireworks provided a sort of equalizer, especially for those who were not good at sports and knew they were doomed to spend the long summer afternoons in the far reaches of right field. They, too, on the Fourth of July had the capacity to create something just as satisfactory as a base hit--and make a big racket about it besides--with only the requirement of nerve enough to approach the brightly papered device on the lawn to set it off.

The next best was when evening came, and out beyond the band shell in the park the professionals went to work with their show--mysterious shapes moving in the twilight out where finally a red flare would glow--and the commemoration would get under way of the day that John Adams, on July 3, 1776, 24 hours before the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted, wrote would be "celebrated by succeeding Generations...to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade...Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other, from this Time forward forevermore."

Fireworks have always been a traditional means of observing triumphant occasions. As far back as 1532, Charles V, ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, had "fireworkers" in his army (as distinct from gunners) whose function was to put on victory displays. The emperor was a timid man (he was well known for his fear of mice and spiders) though a brave warrior, and one imagines him taking a great deal more pleasure in the fireworks than in the proceedings that led to the celebration.

In later times the celebration became more extensive. The coronation of Czar Alexander II in 1855 was extolled with a fireworks extravaganza staged on a 50-acre site, a band of 2,000 instruments and a choir of 1,000 voices that had to strain to be heard not only above the fireworks but a supplementary corps of artillery.

Most productions of any size in the 18th century were staged against an entire backdrop outfitted to shoot off rockets and firepots, a "temple" it was called, usually constructed in the form of the facade of a large building flanked by columned porticoes. One of the largest temples ever built was put up in London to observe the peace treaty ending the War of the Austrian Succession, an enormous facade 410 feet long and 114 feet high that took six months to build. The Royal Laboratory made a total of 10,650 rockets, shells and pinwheels to be shot out of the thing, and a special team of Italians was sent over to see to the proceedings. Handel composed his Music for the Royal Fireworks for the occasion, a score that called for a noise level not only of fireworks but 100 brass cannons at its conclusion. Just as the performance started, an argument broke out in the temple among the staff--hardly the sort of place for tempers to flare--and, sure enough, an explosion went off, and a fire began that destroyed part of the structure. The show continued throughout all this, but it was a ragged performance at best, and by midnight--the staff continuing to glare at each other, firepots close at hand--much of the fireworks material provided by the Royal Laboratory had yet to be used. The critics were harsh, and subsequent displays relied less on ornate backgrounds.

The guiding figure in the history of fireworks was Charles Thomas Brock, the patriarch of an English family that since the 18th century had manufactured and exhibited fireworks in the amusement parks of England and continental Europe. 

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THANKS, W:

Myth No. 1: The government should have done nothing.

There's an idea gaining currency that everything the government did, from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (the now infamous TARP) to the Federal Reserve's innovative lending programs and rate cutting, just made the problem worse. And that we should have simply let markets do their thing.

Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! During the dark days of 2008-09, when giant institutions like Washington Mutual and Wachovia and Lehman Brothers failed and the likes of Citigroup (C), Bank of America (BAC), AIG (AIG), GE Capital (GE), Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and huge European banks were near collapse, letting them all go under would have brought on the financial apocalypse. We could well have ended up with a downturn worse than the Great Depression, which was the previous time that failures in the financial system (rather than the Federal Reserve raising rates) begat a U.S. economic slowdown.

You want to let big institutions fail? Okay, look at what happened when Lehman was allowed to go under in September 2008. (The Treasury and Fed insist there was no way to save the firm, though I wonder if they would have devised one had they not gotten tons of grief six months earlier for not letting Bear Stearns collapse.)

Lehman's collapse froze short-term money markets, making normal finance impossible. A run on money-market funds began when the Reserve Primary Fund, an industry pioneer, said it was "breaking the buck" because of losses on Lehman paper. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were about to fail because hedge funds and other "prime brokerage" customers began yanking their cash in response to prime brokerage assets at Lehman's London branch being frozen.

The federal government (including the Fed) had to front trillions of dollars and guarantee trillions of obligations -- a total I calculated last year (see "Surprise! The Big Bad Bailout Is Paying Off") at more than $14 trillion -- to stop the panic.

Lehman was a beta test for letting markets take care of problems themselves -- and it failed miserably.

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WE MATTER, THEY DON'T:

Ultimately, as one European diplomat put it to me, when it comes to China's foreign policy, it's all about the United States.  This monofocus on America tells us a great deal about China's worldview, but it also reveals the degree to which Washington is hampered in forging a better working relationship with Beijing.

Unlike the United States, which has had a complex, yet robust set of alliances and more informal partnerships in Asia since the 1950s, China has not formed deep ties with any Asian state.  There is no analogue in Chinese foreign policy to America's relationship with Japan or its initiatives with Singapore.  While there is always skepticism abroad about Washington's true intentions towards it's Asian partners, and a resignation about the inherently unequal power relationship between America and any of its smaller allies, there is also recognition that the United States usually seeks some type of mutually-beneficial status.  Although a superpower (or perhaps because of it), American diplomats have a basic predisposition towards equality in their negotiations and agreements.  The U.S. military, for its part, has spent decades helping to train foreign armed forces, provide humanitarian aid, and of course serve as an ultimate guarantor of regional stability, at least theoretically.

China's foreign policy, at least today, is far different.  Once it may have seen itself as a co-leader of the global Communist bloc, or as the center of a Sinic grouping of nations up to the nineteenth century.  Now, its foreign gaze is centered squarely on its relationship with the United States. 

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AND AS THE RETURN OF EMPLOYMENT RATES TO HISTORIC NORMS DEMONSTRATES...::

Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I'd agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about "work-family balance." I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion's share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for "not giving just one more fatuous 'You can have it all' talk." Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.

The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating "you can have it all" is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

I still strongly believe that women can "have it all" (and that men can too). I believe that we can "have it all at the same time." But not today, not with the way America's economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged--and quickly changed.

BEFORE MY SERVICE in government, I'd spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.

I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began--a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people's drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children's sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).

In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else's schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be--at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office--at least not for very long.

I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: "Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work."

Yet the decision to step down from a position of power--to value family over professional advancement, even for a time--is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, "leaving to spend time with your family" is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:

Ms. Flournoy's announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. "I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family," said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. "She has loved this job and people here love her.

Think about what this "standard Washington excuse" implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one's vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation's capital, despite the ritual commitments to "family values" that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by "younger women today." One expressed dismay that many younger women "are just not willing to get out there and do it." Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: "They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family."

A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to "leave before you leave." When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, "she doesn't raise her hand anymore ... She starts leaning back." Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg's exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: "What's the matter with you?"

They have an answer that we don't want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, "I look for role models and can't find any." She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, "many of which they don't even seem to realize ... They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all." Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.

...the jobs were mainly makework in the first place.  The return to traditional family roles will not disrupt the economy at all.

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OVERHEARD AT CASA DEL JUDD:

Offering 3 options

The old truth about offering 3 pricing options holds water. Here's a pricing experiment in selling beer - again from W. Poundstone's amazing book Priceless.

People were offered 2 kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50 and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer.

Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80 beer and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option.

Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and arounf 10% opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price.

You can influence people's choice by offering different options. Old school sales people also say that offering different price point options will make people choose between your plans, instead of choosing whether to buy your product or not.

How to test it: Try offering 3 packages, and if there is something you really want to sell, make it the middle option.

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THE HIGH COST OF SAVING JOBS:

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ALONG THE AXIS OF GOOD:

Accounts of the G-20 summit in Mexico largely miss the most significant development.

The most significant development during the G-20 summit in Mexico occurred on the sidelines and was largely buried in media reports: The decision to invite Canada and Mexico to join negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP). Adding Mexico and Canada to the current nine-member TPP will result--if negotiations are successful--in a free trade area covering some 658 million people and about $20.5 trillion in economic activity.

Further, many trade analysts predict that the move by Canada and Mexico will produce a domino effect, beginning with the addition of Japan and South Korea within the next year. That would produce a free trade area encompassing more than 700 million people with a combined GDP of some $26 trillion. It is this prospect that gives substance to the claim that, in an otherwise lackluster and frustrating G-20 summit, such a breakthrough is potentially a really big deal.

For most of their history, the TPP negotiations have been conducted beneath the radar of publicity or media attention. They began with four small nations--Singapore, Brunei, New Zealand, and Chile (P-4)--aiming for a high standard, U.S.-model Free Trade Agreement, with the goal of providing a pathway to an inclusive, trans-Pacific trade and investment open market. Subsequently, Australia, Peru, Vietnam, and Malaysia signed on, but the transforming event came with the Bush administration's decision to start the process for membership in its last months in office.

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NO SODOMY, NO WORRY:

The Chinese Ministry of Health has lifted a 14-year-old ban on lesbians donating blood in effect as of July 1.

The ban still applies to men who are sexually active with other men, but celibate homosexuals are permitted to give blood, according to the Ministry of Health's website.

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NITWITS + CRIMINALS + GUNS = MURDERS:

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GENERAL MARSHALL WINS:

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A LABORER:

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NO PRESSURE, ANDY:

Perry was the first player to win all four Grand Slam championships - of Wimbledon, the United States, France and Australia. He also played a key part in Britain's four Davis Cup triumphs between 1933 and 1936.

Especially memorable was the decisive final rubber against France, in Paris in 1933. Perry, who had taken five sets to beat Henri Cochet on the opening day, recovered from losing the first set and being two set points down in the second set to beat Andre Merlin 4-6, 8-6, 6-2, 7-5.

It was Britain's first success since 1912, and ended six years of French domination.

When the team arrived at Dover, they received a telegram of congratulation from King George V. A crowd of 10,000 greeted the train when it reached Victoria.

Perry competed in a total of 20 Davis Cup matches, winning 34 of his 38 rubbers in singles, and 11 out of 14 in doubles. Since then, Britain has reached the final once.

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GENERAL MARSHALL WINS AGAIN:

On Monday, an independent audit of the French economy, ordered by the new government, spooked the markets as it showed that France was on course to run a budget deficit equivalent to around 5.2% of its output, up sharply from earlier estimates. The budget gap grew after the new government announced plans to roll back a number unpopular austerity measures passed by the former conservative government. The deficit also expanded as the government finally got real about its economic situation, forcing it to adjust its overoptimistic economic growth forecasts. The government now projects the French economy will grow at 0.3% in 2012, down from the rosier 0.7%. They also lowered their 2013 forecast, projecting a 1.2% growth, down from 1.75%.

The Socialist Party ran on a platform that envisioned lowering France's budget deficit to zero by 2017. To do that, it would need to achieve a budget deficit equivalent of 4.5% of GDP in 2012 and 3% in 2013. Achieving those targets now with the revised data means that the government will need to cut spending or raise revenue in 2012 by an additional 6 billion to 10 billion euros than what they had originally anticipated. The gap is then expected to explode to as much as 33 billion euros in 2013.

To close the chasm in the budget, the government is focusing on the revenue side of the equation by imposing a number of one-time and permanent tax hikes. The new taxes will focus mainly on investors, large businesses and the wealthy. In its revised budget, the government is aiming to raise an additional 7.2 billion euros in taxes for 2012. This massive tax hike comes through a number of sources, including controversial plans to raise the national tax rate for the wealthy French citizens, which according to the French government is anyone pulling over 1 million euros a year, to an astounding 75%.

The government projects its new wealth tax will bring in an additional $2.3 billion to the nation's coffers. That is, of course, assuming that many "wealthy" Frenchman and businesses simply won't flee France to a more friendly tax jurisdiction. The European Union's law of free movement of peoples makes it easy to pack up and establish residency in a neighboring country to avoid higher taxation in their own country. It is unclear how many of Frenchmen will make an effort to avoid the new tax, but the French government was livid last month when David Cameron, the United Kingdom's Prime Minister, said he would, "roll out the red carpet," for French businesses seeking to essentially dodge the tax hike.

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FRIEND DRISCOLL NOTES...:

...a perfect illustration of the rule that comedy is always conservative.

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IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP RATES THIS ARTIFICIALLY HIGH:

E-mails revealed as part of the rate fixing investigation showed traders were seeking beneficial rates for their trading positions.

During the credit crisis of 2007 and 2008, Barclays high Libor postings came under scrutiny and the bank, concerned about "unfounded negative perceptions," lowered its Libor submissions, according to Barclays notes to the Treasury Committee.

Regulators investigating Libor manipulation last month fined the bank more than $450 million. A report from the UK's Financial Services Authority concluded the issues were of the "utmost seriousness" owing to the prevalence of rates references throughout the markets.

But Barclays is unlikely to be the only bank facing financial penalties. Several additional banks are cited but not named in documents made public as part of Barclays settlement with the FSA.

Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and UBS are among the banks that are acknowledged as being investigated by regulators.

Libor, or the London Interbank Offered Rate, is the benchmark rate which is set every morning by banks posting the rate at which they are willing to borrow with the British Bankers' Association.

The BBA publishes Libor as a result of this, and the rate is then used to fix the borrowings of credit cards, mortgages, car leases and more.

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THE CULTURE WAR WAS A ROUT:

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WHERE DID THAT QUARTER CENTURY GO? [profanity alert]:

As is the case with any impassioned faith-based group, opinion amongst ardent Replacements fans regarding what constitutes their best work is vocal and fractious. Many contend that the 'Mats never improved upon their seminal 1984 indie swan song Let It Be, while others believe that despite slipshod production and faintly ridiculous artwork, Paul Westerberg never put together a better group of songs than on the band's 1985 major label debut Tim. Certainly no one would be wrong by asserting either of those classics as the finest record the band ever made. But for a small minority of diehards, the patented formula of big hooks, boozy raunch, and lonely midnight-hour laments never got better than on Pleased To Meet Me, released on 7/7/1987, 25 years ago.

Seemingly by design, every single year was an ordeal for the Replacements, but even by their established standard of practiced professional incompetence, the period leading up to Pleased To Meet Me was a mess. Having made the jump to the big leagues, the 'Mats proceeded to demolish commercial ambitions with the same studied attention to detail that their contemporaries R.E.M. impeccably used to build a mass audience. Despite its slow-building brilliance, Tim received only a lukewarm commercial reception, while the band introduced themselves to mainstream America with a not-atypically addled performance on Saturday Night Live. Founding member and lead guitarist Bob Stinson was fired by Westerberg and Stinson's own younger brother Tommy. The explanation that Bob had simply become too unreliable in his excesses seemed at once plausible and ironic. Stinson WAS unreliable -- he could show up at gigs too drunk to play, or miss them altogether, leaving the roadie to play his parts. But then, it wasn't like this was Barney Gumble stumbling into Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers -- Bob had always been the wildcard in a band filled with jokers. For years after Bob was dismissed, and until the band's final rueful end, they were never much more then a 50/50 proposition in terms of a live act. Catch them on the right night and you might never see a better show. Catch them on the wrong one and it was difficult to imagine these individuals had ever played together. No one even seemed to know the songs. Intoxicants were a factor.

For many, the band would never be the same minus Bob Stinson's sad clown act and over-the-top lead playing, which often pushed Westerberg's soaring anthems into the ecstatic. Clearly, though, the Replacements were heading ostensibly in a more refined direction. For their follow-up, they decamped to a kind of spiritual home base: Ardent Studios in Memphis, where they would record with legendary producer Jim Dickinson, who in the previous decade had produced the three classic albums by Westerberg's heroes Big Star. It is seems fair to say that the affinity the Replacements felt for Big Star was a product not only of musical admiration, but a sense of living through the same thing trajectory. It had begun to seem that their surpassingly great music would never quite be the fashion of the time, and that the delicate, diffident nature of the personalities involved might be the final blow to any chance of being genuine hit makers.

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Signs and Signifiers, the debut record from bluesy, rockabilly artist JD McPherson, was rereleased by Rounder Records earlier this year. The wider release gives music fans a second chance to discover a quickly rising talent in McPherson. [...]

Songs performed: "North Side Gal," "Farmer John," "Signs & Signifiers," and "Dimes For Nickles."

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AND R.A. DICKEY IS THE BEST INDIVIDUAL STORY:

I know this isn't the type of thing people like to hear around these parts, but honestly: This city has been absolutely spoiled by success. The Yankees won a World Series just three years ago, and already there's talk of a Bronx championship drought. The Giants won two ­Super Bowls in five years­--in the most dramatic ways imaginable, I might add--and all anyone wants to talk about the summer afterward is whether the quarterbacks of the freaking Jets are going to be friends. We're handed the most organically thrilling sports story of the year in Linsanity, and just a few months later, we're complaining about the guy wanting too much money. (Already.) In a couple of months, this town is getting a whole new team. Amazing things are always happening here. Forgive Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Seattle for not having much pity for us.

But there's one sports story I think might top them all. The Jets might have more years between them and their last title--44 and counting, heading into this season--but I can't imagine anything bigger in this city than the New York Mets' winning a World Series this year, their 50th anniversary of existence. It would be the most unlikely, ludicrous, transcendent bit of sports business this city has seen in a generation. It would make the 1969 Miracle Mets look like the sun coming up in the east; it would make Mr. Met's head pop off. It would be the most jaw-dropping baseball story in a decade.

No one's talking about this, because this is the Mets, and fans, quite justifiably, have been through enough the past few years. The Mets' success heading into the All-Star break--they are among the top contenders for one of the two wild-card spots and, lo and behold, are leaving those hated Phillies in the dust--has been applauded, but cautiously so, like a parent whose child gets his or her first base hit after a whole season of strikeouts: We're happy for the kid, but that was a lot of strikeouts. Nobody wants to make this harder on everybody than it has to be. The shoe has to drop soon, right? Protect ourselves while we can.

But this season is more than half over, and the Mets have shown no signs of fading. 

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IT'S OVER, WE WON:

Spinoff groups from al Qaeda have become increasingly engrossed in insurgencies in Africa and the Middle East, inflicting death and mayhem on local communities. But this emphasis on the pursuit of the enemy nearby has cast doubt on their commitment, in practice, to bin Laden's war on the "far enemy" - the West and the United States in particular.

More than a year after U.S. forces killed bin Laden, some groups such as the Yemeni-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) undoubtedly remain a menace to the West.

Turmoil in Syria, Somalia and parts of Libya, Mali, Iraq and Nigeria has also allowed Islamist militias to recruit, train, arm and organise. And yet their targets have been overwhelmingly close at hand, rather than in Europe or the United States.

"Al Qaeda has become a useful label for any group that essentially pursues local aims but wishes to exaggerate its reach and sophistication," said Richard Barrett, Coordinator of the Al-Qaida-Taliban Monitoring Team at the United Nations.

"Al Qaeda has lost much of its reputation as the vanguard of a global cause, and as the activities of its affiliates result in more and more death and destruction for local communities, this process will accelerate," he told Reuters.

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CASH, NOT CARE:

Tyler Cowen caught a lot of flak recently for saying something that is clearly correct. A lot of the flak has come from people who have misunderstood the implications of what he wrote.

Here's the relevant passage:

Trying to equalize health care consumption hurts the poor, since most feasible policies to do this take away cash from the poor, either directly or through the operation of tax incidence.  We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor....  We shouldn't screw up our health care institutions by being determined to fight inegalitarian principles for one very select set of factors which determine health care outcomes.

Cowen is right. As both inequality and health-care costs rise, it becomes more difficult to equalize health-care consumption through transfer payments. The size of the transfers eventually becomes untenable. They also become wasteful: You end up providing hugely expensive health-care transfers to people with low incomes who would be better off with cash, housing or something else. Even if it meant they wouldn't live as long, at least the quality of their lives would be higher.

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THE WAR WITHIN:

For their supporters, seminary students are preserving a tradition that has served as the very bedrock of Judaism for thousands of years.

"Jews need to study the Bible. That is what makes us unique as a people," Yerach Tucker, a 30-year-old spokesman for the ultra-Orthodox community, said proudly as he guided a visitor through the Mir Yeshiva. "It is the essence of our lives."

But polls show the vast majority of Israelis, who risk their lives and put their careers on hold while serving in the military, object strongly to the arrangement, and many see it as the essence of everything that is wrong with their country.

This resentment has fueled a broader high-decibel culture war. In recent months, secular activists have rebelled against what they consider growing religious coercion by the ultra-Orthodox, such as attempts to enforce gender segregation on buses and public places, and a religious backlash by ultra-Orthodox who feel unfairly persecuted.

"It is something so ethical, so basic, that we have all grown up upon: service, giving to the state. Everyone here has to give something to society because we are one society," said Boaz Nol, a reserve officer who is among those planning a massive protest in Tel Aviv this weekend against the continued exemptions.

The Supreme Court earlier this year ruled the draft exemptions illegal and gave the government until Aug. 1 to figure out a new, fairer system. That is proving far more difficult than expected.

Last week, the deep divisions between religious and secular parties inside Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government led to the collapse of a special committee formed to draft new legislation.

Netanyahu's largest governing partner, the centrist Kadima Party, is now threatening to quit the government, just two months after joining the coalition with the goal of reforming the draft. Netanyahu has vowed to find a compromise.

A glimpse into the world of the ultra-Orthodox shows just how intractable the issue has become. The draft exemptions date back to the time of Israel's independence in 1948, when founding father David Ben-Gurion exempted 400 exemplary seminary students to help rebuild great schools of Jewish learning destroyed in the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were murdered.

As ultra-Orthodox parties became power brokers, the numbers mounted. Ultra-Orthodox officials now estimate there are about 100,000 full-time Torah learners of draft age.

The pattern has lasting ramifications. The heavy emphasis on religious study, begun early on in a separate system of elementary schools, has pushed many ultra-Orthodox men to shun the work world, relying on welfare as they spend their days immersed in holy texts. The ultra-Orthodox make up about 10 percent of Israel's 8 million citizens.

Steep unemployment, believed to hover around 50 percent, coupled with a high birthrate has fueled deep poverty in the ultra-Orthodox sector. With families of eight to 10 children commonplace, more than a quarter of all Israeli first graders today are ultra-Orthodox. Experts say if these trends continue, Israel's long-term economic prospects are in danger.

But changing the ways of the ultra-Orthodox will not be easy. Leaders speak proudly of centuries-old traditions of prayer and learning that they believe has allowed the Jewish people to survive such tragedies as the Spanish Inquisition, European pogroms and the Holocaust. Study in Yeshiva seminaries, they say, is no less important than military strength in protecting the country from modern threats in a hostile region.

"You have to understand, we are part of the Jewish army," said Aharon Grossman, a 30-year-old student at Mir Yeshiva. "Some people serve in tanks. We serve in yeshiva."

Ultra-Orthodox leaders insist they will never be forced to serve in the military.

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PREACHING TO THE CHOIR:

Four months before Mitt Romney signed his health care plan into law in Massachusetts in 2006, he told a conservative group that the state's tax code would be the hammer that would make the plan work.

