Quote of the Day

"When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived or that the fact which he relates should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other and according to the superiority which I discover, I pronounce my decision. Always I reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous than the event which he relates, then and not till then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion." – David Hume

The trouble with the Wall Street protests

Matthew Yglesias argues that their lack of specific demands limits their effectiveness:

I’ll cheer. If we do one down by the Eccles Building, I’ll show up. But when the lodestar of your movement is to say, “The one thing we all have in common is that We Are The 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” it’s difficult for me to get excited. You have to have a dream scenario in mind. What if the protests are super-popular, the crowds are enormous, and the inconvenience to the high and mighty becomes intolerable? What if the bad guys decide it’s time to consider a surrender? You want them to come out, address the crowd, and do what?

That’s not to say that slogans need to be wonky and boring. “Jobs with justice” is a slogan, not a specific proposal. But (when it works) it’s a slogan that does have some concrete ideas behind it about whose jobs would be impacted and what changes would constitute justice.

Image: "Participants in a march organized by Occupy Wall Street walked through the Financial District Saturday." (Associated Press, via the Wall Street Journal)

Google vs. Facebook

There has been much debate recently over the rivalry between Facebook and Google. Daniel Soar expresses concern that it is Google we should be worrying about, not Facebook, when it comes to the amount of data about us each company stores:

Facebook gets away with being evil – or does it? – because the personal information it makes available for targeting is information that users have voluntarily surrendered by filling in their profiles: birthday, relationship status, hometown, workplace; every time they click on a ‘Like’ button on the web they are deemed to have declared an interest that can be used for targeting. But another answer might be that the information Google has is too valuable to give away, that it has another reason for collecting every piece of data it possibly can, that the stuff it’s amassing is worth more than just money.

The idea of Facebook's 'voluntarily surrendered information' is key to understanding the distinction. Which is more creepy, you might ask: a company with information you give to it, or a company that sends cars up your street to take photographs of your house?

Would the real father of modern economics please stand up?

Robert H. Frank, a columnist for the New York Times and the author of a book entitled The Darwin Economy, argues that Charles Darwin – not Adam Smith – will eventually be recognised as the father of modern economics. Furthermore, he considers Darwin's theory of evolution to be a superior description of the market than Smith's theory of the invisible hand. John Whitfield counters:

Frank's biological misfires aren't mere naivety; they touch on ideas at the leading edge of evolutionary thought and show what stands in the way of the reforms he advocates. Frank bases his argument on the Darwinian notion that life is graded on a curve. How much is enough depends on what others have got. Most people, for example, would rather live in a 4,000-square-foot house that was bigger than their neighbor's than a 6,000-square-foot house that was the smallest on the street. Economists call these positional goods, and contrast them with things that aren't so relative, such as safety at work, where most people think it's better to be safe in absolute terms than the safest worker in a hazardous factory.

There's really no single passage I could quote and give the full effect, so you'll just have to read the whole thing.

Where Orwell meets Twitter

George Orwell Oil on board 10 x 10 inches 2009. Nicole Pasulka captions:

Twitter’s not just the next step in online communication or social networking, according to Francesco Masci—it’s the next step in civilization. In Masci’s “Twitter Issue” paintings, the little blue mascot flirts with Gregory Bateson, cuddles up to Charles Darwin, and leaves a mess on Jean Baudrillard’s forehead, claiming that every “revolutionary” new tool belongs to a history of great ideas.

I'm intrigued. See the rest of the gallery here.

"Anyone can make money from a crash," ctd

Our suspicions confirmed: it was a hoax. "How a man who has never been authorised by the Financial Services Authority and has no discernible history working for a City institution ended up being interviewed by the BBC remains a mystery."

Bachmann and the polls

Her campaign boasts, via email:

Our campaign’s rising poll numbers have not gone unnoticed. The latest Iowa poll has our campaign in second place, just behind Mitt Romney and ahead of Rick Perry.

David Weigel questions:

Which poll? The e-mail doesn't say, but the only new Iowa poll to come out recently is this one, from the American Research Group. Sure enough, it has Mitt Romney in first place with 21 percent, Bachmann in second place with 15 percent, and Perry in third with 14 percent. One problem: ARG conducted another Iowa poll in July. Back then, Bachmann was leading in Iowa with 21 percent, to 18 percent for Romney and 2 percent for the then-theoretical Perry campaign.

The future of Al Jazeera

Increasingly, the network offers the best coverage of world events, in an age where formerly-dominant networks like CNN continue to offer us little of substance. Philip Seib considers its future:

Since the beginning of the Arab Spring, which the network is regularly credited (and criticized) for galvanizing, Al Jazeera played a vital role in spreading news about the uprisings throughout the region. Al Jazeera's critics -- and the network's dogged reporting ensures that it has plenty -- may argue that its coverage was sensationalistic, but the channel provided a much-desired flow of information that offset old-guard governments' efforts to suppress the news. It also helped lay the groundwork for the revelations by providing skeptical coverage of religious and other sensitive issues, such as women's rights, that traditional government-dominated media had long avoided.

I can recall Al Jazeera as the best source of coverage following the Japan earthquake and Fukushima disaster in March. A welcome voice of reason, it seems.

Do taxes narrow the wealth gap?

They can't constitute a full solution, argues Alan Viard:

Raising millionaires’ taxes may seem fair -- they can obviously afford to pay more. But, this policy has significant economic costs. Higher tax rates will encourage millionaires to report less taxable income, limiting the revenue inflow. And, the higher rates will discourage saving by the group that finances much of the business investment on which economic growth and wages depend. If we’re willing to accept those costs, tax increases on millionaires can be part of the fiscal solution. But economists and commentators across the political spectrum agree that taxing the rich cannot be the full solution -- basic math shows that closing the fiscal gap will also require entitlement cuts and tax increases on the broad middle class.

Larry Bartels counters. Apologies for the article being a little older than would normally be expected, but an article (even one from ten days ago) on the wealth gap begs to be accompanied by Friedman's comments on the issue. Originally, I had a video of Thatcher talking about a similar issue, but I thought this to be closer to the point.

Defining populism

Jan-Werner Mueller suggests we should gain a common understanding of it:

So is a populist simply a successful politician one doesn’t like? Can the charge of “populism” itself be populist? I would argue that populism is not about a particular social base (such as the lower-middle class or what the French call les classes populaires), but is rather a form of political imaginary. It’s a way of seeing the political world that opposes a fully unified—but essentially fictional—people against small minorities who are put outside the authentic people.

Does the euro have a future?

George Soros considers the question:

Even if a catastrophe can be avoided, one thing is certain: the pressure to reduce deficits will push the eurozone into prolonged recession. This will have incalculable political consequences. The euro crisis could endanger the political cohesion of the European Union. There is no escape from this gloomy scenario as long as the authorities persist in their current course. They could, however, change course. They could recognize that they have reached the end of the road and take a radically different approach. Instead of acquiescing in the absence of a solution and trying to buy time, they could look for a solution first and then find a path leading to it. The path that leads to a solution has to be found in Germany, which, as the EU’s largest and highest-rated creditor country, has been thrust into the position of deciding the future of Europe.

Kottke on blogging

"Some days, you just don't want to do it. You look at so much stuff everyday and it all becomes kind of the same—all equally interesting or uninteresting. It's hard to maintain that sense of discovery, that little hit that you get when you find something that you haven't seen before. I've posted 15,000, maybe 20,000 links since I started. I've been whittling down the discovery space of things that are going to be new and interesting." Farhad Manjoo and Chris Wilson attempt to build an automated version of superblogger Jason Kottke's popular kottke.org.

Top of the monument

"Workers test their equipment at the top of the Washington Monument, on the National Mall, in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011, preparing for people to rappel down the sides to survey the extent of damage sustained to the monument from the Aug. 23 earthquake." (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, via Ben Smith)

Parker and Stone's subversive comedy

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are interviewed on 60 Minutes.

