For the record, the alleged perpetrators of these crimes should be investigated, prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law, including summary execution if/as warranted. There is no excuse. That said, their actions should not be used to drive macro policy decisions that by virtually everyone's estimation would result in far far greater carnage.
Don't even ask how I tripped over this one; but it got my attention in a great big hurry.
First, some background.
Last week, we dropped my daughter off at college. It's her freshman year. She is our oldest. It's a big deal for all of us and one we're only beginning to come to grips with.
I'm over-the-moon happy for her. It's a small, high-calibre institution--her first choice. The place has managed to cultivate some super-dedicated teaching-oriented professors, from what we can tell, and places great value on their professional and academic interrelationships with students.
She's already made plenty of friends. She got all the courses she wanted. Reviewing the reading lists, I'm delighted to see plenty of meaty, conventional classics. No fru-fru Marxist manifestos (e.g., from Howard Zinn). The school is in the South. That may help explain it. That all helps make us happy for her and enables me to walk by her near-empty room without getting too sentimental.
She's more than two hours away from us now--by plane. And yet I sensed, as we drove away, that I would have felt the same kind of gut-wrenching grey-sadness-mixed-with-excitement I've been feeling even had she gone somewhere close. I haven't written about it yet because the emotions are still way too raw (couldja tell?). The insights are many, but so far at least, inadequately coalesced--even for a blog.
That's all background--an explanation of what sensitized me to this new book ('Romance in the Ivory Tower: The Rights and Liberty of Conscience', by Paul R. Abramson)--which I'll admit I haven't read... and don't plan to. The reviews and endorsements are enough.
The first suspicion-raising endorsement featured on Amazon is from Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU. The other endorsements are from male college professors. That makes perfect sense in light of the book's primary thesis: college professors should be allowed to hit on their students.
The picture below is of the author, Paul R. Abramson, described by the Chronicle of Higher Education as "a happily married, 57-year-old psychology professor at UCLA... who says he has never had a serious romantic relationship with one of his students."
I try very hard to resist premature judgment--really I do--particularly based on appearance. I don't know this guy. He may be perfectly nice and utterly moral. For all I know, he may be devoutly religious--scrupulous about excising any remnants of lust in his heart.
But I'm sorry, in light of the Svengali picture (above), the topic of the book and the triple qualifier to his statement--no serious romantic relationship with one of his students--I'm not betting against my better (and in this case admittedly snap) judgment: this smells fishy. (I'm just imagining the home dialogue: But honey, it wasn't serious. It was only sex, and she wasn't registered in my class this semester!)
Here's the book description on Amazon, in its entirety:
Allen Ginsberg once declared that "the best teaching is done in bed," but most university administrators would presumably disagree. Many universities prohibit romantic relationships between faculty members and students, and professors who transgress are usually out of a job. In Romance in the Ivory Tower, Paul Abramson takes aim at university policies that forbid relationships between faculty members and students. He argues provocatively that the issue of faculty-student romances transcends the seemingly trivial matter of who sleeps with whom and engages our fundamental constitutional rights.My libertarian readers may be inclined to disagree, but as a parent, it seems rather obvious that although 18 is the legal age for consent (a fact that I must, and do, accept as a matter of law), it is a transitional age in terms of maturity, judgment and social development. Recent brain science backs this up. Whatever kind of psychology Abramson teaches, it apparently doesn't take that into account and that's disgraceful.
By what authority, Abramson asks, did the university become the arbiter of romantic etiquette among consenting adults? Do we, as consenting adults, have a constitutional right to make intimate choices as long as they do not cause harm? Abramson contends that we do, and bases this claim on two arguments. He suggests that the Ninth Amendment (which states that the Constitution's enumeration of certain rights should not be construed to deny others) protects the "right to romance." And, more provocatively, he argues that the "right to romance" is a fundamental right of conscience--as are freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Campus romances happen. The important question is not whether they should be encouraged or prohibited but whether the choice to engage in such a relationship should be protected or precluded. Abramson argues ringingly that our freedom to make choices--to worship, make a political speech, or fall in love--is fundamental. Rules forbidding faculty-student romances are not only unconstitutional but set dangerous precedents for further intrusion into rights of privacy and conscience.