For those who refused to comply with the state's mandate to buy health insurance, he said in remarks to the Heritage Foundation, "they are going to lose their personal tax exemption."

"We will withhold any of their tax refund," he said.

As the Massachusetts governor and then as a presidential candidate, Mr. Romney spent the next six years describing in a variety of different ways the possible punishments for ignoring the Massachusetts mandate: as "free-rider surcharges," "tax penalties," "tax incentives" and sometimes just as "penalties."

But regardless of the terms he used, his intentions were clear: Massachusetts residents who chose not to buy health insurance would see their state income taxes go up.

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JUST ANOTHER INDUSTRY:

Americans made about 160 million doctors visits per quarter in the mid-2000s, but around 2009 they cut back to around 140 million, and, at least through 2011, haven't gone back to the old level, Kaiser and IMS Institute for Healthcare Infomatics estimate. Citigroup Global Markets surveys find year-over-year declines in hospital admissions for nearly every quarter since the beginning of 2008. The Congressional Budget Office has been scaling back Medicare projections because spending has been lower than it anticipated.

The big question now: Will spending on health bounce back when the U.S. economy does or is this change longer lasting?

Adjusted for inflation, U.S. per-person spending on health care grew at an annual average rate of 2.1% between 2005 and 2010 compared with 4.3% in the five previous years and 3.2% in the five years before that. Government actuaries predict that spending will grow slowly for another couple of years, and then bounce back. Over the next five years, they see per-person spending climbing 3.3% a year, driven in part by the expansion of coverage under Mr. Obama's Affordable Care Act. But they're basically making educated guess. The health system has so many moving parts that accurate predictions are impossible. Take prescription-drug spending. It's below projections because so many brand-name drugs are going off patent, which means patients are using cheaper generics, while pharmaceutical firms haven't found many new blockbusters. In March, CBO shaved $100 billion over 10 years for its Medicare prescription-drug spending estimate.

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THE GRACEFUL AMERICAN NARRATIVE:

The uniqueness of our American identity is that it is, above all, contagious. While critics of immigration are quick to claim that new arrivals "don't want to be American" or "are weakening our common identity," Tufts political scientist Deborah Schildkraut's new book, Americanism in the Twenty-First Century, finds something much more benign, even graceful, in the American narrative. A nationwide survey validated a fact that is rather obvious to most Americans: Immigrants and those born in the country share similar views of what it means to be an American.

Regarding those great American notions of economic and political freedom, there is barely a distinction. Better still, Schildkraut told me, "This is not just about rights, but also about obligations and being engaged through this notion of civic republicanism." Immigrants and those born here believe in giving as much as they do in taking.

Schildkraut's book eviscerates misconceptions about a struggle for America's soul, fears that have lingered since our independence. Benjamin Franklin lamented an influx of Germans into colonial life. Present policy debates aside, the fear of America's identity being overwhelmed has affected a broad range of groups: the Irish Catholics in the 1840s; the Chinese in the 1880s; the Japanese in the 1940s.

Related articles

• Just like us: Immigrants embrace 'distinctly American' values (eurekalert.org)
• Study: Immigrants embrace American values (upi.com)

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HAD THE GREATEST TARGET BEEN STALIN THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN NO COUNTER-REVOLUTION:

The greatest target was Stalinism--a taboo subject since the failed Khrushchev thaw of the mid-1950s and early 1960s. Even if the Soviet Union had been an economic, cultural and social success story, it could scarcely have survived the revelation that it was based on the murder by shooting and starvation of millions of innocent people, and the enslavement of tens of millions. As Mr. Aron recounts, secret archives were opened and firsthand accounts by former prisoners were aired. "In the November 27, 1988, issue of Moskovskie novosti . . . Marxist historian and former dissident Roy Medvedev for the first time in the Soviet press" estimated the number of arrested, imprisoned or executed under Stalin before 1937--"no less than" 10 million died.

Mr. Aron also captures well the sensational 1989 revelation of the secret protocols of the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact of 1939. The public emergence of the pact's details destroyed the great myth of Soviet wartime history: that Stalin's deal with Hitler was a wise tactical ruse to buy time for the Soviet war machine, when in truth it was a sincere and disastrous miscalculation. The valor of the Soviet Union's soldiers was the only aspect of the war, Mr. Aron says, that did not come "under assault by the glasnost mythslayers."

On top of all the historical truth-telling came public soul-searching about the corrosive effects of the modern Soviet system on morals and behavior. As Maya Ganina wrote in Literaturnaya gazeta in 1988: "Let's find out at what point in our lives bribery, thievery, lies, humiliation of the powerless and servility towards the powers that be have become more than just a deviation from the norm."

Mr. Aron writes: "The most urgent concern was not the economy itself but rather what it did to the men and women who worked in it: their ideas, their views of themselves, their conscience--their 'souls.' Surrounded by waste and negligence, poverty and neglect, arbitrariness and incompetence of all-powerful bureaucracies implementing myriad irrational laws and regulation, men and women were found to have lost much of what was needed to make their country free and prosperous."

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hISTORY ENDS EVERYWHERE:

The changes at University Avenue are symbolic of the dramatic shifts that have occurred over the past two years in Myanmar, which outside of North Korea was probably the most repressive and isolated country in the world, ruled for five decades by a military regime. Under the watchful eye of a new president, Thein Sein, Myanmar's military officially ended its rule, handing power to a civilian parliament. Thein Sein then inaugurated rapid reforms: he freed many of the country's political prisoners, launched efforts to achieve permanent peace with many insurgent armies, began opening up the media and the economy, and publicly called for exiles to return and rebuild the country, a tacit admission that years of military rule had impoverished what was once a promising economy. In April, Suu Kyi's party was allowed to compete in by-elections for a handful of parliamentary seats, for the first time since 1990. The party dominated the voting, winning 44 out of 46 seats. Suu Kyi herself took one seat, and now sits in parliament, a shocking development given that only two years ago she was locked in her home.

In response to this surprising shift, most western nations are re-engaging with the country. The US, European Union, Australia and Japan have already dropped some economic sanctions, and many companies are laying plans to invest heavily in Myanmar. Coca-Cola, General Electric and other big multinationals have already launched exploratory plans to get into Myanmar. In April, David Cameron, the British prime minister, became the first major western leader to visit the country in two decades. And yet, the pace of reform after so many years of repression, and the absence of any public explanation for why the military now decided to cede power, has left some citizens, and outside observers, both wary and thrilled.

If Myanmar could change so rapidly, what lessons might it offer for the world's other most repressive nations, countries with seemingly intractable problems and dictatorial rulers like North Korea, Uzbekistan, or Eritrea? Or, perhaps this Myanmar spring is as false as other brief periods of hope the country enjoyed. After all, despite the dramatic changes some nagging questions remain. Why has the military maintained the right to step back into power if need be? Why is the country seemingly intent on building a nuclear and missile programme? Why, as politics opens up has the military stepped up its war against several ethnic militias, leading to a refugee outflow from the country's north?

[E]ven the most astute observers in Myanmar are left wondering why these changes have occurred. No country was likely to invade Myanmar, the regime was sitting on piles of cash, and with Suu Kyi ageing, the NLD's leadership had been shattered by years of repression. What's more, the previous economic and financial sanctions imposed by the West had achieved little. Yet several Myanmar officials suggest that world events did have an impact, that the generals realised that, by working with Suu Kyi, they could avoid a troublesome fate.

"The events around the world [the Arab uprisings], the generals saw this," said Priscilla Clapp, a former US diplomat in Myanmar. In fact, by overseeing a managed transition, the generals could keep the vast wealth they had amassed illegally, and often deposited overseas - a lesson, potentially, for other dictatorships like Syria, where leaders are very reluctant to leave the scene. "We may want a process of justice and accountability [for the former military leaders] in Burma [Myanmar]," said one senior US official, "but they may feel they just want to move beyond the past."

Indeed, the generals seem to have made a wise move. Suu Kyi herself, despite her credentials as a critic of the regime, has reciprocated their trust. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, she played down the idea of severe punishment for the military rulers' past abuses, and called for forgiveness for their crimes, including those perpetrated against her.

In addition, the world around Myanmar began to change, helping, in a backwards kind of way, to create political change in the country - and perhaps in other long-standing dictatorships in Asia as well.

For nearly two decades, Myanmar had been dependent on China, even though many senior generals actually had little love for Beijing. Over time, as China became Myanmar's largest trading partner, and hundreds of thousands of migrants moved to Myanmar for business, average citizens also started to have second thoughts about that relationship. When I travelled through Mandalay, a city whose central business district is now dominated by Chinese guesthouses, Chinese-built malls, and Chinese vendors, I found resentment running very high. Some locals accused the Chinese of dumping products on the Myanmar market, or pushing locals out of flats and office spaces; others angrily complained that big Chinese companies were exploiting Myanmar's resources.

Beijing has also shed its hands-off foreign policy and adopted a much tougher approach. In the 2000s, China, still trying to win the friendship of its neighbours, lavished aid on countries like Myanmar, Cambodia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and others in the region, all the while insisting that China, unlike the bad old western powers, would respect other countries' concerns.

In a book of the same title, I called this winning Chinese diplomacy of the 2000s a "charm offensive". But, by the late 2000s and early 2010s, that charm had begun to fade. With the West reeling from economic downturn, China was no longer willing to simply play the noninterventionist card. Instead, it began to claim larger areas of disputed waters in South East Asia, to jostle with India over borders, to build dams on the upper portions of rivers that flowed into other countries, and to demand greater fealty from friends, asking that the Myanmar government crack down on cross-border refugee flows and drugs, offer China more favourable trade deals, and essentially carry China's water in regional organisations.

Increasingly worried about being so dependent on China, Myanmar's regime began to open up in order to court the West as a counter balance to Beijing. In a strange way then, since sanctions pushed the Myanmar government into the hands of China, and then the generals tired of their relationship, sanctions began to foster a rapprochement with western nations. Across Asia, the US government has taken advantage of countries' concerns about a rising, increasingly aggressive China, and the White House has used that fear to build stronger relationships with Vietnam, the Philippines and Singapore. 

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BUSH LIGHT:

Transitions to genuine democracy can be difficult and time-consuming, and they don't always move forward in straight lines. Egypt and the Egyptian people still have a way to go to complete the transition. Many questions still have to be answered. But based on what has happened already, and on the Egyptians' collective ability to resolve those issues not only peacefully, but successfully, I have much confidence in the future of your great country. I believe that you will continue to do right and to demand a democratic society that respects human rights and enables broad participation in political affairs. I believe the trend toward democracy in Egypt is inevitable.

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RADICALLY CONSERVATIVE, NOT RADICALLY RIGHT:

Roberts's opinion will not have the dramatic conservative effects that are being claimed for it. In this case, the first headlines were correct: Roberts actually exercised judicial restraint -- and the decision is a victory for anyone who believes that such restraint is a good thing.

The first topic of revisionism is Roberts's statement that Congress lacked authority to enact the ACA under the Commerce Clause, because the health-care-reform law regulates inaction (failure to buy insurance) rather than action. Roberts, writing only for himself, essentially bought the broccoli argument: If Congress can require you to buy health insurance, what is to stop it from making you buy (and eat) your vegetables?

On the surface, this looks like a win for conservatives and a restriction on Congress' commerce power. It isn't. The reason isn't that the four conservatives, including Justice Anthony Kennedy, deliberately chose not to join Roberts's opinion (maybe because they were angry at him for breaking ranks). It is that in the real world, as opposed to the realm of legal theory, there is no meaningful difference between action and inaction. In the future, Congress can simply phrase Commerce Clause commands in the affirmative.

Consider the Civil Rights Act: Does it require public businesses to serve customers regardless of race? Or does it prohibit them from refusing to serve customers on the basis of race? See the difference? Oh yes, there isn't one.

If that weren't enough, there is also Congress's power to tax, on which Roberts relied. If Congress wants to penalize you for not doing something in the future, it can impose a tax. And as Roberts's ACA decision affirmed explicitly, Congress doesn't even have to call it a tax. In short, in practical terms, Congress has no less power than it had prior to the decision.

We have been down this road of pseudo-limitations on the commerce power before. In the 1990s, the Supreme Court twice struck down laws for exceeding the commerce power, once in the case of the Gun Free School Zones Act and once concerning a provision of the Violence Against Women Act. Constitutional lawyers sweated over whether the extensive commerce power had been meaningfully restrained. In practice, they concluded, it had not. Congress could find ways to do what it needed -- and it still can.

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STYLE, NOT SUBSTANCE:

No intelligent person would choose organic food over conventional food on objective grounds. Its support is based on a number of false assumptions.

For example, it is assumed that conventional food usually contains pesticide residues. Overall, this is not true. As confirmed by repeated surveys, most food is almost completely free of pesticide residues.

It is also assumed that tiny residues of pesticides are harmful. This is similarly false except for rare individuals with specific allergies. All pesticides are scrutinised in exhaustive detail before they may be sold and there are huge safety margins built into their use rates. Some of them are certainly dangerous straight out of the container, but so is laundry bleach and swimming pool chlorine. Legal pesticide residues do not cause acute or chronic illness.

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It is assumed that organic food is free of pesticides. In fact, certain pesticides are permitted under the various organic codes and many organically grown plants produce endogenous pesticides that are chemically similar to manmade pesticides. And there are also occasional organic farmers who are forced to apply pesticides to save their crops. Not surprisingly, they don't talk about that much.

It is assumed that organic production is better for the environment. That this is false is shown by the approach to controlling weeds. A conventional farmer will use herbicides to kill weeds and avoid disturbing the soil to conserve moisture, minimise erosion and preserve topsoil organic matter. Organic farmers are not permitted to use herbicides, so they have to use cultivation.

The assumption that pesticides wipe out bees and other beneficial insects is also false. Modern insecticides are highly selective and increasingly used in conjunction with beneficial insects in integrated pest management programs. Hypocritically, none of the organic codes recognise genetically-modified crops in spite of their need for little or no pesticides.

And it is assumed that organic production is a viable alternative to conventional agriculture, and the world would be better off it was adopted globally. In fact, organic methods are significantly less productive that conventional agriculture, producing on average 20% lower yields. More land is needed to produce the same amount of food using organic production methods, meaning higher prices or less set aside for conservation. The poor farmers who clear the rainforests in Indonesia and Brazil typically do not use pesticides.

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WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

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TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

ON Sunday, the best climate policy in the world got even better: British Columbia's carbon tax -- a tax on the carbon content of all fossil fuels burned in the province -- increased from $25 to $30 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, making it more expensive to pollute.

This was good news not only for the environment but for nearly everyone who pays taxes in British Columbia, because the carbon tax is used to reduce taxes for individuals and businesses. Thanks to this tax swap, British Columbia has lowered its corporate income tax rate to 10 percent from 12 percent, a rate that is among the lowest in the Group of 8 wealthy nations. Personal income taxes for people earning less than $119,000 per year are now the lowest in Canada, and there are targeted rebates for low-income and rural households.

The only bad news is that this is the last increase scheduled in British Columbia. In our view, the reason is simple: the province is waiting for the rest of North America to catch up so that its tax system will not become unbalanced or put energy-intensive industries at a competitive disadvantage.

The United States should jump at the chance to adopt a similar revenue-neutral tax swap. It's an opportunity to reduce existing taxes, clean up the environment and increase personal freedom and energy security.

Let's start with the economics. Substituting a carbon tax for some of our current taxes -- on payroll, on investment, on businesses and on workers -- is a no-brainer. Why tax good things when you can tax bad things, like emissions? The idea has support from economists across the political spectrum, from Arthur B. Laffer and N. Gregory Mankiw on the right to Peter Orszag and Joseph E. Stiglitz on the left. That's because economists know that a carbon tax swap can reduce the economic drag created by our current tax system and increase long-run growth by nudging the economy away from consumption and borrowing and toward saving and investment. [...]

What would a British Columbia-style carbon tax look like in the United States? According to our calculations, a British Columbia-style $30 carbon tax would generate about $145 billion a year in the United States. That could be used to reduce individual and corporate income taxes by 10 percent, and afterward there would still be $35 billion left over.

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BUT....IT MUST MATTER...SOMEONE PAYS ME TO DO NOTHING!:

Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day. I once knew a woman who interned at a magazine where she wasn't allowed to take lunch hours out, lest she be urgently needed for some reason. This was an entertainment magazine whose raison d'être was obviated when "menu" buttons appeared on remotes, so it's hard to see this pretense of indispensability as anything other than a form of institutional self-delusion. More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn't performed by a cat or a boa constrictor in a Richard Scarry book I'm not sure I believe it's necessary. I can't help but wonder whether all this histrionic exhaustion isn't a way of covering up the fact that most of what we do doesn't matter.

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A TRANSFORMATION, NOT A CRISIS:

The most important point to realize is that the problem facing wealthy countries at the moment is not that we are poor, as the stern proponents of austerity insist. The problem is that we are wealthy. We have tens of millions of people unemployed precisely because we can meet current demand without needing their labor.

This was the incredible absurdity of the misery that we and other countries endured during the Great Depression, and which Keynes sought to explain in The General Theory. The world did not suddenly turn poor in 1929, following the collapse of the stock market. Our workers had the ability to produce just as many goods and services the day after the collapse as the day before; the problem was that after the crash, there was a lack of demand for these goods and services.

The result of this lack of demand was a decade of double-digit unemployment in the United States. The spending programs of the New Deal helped to alleviate the impact of the downturn, but because of the deficit hawks of that era, Roosevelt never could spend enough to bring the economy back to full employment - at least until the second world war made deficits irrelevant.

This is the same story we face today. The US and European economies were close to full employment in 2007 due to demand created by housing bubbles in the United States and across much of Europe. These bubbles then burst, substantially reducing demand. As Krugman and Layard point out in their statement, one remedy for this loss of demand is for government to fill the gap. If the private sector is not prepared to spend enough to bring the economy to full employment, then the government can engage in deficit spending to make up the shortfall.

But there is another dimension to this issue. It's great for the government to generate demand insofar as it can productively employ people. This means either providing immediate services, like healthcare and education, or in investing in areas that will provide future dividends, such as modernizing the infrastructure or retrofitting buildings to increase their energy efficiency.

However, it can also employ people by encouraging employers to divide work among more workers. There is nothing natural about the length of the average work week or work year and there are, in fact, large variations across countries. The average worker in Germany and the Netherlands puts in 20% fewer hours in a year than the average worker in the United States. This means that if the US adopted Germany's work patterns tomorrow, it would immediately eliminate unemployment.

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...AND RICHER...:

Here's something to stoke some patriotism ahead of Independence Day. America remains the world's richest country, with more wealth than the combined treasures of the next four richest nations -- Japan, China, Germany and the UK. And most of its wealth comes from the potential of its people.

While that might sound like the kind of platitude a politician might claim behind a flag-draped podium this Fourth of July, it's actuallys the assessment of a recent United Nations study. The 336-page "Inclusive Wealth Report," put together by the U.N. University and the U.N. Environmental Programme, tabulated the wealth of nations by including not just the economic output potential and asset capital bases of various countries, but also their mineral wealth and human capital. The report, which applied the methodology to dozens of countries, also looked at other hard-to-measure assets that are rarely taken into account when the national riches are considered, like quality of ecosystems and water resources.

It tabulated the "inclusive wealth index" of the U.S at around $117.8 trillion in 2008. That number exceeds the combined figures for Japan, China, Germany and the UK, ranked respectively at $55.1 trillion, $19.9 trillion, $19.5 trillion and $13.4 trillion. It fell just shy of also being able to incorporate the wealth of the next-richest country, France's $12.9 trillion. About 75 percent of America's wealth was deemed as coming from its "human capital," a high percentage that was exceeded only by a few highly developed European nations.

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SHHHH...YOU'LL INTRUDE ON THE RIGHT'S RAVING:

One of the few bright spots in last week's Supreme Court ruling on President Obama's health care overhaul was a political one: The opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts argues that Obamacare is constitutional under the taxing powers of Congress. The Obama administration's advocate before the Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, made this case during oral arguments, and Roberts bought it. The decision, in a sense, formalized what many conservatives had long argued: The Obamacare tax is a tax.

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Obamacare's individual mandate on Thursday -- and in fact dubbed it a tax in spite of the Obama administration's denials -- no one was more jubilant this past weekend than the recently hired agents at the Internal Revenue Service who get to keep their jobs, according to a law enforcement official in Washington, D.C. Their jobs are now safe and secure.

Over the weekend, President Barack Obama's minions swarmed the Sunday morning news shows arguing that Americans were not going to be taxed to raise money for Obamacare, yet reporters failed to point out that it will be tax collectors, who will be responsible for gathering the cash to pay for the largest government expansion in U.S. history, according to economists and political strategists.

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) executives are witnessing the largest manpower expansion -- at least since withholding taxes were first introduced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II -- to enforce the new tax mandates and penalties included in the health care law, according to Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX).

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BECAUSE tHE fALL IS A COMEDY, NOT A TRAGEDY:

Why do we so desperately long to live in Mayberry? Why do we listen, ponder, laugh and even shed a few tears over episodes we've seen so many times before?

Perhaps the simplest and best answer comes from Griffith himself, given several years ago at the unveiling of a statue of Andy and Opie in Mount Airy, North Carolina, the actor's home town. When asked why TAGS remained so popular for so many years, and why it served as a vehicle of blessing to so many still, Griffith replied, "It was all about love."

True words. Mayberry was a collection of oddballs and homebodies, little old lady bootleggers and bluegrass playing farmers and a frantic deputy who kept his one bullet in his shirt pocket. There was the barber who couldn't see straight and the rock-throwing wild man whose sidelines included escaping jail and reciting poetry. Aunt Bee made pickles of such pungent renown that their nickname, "kerosene cucumbers," has essentially entered into the public domain. Gomer the gas station jockey was as sweet as a five-year-old, and just about as gullible. And his cousin Goober had, if anything, even less worldly wisdom than Gomer.

Yet as offbeat as these characters were, they were human. They were never shorn of their dignity, never ridiculed or made fun of. Other sitcoms of the time--and all too many today--have contempt for their characters, sometimes thinly veiled, often not. We laugh at them from the height of our supposed superiority, or mock them for their failures or excesses. But in Mayberry, we are made privy to a more intimate understanding of these beloved characters.

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FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE PUBLIC SECTOR BOONDOGGLES...:

The once dominant tech company is just now playing catch-up to the hip forward-thinking Apple and now we know what took it so long: bureaucracy. In company emails obtained by Vanity Fair's Kurt Eichenwald, he details the top-down culture called "stack ranking" that not only stifled overall innovation, but killed both an early 1998 tablet, e-reader deal and a pre-Facebook social network. Under this "stack ranking" system, which this Vanity Fair preview of Eichenwald's article describes as "a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor," employees were more concerned with impressing bosses than creating things. So we get situations where people like former Microsoft engineer Brian Cody have no incentive to innovate. "It was always much less about how I could become a better engineer and much more about my need to improve my visibility among other managers," Cody told Eichenwald.