Do we need less democracy?

Peter Orszag argues that we do:

Facing this problem is crucially important because our current legislative gridlock is making it increasingly difficult for lawmakers to tackle the issues that are central to our country’s future—issues like climate change, the hard slog of recovering from a financial slump, and our long-term fiscal gap. It is clear to everyone that a failure to act will lead to undesirable outcomes in these areas. But polarization means that little action is possible. This is why I believe that we need to jettison the Civics 101 fairy tale about pure representative democracy and instead begin to build a new set of rules and institutions that would make legislative inertia less detrimental to our nation’s long-term health.

The idea seems dreadfully radical, and ignores the value of basic democratic processes that countries like the United States install to protect its citizens from poor governance (well, more to the point, it appears to advocate abolishing many of them). We should remember: greater problems will come of poking around in the realm of democratic systems, and ignoring the issues themselves. It sounds mawkishly twee, but it's not democracy – it's how we're using it.

Not a euro crisis, but a debt crisis

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned critics that the eurozone isn't facing "a euro crisis, but a debt crisis." Ambrose Evans-Pritchard provides a correction:

Total levels of private and sovereign debt in the eurozone are lower than in the UK, the US, and far lower than in Japan. Greece’s debt levels are around 250pc of GDP, at the lower end of the developed world. Spain’s sovereign debt is admirably modest at around 65pc. Italy’s household debt level is the envy of the rich world. It has a primary budget surplus. Italy has many problems, but the budget deficit is not one of them. So why is there such a destructive and long-festering crisis in the eurozone? Why have three countries required an EU-IMF bail-out? Why is the ECB having to shore the debt markets of five countries — soon to be six — with direct bond purchases, including Spain and Italy? Not because of debt, except in the most superficial sense. 

(Video: You may remember, I posted about this yesterday.)

The 'lovable' Rick Perry

That's how Richard Cohen has described him:

A touch of sympathy swells within me when I see him on some debate platform, squinting hard to explain to a conservative audience how, on occasion, he has let his feelings get the better of him. He unaccountably felt a need to protect teenage girls from cervical cancer, and he wanted the children of illegal immigrants to get a good education.

I suspect Mr. Cohen – in his snide, politely-worded personal attacks – was running a little short of ideas for his column this week. One commenter made a rather apt comparison to something you might find under the byline of Maureen Dowd. I'm inclined to agree.

Mass transit subsidies as stimulus

Matthew Yglesias contemplates the idea:

While President Obama is proposing both $35 billion in aid to state and local government and $50 billion in transportation infrastructure, the plan neglects to support operation of the mass transit infrastructure the country already has. Consequently, were the program to pass, a transit agency could find itself in the perverse situation of laying off bus drivers today even as it hires construction workers to build a train for tomorrow.

When Kerouac met Kesey

They had a lot less in common than you might expect, writes Sterling Lord, their literary agent:

With all that happened to Kesey in the ’60s, why wasn’t he the darling of the East Coast literary world, as Kerouac had been in the ’50s? Kerouac was basically shy when outside his own milieu and in no way a self-promoter. But he lived much of the time in New York or nearby Long Island, and at least during the ’50s was accessible to the media, although he did not seek publicity or present himself well in public. They came to him. On the Road had electrified the literary community and sharply marked the arrival of a new generation, and he made good copy for the newspapers.

Kesey was anything but shy. He embraced people; he gave of himself to others. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the debut of a daring new voice, but in the end, Kesey’s profound impact on his generation and those to come was the result of his whole style of life—novels, bus trips, acid tests, public performances, and the like. Also, Kesey didn’t seek out the press and he lived so far away from what earlier journalists called “the ballyhoo belt”—New York City. Besides, as he put it, “fame gets in the way of creativity.”

Apparently Kesey never actually saw the much-praised film adaption of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and, when asked which was the best theatrical production of the book he'd seen, Kesey replied, "Sacramento High School." On that note, Kerouac's On the Road and Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test are both on my bookshelf. I really ought to get around to those.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell ends, ctd

Another adds her voice to the chorus of those who are pleased by the end of DADT, but shan't be coming out:

The military’s a big melting pot, and unfortunately there can be a lot of hate toward things people don’t understand, like homosexuality. As a platoon leader, it can make your life infinitely harder when your subordinates know you’re different, especially if you’re gay. These last few years, there’s been a lot of talk about “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and you’d hear the rumblings. People would be moaning, “Oh, God, we’re gonna have to let the faggots in.” And they don’t know we’re already there, next to them. 

Previous posts in the thread here, here, and here.

Protesting the highway

"An indigenous person participates in a protest against the construction of the Villa Tunari - San Ignacio de Moxos highway, in La Paz September 26, 2011. The 185-mile (298-km) long highway will bisect a protected park in the Isiboro Secure Territory, known by its Spanish acronym TIPNIS, in the Amazon forest. The protest was also held against the riot policemen for breaking up a month-long protest by indigenous people in Yucumo." (Reuters/Gaston Brito, via BoingBoing)

"Anyone can make money from a crash"

This video from the BBC. Free Exchange captions: "I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry. Or grab a pitchfork. Or call him for investment advice."

Monkeys close to producing Shakespeare

"The experiment [using computer software] attempts to prove the theory that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at an infinite number of typewriters would eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare by chance." Apparently they're close. It strikes me as one of these theories we generally understand to be true, but feel the need to test anyway. I laughed aloud at the thought of this:

In 2003 the Arts Council for England paid £2,000 for a real-life test of the theorem involving six Sulawesi crested macaques, but the trial was abandoned after a month. The monkeys produced five pages of text, mainly composed of the letter S, but failed to type anything close to a word of English, broke the computer and used the keyboard as a lavatory. 

It's okay, because when your institution has a name like the 'Arts Council', you can get away with almost anything. "It's not science," they'd argue. "It's art."

The philosophy of cynicism

Stefany Anne Golberg profiles the satirist Ambrose Bierce, on the one-hundredth anniversary of his much-loved The Devil's Dictionary. The article is (excellent, but is also) accompanied by this delightful little titbit:

The archetypal Cynic is a 5th-century Greek fellow named Diogenes. He wasn’t the only Cynic philosopher and he wasn’t the first. But Diogenes’ practice of Cynicism was so extreme, and so full of anecdotes about his eccentric behavior, that he came to define what we think of as classical Cynicism. Diogenes made fun of Alexander the Great and sabotaged the lectures of Plato. He was reported to dwell in a tub and live on a diet of onions. Diogenes is famous for stalking the streets of Athens carrying a lantern in the daytime, searching for an honest man (and infamous for masturbating in the marketplace). Diogenes, however, was no showboat. At the heart of Cynic philosophy was the message that virtue could only come through wisdom and self-sufficiency. The Cynic must be free of influence — wealth, power, fame, as well as social convention. In his antics, Diogenes was taking the word of Cynicism to its logical conclusion. 

Romney's campaign lie

Steve Benen piles on Romney's "Obama apologised for America" line. Daniel Larison, of the American Conservative, seconds:

I realized that this rhetoric about apologies and other conservatives’ charges that Obama didn’t believe in American exceptionalism were never meant to refer to anything that Obama had actually done. Instead, they were opportunities for the people making these charges to wrap themselves in the mantle of American nationalism, define belief in American exceptionalism in such a way that it could only apply to people who agreed with them, and to impute anti-Americanism to anyone else. The entire exercise is clearly fraudulent, but it is also one that many Republicans find quite satisfying.

Agreed. It's one thing to criticize a president's foreign policy, it's quite another to assert – I might add, in the absence of any evidentiary substance – that a president is of an anti-American nature. Make no mistake: this is exactly the kind of image Romney and many of his colleagues in the current GOP stable wish to make of the president, and for good reason – it appeals rather nicely to the vapid audiences that unfailingly frequent their debates. The truly worrying fact in all of this is that Romney is actually one of the more appealing candidates in the GOP race at the moment (or, at least, he strikes me as the most 'presidential', whatever that means).

It's amusing how Romney attempts to pull the 'substance over rhetoric' argument, given that he's one of the worst offenders; that charge, nestled in amongst all the other catchphrases like 'Believe in America', preceded by a comparison between Obama and Marie Antoinette. (By the way, I don't mean to be pedantic, but I think we're all aware she didn't say "let them eat cake." C'mon. You're turning into Bachmann.) Tell us what you're actually going to do now. We're listening.

Regime change doesn't work

Alexander Downes makes the argument:

Regime change often produces violence because it inevitably privileges some individuals or groups and alienates others. Intervening forces seek to install their preferred leadership but usually have little knowledge of the politics of the target country or of the backlash their preference is likely to engender. Moreover, interveners often lack the will or commitment to remain indefinitely in the face of violent resistance, which encourages opponents to keep fighting. Regime change generally fails to promote democracy because installing pliable dictators is in the intervener’s interest and because many target states lack the necessary preconditions for democracy. 

The many faces of Charles Dickens

Much like Shakespeare, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes, Dickens' story remains difficult to tell entirely; "no written account can possibly be adequate to the complexity of a real life." The author, who will publish a biography of Dickens next week, explains:

In some ways Dickens reveals the central problem with all life-writing, which is that no written account can possibly be adequate to the complexity of a real life. Every biography highlights some details and ignores others, producing a narrative rhythm of skipping and lingering that is far closer to the style of a novel than to the confusion and inconsequentiality of everyday existence. Trickier still is the fact that, whereas writing can only describe one thing at a time, most people find themselves living out several different stories at once. As Virginia Woolf pointed out in Orlando, “a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand”.

Obama on GOP debates

I'm with this guy:

"I mean has anybody been watching the debates lately?" Obama said. "You've got a governor whose state is on fire denying climate change. It's true. You've got audiences cheering at the prospect of somebody dying because they don't have healthcare. And booing a service member in Iraq because they're gay."

The end of the death penalty? Ctd

Carol S. Steiker and Jordan M. Steiker are convinced that opponents in the U.S. are closer to achieving their goal than they may think:

Death sentencing has dropped remarkably over the past fifteen years, making what was already a marginal practice (in terms of the frequency with which murder is actually punished with death) an exceptionally rare one. Whereas over 300 defendants were condemned to die per year in the mid-1990s, the most recent figures show a nationwide average closer to 115 per year—a more than 60 percent decline. Executions, too, have fallen significantly—by about 33 percent if one compares 1997-2003 (about 75 executions nationwide per year) and 2004-2010 (about 50 executions nationwide per year).

Wendy Kaminer takes note of the death penalty's enduring emotional appeal. (Image: Protesters show their support for death row inmate Troy Davis during a rally at the capitol in Atlanta September 20, 2011 / Reuters, via The Atlantic.)

Quote of the Day

"Every Italian feels he or she stands alone against the world, or at least the neighbors. Survival—personal, family, social and economic—is a source of pride and a test of ingenuity. Much has been written about Italians' individualism and resourcefulness, and Mr. Berlusconi embodies these qualities. First he amassed his fortune, earning his spurs as a self-made man. Next, he built on Italians' distrust of everything shared, our intolerance of rules and the inner satisfaction that we take in finding private solutions to collective problems. In Italy, there is no real public pressure for a new, fairer tax system. People simply figure out ways to evade the one they already have." — Beppe Severgnini (via The Awl)

Thatcher's cultural legacy

A.O. Scott considers it:

Her ascendancy was a result of tensions and contradictions within British society that also produced a singularly vibrant culture of opposition. Those forces predated her 1979 election: punk rock, realist television dramas, agitprop theater and caustically satirical fiction were all features of the earlier ’70s, when the country was governed by Edward Heath and James Callaghan, two of the least charismatic statesmen in modern European history. But Thatcher deepened and sharpened the contradictions. Her impatient, confrontational populism can be seen as a reaction against the disorder amplified and travestied by punk, but her impatience with decorum and hypocrisy, her assault on customs and institutions, was itself a form of punk. 

Perry's political image

“We need to elect the candidate with the best record, and the best vision for this country," Rick Perry told an audience in Orlando recently. “The current occupant of the White House can sure talk a good game, but he doesn't deliver. Matter of fact, remember President Clinton? Man, he could sell ice cubes to Eskimos. And the next day be against ice cubes! The alternative is candidates who stick to principle, stand their ground, because they believe in something." Timothy Noah is unimpressed:

So ... being a good debater means you're ineffectual at best, inauthentic or downright dishonest at worst. Coherence equals glibness. If I were stuck with Perry's particular skill set that's probably what I'd be saying too. But by playing up the idea that strong, silent cowpokes like himself "stick to principle, stand their ground," Perry makes it harder to back away from extremist political positions such as his stated belief that Social Security, Medicare, and the direct election of senators are all unconstitutional. Perry's opponent, Mitt Romney, has no intention of letting debate audiences forget about this.

People have argued for countless years that we ought to be skeptical of those who state their opinions with eloquence or finesse. Such sentiment runs beyond the whole 'substance vs. rhetoric debate', which is important, and instead borders on dangerous. Noah's third sentence seems to round things off perfectly: "If I were stuck with Perry's particular skill set that's probably what I'd be saying too." Yeah, I suppose so.

Three meals a day

Some argue that the tradition has its roots in cultural construct, not biological investigation:

The three-meals model is a fairly recent convention, which is now being eclipsed as, like everything else, eating becomes a highly personalized matter of choice. What and when and how frequently we eat is driven less and less by the choices of our families, coworkers and others, and more and more by impulse, personal taste and favorite nutrition memes, and marketing schemes such as Taco Bell's promotion of late-night eating known as "Fourthmeal: the Meal Between Dinner & Breakfast." Selecting how and when we eat is like loading our iPods. 

Utilitarians are not nice people

Goodness has nothing to do with it, argues the Economist:

In the grand scheme of things Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are normally thought of as good guys. Between them, they came up with the ethical theory known as utilitarianism. The goal of this theory is encapsulated in Bentham’s aphorism that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”

Which all sounds fine and dandy until you start applying it to particular cases. A utilitarian, for example, might approve of the occasional torture of suspected terrorists—for the greater happiness of everyone else, you understand. That type of observation has led Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell to ask what sort of people actually do have a utilitarian outlook on life. Their answers, just published in Cognition, are not comfortable. 

Where are the independents?

Stanley Greenberg debunks the myth:

Independents are a hodgepodge; it doesn’t work to look at them as having any common worldview. There are affluent suburban voters who are fiscally conservative and culturally liberal; there are seniors, who are more populist than the population as a whole; and there are a high number of white, blue-collar voters who are deeply angry and have been explosive in election after election. In 2006 and 2008, all these groups voted overwhelmingly for Democrats. In 2010, they voted overwhelmingly for Republicans. Right now, I don’t think we have a clue where they’re going. 

I'm not entirely sure to what extent I agree with Mr. Greenberg's view. It seems, at least to me, that sometimes people are to concerned with arguing for what fits their ideology, and show little concern for simply advocating what they perceive as right. (This, by the way, is how I feel when I look at Instapundit.)

Laptop campers

Starbucks has 'declared war' on them.

Voting, driving, and women's rights

Saudi commentators observe that giving women the right to vote is a more contentious issue than allowing them to drive. Brian Palmer explores the development:

While voting in municipal elections is hardly a move toward true political authority, Saudi conservatives view female driving as the first practical step away from the kingdom's guardian system, which keeps women reliant on men. As things stand, women in Saudi cities can't get around unless they can afford a driver or have a male family member who's willing to chauffeur them. (Young men with many sisters have it tough in the kingdom.) Public buses have separate doors and seating areas for women, but they are slow and unreliable. Some women are afraid to ride in taxis because there have been reports of inappropriate comments by Saudi drivers. (Foreign-born drivers don't have the same reputation, because the Saudi criminal justice system has treated immigrants brutally.) 