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THE OTHER OTHER JUDD BROTHERS WITH MITT AND KELLY:

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LIBERTY RESOLVES THE CONFLICT BETWEEN FREEDOM AND SECURITY:

Is the U.S. a land of liberty or equality? (Robert J. Samuelson, 7/03/12, Washington Post)

The backdrop to this struggle is long-standing. As Alexis de Tocqueville noted, Americans venerate both liberty and equality. Our entire history involves this tension between preserving freedom and promoting equality. If you are defending either, you naturally think that you are the legitimate heir of the country's core beliefs.

In a democracy, de Tocqueville argued, Americans would ultimately favor equality over freedom, because its material benefits are more immediate and tangible. Not so, countered the late political scientist James Q. Wilson. Americans strongly value freedom, far more than do citizens of any other democratic country, he argued.

There's plenty of evidence he is right. A recent Pew poll asked people to pick between "freedom to pursue life's goals without state interference" and the "state guarantees nobody is in need." Americans selected freedom 58 percent to 35 percent. European responses were reversed: Germany's 36 percent to 62 percent was typical. By wide margins compared with Europeans, Americans believe that "success in life" is determined by individual effort and not by outside forces. Yet, in their voting habits, Americans often prefer security.

The inconsistencies and contradictions won't soon vanish. But in today's politically poisoned climate, righteousness is at a premium and historical reality at a discount. Each side, whether "liberal" or "conservative," Republican or Democrat, behaves as if it has a monopoly on historical truth. The fear that the existence of their version of America is threatened sows discord and explains why love of country has become a double-edged sword, dividing us when it might unite.

Action regulated by law is free...not when the law is accepted voluntarily, or when it corresponds to the desires of the citizens, but when the law is not arbitrary, that is, when it respects universal norms (when it applies to all individuals or to all members of the group in question), aspires to the public good, and for this reason protects the will of the citizens from the constant danger of constraint imposed by individuals and therefore renders the will fully autonomous.

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YOU'D THINK IT WOULD BE POLAND:

It may be America's birthday, but the United States isn't the only country that celebrates it. Denmark started throwing a Fourth of July bash in 1912 after thousands of Danes emigrated to the United States.

Thousands of Danish Americans and U.S. military personnel stationed in Europe celebrate Independence Day at the annual outdoor festival in Rebild, Denmark. The Danish tourism office bills it as the largest Fourth of July celebration outside the United States.

Former presidents such as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush have been keynote speakers at the celebration, as have other famous Americans like Walter Cronkite and Walt Disney, according to the Rebild National Park Society.

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A CONFORMITY, NOT A REVOLUTION:

Here are ten facts about the American founding that are worth knowing and contemplating as our country celebrates its independence on the Fourth of July.

1.  At the time of the passage and signing of the Declaration, roughly 2.15 million persons lived in the 13 colonies.  Of those not enslaved, the vast majority was of Anglo-Saxon-Celtic descent and nearly 100% were Protestant.  The "fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people on the earth. . . . Religion, always a principle of energy, in this new people is no way worn out or impaired," Edmund Burke stated publically in 1775.  "The people are Protestants; and of that kind which is most adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion." [...]

4.  The level of education for Americans at the time was astounding.  Though no public schools existed in any recognizable sense in the eighteenth century, some "Common Schools" did.  At a Common School, tutors and teachers drilled students for hours in Greek and Latin.  Even if a student only attended school from, say, ages 6-8, he would learn only classical languages.  Parents were expected to teach their children to read, almost always from the King James Bible.  The colonists met with great success, and the American colonies probably contained the single most literate people in the world at that time.  For those attending one of the several colleges in the American colonies (Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, King's College (Columbia)), a liberal education was the only real education.  As the grand historian of the period, Forrest McDonald, has revealed, when a student entered college (usually at age 14 or 15), he would need to prove fluency in Latin and Greek.  He would need to "read and translate from the original Latin into English 'the first three of [Cicero's] Select Orations and the first three books of Virgil's Aeneid' and to translate the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin, as well as to be 'expert in arithmetic' and to have a 'blameless moral character.'"  Keeping this in mind, Americans should not be surprised to see the seventy-plus classical references in The Federalist Papers or the architecture of the Capitol building.  Americans were, second only to their Protestantism, a classically oriented people.

6. The revolution was, therefore, not surprisingly, a "revolution prevented, not made," as Burke explained it.  When asked, for example, where he derived the ideas contained within the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson revealed how historical and "backward looking" the document was.  "This was the object of the Declaration of Independence," Jefferson explained in 1825, not long before his death. "Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take.  Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  All its authority rests then on the harmonizing sentiments of the day, whether expressed in conversation, in letters, printed essays, or in elementary books of public right, as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, Sidney, etc."

6.  The first shots fired in what became the War for Independence were calculated to lead neither to a full-scale war nor to the independence of the colonies from her mother.  Instead, the men of Lexington, Massachusetts, followed what they believed to be the strongest form of protest--not an act of secession.  Jonas Clarke, the Calvinist pastor at the Lexington church and one of the leading intellectuals of the colonies, had been exploring Christian notions of liberty for well over a decade.  "And it is a truth, which the history of the ages and the common experiences of mankind have fully confirmed," he stated in 1765, "that a people can never be divested of those invaluable rights and liberties which are necessary to the happiness of individuals, to the well-being of communities or to a well regulated state, but by their own negligence, imprudence, timidity or rashness.  They are seldom lost, but when foolishly or tamely resigned." After debating a response to the British march toward Concord for hours in the local pastor's house, the town pub, and on the town green (all three places adjoining), about forty Lexingtonians stood on the village green at 5:00am, April 19, 1775, arms placed in parade formation.  

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: SO WE GROAN:

The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams by Lester J. Cappon (Editor)

Adams to Jefferson (Montezillo, May 12th. 1820.)

The question between spirit and matter appears to me nugatory because we have neither evidence nor idea of either. All that we certainly know is that some substance exists, which must be the cause of all the qualitys and Attributes which we perceive: Extension, Solidity, Perception, memory, and Reason, for all these are Attributes, or adjectives, and not Essences or substantives.

Sixty years ago, at College, I read Berkley, and from that time to this I have been fully persuaded that we know nothing of Essences, that some Essence does exist, which causes our minds with all their ideas, and this visible World with all its wonders. I am certain that this Cause is wise, Benevolent and powerful, beyond all conception; I cannot doubt, but what it is, I cannot conjecture.

Suppose we dwell a little on this matter. The Infinite divisibility of it had long ago been demonstrated by Mathematicians--When the Marquis De L'Hospital arose and demonstrated that there were quantities and not infinitely little, but others infinitely less than those infinitely littles, and he might have gone on, for what I know, to all Eternity demonstrating that there are quantities infinitely littles, and he might have gone on, for what I know, to all Eternity demonstrating that there are quantities infinitely less than the last infinitely littles; and the Phenomena of nature seems to coincide with De L'Hospitals demonstrations. For example, Astronomers inform us that the Star draconis is distant from the Earth 38. 000, 000. 000. 000. miles. The Light that proceeds from that Star, therefore, must fill a Sphere of 78. 000, 000, 000, 000, miles in diameter, and every part of that Sphere equal to the size of the pupil of the human Eye. Light is Matter, and every ray, every pencil of that light is made up of particles very little indeed, if not infinitely little, or infinitely less than infinitely little. If this Matter is not fine enough and subtle enough to perceive, to feel and to think, it is too subtle for any human intellect or imagination to conceive, for I defy any human mind to form any idea of anything so small. However, after all, Matter is but Matter; if it is infinitely less than infinitely little, it is incapable of memory, judgement, or feeling, or pleasure or pain, as far as I can conceive. Yet for anything I know, it may be as capable of Sensation and reflection as Spirit, for I confess I know not how Spirit can think, feel or act, any more than Matter. In truth, I cannot conceive how either can move or think, so that I must repose upon your pillow of ignorance, which I find very soft and consoleing, for it absolves my conscience from all culpability in this respect. But I insist upon it that the Saint has as good a right to groan at the Philosopher for asserting that there is nothing but matter in the Universe, As the Philosopher has to laugh at the Saint for saying that there are both Matter and Spirit, Or as the Infidel has to despise Berckley for saying that we cannot prove that there is anything in the Universe but Spirit and Idea--for this indeed is all he asserted, for he never denied the Existence of Matter. After all, I agree that both the groan and the Smile is impertinent, for neither knows what he says, or what he affirms, and I will say of both, as Turgot says of Berkley in his Article of Existence in the Encyclopedia: it is easier to despise than to answer them.

[...]

Oh delightful Ignorance! When I arrive at a certainty that I am Ignorant, and that I always must be ignorant, while I live I am happy, for I know I can no longer be responsible.

We shall meet hereafter and laugh at our present botherations. So believes your old Friend,

JOHN ADAMS

Jefferson to Adams (Monticello. Aug. 15. 20.)

[L]et me turn to your puzzling letter of May 12. on matter, spirit, motion, etc. It's croud of scepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it, and laid it down, again and again: and to give rest to my mind, I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne, 'I feel: therefore I exist.' I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organisation of matter, formed for that purpose by it's creator, as well as that attraction is an action of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall shew how he could endow the Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the tracts of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will, and, by that will, put matter into motion, then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But a heresy it certainly is. Jesus taught nothing of it. He told us indeed that 'God is spirit,' but he has not defined what a spirit is, nor said that it is not matter. And the antient fathers generally, if not universally, held it to be matter: light and thin indeed, an etherial gas; but still matter. [...] All heresies being now done away with us, these schismatics are merely atheists, differing from the material Atheists only in their belief that 'nothing made something,' and from the material deist who believes that matter alone can operate on matter.

Rejecting all organs of information therefore but my senses, I rid myself of Pyrrhonisms with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely: and never all our senses together, with the faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities; and there are enough of these for the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence. I am sure that I really know many, many, things, and none more surely than that I love you with all my heart, and pray for the continuance of your life until you shall be tired of it yourself.

TH: JEFFERSON

Though Adams' skepticism is quite obviously right, it is Jefferson's closing lines that are the kicker, for no man will deny that he loves and is loved and that this love is something quite real and independent of the world of mere material. That's not a reasoned argument, just an assertion (an expression of faith) but it is sufficient and just as sufficient now as it was then. And so, ultimately, we all groan with the Saint.

[originally posted: 9/24/03]

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ISLAM'S WITTENBERG:

That immigrant passion for America was first described to me by a university president who noticed that foreign students are susceptible to a peculiar effect that warps their plans and bends their dreams. If they return to their homeland, they wish it were more like America, and will work to make it so. Often they choose not to go home, or choose to return to America after a while.

Once you're crazy in love with America, you begin to see life in a cockeyed manner, even if you try to resist it. You begin to believe you can pen the script of your own life, instead of allowing your family or your culture to write it for you. You sulk on your visits back home that life there is too corrupt or inefficient or limiting.

And while you're concerned about that legendary permissiveness in America, you also sense that these Americans aren't overly uptight, and something feels right about that. And when your children begin to drift from your heritage, as was the case with me and my father's other children, you might stay awake late fuming about this country, but you suspect your destiny is tied inextricably with it.

That drifting involves a certain liberty, which has its roots all the way back to the settlement of this country by seekers of religious freedom. That basic value, fought and died for, has protected freedom of conscience to worship - or not - as one will.

Similarly, that freedom is helping (slowly) moderate latter-day Islam, as Gallup and Pew polls of Muslim-Americans have shown.

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IT MADE OUR LIST:

Which songs are on yours this Summer?

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HOME FOR THE HOLIDAY:

Even or especially the Darwinians say that we find our purpose and significance as parts of groups or tribes or wholes greater than ourselves.  We become too personally obsessive to ever be happy if we don't believe that there are people and personal causes worth dying for. We can't live well with the homelessness we can't help but experience as self-conscious persons if we don't experience ourselves as in many senses at home.  Today, we should thank God as Americans that we're not stuck with only being displaced persons. 

We Americans, of course, know that we're not merely or even most deep down citizens.  We're free from political domination, as Madison, for one, wrote, to discover our conscientious duties to our Creator--who's the God of all and so not the God of America in particular.  We also know, of course, that our personal identities includes an awareness our irreducible individuality.  We're not Spartans, thank God.

As social or relational beings, our religious and familial attachments are more personal and so inevitably trump our political attachments.  Even that doesn't mean that America doesn't require and deserve our personal attention and cultivation.

We're also not Marxists or hyper-libertarians hoping and working for "the withering away of the state."  We're not "statists" because we don't understand our country as an alien and oppressive state.

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AS THE OTHER BROTHER REPORTS...:

 Mitt Romney and his family will march today in the Wolfeboro Fourth of July Parade  and possible running mate  Sen. Kelly Ayotte and her family are expected to join him along the route.

The parade, set to begin at 10 a.m., which will go right through Main Street of the town known as "The Oldest Summer Resort in America." Romney is expected to give brief remarks at the end of the parade route. This is the first public campaign event for Romney since last Thursday when he gave his statement in response to the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare.

The parade is the topic of conversation everywhere from the docks to the restaurants to the long line for the famous Bailey's Bubbles ice cream stand. On Main Street Tuesday, residents were bragging to one another about their place in the parade, making sure everyone knew they'd be marching in the same parade as Mitt Romney. Hotel receptionists greeting newcomers with the anxious question: "Are you here for the Romneys?"

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: DENY EVIL, DENY AMERICA:

The new Nero (Francois de Bernard, 3/31/03, Ha'aretz)

[T]he time has come for us to open our eyes. The time has come to forget the old idea - forged during the course of two centuries - of the United States as the bridgehead of the "free world" and "democracy."

The reality that we are trying to keep at a distance is that the United States has become a theocracy and a pathocracy. It has become a theocracy because nearly all the important decisions of President George W. Bush's administration are taken "in the name of God" - an angry and vengeful God, not a God of love and compassion - and because this system is not encountering any serious opposition on the part of the legislative and legal institutions, not to mention the media.

We are Democracy, by the will of our angry God, and our role is to promote it in His name and for His sake. The fact that this democracy has only a marginal and metaphorical connection to 2,5000 years of political tradition is of no importance. The self-definition and the self-justification are the two breasts of the empire. Just as the United Nations is a negligible factor that can be ignored when it opposes our plans, we were established in order to impose on the rest of the world the idea of democracy that corresponds only to our convictions.

For two years now - and increasingly since September 11, 2001, there has been a great deal of focus in the discourse on the subject of "good and evil" and the strategy derived from it with respect to the "axis of evil." This has generally been based on the return, in full force, of the primitive moralizing that runs through a large part of the political and intellectual history of the United States. But in fact, it is something of an entirely different nature. It is the brutal transformation of an oligarchic republic tinged with democracy into a republic that is essentially theocratic.

If we realize this, then it is possible to understand that everything becomes possible from the point of view of Bush's administration, from the rejection of the Kyoto treaty to the perpetuation of the death penalty, from the attempt to marginalize the UN to the approaching exit from the World Trade Organization, from the war in Afghanistan to the war in Iraq.

But the United States has also become a pathocracy, that is, a regime that is neurotic in essence, the leaders of which are, quite simply, psychopaths. I offer the hypothesis that the American president is personally suffering from a paranoid psychosis and that the quartet he has formed with Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld constitutes a government that is both theocratic and pathocratic.

Mr. de Bernard states the difference between Europe (and the Left generally) and America (and the Right generally) about as starkly and honestly as you'll find anywhere: the two sides divide over the question of good and evil. It is actually he and his ilk who deny the Western political tradition, for what does that tradition consist of if not the central insight of the Fall of Man, that we are inherently sinful and incapable of changing our nature, though we must strive to contain the evil of which we are all capable, towards which we may even be inclined? You'd be hard pressed to find a Founder more closely associated with the celebration of humanity than Thomas Jefferson, but recall his words when it comes to how men should be governed: "In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution." And, of course, the most famous passage in the Federalist Papers, and thus the most authoritative statement of how we view our political system, is Madison's (?) in Federalist 51:

[T]he great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other
that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit.

Thus is American Republicanism deeply premised on the desire of men to encroach upon each others' rights. It is no exaggeration to say that America's genesis lies in Genesis, in the millennia old revelation that men are not angels, are not "good". The United States is not, of course, a theocracy, but it very much owes its existence and endurance as the world's freest and longest-lived democracy to Judeo-Christian theology. Yet this foundation is precisely what Mr. de Bernard is proposing should be viewed as our "pathology" and "psychosis".

Indeed, Mr. Benard's view--that there is no such thing as good and evil and that religion is a kind of dangerous neuroses--informs modern European intellectual life (and that of the American Left) and has driven Europe's seemingly inexorable decline. Everything from the massive Social Welfare states they've created, with their now thoroughly discredited assumption that men will not eagerly become dependents of the State; to their permissive moralities; to their willingness to cede national sovereignty to EU and UN bureaucrats; to their increasing isolation from world affairs, as in their refusal to confront Iraq; are all fundamentally outgrowths of a fantastical belief that man is essentially good, that we can impute the best of motives to all and sundry, and that every conflict between men is a function of mere misunderstanding, rather than a clash of values, some of which are superior
to others.

The Franco-European vacation from reality can in large part be traced to Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose philosophy Mary Ann Glendon describes as follows (since we, as Americans, basically ignore Rousseau as nonsensical utopianism, it will be appropriate to quote her at length):

He began his Discourse on Inequality by scoffing at previous attempts to account for the origins of government by describing what human beings must have been like in the "state of nature." The mythic tales told by Hobbes and Locke had recounted the progress of mankind from "a horrible state of war" (Hobbes) or from a "very precarious, very unsafe" existence (Locke) into a more secure way of life in organized society. According to Rousseau, such accounts had it backwards. Prior writers had failed to understand the natural condition of man, he claimed, because they "carried over to the state of nature ideas they had acquired in society; they spoke about savage man but they described civilized man." The complex fears and desires they attributed to our early ancestors could only have been produced by society.

Rousseau then presented his own version of pre-history as universal truth: "O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, listen: behold your history as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies." The earliest human, as Rousseau imagined him, was a simple, animal-like creature, "wholly wrapped up in the feeling of [his own] present existence." He was not inherently dangerous to his fellows as Hobbes had it. But neither was he fallen as the biblical tradition teaches. Rather, he must have led a "solitary," "indolent" life, satisfying his basic physical needs, mating casually without forming ties. He possessed a "natural feeling" of compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings that made him unwilling to harm others, unless (a big unless) his own self-preservation was at stake. He was not
naturally endowed with reason, but existed in an unreflective state of pure being. The transition from this primitive state into civil society represented a "loss of real felicity," in Rousseau's view, rather than an unambiguous step forward.

Rousseau next took aim at the social contract theories of his predecessors. As he saw it, what drew human beings out of their primeval state was not rational calculation leading to agreement for the sake of self-preservation (as Hobbes and Locke thought), but rather a quality he called "perfectibility." Previous thinkers, he claimed, did not pay sufficient attention to the distinctively human capacity to change and develop, to transform oneself and to be transformed. In other words, they failed to consider the implications of the fact that human nature itself has a history. Or that human beings, through their capacity to form ideas, can to some extent shape that history. These were the insights of the Discourse on Inequality that won the admiration of such a dissimilar personality as Immanuel Kant and stirred the historical imaginations of Hegel and Marx.

With the development of human faculties, Rousseau continued, came language, family life, and eventually an era when families lived in simple tribal groups. That centuries-long stage of communal living, succeeding the state of nature and preceding organized society, he wrote, "must have been the happiest and most stable of epochs," which only a "fatal accident" could have brought to an end. That accident was precipitated by the ever-restless human mind that invented agriculture and metallurgy, which led in turn to the state of affairs where human beings lost their self-sufficiency and came to depend on one another for their survival. ("It is iron and wheat which have civilized men and ruined the human race.")

In contrast to Locke, who taught that property was an especially important, pre-political right, Rousseau wrote:

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, 'Beware of listening to this imposter, you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.' "

Contrary to Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau contended that it was civil society, not nature, that gave rise to a state of affairs that was always in danger of degenerating into war. Civil society begat governments and laws, inequality, resentment, and other woes. Governments and laws "bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery, and wretchedness." It would be absurd to suppose, he went on, that mankind had somehow consented to this state of affairs where "the privileged few . . . gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life."

Though Rousseau's evocative imaginary depictions of primitive societies were to swell the tide of nineteenth-century romantic "nostalgia" for the simple life, he himself insisted that there was no escape from history. There was no going back, he explained, because human nature itself had changed: "The savage and the civilized man differ so much . . . that what constitutes the supreme happiness of one would reduce the other to despair." Natural man had been sufficient unto himself; man in civil society had become dependent on his fellows in countless ways, even to the point of living "in the opinions of others." Reprising the theme of his Dijon essay, Rousseau concluded that modern man, though surrounded by philosophy, civilization, and codes of morality, had little to show for himself but "honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness."

The radical character of Rousseau's political thought is nowhere more apparent than in his treatments of reason and human nature. Together with early modern and Enlightenment thinkers, he rejected older ideas of a natural law discoverable through right reason. But by insisting that human beings are not naturally endowed with reason, he struck at the very core of the Enlightenment project, subordinating reason to feeling in a move that would characterize the politics of a later age. Like others within the modern horizon, he rejected the older view that human beings are naturally social or political. But by exalting individual solitude and self-sufficiency, he set himself apart from his fellow moderns, anticipating the hyper-individualism of a much later age--our own.

Not without justification, then, did Bloom call the Discourse on Inequality "the most radical work ever written, one that transformed the way people thought about the world." This one essay contained the germs of most of the themes Rousseau would develop in later works, and that would be further elaborated by others who came under his spell. Rousseau's lyrical descriptions of early man and simple societies fueled the nineteenth-century popular romantic revolt against classicism in art and literature. His criticism of property, together with his dark view of the downside of mutual dependence, made a deep impression on the young Karl Marx.

The thesis of the Second Discourse, that the most serious forms of injustice had their origins in civil society rather than in nature, foreshadowed Rousseau's famous charge at the beginning of The Social Contract that virtually all existing governments were illegitimate: "Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains." Having raised the explosive issue of legitimacy, and sensing that Europe's old regimes were about to crumble, Rousseau turned to his most ambitious project to date: the question of how better governments might be established. "I want to seek," he wrote, "if, in the civil order, there can be some legitimate and solid rule of administration, taking men as they are and the laws as they can be."

Like many critical theorists before and since, Rousseau was less successful at developing a positive political vision of his own than he had been at spotting flaws in the theories of others. In The Social Contract, he framed the problem of good government as that of finding a form of political association which would protect everyone's person and property, but within which each person would remain "as free as before." The solution he devised was an agreement by which everyone would give himself and all his goods to the community, forming a state whose legislation would be produced by the will of each person thinking in terms of all (the "general will"). The state's legitimacy would thus be derived from the people, who, in obeying the law, would be obeying themselves.