For Rick Perry, the beginning of the end?

Michael Medved moots that although the most recent GOP debate revealed no decisive winner, it certainly illuminated the inadequacy of Rick Perry, whose lack of presidential appeal may well usher in an end to his presidential ambitions sooner than anyone had imagined. He writes:

What hurt him most weren’t the tentative, insecure moments when he tried to defend himself against attacks (from Rick Santorum in particular, but also from Michele Bachmann and Mitt Romney) but the feeble, stumbling occasions when he tried to go on offense in his own right against his chief rival, Romney. An obviously canned “gotcha” line intended to slam Romney for switching sides on several major issues (abortion, gun rights, health care) collapsed into such tongue-tied incoherence that it became uncomfortable to watch. Romney deftly responded that he set out his substantive positions clearly and unequivocally in the book he wrote two years ago (No Apology) and that he stood behind every argument and proposal specified in the text. A more nimble debater than Perry might have jumped in to say that “it’s hardly appropriate to congratulate yourself, governor, on your rock-solid convictions just because you’ve now managed to go two years without changing them.” But Perry, looking down at his podium and scribbling notes about something, let the moment (and the opportunity) slide. 

Ardent supporters of the Republican Party, as observers of Palin and Romney can well attest, care little for substance or meaningful political discussion; most of the GOP candidates this year have survived on rhetoric. Following Obama, it is expected that a president (even a Republican president) should have a certain level of eloquence, charm, and charisma. Perry lacks these things. If he is to revive his campaign, it will require the kind of emotive circumlocution until recently dominated by the intelligent, now mastered by the likes of Romney and Palin.

England's potent sweep of history

Journalist Simon Jenkins argues that England has produced far greater numbers of heros than villains. It is still, he moots, the greatest country in the world:

I write of England because (as a half-Welshman) I regard it as a real and distinctive country. The rest of the United Kingdom has a separate history, as does the British Empire and that other union of which England is now part, Europe. Ireland has gone and Scotland and Wales are increasingly separate countries, even if joined in a federal nation state. England remains a coherent whole, badly in need of redefinition. I have come to regard England as the most remarkable country in European history. While its relations with its neighbours, especially Celtic ones, have often been appalling, its ability to assimilate newcomers, reform its politics, care for its citizens and be a liberal beacon to the world, is astonishing. Its “game-changing” individuals – Elizabeth, Cromwell, Walpole, Gladstone, Lloyd George, Churchill, Thatcher – far outnumber its villains. 

The Great Divergence is over

Niall Ferguson on the six 'killer apps' of prosperity:

Obama is finally doing the right thing on Israel

Martin Peretz praises Obama's UN speech:

Well, for the first time the president had actually been honest with himself, not totally honest, to be sure, but honest enough, giving him the undeserved benefit of the doubt. Had he spoken like this in any one of the venues where he had previously addressed crowds actually concerned about a peace settlement in the region he would have first of all assured the State of Israel that he understood its history, its security needs, and its very realistic anxieties about the mercurial neighborhood in which it lives. 

Facebook, a monopoly

David Mitchell explores the notion:

I'm sure Facebook would claim it's not a monopoly – strictly speaking it isn't – but it clearly wants to be and, if there are whole sections of society who feel obliged to sign up in order to be able to communicate with one another, then its dreams are coming true. Next there'll be electric sheep. Facebook isn't aspiring to be Cable & Wireless or AT&T, major players within a medium; it wants to be the whole telephone network.

In some ways, this works well for everyone. It's more convenient if we're all joined up by the same social network, just as Google is more useful as a search engine because almost everyone uses it. It would be different if, like phone providers, different social media sites communicated with one another – if you could send someone a message from your Facebook account that popped up on their LinkedIn or Netlog page (I looked up those names on Yahoo). But you can't and, while it's providing its services for free, there's no pressure on Facebook to rein in its monopolistic urge.

On a related note, if you've been on Facebook recently, you'll undoubtedly have noticed the outpouring of anger over the new design update – yes, the one that follows each redesign with almost reassuring, routine inevitability. Indeed, the whole flurry of attention on the new design has been greatly intensified because Facebook now has a competitor: Google+, which (bless its heart) has not yet reached the number of users generally considered ideal for a social network. Even so, Facebook's end will come someday. So it goes.

(Image: "Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a keynote address during the Facebook f8 conference on September 22, 2011 in San Francisco, California. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the conference introducing a Timeline feature to the popular social network." Justin Sullivan/Getty Images North America)

1493 as the beginning of globalisation

The year in which Columbus discovered America, Marek Kohn writes, is traditionally viewed as the year in which a 'new world' was born. More than that, he argues, "1492 was the Year Zero of globalisation, and 1493 was Year One." He continues:

It has been a thrilling and frequently catastrophic ride for humankind ever since, and science writer Charles C Mann’s excitement never flags as he tells his breathtaking story. His account enshrines Columbus as a founding father of globalisation, and recognises that its effects have been as much biological as economic. Here he borrows from the historian Alfred W Crosby, who in 1972 coined the phrase “Columbian Exchange” to describe the traffic of species between continents. The term is elegant, but the exchange was often anything but equitable. Europe sent malaria to the Americas; in return the Americas gave Europe a cure, the Andean cinchona bark from which quinine is derived.

Home news

I've got good news and bad news. The good news is that the design has been updated slightly; the bad news is that my co-blogger and I will be sitting 'mock exams' this week (or, in the preferred parlance of our school, 'preliminary examinations', as apparently it's less than desirable to 'mock them'). As such, the prospect of extensive updates until Thursday (that's Wednesday for U.S. readers) is looking rather dim. We'll undoubtedly see you over the course of the week, but I thought it appropriate to give you notice nonetheless.

Academic publishing as a profitable business

George Monbiot explains:

Universities are locked into buying their products. Academic papers are published in only one place, and they have to be read by researchers trying to keep up with their subject. Demand is inelastic and competition non-existent, because different journals can't publish the same material. In many cases the publishers oblige the libraries to buy a large package of journals, whether or not they want them all. Perhaps it's not surprising that one of the biggest crooks ever to have preyed upon the people of this country – Robert Maxwell – made much of his money through academic publishing.

The publishers claim that they have to charge these fees as a result of the costs of production and distribution, and that they add value (in Springer's words) because they "develop journal brands and maintain and improve the digital infrastructure which has revolutionised scientific communication in the past 15 years". But an analysis by Deutsche Bank reaches different conclusions. "We believe the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process … if the process really were as complex, costly and value-added as the publishers protest that it is, 40% margins wouldn't be available." Far from assisting the dissemination of research, the big publishers impede it, as their long turnaround times can delay the release of findings by a year or more.

Capital punishment in China

Max Fisher investigates the state of the death penalty in China:

Research by Amnesty International found that 23 countries used the death penalty in 2010. The U.S., ranked fifth, executed 46 prisoners. Iran, ranked second, executed at least 252. China, according to Amnesty International, executed "thousands." The exact number is a state secret. The Dui Hua Foundation, a U.S.-based human rights non-profit that focuses on China, estimates China kills about 5,000 prisoners annually. In absolute terms, that would be about 14 executions daily, or in three days what the U.S. performs in an entire year. Most executions in China are reportedly carried out by lethal injection or a single gunshot to the head, although, as in the U.S., there does not appear to be a uniform national policy. 

(Image: A woman from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou shouts before being taken to be executed, Reuters, via The Atlantic)

Understanding the London riots

Stephen Reicher reminds people that trying to doing so is not a crime:

Perhaps the greatest investigation into the nature of riots was the Kerner Commission, established by US President Lyndon Johnson to find out the causes of the civil unrest that erupted in Detroit and other US cities between 1965 and 1967. The commission sent teams of investigators into the affected communities to study those who had taken part. What they found challenged many preconceptions about what had happened.

Booing a gay soldier

Many bloggers and reporters, including me, have expressed disgust over the conduct of debate audiences as of late. In particular, last night's incident wherein audience members of the Fox News/Google GOP debate booed a gay soldier's question about the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'. Sarah Rumpf tries to dispel the notion that this was a 'crowd reaction':

The person who booed was just a few rows in front of us. The booing got an immediate and angry reaction from nearly everyone sitting around him, who hissed and shushed at him. Lots of loud gasps, "Shhhh!" "No!" "Shut up, you idiot!" etc.

There was a concrete floor beneath all of our chairs. Ever been in a metal shop or warehouse with a concrete floor? Certain sounds can really resonate on that kind of surface.

I'm still unimpressed. Not so much with the audience anymore, although their vapidity makes me rather uncomfortable, but instead with Santorum himself. It was disconcerting to see that his answer continued on, having neglected to thank the soldier for his service (as would generally be considered appropriate), to lecturing his audience about how allowing gay people to serve in the military is granting them a 'special privilege'. He goes on to say (in essence) that by allowing people to declare themselves as gay, we are somehow making the military less effective, and that it undermines the military's ability to protect the United States. It's nonsense.

Worse still was the remark about playing 'social experimentation' with the military and that it's 'tragic'. Personally, I'm having trouble coming to terms with how coming out of the closet is a social experiment. Santorum's answer was littered with small pieces from his known anti-gay sentiment; it seemed to be a circuitous way of expressing those views. At least, though, we can take comfort in the unlikelihood of this man ever becoming president.

A student loan bubble

Sarah Jaffe suggests that the U.S. might have one:

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, college enrollment skyrocketed 38 percent, from 14.8 million to 20.4 million, between 1999 and 2009. (The previous decade it had only gone up 9 percent.) This should be a good thing—except it was not accompanied by measures to make tuition affordable for working families who wanted to send their kids to school. Combined with the decline in the type of union manufacturing jobs that used to allow workers to be comfortably middle-class without a college degree, we've wound up with working-class families taking on debt to send their kids to college, which they are told will help those kids make more money. 

His Holiness

"Worshipers attended a vesper service held by Pope Benedict XVI in Etzelsbach, Germany, Friday. The 84-year-old pope has a packed program, with 18 sermons and speeches planned for his four-day trip to Berlin, Erfurt and Freiburg." (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images, via the Wall Street Journal)

The reinvention of the night

Tim Blanning chronicles the rise of 'nocturnalisation'.

Has pop culture, uh, stopped?

James Parker asks the question:

Why do the major musical developments of the past decade include Guitar Hero, reunion tours, hip karaoke, the rise of the tribute band, pop stars made entirely from bits of other pop stars, and Van Morrison re-performing Astral Weeks? Lady Gaga, bless her radical retro soul, is Cher after three weeks in Warhol’s Factory. Cee Lo is Motown with swearing. This month, even as Roger Waters breaks temporarily from his transglobal plod-through of Pink Floyd’s 32-year-old rock opera, The Wall, Roger Daltrey sallies forth with a production of The Who’s 42-year-old rock opera, Tommy. One salutes the unkillability of these gentlemen, one reveres their work, but, honestly. And wherefore this pile of rock docs and rock bios, these waves of compulsive historicization? The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! … The Making of The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! … The Making of The Making of The Making of Frampton Comes Alive! …

Movies of the mind

Using a combination of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists and researchers at UC Berkeley are looking to unlock people's "dynamic visual experiences."

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers. 

Debate audiences

I have loathed them lately. Steve Kornaki evaluates the problem:

It could be that this won't end up mattering in the end. If the economy is rotten enough, swing voters might end up voting straight ticket Republican next year no matter how extreme the GOP seems to them. But when members of a Republican crowd at a nationally televised Republican event start booing members of the military, it's safe to say the GOP is playing with fire.

They seem to constantly and consistently threaten the integrity of public political discourse in the United States. Perhaps even more damaging, though, is that they appear to provide the GOP with something of an image problem: as candidates are constantly associated with the patrons and audience members of their events, it's not an entirely positive image when – for example – an audience boos a gay soldier, or cheers at the death of an uninsured man, or – perhaps worst of all – applauds an unmatched execution record. These are not the practices of a well-mannered debate audience.

I suppose I find these moments troubling not because they occur, but because they are simply ignored by those with power, those with a microphone at their disposal. The candidates and moderators have the authority to press for sound and respectful discussion, but for whatever reason they neglect to enforce reasonable conduct among the audiences. Audiences which have undoubtedly become accustomed to frequenting such events, where it seems they can get away with almost anything – cheering death, or otherwise. I don't contest the notion that it's merely a minority; I just suggest that said minority ought to be silenced, and soon.

Orlando debate, reaction roundup

Taegan Goddard:

Romney easily deflected Rick Perry's attempt at calling him a flip-flopper by stating he stood by everything in his book, No Apology, while Perry has already backed away from proposals in his book, Fed Up! Romney was the clear winner of this debate. In contrast, Perry looked tired and was barely able to finish a two hour debate. He stumbled badly over his attack lines on Romney -- almost as if he never practiced them. Not looking at Romney while attacking him was a big mistake. If this was Perry's chance to convince the GOP establishment he could win the nomination and defeat President Obama, he didn't come close to sealing the deal.

Josh Marshall:

Perry was clearly prepped with a series of attack lines. But he stumbled over them like you'd woken him up in the middle of the night. Or maybe he was a punch drunk heavyweight at the end of the 14th round. Then Romney comes in -- an amazing flip-flopper if there ever was one -- and manages to just run circles around Perry. It was almost sad. Romney was on fire. And yet, Perry's clearly this audience's guy. He's got the positions they like. Romney basically doesn't. He says he does. But people don't really buy that. So how far does the complete debate mastery go?

David Weigel:

With every debate, the arrangement seems weirder and weirder. Almost no one wants to attack Mitt Romney. No one attacks him effectively. This would have been unimaginable a few months ago, but as long as Perry rides high, it's true. Romney was focused when he needed to be about a foe he showed utter contempt for. His gauzy answers on specifics -- well, nothing new there, nothing out of the ordinary for debates.

Paul Begala:

As happened in previous debates, the audience in the Fox News/Google debate stole the show—and shocked the conscience. When a gay soldier asked a question, the audience booed. They booed a man who is risking his life for their freedom. Rarely have I seen a more unpatriotic public display. Not long thereafter, Mitt Romney gave a sappy paean to cheap patriotism, saying we’re the only country whose citizens put their hands over their hearts during the National Anthem. Fine. But shouldn’t someone have spoken up for that brave soldier? That would have taken real courage and shown real patriotism. 

Jonathan Chait:

Perry probably emerged with the stronger meta-theme. His overarching condemnation of Romney is as a slippery, quasi-Democratic figure. Romney has nothing anywhere near so strong to deploy against Perry. He has tried, elliptically, to paint his foe as unelectable. But the deeper Romney expresses contempt for Obama — tonight he accused him of never having held a job — the harder it must be for Republican voters to imagine that any nominee would actually lose to this unemployed, socialist, America-hating failure.

James Fallows:

So, yes, that's the ugliness that will last from this "Fox/Google" debate. (This whole event was not Google's finest moment.) But here's the line that truly deserves pondering upon: It came when each of the candidates was asked to suggest the ideal vice presidential candidate if he or she were the nominee. And Rick Perry -- who also said that he would "always err on the side of life," an interesting counterpoint to the cheers he got earlier for having overseen more executions than any other governor -- answered thus: "I would like to take Herman Cain and mate him up with Newt Gingrich." Reflect on that for a while. In all its ramifications. And, good night.