That solution to the problem of legitimate government would obviously require a special sort of citizen, a "new man" who could and would choose the general will over his own interests or the narrow interests of his group. The concept of the general will thus links The Social Contract to Rousseau's writings on nurture, education, and morals, particularly Emile, which contains his program for forming the sentiments of the young so that they will retain their natural goodness while living in civil society.

The legitimate state, as Rousseau imagined it, would need not only virtuous citizens, but an extraordinary "Legislator" who could persuade people to accept the rules necessary for such a society. Law in the properly constituted state would be, among other things, an instrument of transformation: "He who dares to undertake the making of a people's laws ought to feel himself capable of changing human nature." Rousseau had learned from the classical philosophers, however, that good laws can take root only amidst good customs. It was thus implicit in The Social Contract that many existing societies were already beyond help. "What people," Rousseau asked, "is a fit subject for legislation?" His answer was not encouraging to revolutionaries bent on overthrowing unjust regimes: "One which, already bound by some unity of origin, interest, or convention, has never yet felt the
real yoke of law; . . . one in which every member may be known by every other, and there is no need to lay on any man burdens too heavy for a man to bear; . . . one which is neither rich nor poor, but self sufficient. . . . All these conditions are indeed rarely found united, and therefore few states have good constitutions."

Once a legitimate state is established, it needs to be maintained and defended. Thus, according to Rousseau, there should be no "particular associations" competing for the loyalty of citizens; religion should not be left independent of political control; and those who refuse to conform to the general will would have to be "forced to be free."

The contrast between Rousseau's program and the practical ideas that guided the American Founders could hardly be more striking. The legacy of the most influential political thinker of the eighteenth century is thus at odds with the era's greatest political achievement--the design for government framed by men who believed that good governments could be based on reflection and choice. The pragmatic authors of The Federalist had their own, clear-eyed, understanding of human nature with its potency and its limitations. They knew that human beings are creatures of reason and feeling--capable of good and evil, trust and betrayal, creativity and destruction, selfishness and cooperation. In Madison's famous formulation: "As there is a certain degree of depravity in human nature which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence."

And so we have Franco-European thinkers, the children of Rousseau, who imagine that governmental institutions--the State, the EU, the UN, etc.--will have a transformative effect on mankind, will create the "new man". This could not be more antithetical to Americans, children of the Founders, who erected an elaborate system of checks and balances even against fellow citizens and who know human nature to be immutable and who scoff at the idea of trusting the folk of other nations or the bureaucrats of transnational institutions with political power. Mr. de Bernard refers to us as "paranoid" because we do not trust the French, UN, the Taliban, Saddam, etc., but paranoia is a condition of irrational distrust. American distrust of their fellow Americans and even more so of non-Americans and even more than that of institutions that concentrate power is entirely rational and is justified by
long and bitter human experience. It is Franco-European faith in the good intentions of governments and bureaucrats and radical Islamicists that is in fact the product of irrational fantasy. It has been common, especially on the American Left, to dismiss the current split between America and Old Europe as driven by emotion and only temporary. Such folks contend that we are bound by more commonalities than are we divided by our differences. This is simply untrue. We diverged over two centuries ago and though it has taken some time for that to become obvious to all, the precipitous decline of Europe, as a result of the false path it has followed, is going to make it impossible to ignore any longer.

MORE:
Desperately Wicked: Reckoning with evil. (Alan Wolfe, March/April 2003, Books & Culture)

"The problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe," wrote Hannah Arendt in 1945. She was wrong. To be fair, her comment was not directed at the United States, and it applied to intellectual life in general rather than to academic trends in particular. Still, postwar thought in the West in the last half of the 20th century did not make evil central to its concerns. On the contrary: philosophers retreated even more deeply into analytic preoccupations with logic and language; social scientists reacted to the massive irrationalities of war and totalitarianism by treating all human behavior as if it were ultra-rational; both literary theorists and novelists were attracted to forms of postmodernism that denied any fixed distinctions, including the one between good and evil; and the most influential theologians studiously avoided neo-Augustinian
thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr. The one European thinker who comes closest to Arendt in breadth of knowledge and passionate concern with the fate of humanity--JŸrgen Habermas--has devoted his work not to exploring the horrors of the modern world, but to the conditions under which meaningful human communication is possible.

What was not true of the past fifty years, however, may turn out to be true of the next fifty. Evil is getting increased attention. Presidents Reagan and Bush used the term in their rhetoric to significant public acclaim. Popular culture addicts know all about Hannibal Lector and consume the plots of Stephen King. And the books under review here are representative of a much larger number of recent titles, suggesting that academic fields as diverse as philosophy, theology, and psychology are turning with increasing frequency to a subject they once ignored. It has taken a half-century since the end of World War II for the study of evil to catch up with the thing itself--perhaps, given the traumas of the evils uncovered at war's end, not an unreasonable amount of time.

Now that evil is once again prominent on the intellectual and academic radar screen, the problems of understanding it have only just begun. These books not only fail to agree on what evil is, they disagree on how it came into the world and whether it ever can be expected to leave. Consider them, as all of their authors save one would want them to be considered, provisional efforts to start an inquiry rather than foundational attempts to solve a problem. [...]

Although many of the thinkers who tried to make sense out of the Holocaust were Jewish, they were influenced by Christian theology; Hans Jonas was a student of Rudolf Bultmann, and Hannah Arendt, as Charles T. Mathewes reminds us, always worked in the shadow of Augustine. Evil and the Augustinian Tradition features Arendt, along with Reinhold Niebuhr, as representing alternatives to what Mathewes calls "subjectivism," which he defines as "the belief that our existence in the world is determined first and foremost by our own (subjective) activities."

Niebuhr is often assumed to be a conservative, but, as Mathewes points out, this cannot be easily reconciled with his political activism, most of which was concentrated on left-wing causes. Moreover, because American conservatism is so tied to a Smithian love of the marketplace, it has never--with the exception of now somewhat forgotten figures such as Whittaker Chambers or the Southern agrarians--been able to develop the ironic, and often pessimistic, stance toward modernity that any good conservative mood should reflect. In Augustine's theology Niebuhr found an alternative to the prevailing American optimism of his day.

Niebuhr's voice was tragic. Evil, the realist in him recognized, is "a fixed datum of historical science"; not for Niebuhr the kind of naivete that has often characterized religious leaders' involvement in politics. At the same time, our sins are not of such a depraved nature that any hope has to be ruled out of order. We can take responsibility for our acts, and Mathewes is especially good as describing this Niebuhrian sense of responsibility. "We have no intellectual resources for 'handling' evil," he writes, "if 'handling' it means managing it." Our thought is always torn open at its side, as it were, and bleeds from the knowledge that we sinners, we evil doers, are at fault and are yet the vehicles whereby God's salvation is made manifest." [...]

We live with evil because evil has chosen to live with us. The best we can do is to be as ambitious as we can in trying to tackle one of the great mysteries surrounding us, without becoming so ambitious that we bring evil down to the level of ordinary existence. As Richard Bernstein concludes in an especially reflective summary of what we know and what we do not, evil is "an excess that resists total comprehension." Yet, he continues, "interrogating evil is an ongoing, open-ended process" which requires not only a reaffirmation of the importance of personal responsibility but also a commitment to rethinking what responsibility means. Whether we are followers of Augustine or Kant, we are individuals with free will. Faced with the Holocaust, some people chose to do the right thing--even while far more chose evil.

[originally posted: 2003-03-31]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: SOUL MEN:

Bored on the Fourth of July (Peter Lawler on July 4, 2011, Big Think)

[T]oday we're celebrating by sharing our allegiance to truths we hold to be self-evident. We are, as G.K. Chesterton wrote, "a nation with the soul of a church." Churches are held together by common belief in particular dogmas. We're held together by common belief in the principles set forth, Chesterton wrote, with "dogmatic lucidity" in the Declaration.

The not-so-silent Calvin Coolidge wrote that those principles are restful because they're final. We believe that no progress can be made beyond them--just as we believe that our progress comes from more faithfully and consistently actng in accordance with them. The Fourth of July, in that light, should be a day of rest for the same reason every Sunday should be. We need to take a break from our incessant activity to remind ourselves of the foundation that makes our free and restless prosperity possible.

So we can criticize the authors and signers of the Declaration for not acting in full accordance with their principles. Jefferson knew that all human beings--including those imported from Africa to be slaves--we're created equal and had inalienable rights. But he didn't always act according to what he knew.

But we remember that it was the Abolitionists, from the very beginning, who talked up more than other Americans the stirring words of the Declaration as the foundation of their liberationist cause. So did our first strong proponents of the rights of women. And the southern slaveholders ended up openly denying the Declaration's truth, saying that Jefferson didn't know what he was talking about. It was in the context of the spilling of a huge amount of blood for a new birth of freedom that Lincoln rededicated us to the Declaration's proposition that all men are created equal.

[originally posted: 7/04/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE ANTI-NATION:

How the Complete Meaning of July Fourth Is Slipping Away (Gordon S. Wood, July 4, 2011, New Republic)

[F]or Americans the Declaration has a special significance. It infused into our culture most of what we have come to believe and value. Our noblest ideals and highest aspirations--our beliefs in liberty, equality, and individual rights, including the right of every person to pursue happiness--came out of the Declaration of Independence. Consequently, it is not surprising that every reform movement in American history--from the abolitionists of the 1830s, to the feminists at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the civil rights advocates of the 1960s--invoked the words and ideals of the Declaration. It was Abraham Lincoln who made the most of the Declaration, particularly its assertions of human equality and inalienable rights. Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration, said Lincoln, "had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression." A century later, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King, Jr. took inspiration from this abstract truth embodied in the Declaration.

For us Americans, the words of the Declaration have become central to our sense of nationhood. Because the United States is composed of so many immigrants and so many different races and ethnicities, we can never assume our identity as a matter of course. The nation has had to be invented. At the end of the Declaration, the members of the Continental Congress could only "mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." There was nothing else but themselves that they could dedicate themselves to--no patria, no fatherland, no nation as yet. In comparison with the 235 year-old United States, many states in the world today are new, some of them created within fairly recent past. Yet many of these states, new as they may be, are under-girded by peoples who had a pre-existing sense of their ethnicity, their nationality. In the case of the United States, the process was reversed: We Americans were a state before we were a nation, and much of our history has been an effort to define that nationality.

In fact, even today America is not a nation in any traditional meaning of the term. We Americans have had to rely on ideas and ideals in order to hold ourselves together and think of ourselves as a single people. And more than any other single document in American history, the Declaration has embodied these ideas and ideals. Since it is our most sacred text, the day, July 4, 1776, that gave birth to it ought to be understood with all the significance and solemnity that John Adams gave to it.

[originally posted: 7/05/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: A NEIGHBORHOOD, NOT A NATION:

Who Are Americans?: What Christians contribute to the search for a national identity. (Chuck Colson with Catherine Larson, 6/21/2010, Christianity Today)

Can a Christian worldview inform us as we wrestle with our national identity?

Any kind of racially or ethnically intolerant society would be incompatible with Christian principles.

Further, we know that the core values of our creeds, which in particular promote the dignity of all people, resonate with Scripture and are worth preserving. American patriotism does not rest on jingoistic nationalism but on a universal creed that says, "All men are ... endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights."

Liberty is one of those unalienable rights. And this core value, also emphasized in Scripture, teaches us that we cannot force beliefs on others. Our founders understood, however, that freedom of religion is not synonymous with expunging religion from public life, a problem that I and others addressed last fall in the Manhattan Declaration. So if Huntington is in fact right that the U.S. needs a reinvigorated religious commitment, it won't come from a nation-mandated religion but rather from a reinvigorated populace.

I believe, then, that for national identity to be salient in the midst of our changing society, we need to promote a recommitment to our creeds, a respect for American history, and a proper role of patriotism, rooted in love of neighbor. Our founders' Judeo-Christian heritage helped produce a culture in which moral responsibility, transcendent ethical principles, and the dignity of all people could flourish--a culture in which our creedal values made sense. This is why our role as leaven within society is so important, and why we must continue to bring a biblical influence to the public square, reinvigorating society.

As we do so, we must guard against the easy tendency to embrace xenophobic notions or fall into the equally perilous trap of promoting subcultural identities over national identity. People will not live with, let alone die for, a nation that has abandoned its religious moorings and adopted a creed that suggests we simply live together in cosmopolitan bliss. Millions of us, however, have been willing to live and die for beliefs rooted in our deepest convictions about God and man--convictions that were expressed so well in the stirring words of our national creed, the Declaration of Independence.

MORE:
An immigrant's trip to Arizona: The columnist's mother finds much to like -- and much to be concerned about -- on a visit to California's neighbor. (Hector Tobar, July 10, 2010, LA Times)

In Sedona, she was reminded of the growing tension between the two worlds she has lived in since she was 20 -- one English-speaking, the other mostly Spanish-speaking, both filled with people she respects.

She found some English-speaking friends a little glib in their dismissal of people's fears.

"Mercedes, how could you be concerned about the new law?" one asked her. "There's no profiling. You're only going to be stopped if you're breaking the law!"

This same longtime friend, who before had seemed apolitical, was upset at the immigrants rights groups calling for a boycott of the state.

My mother was surprised by the sudden anger.

Being in Arizona made her reflect on her own immigrant experience. She thought about the people who've arrived in the U.S. after she did and was inspired to write down a list of principles all current and future immigrants should follow.

"1. Learn the language. 2. Obey and respect the law. 3. Be careful of the image you project -- without losing your identity. 4. Imitate the good things -- but don't get caught up in [the Americans'] bad habits. 5. Never be embarrassed to say where you are from. 6. Be grateful for the opportunities you are given. 7. And give something back that will enrich your adopted country."

Words of wisdom, of course.

But she kept feeling rankled, despite all her perspective.

"Our governor is only trying to protect our borders because we don't have any federal help," another of her Anglo friends told her.

"Somehow, the word 'protect' bothered me," my mother wrote, because it was said with a "tone of discrimination."

The new Arizona law is meant to "protect" Americans from danger -- and it bothers my mother that so many Americans think of their Latin American neighbors as a source of danger.

Her Mexican-born friends spoke of strange encounters with local police. Some involved traffic stops made with what seemed like the flimsiest of excuses. A son-in-law of a friend, she was told, was pulled over for "leaving a dog on the street corner" -- even though he's never owned a dog.

"All I know is that before I felt free to go anywhere," said Antonia Rodriguez, a native of Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a naturalized U.S. citizen. "And now if I don't have my passport with me, I feel scared."

Those who aren't citizens, her Mexican-born friends told her, fear being deported and separated from their U.S.-born children.

After listening to all these stories, and seeing the fear in her friends' eyes, my mother wrote: "Just the idea of seeing a police car behind you, and knowing they can stop you and ask you for your papers does something to your dignity."

"I've never been a person with a complex," my mother wrote, by which she meant she's never been hung up on the idea that she was the victim of discrimination. "But this new law makes me feel sad."

[originally posted: 7/11/10]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: PROFOUNDLY AMERICAN:

Speech on the Occasion of the One Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (Calvin Coolidge, July 5, 1926, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)

We meet to celebrate the birthday of America. The coming of a new life always excites our interest. Although we know in the case of the individual that it has been an infinite repetition reaching back beyond our vision, that only makes it the more wonderful. But how our interest and wonder increase when we behold the miracle of the birth of a new nation. It is to pay our tribute of reverence and respect to those who participated in such a mighty event that we annually observe the fourth day of July. Whatever may have been the impression created by the news which went out from this city on that summer day in 1776, there can be no doubt as to the estimate which is now placed upon it. At the end of 150 years the four corners of the earth unite in coming to Philadelphia as to a holy shrine in grateful acknowledgement of a service so great, which a few inspired men here rendered to humanity, that it is still the preeminent support of free government throughout the world.

Although a century and a half measured in comparison with the length of human experience is but a short time, yet measured in the life of governments and nations it ranks as a very respectable period. Certainly enough time has elapsed to demonstrate with a great deal of thoroughness the value of our institutions and their dependability as rules for the regulation of human conduct and the advancement of civilization. They have been in existence long enough to become very well seasoned. They have met, and met successfully, the test of experience.

It is not so much then for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound. Amid all the clash of conflicting interests, amid all the welter of partisan politics, every American can turn for solace and consolation to the Declaration of independence and the Constitution of the United States with the assurance and confidence that those two great charters of freedom and justice remain firm and unshaken. Whatever perils appear, whatever dangers threaten, the Nation remains secure in the knowledge that the ultimate application of the law of the land will provide an adequate defense and protection.

It is little wonder that people at home and abroad consider Independence Hall as hallowed ground and revere the Liberty Bell as a sacred relic. That pile of bricks and mortar, that mass of metal, might appear to the uninstructed as only the outgrown meeting place and the shattered bell of a former time, useless now because of more modern conveniences, but to those who know they have become consecrated by the use which men have made of them. They have long been identified with a great cause. They are the framework of a spiritual event. The world looks upon them, because of their associations of one hundred and fifty years ago, as it looks upon the Holy Land because of what took place there nineteen hundred years ago. Through use for a righteous purpose they have become sanctified.

It is not here necessary to examine in detail the causes which led to the American Revolution. In their immediate occasion they were largely economic. The colonists objected to the navigation laws which interfered with their trade, they denied the power of Parliament to impose taxes which they were obliged to pay, and they therefore resisted the royal governors and the royal forces which were sent to secure obedience to these laws. But the conviction is inescapable that a new civilization had come, a new spirit had arisen on this side of the Atlantic more advanced and more developed in its regard for the rights of the individual than that which characterized the Old World. Life in a new and open country had aspirations which could not be realized in any subordinate position. A separate establishment was ultimately inevitable. It had been decreed by the very laws of human nature. Man everywhere has an unconquerable desire to be the master of his own destiny.

We are obliged to conclude that the Declaration of Independence represented the movement of a people. It was not, of course, a movement from the top. Revolutions do not come from that direction. It was not without the support of many of the most respectable people in the Colonies, who were entitled to all the consideration that is given to breeding, education, and possessions. It had the support of another element of great significance and importance to which I shall later refer. But the preponderance of all those who occupied a position which took on the aspect of aristocracy did not approve of the Revolution and held toward it an attitude either of neutrality or open hostility. It was in no sense a rising of the oppressed and downtrodden. It brought no scum to the surface, for the reason that colonial society had developed no scum. The great body of the people were accustomed to privations, but they were free from depravity. If they had poverty, it was not of the hopeless kind that afflicts great cities, but the inspiring kind that marks the spirit of the pioneer. The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty-loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them.

The Continental Congress was not only composed of great men, but it represented a great people. While its members did not fail to exercise a remarkable leadership, they were equally observant of their representative capacity. They were industrious in encouraging their constituents to instruct them to support independence. But until such instructions were given they were inclined to withhold action.

While North Carolina has the honor of first authorizing its delegates to concur with other Colonies in declaring independence, it was quickly followed by South Carolina and Georgia, which also gave general instructions broad enough to include such action. But the first instructions which unconditionally directed its delegates to declare for independence came from the great Commonwealth of Virginia. These were immediately followed by Rhode Island and Massachusetts, while the other Colonies, with the exception of New York, soon adopted a like course.

This obedience of the delegates to the wishes of their constituents, which in some cases caused them to modify their previous positions, is a matter of great significance. It reveals an orderly process of government in the first place; but more than that, it demonstrates that the Declaration of Independence was the result of the seasoned and deliberate thought of the dominant portion of the people of the Colonies. Adopted after long discussion and as the result of the duly authorized expression of the preponderance of public opinion, it did not partake of dark intrigue or hidden conspiracy. It was well advised. It had about it nothing of the lawless and disordered nature of a riotous insurrection. It was maintained on a plane which rises above the ordinary conception of rebellion. It was in no sense a radical movement but took on the dignity of a resistance to illegal usurpations. It was conservative and represented the action of the colonists to maintain their constitutional rights which from time immemorial had been guaranteed to them under the law of the land.

When we come to examine the action of the Continental Congress in adopting the Declaration of Independence in the light of what was set out in that great document and in the light of succeeding events, we can not escape the conclusion that it had a much broader and deeper significance than a mere secession of territory and the establishment of a new nation. Events of that nature have been taking place since the dawn of history. One empire after another has arisen, only to crumble away as its constituent parts separated from each other and set up independent governments of their own. Such actions long ago became commonplace. They have occurred too often to hold the attention of the world and command the admiration and reverence of humanity. There is something beyond the establishment of a new nation, great as that event would be, in the Declaration of Independence which has ever since caused it to be regarded as one of the great charters that not only was to liberate America but was everywhere to ennoble humanity.

It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.

If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination. But remarkable as this may be, it is not the chief distinction of the Declaration of Independence. The importance of political speculation is not to be under-estimated, as I shall presently disclose. Until the idea is developed and the plan made there can be no action.

It was the fact that our Declaration of Independence containing these immortal truths was the political action of a duly authorized and constituted representative public body in its sovereign capacity, supported by the force of general opinion and by the armies of Washington already in the field, which makes it the most important civil document in the world. It was not only the principles declared, but the fact that therewith a new nation was born which was to be founded upon those principles and which from that time forth in its development has actually maintained those principles, that makes this pronouncement an incomparable event in the history of government. It was an assertion that a people had arisen determined to make every necessary sacrifice for the support of these truths and by their practical application bring the War of Independence to a successful conclusion and adopt the Constitution of the United States with all that it has meant to civilization.

The idea that the people have a right to choose their own rulers was not new in political history. It was the foundation of every popular attempt to depose an undesirable king. This right was set out with a good deal of detail by the Dutch when as early as July 26, 1581, they declared their independence of Philip of Spain. In their long struggle with the Stuarts the British people asserted the same principles, which finally culminated in the Bill of Rights deposing the last of that house and placing William and Mary on the throne. In each of these cases sovereignty through divine right was displaced by sovereignty through the consent of the people. Running through the same documents, though expressed in different terms, is the clear inference of inalienable rights. But we should search these charters in vain for an assertion of the doctrine of equality. This principle had not before appeared as an official political declaration of any nation. It was profoundly revolutionary. It is one of the corner stones of American institutions.

But if these truths to which the declaration refers have not before been adopted in their combined entirety by national authority, it is a fact that they had been long pondered and often expressed in political speculation. It is generally assumed that French thought had some effect upon our public mind during Revolutionary days. This may have been true. But the principles of our declaration had been under discussion in the Colonies for nearly two generations before the advent of the French political philosophy that characterized the middle of the eighteenth century. In fact, they come from an earlier date. A very positive echo of what the Dutch had done in 1581, and what the English were preparing to do, appears in the assertion of the Rev. Thomas Hooker of Connecticut as early as 1638, when he said in a sermon before the General Court that--

"The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people"

"The choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God's own allowance."

This doctrine found wide acceptance among the nonconformist clergy who later made up the Congregational Church. The great apostle of this movement was the Rev. John Wise, of Massachusetts. He was one of the leaders of the revolt against the royal governor Andros in 1687, for which he suffered imprisonment. He was a liberal in ecclesiastical controversies. He appears to have been familiar with the writings of the political scientist, Samuel Pufendorf, who was born in Saxony in 1632. Wise published a treatise, entitled "The Church's Quarrel Espoused," in 1710, which was amplified in another publication in 1717. In it he dealt with the principles of civil government. His works were reprinted in 1772 and have been declared to have been nothing less than a textbook of liberty for our Revolutionary fathers.

While the written word was the foundation, it is apparent that the spoken word was the vehicle for convincing the people. This came with great force and wide range from the successors of Hooker and Wise, It was carried on with a missionary spirit which did not fail to reach the Scotch-Irish of North Carolina, showing its influence by significantly making that Colony the first to give instructions to its delegates looking to independence. This preaching reached the neighborhood of Thomas Jefferson, who acknowledged that his "best ideas of democracy" had been secured at church meetings.

That these ideas were prevalent in Virginia is further revealed by the Declaration of Rights, which was prepared by George Mason and presented to the general assembly on May 27, 1776. This document asserted popular sovereignty and inherent natural rights, but confined the doctrine of equality to the assertion that "All men are created equally free and independent." It can scarcely be imagined that Jefferson was unacquainted with what had been done in his own Commonwealth of Virginia when he took up the task of drafting the Declaration of Independence. But these thoughts can very largely be traced back to what John Wise was writing in 1710. He said, "Every man must be acknowledged equal to every man." Again, "The end of all good government is to cultivate humanity and promote the happiness of all and the good of every man in all his rights, his life, liberty, estate, honor, and so forth . . . ." And again, "For as they have a power every man in his natural state, so upon combination they can and do bequeath this power to others and settle it according as their united discretion shall determine." And still again, "Democracy is Christ's government in church and state." Here was the doctrine of equality, popular sovereignty, and the substance of the theory of inalienable rights clearly asserted by Wise at the opening of the eighteenth century, just as we have the principle of the consent of the governed stated by Hooker as early as 1638.

When we take all these circumstances into consideration, it is but natural that the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence should open with a reference to Nature's God and should close in the final paragraphs with an appeal to the Supreme Judge of the world and an assertion of a firm reliance on Divine Providence. Coming from these sources, having as it did this background, it is no wonder that Samuel Adams could say "The people seem to recognize this resolution as though it were a decree promulgated from heaven."

No one can examine this record and escape the conclusion that in the great outline of its principles the Declaration was the result of the religious teachings of the preceding period. The profound philosophy which Jonathan Edwards applied to theology, the popular preaching of George Whitefield, had aroused the thought and stirred the people of the Colonies in preparation for this great event. No doubt the speculations which had been going on in England, and especially on the Continent, lent their influence to the general sentiment of the times. Of course, the world is always influenced by all the experience and all the thought of the past. But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, the sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.

Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We can not continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

In the development of its institutions America can fairly claim that it has remained true to the principles which were declared 150 years ago. In all the essentials we have achieved an equality which was never possessed by any other people. Even in the less important matter of material possessions we have secured a wider and wider distribution of wealth. The rights of the individual are held sacred and protected by constitutional guaranties, which even the Government itself is bound not to violate. If there is any one thing among us that is established beyond question, it is self-government--the right of the people to rule. If there is any failure in respect to any of these principles, it is because there is a failure on the part of individuals to observe them. We hold that the duly authorized expression of the will of the people has a divine sanction. But even in that we come back to the theory of John Wise that "Democracy is Christ's government." The ultimate sanction of law rests on the righteous authority of the Almighty.

On an occasion like this a great temptation exists to present evidence of the practical success of our form of democratic republic at home and the ever-broadening acceptance it is securing abroad. Although these things are well known, their frequent consideration is an encouragement and an inspiration. But it is not results and effects so much as sources and causes that I believe it is even more necessary constantly to contemplate. Ours is a government of the people. It represents their will. Its officers may sometimes go astray, but that is not a reason for criticizing the principles of our institutions. The real heart of the American Government depends upon the heart of the people. It is from that source that we must look for all genuine reform. It is to that cause that we must ascribe all our results.

It was in the contemplation of these truths that the fathers made their declaration and adopted their Constitution. It was to establish a free government, which must not be permitted to degenerate into the unrestrained authority of a mere majority or the unbridled weight of a mere influential few. They undertook the balance these interests against each other and provide the three separate independent branches, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial departments of the Government, with checks against each other in order that neither one might encroach upon the other. These are our guaranties of liberty. As a result of these methods enterprise has been duly protected from confiscation, the people have been free from oppression, and there has been an ever-broadening and deepening of the humanities of life.

Under a system of popular government there will always be those who will seek for political preferment by clamoring for reform. While there is very little of this which is not sincere, there is a large portion that is not well informed. In my opinion very little of just criticism can attach to the theories and principles of our institutions. There is far more danger of harm than there is hope of good in any radical changes. We do need a better understanding and comprehension of them and a better knowledge of the foundations of government in general. Our forefathers came to certain conclusions and decided upon certain courses of action which have been a great blessing to the world. Before we can understand their conclusions we must go back and review the course which they followed. We must think the thoughts which they thought. Their intellectual life centered around the meeting-house. They were intent upon religious worship. While there were always among them men of deep learning, and later those who had comparatively large possessions, the mind of the people was not so much engrossed in how much they knew, or how much they had, as in how they were going to live. While scantily provided with other literature, there was a wide acquaintance with the Scriptures. Over a period as great as that which measures the existence of our independence they were subject to this discipline not only in their religious life and educational training, but also in their political thought. They were a people who came under the influence of a great spiritual development and acquired a great moral power.

No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren sceptre in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshiped.

[originally posted: 7/04/06]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: WE'RE ALL OLIGARCHS NOW:

What's So Special About Democracy? (HARVEY MANSFIELD, July 26, 2006, NY Sun)

The answer to [What is special about modern politics?], Mr. Dunn indicates, is representative government, invented by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. Hobbes (followed by Spinoza and Locke) argued that government is properly instituted by contract among individuals in the state of nature who authorize a sovereign over themselves to represent them. The crucial new concept in this theory is the state of nature that precedes all society, is therefore insecure and full of violence, and is further characterized by the rough equality of all those who experience or imagine it. Men are equal in the state of nature, according to Hobbes, for the very realistic reason that no one can be sure of always getting the better of (i.e. killing) anyone or everyone else. Here, democracy is installed as the foundation of all government.

Democracy in the basement, however, is not necessarily democracy in the house above. A representative government may not hold elections (such as the hereditary monarchy that Hobbes wanted), and if it does, the elections may not be democratic, with universal suffrage. Representative democracy came later, in the American and French Revolutions, and of course women's suffrage was still later.Yet the nature of democracy is changed when it becomes representative. No longer does the people meet in a body to deliberate on and decide the most important questions of government, but rather the task of actual governing is delegated to a few elected (and non-elected) representatives. In this delegation, as we are often reminded, lies a hidden oligarchy dressed up as democratic. If every representative government is fundamentally democratic, every modern democracy is in practice oligarchic. The ancients knew of a mixed regime composed of democracy and oligarchy, but this is a mixed regime of a new kind in which no one speaks of oligarchy in its principle though everyone find it useful in practice. [...]

Mr. Dunn's analysis turns sober and profound when he presents the opposition between democracy as a form of government and as a way of life. As a way of life (best shown by Tocqueville) democracy is not satisfied with existing equality but tries relentlessly to equalize everything. In this sense democracy is open-ended, or points toward a goal of no power or government at all. As a form of government, however, democracy tries to contain this infinite democratization. One mode of containment is to accept, as democratic electorates even in Europe have done recently, the "order of egoism" that socialists like Babeuf and Buonarroti hate. Mr. Dunn worries that "malign consequences" will follow from the separation of the democratic ethics of equalization from the democratic reality of surrender to egoism.

One may agree that it is harmful to the souls of intellectuals, as Mr. Dunn worries, when they cherish their own moral purity as against the evils of reality. But a remedy can be found in the notion of "self-interest well understood" that Tocqueville attributes to Americans. "Egoism" in America, both in business and in government, is more about ambition than greed for money. The socialists, obsessed with money as they believed their capitalist enemies to be, always missed the point. Money is a sign of success, and success is the satisfaction of one's ambition. It is not necessary to go against egoism or self-interest in order to be public spirited. Ambition was in Aristotle's list of virtues and it is featured in James Madison's famous discussion of the separation of powers in "The Federalist." The history of democracy is the democratization, not the elimination, of oligarchic ambition.

Robert D. Kraynak, a former student of Professor Mansfield, has a better handle on the flaws of democracy.

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THOUGH THE IDEA OF AMERICA DOESN'T REQUIRE AMERICA:

There is something inherently fragile about the United States of America. France will be France and Slovakia will be Slovakia so long as French and Slovak are spoken, irrespective of their mode of government. But if Americans cease to govern themselves in a way that no people ever governed itself before, America will not be America. We are the only nation founded on an idea, rather than on blood, territory or culture. We look back at our founders with reverence. Each day we should ask ourselves whether we are good enough to keep the republic which they bequeathed us. We came close to losing it more than once. If we continue to drift into dependency, we might lose it now.

That is why it behooves us to sing  a national anthem that begins and ends with questions. In this respect, "The Star-Spangled Banner" is an unusual poem. To begin a poem with a rhetorical question is a common enough device ("Why! Who makes much of a miracle?," "What is so rare as a day in June?" or "Who rides in the night through wind and wild?"). Key's opening question, though, is not rhetorical, but existential. The hearer from whom the poet demands a response has kept the poet's company in an anxious vigil the dawn. The question itself thus places the hearer alongside the poet in that vigil.

The poet withholds the name of the object we are trying to espy in the first light: It is "what so proudly we hailed", "whose broad stripes and bright stars" streamed valiantly over the rampart as the poet and his interlocutor watched through the perilous night. And this precious thing could be glimpsed intermittently only by the light of the enemy's munitions, through the glare of rockets and the flash of exploding bombs: these, the missiles of the foe, gave proof through the night that the our flag - at last the object is named - was still there.

But now the first light of the dawn has come. The bombardment has ceased. The poet asks that the listener say whether, in the dim sunrise, he still can see the flag above the ramparts. It is an anxious moment; the hearer has watched through the night to see if the US position has held or fallen; in a few moments he will see in the first light of day whether the flag is still there. All the fears of the nightly vigil are bound up in this moments of anticipation. Even more: the hopes and fears of generations hang upon what the hearer will see as day breaks..

And then the poet repeats the injunction "Say!" and changes the question. The opening question -- can you still see our flag? -- is a synecdoche of sorts for a bigger question -- does that flag "yet wave/O'er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?" The second question refers not only to the battle at hand, but to the destiny of the country. The question is not only whether the flag of freedom still flies over America but also whether America itself is still brave and free.

When the last Frenchman dies, France will die with him.  America will long outlive Americans.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THAT WHICH GIVES THE CITY ITS SHINE:

Abraham's promise and American power: a review of Abraham's Promise by Michael Wyschogrod, edited by R Kendall Soulen (Spengler, 2/08/05, Asia Times)

American Christianity is personal rather than political, in contrast to the Protestant Separatism that founded the United States. The evangelicals who now comprise nearly half of the US electorate entered the political arena with reluctance. Except for the institutions it built, nothing remains of the New England Puritanism that brought to a New Promised Land a New Chosen People. Only the words etched into the marble of Abraham Lincoln's memorial remain of the biblical politics that guided the Union side of America's Civil War. For that reason, I have maintained, it is misguided to think of Americanism as a religion.

Not until I read Michael Wyschogrod's new book Abraham's Promise did it occur to me the long-departed spirit of American Puritanism might once again become flesh. US evangelicals might awaken one morning as a New Israel not merely in metaphor, but self-aware as a New Chosen People in a New Promised Land. The most paranoid imagining about the Christian Right pales beside this prospect. We are talking about the real thing, not a Straussian imitation: a politicized Protestantism in the mold of the 17th-century Separatists. A "Judaizing heresy" made the United States of America possible to begin with, I have argued on other occasions, and Professor Wyschogrod argues a strong case for the evangelicals to Judaize yet again. I do not know whether Wyschogrod anticipates the strategic consequences of his theology, and rather doubt that this is the case, but it is no less radical for absence of intent.

On the surface, his innovation is a way for Christians to think of themselves as a special case of Judaism. That is only the conning tower of his submarine, however. The intellectual resources of US evangelicals have not grown in step with their membership, and the movement is ripe for a re-examination. Wyschogrod provides them with a biblical (as opposed to a philosophical) framework to "understand itself ... [by] coming to terms with the Judaism within it". To a movement founded on the premise of Scripture alone, this may constitute an offer the evangelicals cannot refuse.

Wyschogrod has drawn some jeers from co-religionists (including the neo-conservatives at Commentary magazine), but sympathetic interest from Protestant theologians. To one of them, R Kendall Soulen, a professor at Wesleyan University in Washington, DC, we owe the present volume and a helpful introduction.

An uninvited thought crosses my mind that this might be one of the most important books of the 21st century. Not since the 17th century could anyone make such a statement in earnest about a work of theology. But in the presence of a single superpower, the chief strategic issue of the 21st century is whether the West has the will to continue living. Islam will have assimilated childless Western Europe by the end of the century. If America follows Europe into nihilism, the 21st century will go out in fair imitation of the 5th. That is why the evangelical mind will be the great issue of the next decade or two.

Spengler is often wrong but seldom silly. So when he tosses off that "except for the institutions it built, nothing remains" it's quite startling to see a thought so shallow. After all, those institutions include the Declaration, Constitution and the Republic itself all of which were deeply influenced by Puritan theology and can have no other secure basis but Christianity.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Orthodox Judaism and Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Dr. Michael Wyschogrod)
-REVIEW: of The Lonely Man of Faith by Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Commonweal, Jan 15, 1993, Michael Wyschogrod)
-REVIEW: Reflections on Eva Hoffman's Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and The World of Polish Jews. (Michael Wyschogrod, Sarmatian Review)
-REVIEW: of Abraham's Promise by Michael Wyschogrod, ed. by R. Kendall Soulen (David Hazony, Commentary)
-REVIEW: of Abraham's Promise by Michael Wyschogrod (Benjamin Balint, Azure)
-ESSAY: In the end shall Christians become Jews and Jews, Christians?: On Franz Rosenzweig's apocalyptic eschatology (Gregory Kaplan, Winter 2004, Cross Currents)
-ESSAY: God's first love: Michael Wyschogrod on Israel's election (Kendall Soulen, July 27, 2004, Christian Century)

I FIRST READ Michael Wyschogrod when I was in graduate school. The experience was electrifying. As I sat in the library finishing his essay "Israel, the Church, and Election," I remember being overcome by an almost physical sense of discovery, as though I had bumped into a hitherto invisible rock. What I had just read was undoubtedly the most unapologetic statement of Jewish faith I had ever encountered. Yet instantly I knew that Wyschogrod had helped me to see something in Paul that his Christian commentators had not. It was the theological relevance of the distinction between gentile and Jew.

Of course, the distinction was not wholly unfamiliar to me; far from it. I was accustomed to writers who treated the distinction as a useful bit of historical, sociological or religious description. Above all, I was familiar with the traditional Christian view that held that since Christ's coming the distinction between Jew and gentile had lost whatever theological significance it may once have had. This, after all, was Paul's own view, at least according to his commentators.

But Wyschogrod treated the difference differently. For Wyschogrod, the distinction was the indelible mark of an irrevocable divine choice: God's choice to enter history as the God of Israel. The distinction therefore mattered not only in the past, but also in the present and future. What is more, Wyschogrod treated the distinction as something that mattered not just to Jews, but also to Christians. He addressed Christians not merely as Christians but quite specifically as gentile Christians. With a shock of discovery, I realized that in this respect Wyschogrod was closer to Paul than were his Christian interpreters.

[originally posted: 2005-02-07

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE SHUT-MOUTHED MAN AND THE GOLDEN PRINCIPLE:

Lincoln and the Will of God (Andrew Ferguson, March 2008, First Things).

What Herndon didn't know was that, after his own visit to the Falls, Lincoln had been moved to write an extraordinary note to himself, apparently for his eyes only. The note, as it's come down to us, is a single page, incomplete and trailing off in mid-sentence. It wasn't discovered until after his death and wasn't made public for another thirty years. In it we hear Lincoln talking to himself.

"Niagara Falls!" it begins. "By what mysterious power," Lincoln wonders, "is it that millions and millions are drawn to gaze upon Niagara Falls? There is no mystery about the thing itself."

No mystery? It quickly becomes apparent that this dismissive remark is intended ironically. Niagara, to Lincoln, is nothing if not mysterious. He ticks off the ways in which men have used scientific means to dispense with the mystery of so great a wonder. Geologists will determine the angle of the water's plunge, and measure the volume of the water, and calculate the speed with which it passes over the precipice. "Yet this is really a very small part of that world's wonder." Other scientists and philosophers will admire Niagara's role in the purely physical process of the water cycle: "This vast amount of water, constantly pouring down, is supplied by an equal amount constantly lifted up by the sun"--and so on and so on.

And yet, "still there is more" to Niagara, much more to this wonder of the world--something inexhaustible, he writes, some immensity that human reason can't explain or quantify or otherwise bottle up and before which men are powerless. What appears as "no mystery" to the literal-minded man, to the skeptic, is mysterious indeed. Lincoln, even in speaking to himself, is mute as to what that mystery might be. The fragment is the work of a man suffused with awe, awakening to a slightly uncomfortable appreciation for the limits of human understanding. It is a religious rumination, and, as far as we can trace it, the feeling it expresses would only grow as Lincoln himself grew older.

From fifteen years later, we have another, much better known fragment. Like the Niagara note, Lincoln wrote this to himself and stashed it away. It too reveals Lincoln's religious sense but in a different, more profound phase. From an awed appreciation of the physical world, it had deepened into a much darker apprehension of a Providence that haunts human affairs. The catalyst for this change, of course, was the Civil War--the torrent of suffering and blood that threatened to destroy the country and that Lincoln himself had played a part in unleashing. His secretaries, who found the scrap among his private papers, dated it September 1862, though it could have been written later. They called it "Meditation on the Divine Will."

It is written with a logician's care, in the categories of a lawyer. "The will of God prevails," it begins. "In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time."

Yet the bloody back-and-forth of the war gives no hint as to which of the two parties God has chosen to side with. That very inconclusiveness raises the terrible possibility that God is on neither side--or, rather, that God is simply in favor of the war itself for reasons unknowable. "I am almost ready to say this is probably true--that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet." The will of God, after all, prevails; his sovereignty, Lincoln has come to believe, is the necessary condition of human affairs. "He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest ­proceeds."

Note the bloodless phrasing: "I am almost ready to say this is probably true." Almost . . . probably. It is the expression of a cautious, legalistic mind being shaken up--confronting something too large to fit the intellectual compartments he has used to understand experience. But he is also being led, or leading himself, to a definite conclusion: This is no ordinary war, because this is no ordinary country.

The question of why Providence should have willed such a calamity is foreshadowed in one final fragment to consider, written (most likely) in the early days of the war. In it Lincoln plays with the figure from Proverbs 25:11: "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver."

To Lincoln, the image illuminates the distinction between the picture and the frame, between a thing contained and that which contains it. In his reading, the Union is the frame that contains the golden principle: the proposition of liberty and equality--that all men are created equal--advanced by the Declaration of Independence. "The assertion of that principle, at that time [of the Revolution], was the word, ' fitly spoken' which has proved an 'apple of gold' to us. The Union, and the Constitution, are the picture of silver, subsequently framed around it. The picture was made, not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The picture was made for the apple-- not the apple for the picture."

Read together, the fragments show Lincoln's mind as it matures toward his two greatest utterances, the fullest expressions of his most fundamental ideas. These are, of course, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. They are not merely works of statecraft but homilies in a civil religion of his own devising, steeped in the cadences and rhetoric of the King James Bible. They were the consequence of Lincoln's deepest contemplation and belief, arrived at with some care and (we may suppose) discomfort. At Gettysburg, Lincoln explained why the country--the Union--was worth preserving. It was not any Union that was being ­preserved, it was a particular kind of Union: a Union dedicated to a timeless proposition that existed before the Union was even conceived.

The war would determine whether such a proposition could be safely entrusted to human institutions. By the time of his Second Inaugural, with the end of the war in sight and the preservation of the Union a near certainty, he could say with confidence that the proposition had survived. And this "fundamental and astounding" conclusion had come about under the watchful and unfathomable eye of a Providence whose ways are ultimately beyond explanation but "whose judgments are true and righteous altogether."

This is what we know for certain of Lincoln's religion.

[originally posted: 7/05/08]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE DEFIANT ONES:

(via ef brown):
On Hating the Jews: The inextricable link between anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. (NATAN SHARANSKY, November 17, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

[I]srael and the Jewish people share something essential with the United States. The Jews, after all, have long held that they were chosen to play a special role in history, to be what their prophets called "a light unto the nations." What precisely is meant by that phrase has always been a matter of debate, and I would be the last to deny the mischief that has sometimes been done, including to the best interests of the Jews, by some who have raised it as their banner. Nevertheless, over four millennia, the universal vision and moral precepts of the Jews have not only worked to secure the survival of the Jewish people themselves but have constituted a powerful force for good in the world, inspiring myriads to fight for the right even as in others they have aroused rivalry, enmity and unappeasable resentment.

It is similar with the United States--a nation that has long regarded itself as entrusted with a mission to be what John Winthrop in the 17th century called a "city on a hill" and Ronald Reagan in the 20th parsed as a "shining city on a hill." What precisely is meant by that phrase is likewise a matter of debate, but Americans who see their country in such terms certainly regard the advance of American values as central to American purpose. And, though the United States is still a very young nation, there can be no disputing that those values have likewise constituted an immense force for good in the world--even as they have earned America the enmity and resentment of many.

In resolving to face down enmity and hatred, an important source of strength is the lesson to be gained from contemplating the example of others. From Socrates to Churchill to Sakharov, there have been individuals whose voices and whose personal heroism have reinforced in others the resolve to stand firm for the good. But history has also been generous enough to offer, in the Jews, the example of an ancient people fired by the message of human freedom under God and, in the Americans, the example of a modern people who over the past century alone, acting in fidelity with their inmost beliefs, have confronted and defeated the greatest tyrannies ever known to man.