The end of the death penalty? Ctd

Christopher Hitchens adds his perspective on the hotly-debated issue, in Lapham's Quarterly. "Why is the United States so wedded to the infliction of the death penalty?" Read his piece; it's truly excellent. Good, also, to see capital punishment become a major point of discussion. Previous entries in this thread here and here.

Liveblogging the Google-Fox debate

Note the time structure: EDT/NZST

10:53 / 2:53: And that's it, folks.

10:47pm / 2:47pm: An interesting question, much unlike the last one. Santorum almost didn't answer it, but, in the end, chose a clown of equal imbecility to himself (that was harsh, sorry). Paul didn't answer, but the crowd seemed to like his response anyway. Perry didn't answer, but made a joke from it; Romney didn't either.

How strange that Michele Bachmann should lecture everyone on the constitution, when she so ardently supports policies on creationism and religion which run contrary to constitutional principles. Makes me wince.

10:38pm / 2:38pm: A laughably broad question. "What would you do to turn this country around?" Herman Cain asserts that there is a 'severe deficiency of leadership' in Washington at the moment. A quick reference to Reagan's 'city on the hill' description arouses a great applause from the audience. These people are so easy to please. Another emotive answer from Romney, no substance to be seen. Michele Bachmann's response isn't really worth mentioning, and Ron Paul's comments were just generally on-the-point.

I suppose we can't have expected too much from such a broad question, but at least it was nice to see Ron Paul get the recognition he deserves from the audience. Although, given how easy they appear to be, that's not saying much. Yet another Reagan quote from Santorum. They should know that he's perhaps more liberal than they remember. Apparently, too, Obama is the new King George III. So he's an English farmer now?

10:29pm / 2:29pm: Sullivan is liveblogging, and weighs in on Santorum's DADT comments:

Santorum claims bizarrely that repealing DADT means permission for sexual activity for gays in the military. This is a lie. The same rules of sexual misconduct apply to gays and straights alike. And a gay servicemember is booed by this foul crowd. Santorum keeps saying "sex is not an issue." But that's the current policy! This has nothing to do with sex, as Santorum surely knows. And again, the crowd reveals itself as hateful - even when it comes to those serving their country in uniform. This is one core reason why I cannot be a Republican. So many are bigots - and no one - no one - stands up against them. They're a bunch of bullies congratulating themselves on rooting out the queers.

Thank goodness someone said it.

10:26pm / 2:26pm: Bachmann, as expected, is now making some dim-witted response on her irresponsible HPV comments. It's still ironic that she's haranguing Rick Perry on her 'crony capitalism' charge, especially given her ridiculous record on drug company donations.

10:15pm / 2:15pm: Fact checkers at the ready: Bachmann's making comments on history. "Of course we should be able to exercise our faith...whether that occurs in a public school." She didn't even answer the question. Another example of Bachmann's affinity for emotive rhetoric over substance, albeit poorly delivered.

10:09pm / 2:09pm: "A guaranteed step towards corruption." Tell us how, great oracle.

10:03pm / 2:03pm: Romney says that Obama threw Israel under the bus, and didn't mention the hardship they've suffered. Not true.

America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring. And so we believe that any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day. Let's be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel's citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel's children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile, persecution, and the fresh memory of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they were.

That sounds pretty sympathetic to me. Oh, God: now Herman Cain's speaking. One hopes he makes better pizza than he does discussion on foreign policy.

9:49pm / 1:49pm: Now we're having the continuation of the 'illegal alien education' debate between Perry and Romney. I suppose it would be foolish to provide incentives for illegal immigration, but I agree with Perry in that it is not the fault of illegal immigrants' children. "They will become a drag on our society." He's right: they need to be educated. This is wonderful. Santorum asks why they should be given 'preferential treatment'. One wonders what Santorum's definition of 'preferential' would be; it's certainly not the one you'd find in the dictionary. "We will make America secure." Well said. Perry seems to be the winner of that particular portion of the debate, despite a little disapproval from the audience.

Meg Whitman named CEO of HP

I suppose she needs something to fill the time – y'know, given that her $144 million effort to win the governorship of California didn't really work out. The WSJ gives details on the hire.

The end of the death penalty? Ctd

Will Wilkinson sums it up perfectly:

We punish to deter. We punish to acknowledge the harm brought to the victim, to their loved ones, to their community. We punish to shame and to publicly dishonor the criminal. But the way we do it should embody ideals of humanity, magnanimity, and improvement. Punishment thus should be as light as is consistent with the requirements of security and harmonious society. We must learn, against the grain of our vengeful retributive instincts, to find satisfaction in justice that leaves the thief with his hands, the murderer with his life. 

Alimation

Philip Gould on accepting death

The former Labour spin doctor discusses his terminal cancer diagnosis with Simon Hattenstone, and reveals the extent to which it has changed his perspective on life. "The moment you enter the death phase it is a different place. It's more intense, more extraordinary, much more powerful."

Don't Ask, Don't Tell ends, ctd

A gay soldier explains why he intends to remain in the closet:

I am in no rush to tell everyone around me about my sexuality. What bothered me about "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell" was not the anonymity, but the constant fear. Finally, I can rest easy at home: I can slip into civilian clothes and go about my life as others do, without having to watch constantly over my shoulder. I suspect that many gays who are serving, are like me. We will continue to do our jobs, as we are asked, and may or may not come out. We don’t crave a big announcement, nor do we want to parade our private lives in public—soldiers, gay or straight, simply tend to be more reserved than that. Of course, as I prepare for a potential deployment, I am thankful that this time around I don’t have to fear opening up to those with whom I serve. I can be myself. I can serve my country. I can soldier on just as everyone else. Some I will tell, eventually. And then again, maybe not at all.

Another reflects on a victory long before Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

Eyes on Mrs. MacPhail

"Anneliese MacPhail, the mother of Mark Allen MacPhail, reacts after hearing that Troy Davis would be executed for killing her son." (Hyosub Shin/Atlanta Journal Constitution) More on the somewhat harrowing image, from Michael Shaw, here.

The first trillionaire

Annie Lowrey hypothesizes as to when he (or, indeed, she) may arrive:

The answer depends on variables including inflation, tax rates, and overall economic growth. In a first case, let's assume that our hypothetical trillionaire is actually only as rich as today's richest American, Bill Gates, whose estimated net worth is $56 billion. Since inflation slowly erodes the value of the dollar, it will be easier and easier to hit the trillion-dollar mark as time goes on. (We were all once Zimbabwean trillionaires, after all.) If the United States averages 3 percent annual inflation, and the richest American's fortunes keep up with Gates', America would have a trillionaire in 98 years. But now let's assume that the richest American's fortune not only matches the rate of inflation, but outpaces it by, say, an additional 3 percent a year. At that rate, we should have a trillionaire in 50 years.

Quote of the Day II

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.” – George Bernard Shaw, Getting Married

Considering the Romney threat

To Obama's re-election prospects:

Mitt Romney has quietly become a much more formidable candidate. If he gets the GOP nod, 2012 may feel like a showdown between the CEO and the professor. Guess who voters will pick with 9 percent unemployment? I’ve long had mixed feelings about Romney. On the one hand, his brains, business chops and government experience (including that bipartisan universal health-care reform in Massachusetts) make him instantly credible in the chair. His straight-from-central-casting looks don’t hurt either. Even my mother-in-law thinks he’s dreamy.