Fortunately for America, and fortunately for the world, the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea, and its citizens will need every particle of strength they can muster for the trials ahead. It is their own people's astounding perseverance, despite centuries of suffering at the hands of faiths, ideologies, peoples, and individuals who have hated them and set out to do them in, that inspires one with confidence that the Jews will once again outlast their enemies.

Due to the problems of demographics and assimilation, we're less sanguine than Mr. Sharansky about the future of Judaism, but Judaism is so central to the West and to Christianity that so long as America remains Western/Christian, Judaism's legacy will endure.

[originally posted: 11/17/03]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: "GREAT EXAMPLES ARE BEFORE US"

A Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson (Daniel Webster, August 2, 1826, Faneuil Hall, Boston)

No two men now live, fellow-citizen, perhaps it may be doubted whether any two men have ever lived in one age, who, more than those we now commemorate, have impressed on mankind their own opinions more deeply into the opinions of others, or given a more lasting direction to the current of human thought. Their work doth not perish with them. The tree which they assisted to plant will flourish, although they water it and protect it no longer; for it has struck its roots deep, it has sent them to the very centre; no storm, not of foce to burth the orb, can overturn it; its branches spread wide; they stretch their protecting arms braoder and broader, and its top is destined to reach the heavens. We are not deceived. There is no delusion here. No age will come in which the American Revolution will appear less than it is, one of the greatest events in human history. No age will come in which it shall cease to be seen and felt, on either continent, that a mighty step, a great advance, not only in American affairs, but in human affairs, was made on the 4th of July, 1776. And no age will come, we trust, so ignorant or so unjust as not to see and acknowledge the efficient agency of those we now honor in producing that momentous event.

We are not assembled, therefore, fellow-citizens, as men overwhelmed with calamity by the sudden disruption of the ties of friendship or affection, or as in despair for the republic by the untimely blighting of its hopes. Death has not surprised us by an unseasonable blow. We have, indeed, seen the tomb close, but it has closed only over mature years, over long-protracted public service, over the weakness of age, and over life itself only when the ends of living had been fulfilled. These suns, as they rose slowly and steadily, amidst clouds and storms, in their ascendant, so they have not rushed from the meridian to sink suddenly in the west. Like the mildness, the serenity, the continuing benignity of a summer's day, they have gone down with slow-descending, grateful long-lingering light; and now that they are beyond the visible margin of the world, good omens cheer us from "the bright track of thier fiery car"!

There were many points of similarity in the lives and fortunes of these great men. They belonged to the same profession, and had pursued its studies and its practice for unequal lengths of time indeed, but with dilligence and effect. Both were learned and able lawyers. They were natives and inhabitants, respectively of those two of the Colonies which at the Revolution were the largest and most powerful and which naturally had a lead in the political affairs of the times. When the Colonies became in some degree united by the assembling of a general Congress, they were brought to act together in its deliberations, not indeed at the same time but both at early periods. Each had laready manifested his attachment to the cause of the country, as well as his ability to maintain it, by printed addresses, public speeches, extensive correspondence, and whatever other mode could be adopted for the purpose of exposing the encroachments of the British Parliament, and animating the people to a manly resistance. Both were not only decided, but early, friends of Independence. While others yet doubted, they were resolved; where others hesitated they pressed forward. They were both members of the committee for preparing the Declaration of Independence, and they constituted the sub-committee appointed by the other members to make the draft. They left their seats in Congress, being called to other public employments at periods not remote from each other, although one of them returned to it afterwards for a short time. Neither of them was of the assembly of great men which formed the present Constitution, and neither was at any time a member of Congress under its provisions. Both have been public ministers abroad, both Vice-Presidents and both Presidents of the United States. These coincidences are now singularly crowned and completed. They have died together; and they did on the anniversary of liberty...

And now, fellow-citizens, without pursuing the biography of these illustrious men further, for the present let us turn our attention to the most
prominent act of their lives, their participation in the DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE...

It has sometimes been said, as if it were a derogation from the merits of this paper, that it contains nothing new; that it only states grounds of
proceeding and presses topics of argument, which had often been stated and pressed before. But it was not the object of the Declaration to produce any thing new. It was not to invent reasons for independence, but to state those which governed the Congress. For great and sufficient causes, it was proposed to declare independence; and the proper business of the paper to be drawn was to set for th those causes, and justify the authors of the measure, in any event of fortune, to the country and to posterity. The cause of American independence, moreover, was now to be presented to the world in such manner; of it might so be, as to engage its sympathy, to command its respect, to attract its admiration; and in an assembly of most able and distinguished men, THOMAS JEFFERSON had the high honor of being the selected advocate of this cause. To say that he performed his great work well, would be doing him an injustice. To say that he did excellently well, admirably well, would be inadequate and halting praise. Let us rather say, that he so discharged the duty assigned him, that all Americans may well rejoice that the work of drawing the title-deed of their liberties devolved upon him...

The Congress of the Revolution, fellow-citizens, sat with closed doors, and no report of its debates was ever made. The discussion, therefore, which accompanied this great measure, has never been preserved, except in memory and by tradition. But it is, I believe, doing [n]o injustice to others to say, that the general opinion was, and uniformly has been, that in debate, on the side of independence, JOHN ADAMS had no equal. The great author of the Declaration himself has espressed that opinion uniformly and strongly. JOHN ADAMS, said he, in the hearing of him who has now the honor to address you, JOHN ADAMS was our colossus on the floor. Not graceful, not elegant, not always fluent, in his public addresses, he yet came out with a power both of thought and of expression, which moved us from our seats...

The eloquence of Mr. Adams resembled his general character, and formed, indeed, a part of it. It was bold, manly, and energetic; and such the crisis required. When public bodies are to be addressed on passions excited, nothing is valuable in speech farther than as it is connected with high intellectual and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness are the qualities which produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it, but they will toil in vain. It must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occassion. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may aspire to it; they cannot reach it. It comes, if it comes at all, like the outbreaking of a fountain from the earth, or the bursting forth of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force. The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives and the fate of their wives, their children, and their country hang on the decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear conception, outrunning the deductions of logic, the high purpose, the firm resolve, the dauntless spirit, speaking on the tongue, beaming from the eye, informing every feature, and urging the whole man onward, right onward to his object this, this is eloquence; or rather it is something greater and higher than all eloquence, it is action, noble, sublime godlike action...

Let us, then, bring before us the assembly, which was about to decide a question thus big with the fate of empire. Let us open their doors and look upon their deliberations. Let us survey the anxious and care-worn countenances, let us hear the firm-toned voices, of this band of patriots.

HANCOCK presides over the solemn sitting; and one of those not yet prepared to pronounce for absolute independence is on the floor, and is urging his reasons for dissenting from the declaration.

"Let us pause! This step, once taken, cannot be retracted. This resolution, once passed, will cut off all hope of reconciliation. If success attend the arms of England, we shall then be no longer Colonies, with charters and with privileges; these will all be forfeited by this act; and we shall be in the condition of other conquered people, at the mercy of the conquerors. For ourselves, we may be ready to run the hazard; but are we ready to carry the country to that length? Is success so probably as to justify it? Where is the military, where the naval power, by which we are to resist the whole strength of the arm of England, for she will exert that strength to the utmost? Can we rely on constancy and perseverance of the people? or will they not act as the people of other countries have acted and, wearied with a long war, submit, in the end, to a worse oppression? While we stand on our old ground, and insist on redress of grievances, we know we are right, and are not answerable for consequences. Nothing, then, can be imputed to us. But if we now change our object, carry our pretensions farther, and set up for absolute indpendence, we shall lose the sympathy of mankind. We shall no longer be defending what we possess, but struggling for something which we never did possess, and which we have solemnly and uniformly disclaimed all intention of pursuing, from the very outset of the troubles. Abandoning thus our old ground, of resistance only to arbitrary acts of oppression, thee nations will believe the whole to have been mere pretence, and they will look on us, not as injured, buut as ambitious subjects. I shudder before this responsibility. It will be on us, if, relinquishing the ground on which we have stood so long, and stood so safely, we now proclaim independence, and carry on the war for that object, while these cities burn, these pleasant fields whiten and bleach with the bones of their owners, and these streams run blood. It will be upon us, it will be upon us, if, failing to maintain this unseasonable and ill-judged declaration, a sterner despotism, maintained by military power, shall be exhausted, a harassed, misled people, shall have expiated our rashness and atoned for our presumption on the scaffold."

It was for Mr. Adams to reply to arguments like these. We know his opinions, and we know his character. He would commence with his accustomed directness and earnestness.

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at
independence. But there's a Divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and blinded to her own interest for our good, she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why, then, should we defer the Declaration? Is any man so weak as now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave either safety to the country and its liberties, or safety to his own life and his own honor? Are not you, Sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of England remains, but outlaws? If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit to the measures of Parliament, Boston Port Bill and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We shall never submit. Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting forth to incure the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of our times, we promised to adhere to him, in ever extremity, with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you, that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for defence of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him... "

And now, fellow-citizens, let us not retire from this occasion without a deep and solemn conviction of the duties which have developed upon us. This lovely land, this glorious liberty, these benign institutions, the dear purchase of our fathers, are ours; ours to enjoy, ours to preserve, ours to transmit. Generations past and generations to come hold us responsible for this sacred trust. Our fathers, from behind, admonish us, with their anxious paternal voices; posterity calls out to us, from the bosom of the future; the world turns hither its solicitous eyes; all, conjure us to act wisely, and faithfully, in the relation which we sustain.

We can never, indeed, pay the debt which is upon us; but by virtue, by morality, by religion, by the cultivation of every good principle and every good habit, we may hope to enjoy the blessing, through our day, and to leave it unimpaired to our children. Let us feel deeply how much of what we are and of what we possess we owe to this liberty, and to these institutions of government. Nature has, indeed, given us a soil which yields bounteously to the hand of industry, the mighty and fruitful ocean is before us, and the skies over our heads shed health and vigor. But what are lands, and seas, and skies, to civilized man, without society, without knowledge, without morals, without religious culture; and how can these be enjoyed, in all their extent and all their excellence, but under the protection of wise institutions and a free government? Fellow-citizens, there is not one of us, there is not one of us here present, who does not, at this moment, and at every moment, experience, in his own condition, and in the condition of those most near and dear to him, the influence and the benefits, of this liberty and these institutions. Let us then acknowledge the blessing, let us feel it deeply and powerfully, let us cherish a strong affection for it, and resolve to maintain and perpetuate it. The blood of our fathers, let it not have been shed in vain; the great hope of posterity, let it not be blasted.

The striking attitude, too, in which we stand to the world around us, a topic to which, I fear, I advert too often, and dwell on too long, cannot be altogether ommited here. Neither individuals nor nations can perform their part well, until they understand and feel its importance, and comprehend and justly appreciate all the duties belonging to it. It is not to inflate national vanity, nor to swell a light and empty feeling of self-importance, but it is that we may judge justly of our situation, and of our own duties, that I earnestly urge you upon this consideration of our position and our character among the nations of the earth. It cannot be denied, but by those who would dispute against the sun, that with America, and in America, a new era commences in human affairs. This era is distinguised by free representative governments, by entire religious liberty, by improved systems of national intercourse, by a newly awakened and unconquerable spirit of free inquiry, and by a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of America, America, our country, fellow-citizens, our own dear and native land, is inseparably connected, fast bound up, in fortune and by fate, with these great interests. If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have maintained them. Let us contemplate, then, this connection, which binds the prosperity of others to our own; and let us manfully discharge all the duties which it imposes. If we cherish the virtues and the principles of our fathers, Heaven will assist us to carry on the work of human liberty and human happiness. Auspicious omens cheer us. Great examples are before us. Our own firmament now shines brightly upon our path. WASHINGTON is in the clear, upper sky. These other stars hae now joined the American Constellation; they circle round their centre, and the heavens beam with new light. Beneath this illumination let us walk the course of life, and at its close devoutly commend our beloved country, the common parent of us all, to the Divine Benignity.

[originally posted: 2003-08-05]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: SHARE THE IDEALS AND IT'S YOUR FLAG TOO:

The Banner That Binds Us (JAY AKASIE, July 3, 2007, NY Sun)

[A]s we approach Independence Day, it's time to practice some basic flag etiquette. It's all spelled out in the United States Code, the permanent laws of the land. Title 4 of the Code, Chapter 1, outlines the federal rules and regulations governing the display and treatment of our flag. [...]

The final section of Title 4 captures the essence of why the American flag is so important -- and so different -- from any other flag: "The flag represents a living country and is itself considered a living thing."

The exceptional nature of our country and its flag wasn't lost on the founding fathers. Consider what Benjamin Franklin wrote in his post-war pamphlet, Information to Those Who Would Remove to America, an effort to advertise the wide-open American nation to the best that Europe had to offer.

Franklin wrote that in America "people do not enquire, concerning a stranger, What is he? but What can he do? If he has any useful art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him; but a mere man of quality, who on that account wants to live upon the public by some office or salary, will be despised and disregarded."

Franklin was attempting to explain to a muddled mass of European peasants and nobility alike that hard work, intelligence, and character are what matter in America.

Unless he looks German....

[originally posted: 7/04/07]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: EQUALITY, NOT EGALITIE (via Mike Daley):

Gentlemen Revolutionaries: a review of
Revolutionary Characters: What Made The Founders Different by Gordon Wood ( Peter Berkowitz, Policy Review)

In the introduction to his new book, a collection of previously published and newly revised essays, Wood observes that our "special need for these authentic historical figures" does not have its source in our concern with "constitutional jurisprudence and original intent," or even in the determination to "recover what was wise and valuable in America's past." The true source, he says, is the peculiar manner in which the nation was constituted:

The United States was founded on a set of beliefs and not, as were other nations, on a common ethnicity, language, or religion. Since we are not a nation in any traditional sense of the term, in order to establish our nationhood, we have to reaffirm and reinforce periodically the values of the men who declared independence from Great Britain and framed the Constitution. As long as the Republic endures, in other words, Americans are destined to look back to its founding.

But the spirit in which we explore our inheritance is a matter not of destiny but of choice, and a more learned or lucid guide to the founding than Gordon Wood would not be easy to find.

Contrary to the dominant tendencies of his profession, Wood is a historian who, without scanting the impact of larger social forces, respects ideas and the actions of outstanding historical figures -- not least, in the case of America's founders, the actions they undertook to implement their ideas about constitutional government. He has sympathy for the common opinion among nineteenth-century Americans, still shared by many Americans today, that the founders were great men, larger-than-life figures, brilliant thinkers and bold politicians who brought forth a new kind of nation dedicated to principles of universal appeal and application. He rejects for good and sufficient reason the effort to reduce the founders to place-holders for somebody else's favorite -- or despised -- ideology and the attempt to reduce the founders to instruments of their time and circumstances. Wood is acutely aware that the founders' Constitution involved a compromise with evil, but he inclines to Lincoln's position that the ideas about freedom and equality on which it was based and the political institutions it established set the country on the path to slavery's eventual extinction. In the process of examining the founders' characters and principles, and the distinctive importance they attached to both, Wood restores the founders' complexity and humanity while making their achievements all the more vivid and worthy of study. [...]

John Adams was a cantankerous character whose political principles put him at odds not only with Hamilton and the team of Jefferson and Madison, but also, and perhaps even more, with the theory of government on which the Constitution was based. The first vice president and second president of the United States, Adams is slighted in historical memory, and he felt acutely during his lifetime that his achievements were slighted by his contemporaries. As Wood suggests, this neglect is related to his 1776 pamphlet Thoughts on Government and his A Defense of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America, published in 1787 and 1788, the very writings that established Adams as eighteenth-century America's foremost student of constitutional government. His emphasis in these documents -- and in outspoken public and private remarks -- on the necessary limits on egalitarian politics, even in a country based on liberty and equality, was hardly novel. Other founders agreed that although America was a land blissfully free of distinctions based on rank, it could not eliminate ambition or the desire for distinction, which fed competition, vanity, the love of luxury, and corruption. But Adams harped on the theme.

The genius of the Republic is that it assumes men equal at birth but rejects egalitarianism of results during their lives.

[originally posted: 7/04/06

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: PROPOSITION NATION:

The Boy and some friends are practicing the Gettysburg Address today, so they can deliver it at a Muster Day assembly (Memorial Day for you in the subsequent states). Found these MP3s of Johnny Cash, Sam Waterston, and Jeff Daniels doing it at the great American Rhetoric site.

[Originally posted: 5/06/06]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: SAFEGUARDING DIGNITY:

The Inalienable Right to Dignity (Marcellino D'Ambrosio, Ph.D., 7/04/11, Catholic Exchange)

Fireworks. Baseball games. Picnics. This is what the Fourth of July means to most Americans today. But July 4, 1776, was a very solemn day for the 55 men who affixed their signatures to the Declaration of Independence. For in so doing, they were risking their lives and fortunes to defend the proposition that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Liberty was a corollary of human dignity, and to safeguard human dignity was the reason for their war of independence.

So what does the Fourth of July have to do with the teaching of the Catholic Church? [...]

The Second Vatican Council does nothing but draw out the implications of this biblical witness.

It bases the right to freedom of religion on human dignity. It teaches that morality can never just be imposed from without, as so many rules and regulations, but must be internalized in a sanctuary called conscience. It teaches that not just a select few, but all, are called to the heights of holiness, regardless of their state in life or occupation. It teaches that if all are created in God's image and likeness, then all are equal in dignity, whether man or woman, adult or child, born, or unborn, cleric or lay. It teaches that societies must strive to bring about living conditions that correspond to human dignity.

[originally posted: 7/04/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: ROOTS OF THE MATTER:

What Silent Cal Said About the Fourth of July: The late president believed American freedom had religious roots. (LEON KASS, 7/01/11, WSJ)

Coolidge, citing 17th- and 18th-century sermons and writings of colonial clergy, provides ample evidence that the principles of the Declaration, and especially equality, are of American cultural and religious provenance: "They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit." From this teaching flowed the emerging American rejection of monarchy and our bold embrace of democratic self-government.

Coolidge draws conclusions from his search into the sources. First, the Declaration is a great spiritual document. "Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man . . . are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. . . . Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish."

He also observes that the Declaration's principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress. To deny the truth of human equality, or inalienable rights, or government by consent is not to go forward but backward--away from self-government, from individual rights, from the belief in the equal dignity of every human being.

Coolidge's concluding remarks especially deserve our attention: "We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. . . . If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped."

[originally posted: 7/04/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE SUN MAY NOT SHINE EVERY DAY, BUT IT DOESN'T CEASE TO EXIST:

The American Crisis (Thomas Paine, 1776)

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER," and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Iraq's Fourth of July: Democracy won't come easy--but then, it never has anywhere else. (DANIEL HENNINGER, July 2, 2004, Wall Street Journal)

Most of those stating their doubts in public about democracy in Mesopotamia are conservatives who supported the war itself but have come to believe that Middle Eastern history, culture, religion and an unseemly fascination with explosives and blood feuds makes self-government unlikely. Most liberals, meanwhile, concluded before the war that Iraqi democracy was a neoconservative plot and so are pretty much sitting out this turn in history. In his realpolitik phase a while back, John Kerry announced that notions like democracy and even human rights (a crown jewel of the modern Democratic Party) should be back-burnered.

Iraq: The Visionaries (Charles Rousseaux Published 07/02/2004, Tech Central Station)

[P]resident Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have been castigated for the casualties that have come for their dream of a democratic Iraq. Many more may die, despite the recent transfer of sovereignty. Their critics will continue to insist that a watchful status quo would have been far preferable to the troublesome, toilsome bloody road Messers Bush and Blair took. [...]

Messers Bush and Blair have delightful dreams of the good that democracy might do in the entire region. The liberated citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan could serve as shining examples to their neighbors and become a bulwark against terror. Free states established in the heart of the region could slash at terrorists' bases of support and show potential recruits that ballots are better (or at least healthier) than bullets and suicide bombers.

The disease of democracy could be catching (heaven help the country that gets Florida-itis). In June, Jordan's King Abudullah said that although Mr. Bush's push towards freedom in the Middle East, "frightened people" it also changed the debate in a fundamental way, and "started a process you can't turn back." As The Washington Post's Jackson Diehl noted, King Abdullah is quietly making many reforms in his own country. According to Mr. Diehl, even Europeans and Democrats (can anyone tell the difference? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?) support Mr. Bush's democratic ends even if they deplore his direct means.

It's quite fitting, actually, that the only ones left believing that the Iraqi experiment in liberty will work are the Iraqis themselves and American theocons, the last tenders of the flame of the Founders.

So we have the rather unedifying spectacle of neocons bailing out on their own core beliefs, just because the transition hasn't happened overnight, as in the following:Shattered illusions (Francis Fukuyama, 29jun04, The Australian)

OF all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.

It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.

If the US cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, DC, how in the world does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?

Several neo-conservatives, such as Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Charles Krauthammer, have noted how wrong people were after World War II in asserting that Japan could not democratise. Krauthammer asks: "Where
is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?" He is echoing an argument made most forthrightly by the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who has at several junctures suggested that pessimism about the prospects for a democratic Iraq betrays lack of respect for Arabs.

It is, of course, nowhere written that Arabs are incapable of democracy,
and it is certainly foolish for cynical Europeans to assert with great confidence that democracy is impossible in the Middle East. We have, indeed, been fooled before, not just in Japan but in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism.

But possibility is not probability, and good policy is not made by staking everything on a throw of the dice. Culture is not destiny, but culture plays an important role in making possible certain kinds of institutions - something that is usually taken to be a conservative insight.

Though I, more than most people, am associated with the idea that history's arrow points to democracy, I have never believed that democracies can be created anywhere and everywhere through simple political will.

Here is what Mr. Fukuyama wrote in The End of History:

What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

Apparently "universal" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone.

But it is, of course, not Mr. Fukuyama who is most closely associated with the truth that time's arrow points towards democracy, but the Founders and, in the modern world, George W. Bush. So, where Thomas Jefferson wrote: "The God Who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time." Mr. Bush has said:

Americans are a free people, who know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation. The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity.

We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not know -- we do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history.

The difference here--the reason that Mr. Fukuyama has waffled, while Mr. Bush has kept the faith--is that for the Founders and for the religious today the eventual triumph of liberty is not merely an intellectual conjecture but a fulfillment of God's Creation. The denial of human freedom, no matter how persistent or seemingly intractable, can never be more than temporary, because freedom is God's gift to Man.

It's all well and good to be dubious about Iraq's immediate prospects, but to question its long term prospects, or those of the rest of the Islamic world for that matter, is in the precise sense unAmerican. It requires the disavowal of our Foundational premises:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The problem is that those on the far Right don't believe all men to be equal--especially not the brown ones--while the Left and the secular Right (most Libertarians, neocons, etc.) don't believe man was Created. We're left then with a situation where it's pretty much only conservative Jews and Christians who still believe in the truths that America represents.