1 million dead in 30 seconds

Claire Berlinski warns of the seismic danger posed to countries with poor building codes and ill-designed urban policy:

The odds of more Haiti-scale destruction are growing by the day because the world is urbanizing. Two hundred years ago, Peking was the only city in the world with a population of a million people. Today, almost 500 cities are that big, and many are much bigger. That explains why the number of earthquake-caused deaths during the first decade of this century (471,015) was more than four times greater than the number during the previous decade, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. National Earthquake Information Center. If the fatality trend continues upward—and it will, because the urbanization trend is continuing upward, as is the trend of housing migrant populations in death traps—it won’t be long before we see a headline announcing '1 million dead in massive earthquake'. Indeed, we’ll be lucky not to see it in our lifetimes.

Rick Perry meets Michael Bay

I don't think I've ever seen political advertising employ action-film-trailer techniques to quite the same degree. It's undoubtedly the most laughably grand thing I've seen all day. Amy Davidson pulls it apart:

The Hill thought the opening looked like “a trailer for a zombie movie,” and, on the whole, it has the logic of something Jerry Bruckheimer would have put together: doom impending, accentuated by news clips, then the hero comes, surrounded by hopeful, neighborly faces. It even borrows the motif, from “Armageddon,” of a small child holding up a toy aircraft as real ones fly overhead. There are also quick glimpses of Perry as a young Air Force pilot. With Obama, it seems to say, we are solitary, poor, and have nothing, because he is a nothing—it repeatedly turns the “O” in his name into a zero. With Perry we’ll have lots of friends, and we won’t have to take the subway. 

One thing you must find particularly strange is that the ad is titled Proven Leadership. I'm not entirely sure in which part of the clip we can find evidence of such leadership, but okay. A tip to Perry: don't try so hard; it looks utterly stupid.

Fat jokes matter

The Guardian's Emine Saner interviews Jo Brand.

Quote of the Day

“There is still time, Sean, and I think on both sides of the aisle I think you’re going to see people coming and going from this race. And I’m still one of those still considering the time factor.” – Sarah Palin

Germany's good timing

Erza Klein discusses Germany's decision, ten years ago, to reform social security. In doing so, he writes, the country managed to escape the financial crisis relatively unscathed, without having to make painful fiscal cutbacks. But, as he duly illustrates, most Americans wouldn't consider the state of Germany's welfare system particularly austere:

To live in Germany, even at a time when the state’s belt is tightly cinched, is to live in a country where health care is guaranteed, where unemployment benefits will replace more than two-thirds of your income for the first year and 59 percent of your income in year five, where parents get 14 months of guaranteed leave at two-thirds pay, where the state will pay your employer not to fire you, and where you’re assured 20 days of paid vacation. By our standards, the social-welfare system is absurdly generous, not admirably spare.

"There is no shortcut to peace"

Obama delivers what has been deemed a decidedly 'pro-Israel' speech to the UN general assembly:

America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakable, and our friendship with Israel is deep and enduring. And so we believe that any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security concerns that Israel faces every single day. Let's be honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel's citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses. Israel's children come of age knowing that throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them. Israel, a small country of less than eight million people, looks out at a world where leaders of much larger nations threaten to wipe it off of the map. The Jewish people carry the burden of centuries of exile, persecution, and the fresh memory of knowing that six million people were killed simply because of who they were.

These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a successful state in their historic homeland. Israel deserves recognition. It deserves normal relations with its neighbors. And friends of the Palestinians do them no favors by ignoring this truth, just as friends of Israel must recognize the need to pursue a two state solution with a secure Israel next to an independent Palestine. 

In honesty, to me this seems far less of a 'pro-Israel' speech, but instead a plea for a divided country to sort and manage its own affairs. Obama is right when he declares that 'Israel deserves recognition', and is correct in suggesting that our constant and distant intervention in the form of statements and resolutions in the United Nations will, in the end, achieve relatively little. "Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians who must live side by side. Ultimately, it is Israelis and Palestinians – not us – who must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: on borders and security; on refugees and Jerusalem." Indeed.

The Buffett tax

Krugman, (I'd hate to say it, but) predictably, comes to its defense. It may sound ridiculous – and it flies in the face of my entire philosophy on the role of government – but I would prefer that governments institute a 'rich people must spend this portion of their income' law. We'll call it a 'bureaucracy-free stimulus package'. Yeah, that'll work. There's no doubt that the added value of Buffett's name gives some semblance of credibility to the proposed tax. Without one of the world's richest men, it would seem a purely-political proposal. Flat tax, though, as I've said previously, is the simplest and most sensible code of taxation.

What the race means for Gingrich

David Weigel moots that Newt Gingrich isn't really affecting the race, he's just amusing to cover:

There are heated policy debates happening between the top tier candidates, egged on by the second (Paul, Bachmann, Huntsman) and third (Santorum) tiers. Gingrich isn't engaging in the debates. He derides moderators whenever they try to get him to criticize fellow Republicans, as if presidential primaries were not chances for the parties to define what they'll run on, what they stand for. Gingrich is campaigning independently of the field. You can see the finish line in his eyes: Enhanced stature, new requests for TV and speaking jobs, new books. 

The end of the death penalty?

What the Troy Davis case means for capital punishment. Dahlia Lithwick writes:

Start with the fact that the Troy Davis case has created staggering levels of public interest in the death penalty. (Jeff Toobin called Davis was "the best-known person on death row" and that no death penalty case has engendered this much public doubt and outrage since the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, killed in 1953 for spying for the Soviet Union.) It is probably folly to try to understand why one death penalty case captures the public imagination more than any other. But the Davis case illustrates so many of the growing doubts about the capital system, such as questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony, the grotesque levels of racial bias that infect the capital sentencing system, and the various types of police misconduct. 

I've made my views on the death penalty fairly clear as of late. To impose a permanent, irreversible punishment in the absence of utter certainty undermines the basic principles by which we conduct ourselves morally. The Davis case seems to mark a great shift in public opinion, in an age when we appear to be increasingly aware of our own faults. And yet, some still cheer at the notion of execution. What a world this is.

(Image: "Michael Henry and other protesters for Troy Davis gather on the steps of the Georgia Capitol building, Sept. 20, 2011 in Atlanta." Jessica McGowan/Getty Images, via ABC News.)

Why are we getting fatter?

Apparently the number one reason might be that we're no longer smoking:

As the country sheds manufacturing jobs and more Americans move from blue-collar positions to white, jobs are becoming more and more sedentary. With the economy in tatters, food stamp use (and, with it, the consumption of unhealthy foods) is on the rise. But there's another factor contributing to our weight gain that is often overlooked: Smoking.

Smokers are less likely to be obese. And the declining use of cigarettes across the country -- due to both tightening pocketbooks and new laws (thanks, Mayor Bloomberg) -- accounts for a bigger increase in the obesity rate in the U.S. than any other factor, according to paper authors Charles L. Baum and Shin-Yi Chou, who have both written with some frequency on the economics of obesity. 

Obama's epiphany

Jonathan Chait, now at New York magazine, writes:

Obama also wants to clarify just who is responsible for the economy and the long-term budget. This is the hardest part. People instinctively hold the president responsible for everything that happens. They think of the president as a kind of king. Obama wants to make the point that he is not getting his way, and that the blame for the current state of affairs lies with Republicans, but he wants to do so without appearing weak. That’s why he is avoiding getting sucked into legislative negotiations that he knows won’t work. 

Peter Hessler's reading list

Recent MacArthur grant recipient and long form journalist Peter Hessler has now been writing for the New Yorker for twelve years. Jon Michaud compiles a list of Hessler's pieces for the magazine, in full.

What happened to GOP concern for poverty?

Isaac Chotiner poses the question:

In the last few years, these few traces of compassion and caring seem to have vanished completely from the GOP. At the most recent Republican debate, members of the Tea Party audience applauded the idea that society should allow people without health insurance to die. (In the previous debate, Rick Perry was cheered for Texas’s astronomical number of executions; see our recent editorial here.) And the candidates themselves remain completely uninterested in talking about poverty, or the uninsured, or indeed anyone downtrodden, unless it is to stir resentment over how little those same people pay in taxes. It appears that compassion—even simply at the rhetorical level—is not just passé: it’s also a sign of weakness. What happened?