Fortunately, at the present time, their number happens to include the President.

[originally posted: 2004-07-04]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: A CREED, NOT A BREED:

Why We Keep This Creed (Michael Gerson, July 4, 2007, Washington Post)

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that America has a "schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against herself." But we are redeemed, he argued, by our creed, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, which manages "to forever challenge us; to forever give us a sense of urgency; to forever stand in the midst of the 'isness' of our terrible injustices; to remind us of the 'oughtness' of our noble capacity for justice and love and brotherhood." Americans, he said, believe in "certain basic rights that are neither derived from nor conferred by the state. . . . They are God-given, gifts from his hands."

"You may take my life," King said, "but you can't take my right to life. You may take liberty from me, but you can't take my right to liberty." And this creed of "amazing universalism" calls "America to do a special job for mankind and the world . . . because America is the world in miniature and the world is America writ large."

The privileged and powerful can love America for many reasons. The oppressed and powerless, stripped of selfish motives for their love, have found America lovely because of its ideals.

It is typical of America that our great national day is not the celebration of a battle -- or, as in the case of France, the celebration of a riot. It is the celebration of a political act, embedded in a philosophic argument: that the rights of man are universal because they are rooted in the image of God.

Which is why the nativist, with his particularist claim that America is for him and his, can not succeed in the long run.

[originally posted: 7/05/07]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: MAKING ROOM:

This Fourth of July, why I love America, like most Muslim Americans: Americans may not be able to name all the articles of the Constitution, but they've been taught its ethic for most of their lives. Equality and tolerance are instilled in them. After religious persecution drove me from my native Pakistan, that is why I gratefully call America "home." (Faheem Younus / July 1, 2011 , CS Monitor)

Talk to Muslim Americans and you will hear just how valued, how precious, this tolerance is to them. Some would strongly disagree with the American foreign policy, and some would lament about a personal experience of discrimination. But in my experience, all would agree on one thing: that the United States provides them with more freedom, more security, more opportunity, and more peace than the country from which they emigrated.

Since that day on the Jersey shore, I have made it a habit to make room for my fellow citizens wherever I can. It's only my way to reciprocate to you, America, for you have made room for millions of immigrants like me and provided us the opportunity to live with equality, justice, and freedom.

[originally posted: 7/02/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE MARCH OF LIBERTY BEGINS WITH A STEP:

'All men are created equal' is not hypocrisy but vision (Jeff Jacoby, July 4, 2010, Boston Globe)

[Y]es, it is easy to damn Jefferson and the other Founders for not living up to their highest ideals. But if that is all it takes to be convicted of hypocrisy, how many of us would escape conviction? Surely what is more remarkable about Jefferson is not that he owned slaves, but that he acknowledged forthrightly and repeatedly that slavery was wrong. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia,'' for instance, he characterized slave ownership as "the most unremitting despotism'' -- an outrage bound to provoke divine wrath. "Indeed,'' Jefferson wrote, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever.''

The Founders weren't stupid. Of course they knew that the universal ideals embraced in the Declaration were not matched in reality across the colonies. The controversy over slavery was intense; but even more intense was the need for a united front against England. The urgent choice in 1776 was not between slavery or abolition. It was between hanging together, as Benjamin Franklin supposedly quipped in Philadelphia, or most assuredly hanging separately. They chose to hang together, and the confrontation over slavery was left for later.

But in that confrontation, the lofty ideal of equality enshrined in the Declaration -- precisely because it was enshrined in the Declaration -- imparted enormous moral authority to the abolitionists' cause. Those who indict the Founders because their treatment of African slaves didn't come up to the standard of "all men are created equal'' should be asked: Would the Declaration of Independence have been improved if those words had been omitted? Would slavery have ended sooner had abolitionists not been able to invoke that "self-evident truth''?

[originally posted: 7/04/10]

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ANDY'S AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

MORE: The Folksy TV Sheriff From Mayberry (DOUGLAS MARTIN, July 3, 2012, NY Times)

Mr. Griffith was already a star -- on Broadway in "No Time for Sergeants" and in Hollywood in Elia Kazan's film "A Face in the Crowd" -- when "The Andy Griffith Show" made its debut in the fall of 1960. And he delighted a later generation of television viewers in the 1980s and '90s in the title role of the courtroom drama "Matlock."

But his fame was never as great as it was in the 1960s, when he starred for eight years as Andy Taylor, the sagacious sheriff of the make-believe town of Mayberry, N.C. Every week he rode herd on a collection of eccentrics, among them his high-strung deputy, Barney Fife, and the simple-minded gas station attendant Gomer Pyle. Meanwhile, as a widower, Andy raised a young son, Opie, and often went fishing with him. "The Andy Griffith Show," seen Monday nights on CBS, was No. 4 in the Nielsen ratings its first year and never fell below the Top 10. It was No. 1 in 1968, its last season. After the run ended with Episode No. 249, the show lived on in spinoff series, endless reruns and even Sunday school classes organized around its rustic moral lessons.

The show imagined a reassuring world of fishin' holes, ice cream socials and rock-hard family values during a decade that grew progressively tumultuous. Its vision of rural simplicity (captured in its memorable theme song, whistled over the opening credits) was part of a TV trend that began with "The Real McCoys" on ABC in 1957 and later included "The Beverly Hillbillies," "Petticoat Junction," "Green Acres" and "Hee Haw."

But by the late 1960s, the younger viewers networks prized were spurning corn pone, and Mr. Griffith had decided to leave after the 1966-67 season to make movies. CBS made a lucrative offer for him to do one more season, and "The Andy Griffith Show" became the No. 1 series in the 1967-68 season. [...]

[T]he show's 35 million viewers would have been reassured to learn that even at the peak of his popularity, Mr. Griffith drove a Ford station wagon and bought his suits off the rack. He said his favorite honor was having a stretch of a North Carolina highway named after him in 2002. (That was before President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2005.)

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: CAUSE WAY:

Defending the American cause (Lee Wishing, 5/31/10, World)

Concerned about evidence that Korean War (1950-53) POWs were "easy targets of Communist indoctrination," Kirk wrote his little classic in 1957 to teach American servicemen the basic principles of American civilization. He believed all Americans need to understand the principles that make our country exceptional in order to defend her vigorously abroad and at home. Publishers reprinted The American Cause in 1966 during the Vietnam War and again in 2002 following the 9/11 attacks. In this age of the modern Tea Party, Intercollegiate Studies Institute research suggests we may be even more susceptible to indoctrination by foreign and domestic radical ideologues.

Kirk wrote, "Civilization grows out of religion: the morals, the politics, the economics, the literature and the arts of any people have a religious origin. . . . And in America, it is the Christian religion." Moreover, Kirk defines the American cause as the "defense of principles of a true civilization." If Kirk is right that America's greatness flows from the Christian religion--and I believe he is--it is evident that Christians must bear the weight of perpetuating and defending America. And we must begin at the beginning by understanding how Christian teaching connects to the founding principles of our country. This will take some work, some study, some homework, and we can begin by reading The American Cause. It's an easy and short read.

Kirk cautions that we not make an idol of the USA, and become jingoistic and the self-appointed "keepers of the world's conscience." But it's clear he thought we should work to preserve, protect, and promote the Christian ideals that make American society thrive, such as belief in an unchanging God who made people in His image and entitled to life, liberty, and the protection of their property; punishing actions that violate these inalienable rights; an understanding that mankind and societies are not perfectible through government tinkering and revolution; recognizing that leaders who think otherwise are dangerous ideologues; tolerating other religious faiths and valuing liberty of conscience; and cultivating free and orderly markets to improve the human condition.

[originally posted: 6/02/10]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: A CONTRADICTION THAT COULD ONLY BE RESOLVED ONE WAY:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: How did these words become the most important in the Declaration of Independence? The answer starts with a small band of motivated Americans. (Eric Slauter,
July 3, 2011, Boston Globe)

To members of the small antislavery movement of the time, the language of the Declaration must have arrived as a blessing - a national document, signed by some of America's leading citizens, that included a claim that "all Men are created equal." Almost immediately, it seems, antislavery activists such as Lemuel Haynes of Massachusetts incorporated those words into their arguments against slavery. Haynes had a black father and a white mother and called himself a "Mollato." He had experienced life as an indentured servant and as a soldier, but never as a slave, and he embraced the key sentence as an epigraph for a manuscript he had been working on with the characteristically lengthy (and loosely spelled) 18th-century title of "Liberty Further Extended; or Free thoughts on the illegality of Slave-keeping; Wherein those arguments that Are useed in its vindication Are plainly Confuted. Together with an humble Address to such as are Concearned in the practise."

There, in unedited prose on the title page, he cited the words of Congress: "We hold these truths to Be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happyness."

Haynes's essay was not published in his lifetime, but he was part of a bigger social and political movement, and other similar uses of the phrase did see print. In a sermon given in 1778, a white antislavery minister from Hanover, N.J., asked his listeners and later his readers "if 'tis self-evident, i.e. so clear that it needs not proof, how unjust, how inhuman, for Britons, or Americans, not only to attempt, but actually to violate this right?" That same year, a Quaker from Pennsylvania named Anthony Benezet suggested that a nation that made the public declarations of equality and rights present in the Declaration while simultaneously supporting slavery risked divine punishment during wartime. In 1783, David Cooper of New Jersey published an address directed to "the Rulers of America" in the Continental Congress on the inconsistency of slavery in a land of liberty, using the second paragraph of the Declaration to hold them to account. Could Congress, he asked, have truly meant only "the rights of whitemen" and not of "all men"?

Invoking the language of the Declaration became a powerful part of abolitionist rhetoric. Indeed, a search for the phrase "all Men are created equal" in digitized newspapers and nonperiodical publications reveals that a majority of the citations in the 15 years after 1776 were by opponents of the slave trade. Formal abolitionist societies in Pennsylvania in 1788, in Maryland in 1791, and New Jersey in 1793 all worked the sentence into the constitutions of their organizations. Abolitionist sympathizers in Congress invoked the sentence on the floor of the new House of Representatives in 1790, even though the Constitution itself denied Congress the power to prohibit the migration and importation of slaves before 1808.

And long before abolitionism became a potent political force in America, the Declaration's language of rights became a linchpin of the move away from slavery. In writing it, Jefferson and Congress built on intellectual foundations from John Locke and other and had followed the sweeping language of Virginia's Declaration of Rights, a draft of which circulated in June of 1776 and enumerated the natural rights of life and liberty as well as the right to pursue happiness. Vermont's Declaration of Rights of 1777 opened with similar language, but followed these abstractions with a specific prohibition on slavery. In Massachusetts, the constitution adopted in 1780 began with a Declaration of Rights, which held that "All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights," including life, liberty, "safety and happiness." In 1783, citing that article, the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared slavery unconstitutional, forestalling the necessarily difficult political wrangling and costs that might have ensued with a direct legislative solution for emancipation. As the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, legislators in Rhode Island prefaced an Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery with a direct citation of the claims of rights and equality from the Declaration's second paragraph.

By 1792, when almanac maker Benjamin Banneker, an African-American, quoted the "true and invaluable doctrine . . . 'that all men are created equal' " back to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson in an exchange of letters reprinted in papers across the new nation, abolitionists had been working for a decade and a half to make Americans identify the Declaration of Independence with the cause of enslaved peoples.

The Declaration itself began to take on its iconic status in the early 19th century, as the nation emerged from a second war with Britain and as revolutions in Latin America led to the creation of new declarations of independence. Early in the 1820s, Congress authorized the production of a facsimile of the engrossed parchment copy, and by the time of the Declaration's jubilee in 1826 it was not just abolitionists who were invoking the self-evident truths of the second paragraph as a founding creed of the nation.

[originally posted: 7/03/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE BEST OF ALL GUIDES:

Inventing the Gettsyburg Address (Garry Wills) (Harry V. Jaffa, Fall 1992, First Principles)

Let us consider further how the relation­ship of independence and union was looked back upon in the after-light of the Found­ing. In 1825, Jefferson asked Madison for his recommendation of books or documents that ought to be made authoritative--norma docendi--for instruction by the law faculty of the new University of Virginia. In re­sponse, Madison did recommend--and Jef­ferson incorporated his recommendation into a resolution adopted by the Board of Visitors of the University--some of the "best guides" to "the distinctive principles of the government of our own State, and of that of the United States." The first was the "Decla­ration of Independence, as the fundamental act of Union of these States."

In his earlier book, Wills refers to the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address together as "war propaganda with no legal force" ( 362). But this is to ignore the testimony of Madison and Jefferson, that the Declaration was "the fundamental act of Union.""Act" here means "law." Article VI of the Constitution declares that:

All debts contracted and engagements en­tered into before the adoption of this Consti­tution shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution as under the Confederation.

Article XII of the Articles of Confederation declares, in like manner, that all debts contracted under the authority of Congress before the Articles went into effect shall be considered charges against the United States, and honored as such. This more than con­firms Lincoln's contention that the legal and moral personality of the United States, as a Union, extends continuously not only to the Declaration of Independence, but before that to the Congress of the Union that declared independence, and which had incurred debts from the beginning of the war in 1775. The Declaration of Indepen­dence is today the first of the four organic laws of the United States, according to the United States Code, as adopted by the United States Congress.3 Article VII of the Consti­tution, as signed by George Washington, and submitted to the states for ratification declares that it was "done in Convention in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-seven and of the inde­pendence of the United States of America the twelfth." All acts and deeds of the United States are by the Constitution itself dated from the Declaration of Independence. How anyone could write two books on this topic, as Garry Wills has done, and remain igno­rant of these most elementary historical and legal facts, is difficult to understand.

The enduring significance of the Decla­ration of Independence--embodied in the Gettysburg Address--is accordingly less in marking the separation of the colonies from Great Britain, than of marking the union of the states with each other. This enduring significance, however, is constituted less by the legal fact of union, than by the moral fact that--according to Madison and Jeffer­son--the Declaration embodies the prin­ciples of government of the States severally, and of the United States corporately. More­over, the Constitution of 1787 guarantees "to every state of this union a republican form of government," without ever defining that form. Can there be any doubt that, as indicated by the testimony of the aforesaid witnesses, such form is best defined in the Declaration of Independence?

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What made the Declaration of Indepen­dence the best of all guides to educating the guardians of republican freedom? In 1978, as we have seen, Wills, following Kendall, thought that the equality mentioned in the Declaration referred to the collective legal equality of the States with each other, not to the moral equality of the human persons who were their "inhabitants." We have seen Wills quote with full approval--in opposi­tion to Lincoln--the assertion that:

. . . the statesmen who founded the govern­ment . . . were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that Negroes were their equals. . . .

That the Declaration of Independence in­cluded Negroes in the proposition of hu­man equality is the heart of hearts of Lin­coln's alleged "new past." Wills also inher­ited this thesis from Kendall, who had charged Lincoln with "a startling new interpretation of . . . 'all men are created equal'" ( 39). The denial that Negroes had been included in the humanity of the Dec­laration had also been the contention of Chief Justice Taney in his opinion for the Court in Dred Scott. By a strange twist of fate, what was an article of faith for the old defenders of slavery has become unques­tionable orthodoxy among "black power" historians and their allies of the radical Left, who take it as proof of the racism of the American Founding.

Where does the truth lie? Are individuals equal, or are only "peoples" collectively equal? Consider the Massachusetts Bill of Rights of 1780--whose author was John Adams, a member of the committee charged by the Congress in 1776 to draft the Declaration:

The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good . . .

And the premise upon which this voluntary association is formed is that:

All men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights; among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seek­ing and obtaining their safety and happiness.

Here is an authoritative gloss upon the doc­trine of the Declaration, prefaced to a Revo­lutionary state constitution.

In 1835, after being engaged in mortal combat against the doctrine of state rights enunciated by Calhoun during the nullifi­cation crisis (1828-33), James Madison drafted an essay on the meaning of sover­eignty in constitutional jurisprudence. He wrote:

To go to the bottom of the subject let us consult the theory which contemplates a cer­tain number of individuals as meeting and agreeing to form one political society, in or­der that the rights, the safety, and the interest of each may be under the safeguard of the whole.
The first supposition is, that each individ­ual being previously independent of the oth­ers, the compact which is to make them one society must result from the free consent of every individual.

Therefore, there can be no doubt that the consent that brings the body politic into existence, the consent upon which majority rule and the "just powers of government" depend, is "the free consent of every indi­vidual." It is true that communities of men founded in this way are themselves equal to other independent communities. But this collective equality is a by-product of the equality that individuals enjoyed, as con­tracting parties, prior to forming them­selves into a people. The equality enjoyed by citizens and persons under the constitu­tional law of a free society is a consequence of the antecedent equality belonging to them under the laws of nature and of nature's God. It is this natural equality that defines the ends, and limits the powers, of all legiti­mate governments. This is the philosoph­ical core of the idea of limited government.

[originally posted: 7/04/08]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: NO ONE BELIEVES hE'S OMNIPOTENT:

Philosophy, faith and the Fourth of July (Jeff Jacoby, July 3, 2011, Boston Globe)

Not only are all persons endowed by nature with the unalienable rights of equality and freedom, it avowed, but "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.''

No lawful government without consent and self-rule: It was an extraordinary doctrine for its time. It had never been the springboard from which a new nation was launched. Yet to pursue this "theory of democracy,'' as Coolidge called it, "whole congregations with their pastors'' had pulled up stakes in Europe and migrated to America.

Steeped in the imagery of the Hebrew Bible, the colonists believed that God had led them, as he had led ancient Israel, from a land of bondage to a blessed Promised Land. Thomas Jefferson suggested in 1776 that the seal of the United States should depict the "Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by Day, and a Pillar of Fire by night.'' In that wilderness, Americans knew, God did not simply impose his rule on Israel. First the Hebrews had to give their consent: "And all the people answered together, and said, All that the Lord has spoken we will do.'' Only then was there the revelation at Sinai, the Ten Commandments, and the Law. If God himself would not govern without the consent of the governed, surely King George had no right to do so!

[originally posted: 7/03/12]

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SO OUR AUNT NOTICES A GUY OUT ON HER TRAMPOLINE IN THE LAKE...:

The Romneys aren't the only interesting thing about Wolfeboro, N.H. or Lake Winnipesaukee, however. There's plenty to know about this quiet little lakefront town:

"Winnipesaukee," a Native American word, means "smile of the great spirit" or "beautiful water in a high place," both of which seem fitting names for this idyllic town.

The population of Wolfeboro is a mere 6,296, and the town's largest single employer is the local school district.

Dr. Leo Marvin's ruined family vacation in "What About Bob" is set in Lake Winnipesaukee, but those portions of the film were actually shot in Virginia, not New Hampshire.

Lake Winnipesaukee is also referenced in the beginning of Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town." -- While not set there, some scenes from "On the Golden Pond" were shot on Lake Winnipesaukee. Ernest Thompson, the author of the play that inspired the movie, now lives there.

Jimmy Fallon has mentioned on his show, "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," that he has vacationed in the area.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE OPTIMAL SOLUTION...:

A view of America's independence: INDEPENDENCE: The Struggle to Set America Free By John Ferling (Chuck Leddy, July 4, 2011, Boston Globe)

From the opening pages, Ferling's ambition is clear. He starts with a British debt crisis triggered by military spending to oust the French from much of North America.

After peace arrived in 1763, writes Ferling, "Great Britain was swamped with debt brought on by years of war. The national debt had doubled during the previous seven years'' of war. Parliament, supported by overstretched British taxpayers, asserted that the American colonies, clear beneficiaries of Britain's military victory, should pay their fair share of the debt burden.

So began a decade-long period of futile British efforts to compel the colonies to pay levies and recognize Parliament's authority to tax them. [...]

[F]erling digs deep into a few important themes, which he handles in a fresh way. For instance, Ferling makes it clear that until early 1776, American moderates seeking reconciliation played a powerful role in Congress.

Pennsylvanian Dickinson, for instance, argued passionately for seeking a negotiated settlement with Britain over the tax issue, one that would keep the colonies inside the empire. On the other side of the Atlantic, reconciliationists in Parliament like Edmund Burke sagely warned that "Great Britain must offer conciliatory terms or risk the loss of its American colonies.'' Burke would be proven right.

"Leaders on both sides had many opportunities to choose an alternative course,'' writes Ferling, but the king and his ministers "spurned every American proposal for change, accommodation, and negotiation,'' instead pursuing a stubborn policy of colonial submission through military force. Congress actually sought talks with the king after the battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. George III responded to this offer by declaring war on the colonies and demanding their complete submission to British rule.

...would have been for George to grant us a separate parliament with himself as the monarch of the new polity.

[originally posted: 7/04/11]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: SOMETIMES THEY MAKE IT TOO EASY

The Idea of America: What some wise men had in mind (Mackubin Thomas Owens, July 2, 2003, National Review)

[M]ulticulturalism couldn't exist if even those Americans who praise the Declarations didn't misunderstand its principles. How widely they are misunderstood is driven home by a piece by a piece in the July 2 Washington Post by David Broder. In his penultimate paragraph, Broder makes it crystal clear that he misses the point.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Is our belief in equality truly self-evident? How does it jibe with the growing inequality of income and wealth and opportunity in this country? And is the pursuit of happiness, as now understood, wedded to the same sense of duty and responsibility that animated the men in Philadelphia?

To answer Broder, the equality of which Jefferson speaks is that arising from the equal natural rights all men possess, antecedent to the creation of government, and the political right not to be ruled by another without the former's consent. As Jefferson wrote to Roger C. Weightman on June 24, 1826, "all eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born, with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them...."

As we celebrate the Fourth of July this week, we should reflect on the uniqueness of American nationhood arising from the Declaration of
Independence. We have, of course, not always lived up to the "self-evident truths" articulated in this document, as the history of slavery attests. But these truths constitute what Lincoln called the "central idea" of the American republic without which republican government will fail and the American nation will dissolve.

Note how neatly Mr. Broder's misunderstanding of the Declaration's equality fits this assertion: "The student of political philosophy has the antagonism of equality and liberty constantly forced upon him." [originally posted: 2003-07-04]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: #1 WITHOUT BULLETS:

Silent Cal Had a Lot To Say (Gary Galles, Lew Rockwell)

Historians have trivialized Calvin Coolidge as a do-nothing President naïve enough to believe that "the business of America is business," and many have rated him as one of the worst of all time. However, he produced remarkable results without sacrificing our freedoms. And given that he was born on the 4th of July, there is no better time than our Independence Day to remember him.

Under Coolidge, the top income tax rate of 65% under Wilson was eventually cut to 20%. The stock market began its unprecedented "roaring 20s" climb as it became clear through 1924 that Coolidge's tax reduction bill would pass.

In both his first and last year in office, federal receipts were $3.8 billion and expenditures were $3.1 billion, and in between, he cut the national debt from $22.3 billion to $16.9 billion.

His policies took more than a million people off the income tax rolls, and 98% of Americans paid no income tax at the end of his term. As a result, America prospered under Coolidge. Real economic growth averaged 7% per year while he was in office (the highest growth on record), while inflation averaged only 0.4%. Investment, manufacturing output, and disposable income rose dramatically, and unemployment averaged 3.3%.

That remarkable record explains why, after Coolidge outpolled his Democratic opponent by nearly 2 to 1 in 1924, he would have won in another landslide if he had run again in 1928.

But unfortunately for America, he did not.

For the most part we only consider presidents truly great if they helped the nation weather an existential crisis: Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, Bush. But of the presidents who governed during peacetime, Coolidge is the very model of what an American president should be--unobtrusive, reverent and humble--while his policies--rather minimalist--are archetypal.

MORE:
-BOOKNOTES: Coolidge: An America Enigma by Robert Sobel (C-SPAN, August 30, 1998)

[T]he difference between Coolidge and the
presidents we have today is that you had a different kind of a
presidency back then. Franklin Roosevelt revolutionizes the
presidency, as he did so much other things in American life. After
Roosevelt, a person becomes president because he wants to do
something. He wants to change things. Calvin Coolidge did not want
to change things. He wanted to carry out the pledges that Harding had
made, and then he made a few of his own in the next election, and he
wanted to cut the taxes, which he did. The national debt was
two-thirds of what it was when--after he left office, when he came in.
You had peace, prosperity, low inflation, low unemployment. He never
took credit for this, by the way. He--this--the economy did that.

And he wanted to maximize freedom for the American people, and freedom
for the American people meant taking the 10th Amendment to the
Constitution very seriously: `Those powers not given to the federal
government are retained by the states.' And so when Coolidge was
governor of Massachusetts, he was a very strong governor, had a large
legislative operation. When he becomes president, he says, `That's
not my job. It's the governor's job. And I'll take care of the other
things.'

[originally posted: 2004-07-04]

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: ALL MEN:

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July? (Frederick Douglass, July 5, 1852)

On the 2d of July, 1776, the old Continental Congress, to the dismay of the lovers of ease, and the worshipers of property, clothed that dreadful idea with all the authority of national sanction. They did so in the form of a resolution; and as we seldom hit upon resolutions, drawn up in our day whose transparency is at all equal to this, it may refresh your minds and help my story if I read it. "Resolved, That these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown; and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, dissolved."

Citizens, your fathers made good that resolution. They succeeded; and to-day you reap the fruits of their success. The freedom gained is yours; and you, therefore, may properly celebrate this anniversary. The 4th of July is the first great fact in your nation's history - the very ring-bolt in the chain of your yet undeveloped destiny.

Pride and patriotism, not less than gratitude, prompt you to celebrate and to hold it in perpetual remembrance. I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation's destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost.

From the round top of your ship of state, dark and threatening clouds may be seen. Heavy billows, like mountains in the distance, disclose to the leeward huge forms of flinty rocks! That bolt drawn, that chain broken, and all is lost. Cling to this day - cling to it, and to its principles, with the grasp of a storm-tossed mariner to a spar at midnight.

The coming into being of a nation, in any circumstances, is an interesting event. But, besides general considerations, there were peculiar circumstances which make the advent of this republic an event of special attractiveness.

The whole scene, as I look back to it, was simple, dignified and sublime.

The population of the country, at the time, stood at the insignificant number of three millions. The country was poor in the munitions of war. The population was weak and scattered, and the country a wilderness unsubdued. There were then no means of concert and combination, such as exist now. Neither steam nor lightning had then been reduced to order and discipline. From the Potomac to the Delaware was a journey of many days. Under these, and innumerable other disadvantages, your fathers declared for liberty and independence and triumphed.

Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too--great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise, at one time, such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable; and yet I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.

They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue, and that when it is exhibited, it ought to command respect. He who will, intelligently, lay down his life for his country, is a man whom it is not in human nature to despise. Your fathers staked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, on the cause of their country. In their admiration of liberty, they lost sight of all other interests.

They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. They showed forbearance; but that they knew its limits. They believed in order; but not in the order of tyranny. With them, nothing was "settled" that was not right. With them, justice, liberty and humanity were "final;" not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times.

How circumspect, exact and proportionate were all their movements! How unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles, and set a glorious example in their defense. Mark them!

Fully appreciating the hardship to be encountered, firmly believing in the right of their cause, honorably inviting the scrutiny of an on-looking world, reverently appealing to heaven to attest their sincerity, soundly comprehending the solemn responsibility they were about to assume, wisely measuring the terrible odds against them, your fathers, the fathers of this republic, did, most deliberately, under the inspiration of a glorious patriotism, and with a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom, lay deep the corner-stone of the national superstructure, which has risen and still rises in grandeur around you.

Of this fundamental work, this day is the anniversary. Our eyes are met with demonstrations of joyous enthusiasm. Banners and pennants wave exultingly on the breeze. The din of business, too, is hushed. Even Mammon seems to have quitted his grasp on this day. The ear-piercing fife and the stirring drum unite their accents with the ascending peal of a thousand church bells. Prayers are made, hymns are sung, and sermons are preached in honor of this day; while the quick martial tramp of a great and multitudinous nation, echoed back by all the hills, valleys and mountains of a vast continent, bespeak the occasion one of thrilling and universal interests nation's jubilee.

Friends and citizens, I need not enter further into the causes which led to this anniversary. Many of you understand them better than I do. You could instruct me in regard to them. That is a branch of knowledge in which you feel, perhaps, a much deeper interest than your speaker. The causes which led to the separation of the colonies from the British crown have never lacked for a tongue. They have all been taught in your common schools, narrated at your firesides, unfolded from your pulpits, and thundered from your legislative halls, and are as familiar to you as household words. They form the staple of your national poetry and eloquence.

I remember, also, that, as a people, Americans are remarkably familiar with all facts which make in their own favor. This is esteemed by some as a national trait - perhaps a national weakness. It is a fact, that whatever makes for the wealth or for the reputation of Americans, and can be had cheap! will be found by Americans. I shall not be charged with slandering Americans, if I say I think the American side of any question may be safely left in American hands.

I leave, therefore, the great deeds of your fathers to other gentlemen whose claim to have been regularly descended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!

THE PRESENT.

My business, if I have any here to-day, is with the present. The accepted time with God and his cause is the ever-living now.

"Trust no future, however pleasant,
Let the dead past bury its dead;
Act, act in the living present,
Heart within, and God overhead."

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future. To all inspiring motives, to noble deeds which can be gained from the past, we are welcome. But now is the time, the important time. Your fathers have lived, died, and have done their work, and have done much of it well. You live and must die, and you must do your work. You have no right to enjoy a child's share in the labor of your fathers, unless your children are to be blest by your labors. You have no right to wear out and waste the hard-earned fame of your fathers to cover your indolence. Sydney Smith tells us that men seldom eulogize the wisdom and virtues of their fathers, but to excuse some folly or wickedness of their own. This truth is not a doubtful one. There are illustrations of it near and remote, ancient and modern. It was fashionable, hundreds of years ago, for the children of Jacob to boast, we have "Abraham to our father," when they had long lost Abraham's faith and spirit. That people contented themselves under the shadow of Abraham's great name, while they repudiated the deeds which made his name great. Need I remind you that a similar thing is being done all over this country to-day? Need I tell you that the Jews are not the only people who built the tombs of the prophets, and garnished the sepulchres of the righteous? Washington could not die fill he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men, shout - "We have Washington to our father." Alas! that it should be so; yet so it is.

"The evil that men do, lives after them,
The good is oft' interred with their bones."

"What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence?"

Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here to-day? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?

Would to God, both for your sakes and ours, that an affirmative answer could be truthfully returned to these questions! Then would my task be light, and my burden easy and delightful. For who is there so cold, that a nation's sympathy could not warm him? Who so obdurate and dead to the claims of gratitude, that would not thankfully acknowledge such priceless benefits? Who so stolid and selfish, that would not give his voice to swell the hallelujahs of a nation's jubilee, when the chains of servitude had been tom from his limbs? I am not that man. In a case like that, the dumb might eloquently speak, and the "lame man leap as an hart."

But, such is not the state of the case. I say it with a sad sense of the disparity between us. I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day? If so, there is a parallel to your conduct. And let me warn you that it is dangerous to copy the example of a nation whose crimes, lowering up to heaven, were thrown down by the breath of the Almighty, burying that nation in irrecoverable ruin! I can to-day take up the plaintive lament of a peeled and woe-smitten people!

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth."

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!" To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.

" Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

[originally posted: 2004-07-05]

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ALONG THE AXIS OF GOOD:

Polish authorities have provided amnesty benefits to more than 8,500 illegal immigrants, granting them the right to live and work in one of Europe's most robust economies for a period of two years.

The program, originally announced in January, principally benefits migrants who have lived continuously in Poland for at least four years, but those who were refused refugee status prior to January 2010 are also eligible.

"Persons who have been living illegally in Poland for four years will finally be able to work legally, send their children to school, have a fixed address and will no longer be victims of abuse," Warsaw regional governor Jacek Kozlowski told local reporters.

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AND YOU BOUGHT IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR:

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MAYBE THE OTHER BROTHER WILL FILE A FIRST HAND REPORT FOR US:

New Hampshire Sen. Kelly Ayotte plans to march with Mitt Romney in Wednesday's Fourth of July parade in Wolfeboro, N.H., GOP sources tell ABC News.

Ayotte will be the first vice presidential short-lister to appear publicly with the presumptive Republican nominee during his week-long vacation at his Lake Winnipesaukee retreat. Her appearance also gives Romney the chance to meet with Ayotte privately at his home.

Romney arrived at his lakefront home in the small New Hampshire town last week to begin his annual family vacation, which includes such activities as the  "Romney Olympics," but there has been heightened speculation about whether Romney would use the time away from the political spotlight to meet with potential vice presidential contenders.

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WE ALL KNOW WHERE WE END UP, IT'S JUST A DISAGREEMENT OVER THE PACE:

To be credible, the replacement for Obamacare must address in a plausible way the genuine problems with our system of financing health care. Pre-eminent among these are the explosion in costs, the rising numbers of uninsured, and the challenge of covering Americans with pre-existing conditions.

The good news for Obamacare opponents is that much of the work of building such a plan has already been done. A small but persistent band of reformers and economists has spent many years promoting and refining the elements of a market-based approach to remedying what ails American health care. These ideas have animated scores of plans released by various organizations, including some proposed after Obamacare's enactment. And while these plans differ in their details, they share a core set of seven principles that should form the basis of any proposal for replacing Obamacare.

The first crucial component of any serious reform must be a "defined contribution" approach to the public financing of health care -- the essential prerequisite for a functioning marketplace that imposes cost and quality discipline. In most sectors of our economy, the normal dynamics of supply and demand keep costs in check and reward suppliers that find innovative ways to deliver more for less. As described above, however, this is not the case in the health-care sector, principally because the federal government has completely distorted consumer incentives.

For market forces to work, consumers must be cost-conscious. Those who decide to consume goods or services must face tradeoffs that require them to prioritize the various uses of their money. In the health sector, there is virtually no cost consciousness on the part of consumers: The vast majority of Americans get their insurance through their employers or through Medicare or Medicaid. In each case, as noted above, the federal subsidy grows as the cost of insurance grows, thereby undermining the incentive to keep costs low. When an employer decides to provide a more generous health-benefit plan to his employees, the U.S. Treasury pays for a good portion of the added costs, because health insurance is a tax-free fringe benefit for workers. When a doctor orders more tests or procedures of dubious clinical value for a patient enrolled in Medicare, it is mainly taxpayers who pick up the tab. And when states pile more people into Medicaid, it is again taxpayers -- federal and state -- who shoulder the cost. With this kind of subsidy structure, it is not at all surprising that cost escalation throughout the health system has been rapid.

A replacement program for Obamacare must therefore move American health care away from open-ended government subsidies and tax breaks, and toward a defined-contribution system. Under this approach, health coverage would be provided through competing insurance plans; government's involvement would come through the provision of a fixed financial contribution toward the purchase of insurance by each beneficiary. That subsidy would not vary based on a person's insurance plan, giving Americans every incentive to shop for good value in their health coverage and to get the most for their defined-contribution dollars.

In the context of employer plans, this approach would mean moving away from the unlimited tax break that is conferred on employer-paid premiums, and instead providing directly to workers a fixed tax credit that would offset the cost of enrollment in the private insurance plans of their choice. Workers selecting more expensive insurance plans would pay for the added premiums out of their own pockets. Those choosing low-premium, high-value plans would pocket the savings, enabling them to offset additional health expenses if they wished to do so. This system would not only be more efficient: It would also be a far more equitable way to provide health benefits through the tax code. American taxpayers would get a break for health coverage as individuals, irrespective of their employment status or the generosity of the health plan provided by their employers.

In the context of Medicare and Medicaid, meanwhile, the government would similarly provide a fixed (though of course far more generous) level of support, sometimes called "premium support," that would guarantee insurance coverage to beneficiaries but would allow them to choose among competing options and encourage them to seek out the best value for their money (as discussed at greater length below).

The second pillar of reform should be personal responsibility and continuous-coverage protection. Obamacare attempts to address the challenge of covering people with pre-existing conditions with heavy-handed mandates, especially the requirement that all Americans enroll in government-approved insurance plans (the so-called "individual mandate"). A replacement program for Obamacare should come at the problem from the opposite direction, with government forsaking coercion and instead extending a new commitment to the American people: If you stay continuously enrolled in health insurance, with at least catastrophic coverage, you will never again face the prospect of high premiums associated with developing a costly health condition.

For this commitment to become a reality, some changes would have to be made to both federal law and state insurance regulation. (These proposed changes are discussed in more detail in "How to Cover Pre-existing Conditions," by James Capretta and Tom Miller, published in the Summer 2010 issue of National Affairs.) To begin, the federal government would need to close the gaps in protection that emerge when people move from employer-sponsored plans to the individual market regulated by the states. This problem could be remedied by amending the 1996 HIPAA law to allow workers to move directly from group to individual insurance without first having to pay out of pocket for the (lengthy) extension of their employer-based plans through so-called "COBRA" coverage. In 1985, the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act (or COBRA) allowed workers who lose their jobs to remain on their employers' health-insurance plans for months, provided they pay the full premium cost themselves (usually a significant expense). HIPAA then required workers eligible for this COBRA option to exercise it before they could be given any protection in the individual insurance markets regulated by the states. Since hardly any workers follow this prescribed course, they enter the individual market with no protections from pre-existing condition exclusions. That would change if workers were protected when they moved directly from group to individual insurance plans.

Next, states would need to amend their regulations of the individual and small-business insurance markets to require insurers to sell coverage to customers who have remained continuously covered. These new regulations would also have to require that such coverage be made available at standard rates -- that is, at rates that apply without regard to differences in health status (age and geographic adjustments would be permitted).

Because some workers who leave job-based plans for the individual market could be quite sick, a credible Obamacare replacement plan would also need to include a new approach to covering the high insurance costs for these Americans. Different proposals have offered different mechanisms, but all would move the burden away from the sick patients themselves to a larger and broader pool of people, either through regulation or through a direct government program such as a high-risk pool. For people who have not been continuously insured, these protections generally would not apply. States could continue to allow insurers to charge higher premiums to these individuals based on their respective health risks. There would thus be a very strong incentive for all Americans to remain continuously covered. (At the time of enactment, it would make sense to give those Americans who were not in continuous coverage the opportunity to come into the new system without penalty and to secure this new protection.)

This approach would achieve the goal of providing realistic and affordable options for people with pre-existing conditions, but without imposing the misguided, overbearing, and counter-productive architecture of Obamacare -- and in a way that encourages a competitive insurance market and an innovative health sector rather than undermining them.

The third pillar of reform must be a genuine partnership with the states. Under Obamacare, states are treated as mere functionaries in a new centrally planned and federally managed system. The law gives state officials a take-it-or-leave-it choice: They can implement and administer the new policies under Obamacare -- such as state-level insurance exchanges -- to the letter, without any deviation or adjustment, incurring the extra costs of these new programs along the way. Or state governments can refuse this managerial responsibility and instead have the federal government come in and operate the exchanges and other new components of the law on the states' behalf. But in neither case are the states afforded any independence or flexibility, any room to adapt the requirements imposed by Obamacare to the particular circumstances of their populations, or to innovate to achieve greater quality or efficiency.

A replacement plan must be true to the Constitution and reflect a genuine federalist philosophy. Any program to address the problems in American health care will entail some degree of national policy, but it can still leave ample room for state initiative and encourage state-level solutions. There is good reason to allow such discretion: States vary significantly in their demographics, their economic profiles, their infrastructure, their levels of employment and poverty, their Medicaid enrollments, and their numbers of uninsured. There is wide disparity among states in the costs of uncompensated care, the scope of employment-based health insurance, and the condition of individual health-insurance markets. States differ markedly in the range of their health-care problems and in their capacities to cope with them.

Moreover, states can be powerful engines of policy innovation and experimentation in health-care reform, insurance-market reform, and tort and medical-malpractice reform, as well as in the financing and delivery of care in safety-net programs. In recent decades, a number of states have attempted their own solutions to our health-care financing crisis. But because that financing crisis is driven by deformed federal policies, all that these states have been able to do is try to mitigate the effects of Washington's mistakes. A reform that addressed those mistakes directly at the national level could then free the states to address the problems of health-care financing in the ways that best suit their needs.

To respect federalism and reap its benefits, nothing in an Obamacare replacement agenda should compel state adoption, instead leaving the participation of state governments completely voluntary. Those states that do participate in any federal initiative should be given meaningful control over the most important components of regulation, especially the power to design and operate their own health-insurance markets (within minimal federal standards). Such deference to state authority would mean allowing states to retain full control over matters like what coverage to require in health insurance and how to facilitate consumer enrollment in qualified plans. Crucially, no Obamacare replacement program should include a federal requirement that states set up health-insurance exchanges that could later become instruments of excessive regulatory control. Rather, states should be given two tasks: informing consumers of their insurance options, and easing their enrollment into the plans they choose by cooperating with the federal government to facilitate the payment of credits and vouchers directly to private insurers. How states perform these critical tasks should be left entirely up to them.

Defined-contribution financial support, protection for Americans who remain continuously enrolled in insurance plans, and genuine federalism are the essential overall concepts that must define any serious health-care reform. But policymakers will also need to apply these principles to the transformation of today's funding and financing mechanisms: the tax exclusion for employer-provided health coverage, and the Medicaid and Medicare systems.

TAX REFORM AND HEALTH REFORM

The fourth pillar of a real reform agenda would therefore address the tax treatment of employer-sponsored plans. Today's arrangement is somewhat counterintuitive: Because the tax exclusion for health-care premiums is open-ended, workers and employers have an incentive to make health benefits a disproportionately large share of total compensation. And because employers obtain and manage health plans for their workers, there is far too much distance between those who purchase care and those who consume it. The key decisions in American health care thus rest not with patients and doctors, but rather with employers, managed-care executives, and government officials -- a structure that has prevented the emergence of a properly functioning marketplace. Individuals and families rarely have a property right in their health-insurance policies and rarely control the terms and conditions of coverage (as they do with auto, life, or home owner's insurance). Health insurance is rarely portable in any real sense of the term, as workers cannot remain enrolled in the same insurance plans when they switch jobs.

Federal tax policy is at the root of these market malfunctions, and has caused a host of related problems. These include higher health-care costs, the absence of continuous and secure coverage, a lack of transparency in health-care financing, discrimination against lower-income workers and favoritism toward higher-income workers, and a playing field tilted decidedly in favor of group health insurance and against individually purchased coverage. Among economists, including some of President Obama's advisors, there is an overwhelming consensus that reform of health-insurance markets must begin with a major change in the federal tax treatment of health insurance.

The most plausible way to implement such a change would be to transform today's tax exclusion for employer-provided insurance into a standard tax credit that would extend to all Americans, regardless of employment status, which they could then use to purchase the private coverage of their choice. As to how such a consumer-controlled federal tax credit would be designed, policymakers have a variety of options from which to choose. For instance, in its 2011 "Saving the American Dream" plan, the Heritage Foundation proposed replacing today's unlimited tax break with a new, non-refundable tax credit that would be phased out for the wealthiest citizens. Another approach would be to limit the credit to some pre-determined level of insurance coverage. Because the credit amount would not be increased for workers selecting more expensive insurance plans, those choosing such plans would pay the difference while those opting for plans with lower premiums would not be penalized (with a diminished tax benefit) for economizing.

One such proposal was offered during the 2008 presidential campaign by Senator John McCain, who suggested a universal program of refundable tax credits that would be payable to all households. In 2007, President George W. Bush proposed replacing today's tax treatment of insurance with a universal deduction for health-insurance premiums that would be available to people in employer-sponsored plans, as well as to those in the individual market. In both cases, the value of these credits and deductions would increase over time by some measure of inflation -- ensuring that they would keep pace with fluctuations in the cost of living, while also ensuring that government's costs would remain predictable and manageable.

In all of these formulations, the essential common element is a move toward consumer control. Individuals would become active, cost-conscious consumers looking for value in the health-care marketplace. This shift would, in turn, create tremendous incentives for those delivering medical services to find better and less expensive ways of caring for patients and keeping them well.

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ONLY OIL TAXES CAN CREATE THE PEAK EFFECT:

Peak oil, the point where world oil production reaches an apex and then begins an inexorable decline, was a cult concept until the end of the last decade, when concern about a downward spiral in oil supplies--heightened by high oil prices--reached a fever pitch and the idea that we might run out of oil reached the mainstream. In many ways, this was a good thing; it created a space for alternative energy innovation to grow.

But surprisingly, a new report (PDF) from Leonard Maugeri, a former oil executive and current fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, warns: "oil supply capacity is growing worldwide at such an unprecedented level that it might outpace consumption. This could lead to a glut of overproduction and a steep dip in oil prices." That dip in oil prices would mean cheaper gas, certainly, but it could put a serious damper on how far we've come in the search for non-fossil-fuel-based energy solutions.

The U.S. could be the second biggest oil producer after Saudi Arabia by 2020.

It's all thanks to technology and investment in exploration by oil companies, who are increasingly using "unconventional" oil extraction techniques in shale oil fields, tight oil fields (oil fields that only make sense to drill when advanced techniques like hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling are used), and tar sands.

In fact, says Maugeri, these techniques might allow the U.S. to be the second biggest oil producer after Saudi Arabia by 2020.

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FREELOADERS:

Native-born Americans are half as likely to start new businesses as immigrants, and among U.S. natives, whites are the only major demographic group to show a decline in its share of all new entrepreneurs from 1996-2011, according to the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. 

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