I admit that it would be difficult to argue that the current iteration of the Republican Party lacks compassion entirely, but it wouldn't be entirely unreasonable to suggest that there is some measure of paucity when it comes to concern for the more vulnerable of society. I think you know what I mean: when we've reached the point at which it is considered acceptable to applaud the "should we just let the uninsured man die?" question, things aren't looking terribly promising in the compassion department.

Note, though, that it wasn't Ron Paul applauding the potential death of uninsured people, but instead the debate's relentlessly vapid Tea Party audience, who consistently and continually surprise us with their ignorance. One would hope that it's not the death of the individual they're applauding, but instead the freedom to make such risks and take such responsibility for oneself. It should also be noted that, in response to the question, Paul gave an immediate 'no'. He still has my support.

As someone who feels some sense of fiscal conservatism, I would prefer that we explore other avenues for saving people in their darkest hour; those without health insurance ought not to be tossed aside carelessly, but I would prefer that government is not the primary entity to offer such support. However, I cannot support callous disregard for those in need. There should be no doubt in our minds that these candidates do care about the poor, and should care about the poor. It's perfectly acceptable to hold a discussion whereby we can explore different avenues for providing the afore-mentioned care, but it is a far more important issue than one which can be dismissed with a simple, "Let him die."

Quote of the Day

“Of all the illusions that beset mankind none is quite so curious as that tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those who differ from us in opinion.” — Elbert Hubbard

Why the Middle East will never be the same again

Robert Fisk argues that the Palestinians won't achieve statehood, but their movement will surely gain a place in history:

Personally, I think "Palestine" is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs' land for their colonial projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don't believe me. Israel's massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as punishment, the "cordons sanitaires" beside the Jordanian frontier, the Israeli-only settlers' roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing that prevents the existence of "Greater Israel" is the obstinacy of those pesky Palestinians.

Rejecting higher education

J. M. Coetzee profiles the poet Les Murray, and writes, in relation to his views on higher education:

Though he has at various times held university fellowships, Murray has little good to say about universities, particularly about what goes on in the literature classroom. Academic literary critics are, to him, heirs of an Enlightenment hostile to the creative spirit. Behind its mask of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, he sees the Enlightenment itself as a cabal of rootless, disaffected clercs scheming to grasp power, usually by controlling the fashion for what may or may not be said in public (“political correctness”). Universities have been turned by the Enlightenment into “humiliation mills” that grind out generations of students ashamed of their social origins, alienated from their native culture, recruits to a new metropolitan class whose Australian manifestation Murray dubs “the Ascendancy.”

I can't say I agree.

Richard Dawkins, a basher of orthodoxy

Michael Powell profiles the world's most influential evolutionary biologist:

He did not find fame spending dusty days picking at shale in search of ancient trilobites. Nor has he traipsed the African bush charting the sex life of wildebeests. He gets little charge from such exertions. “My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side,” he says, listing the essential questions that drive him. “Why do we exist, why are we here, what is it all about?” It is in no fashion to diminish Professor Dawkins, a youthful 70, to say that his greatest accomplishment has come as a profoundly original thinker, synthesizer and writer. His epiphanies follow on the heels of long sessions of reading and thought, and a bit of procrastination. He is an elegant stylist with a taste for metaphor. And he has a knack, a predisposition even, for assailing orthodoxy. 

Rick Santorum's Google problem

Apparently he contacted them over Dan Savage's neologism, and how it ranks highly in the company's search results. "I suspect if something was up there like that about Joe Biden, they’d get rid of it...To have a business allow that type of filth to be purveyed through their website or through their system is something that they say they can't handle but I suspect that's not true." Pleased to see Google's stance on matters such as this remains consistent, but I suspect they were just as outraged as any of us at Santorum's disgusting comments.

Religious figures as fictional characters

Julian Sanchez expands on the idea posed by Jonathan Rée:

[Rée argues] the so-called New Atheists misunderstand religion when they treat it primarily as a set of truth-claims on par with a scientific theory. When we read or watch explicitly fictional stories, we sometimes talk about the “suspension of disbelief” that’s necessary to become truly immersed in a tale. We need to find the story, in some sense, “believable” in the sense that it has a kind of internal coherence, without being committed to it’s literal truth. This is the sense in which it’s “unrealistic” for Booster Gold to win a one-on-one fight against Darkseid, even though, of course, there’s nothing remotely realistic about either character.

When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story. On this view, Richard Dawkins is a little like that guy who keeps pointing out that all the ways superhero physics don’t really make sense. 

Bertrand Russell negates it perfectly, albeit a great many years earlier: "There can't be a practical reason for believing what isn't true... either the thing is true or it isn't. If it is true, you should believe it, and if it isn't, you shouldn't."

Debunking the Cul-de-Sac

A helpful guide, from Emily Badger.

Banning coffee

Societies have tried it before, writes Luke Fentress:

Perhaps the strangest attempt to ban coffee came in Berlin in 1777. Fredrick the Great had no taste for the drink of merchants and worried what its effect might be on the army. “The King does not believe that coffee-drinking soldiers can be depended on to endure hardship or beat his enemies.” He’d rather the troops drank the more manly, Germanic alternative: beer, which had clearly won more wars than any espresso had. 

Don't Ask, Don't Tell ends, ctd

Using a pseudonym, Josh Seefried used Facebook groups and other resources to establish an organization for LGBT troops called OutServe. He is said to have connected around 4,000 such troops around the globe, including many serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. As the controversial 'Dont Ask, Don't Tell' policy comes to an end today, the airman reveals his identity fully.

Now I and thousands of other gay and lesbian troops can walk into our units free from fear of losing our jobs, our integrity restored. For most of us, the repeal of DADT has been Y2K all over: something hyped, but nothing more. Most soldiers probably knew the date of Sept. 20 more for the season premiere of Glee than for the date DADT finally died. The hype built around the repeal of DADT has created a situation in which there will be many gay troops who are scared to come out of the closet, a fear built upon decades of slandering gay soldiers. We were painted as soldiers who would put fellow soldiers and this nation at risk. Instead of honoring the courageous actions of troops who were gay and lesbian, we were being fired, investigated, and told we did not deserve to be part of this team. Any contribution offered by a gay soldier was overshadowed by his or her sexuality.  

(Image via New York Times; caption: "Staff Sgt. Chris Cano, a Marine recruiter, prepared to set up Tuesday in Oklahoma. The Marines got a small but warm reception.")

Two frontrunners, Romney and Perry, come from different worlds

In spite of their close position in the run for the GOP nomination, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney come, it seems, from almost different worlds entirely. Philip Rucker highlights their differences:

One was born into a privileged family in a tony Michigan suburb; the other, onto a flat expanse of West Texas dirt with no indoor plumbing. One spent his youth tooling around his father’s car factory; the other, selling Bibles door to door so he could afford to buy a car. One excelled at Harvard University, simultaneously earning law and business degrees and swiftly climbing the corporate ladder; the other, his hope of becoming a veterinarian dashed when he flunked organic chemistry at Texas A&M University, joined the Air Force.

Where Mitt Romney is obedient and cautious, Rick Perry is bombastic and spontaneous. If they had attended the same high school, they probably would have hung out at opposite ends of the hallway. Their relationship today is said to be frosty, if there is one at all. “In every single possible way, they come from different worlds,” said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, who advised Romney in his 2008 race but is unaffiliated in the 2012 race. “You can see the playbook pretty clearly here: It’s populist against patrician, it’s rural Texas steel against unflappable Romney coolness, conservative versus center-right establishment, Texas strength versus Romney’s imperturbability, Perry’s simplicity versus Romney’s flexibility.”