With all due respect to Ms. Rice, who's better than her recent predecessors, this piece in today's WSJ (free at OpinionJournal) illustrates why John Bolton should have the job instead.
Kim [Jong-il] is once again besting the U.S. in accomplishing his two central strategic objectives: staying in power and preserving his nuclear-weapons program. The working groups currently underway do nothing to achieve the proper ends of U.S. foreign policy. A few weeks ago in Shenyang, China, the "denuclearization" working group met without visible progress, even on permanently dismantling Yongbyon.In short, Bolton understands--as does the president--the difference between strategy and feel-good, sound-byte headlines. To put it in sports terms: watch the body, not the head-fake.
There is still simply no evidence that Pyongyang has made a decision to abandon its long-held strategic objective to have a credible nuclear-weapons capability. This inconvenient fact should make it impossible for the State Department to concede on other issues, even if it were inclined to do so. Creative minds are therefore working on ways to explain that any forthcoming North Korean declaration of its nuclear capabilities is "full and complete," thus eliminating the remaining troubling obstacles to full normalization of relations.
Must-read article in the Times (of London). I've predicted a major military showdown with Iran for quite some time. This makes it clear that that eventuality has only become more likely.
Clearly, Iran now believes it can profit from confrontation, which hardliners around President Ahmadinejad appear to be actively seeking. For the past six months, Washington has warned Iran to stop supplying weapons to the insurgents in Iraq. The response has been not only a contemptuous denial but also the dispatch of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to other areas of confrontation. Iranian officials have also admitted that they are supplying weapons to the Taleban in Afghanistan...I'm not sure the American hard-liners are being balanced by concern in Israel and by Iran's arrogant behavior so much as they are solidified in their assumptions--a good thing in this case. Not all consensus needs to come from the UN to be valid. (In fact, none of it does.)
Iran would do well to listen not only to the words but also the tone of Mr Bush’s latest warning. Anger, exasperation and frustration at Iran’s failure to rein in its export of terrorism or to curb its push for a nuclear capability are changing the balance of the debate in Washington. Those who urge further United Nations sanctions, a search for a diplomatic solution and the isolation of Tehran’s hardliners can point to little success. Those who argue that Mr Bush must destroy Iran’s nuclear programme before he leaves office are being balanced by the intense concern in Israel and by Iran’s own arrogant behaviour. If Iran is deaf to warnings from Washington, it should not ignore the tough new language in Europe...
Fascinating article in the Times (of London that is) on the man who saved JFK in WWII:
An elderly villager in the Solomon Islands, one of the poorest and most remote corners of the Pacific, has been honoured by the United States Navy for a crucial, but little remembered, contribution to world history — the day, 64 years ago, when he saved the life of the future American President, John F. Kennedy.I've maintained for some time that George Bush--not only in policy terms, but also familial precedents and historical challenges--has far far more in common with JFK than with his own father (or for that matter, than JFK had with what his brother Ted has become). Good for this administration for honoring this unsung hero.
Last week, Donald Winter, the US Navy Secretary, presented gifts including an American flag to Eroni Kumana, a native scout for the Allied forces who came to the aid of Kennedy and his comrades during the Guadalcanal campaign in August 1943. Mr Kumana, who is now in his mid-eighties and almost deaf, paddled 35 miles (56km) through Japanese-controlled waters to summon help, carrying a message by the future president, carved into a coconut.
“I think it’s a remarkable circumstance,” said Mr Winter. “He changed our history... and I’m very thankful to him for doing it.”
United Nations officials found vials of dangerous chemicals [phosgene gas], which had been removed from Iraq a decade ago, in a U.N. building in New York... The Iraqi weapons inspectors came across the material as they were closing their offices.So aside from the obvious (WMD were indeed in Iraq, at least as late as 1997 according to this brief mention) what kind of bloated bureaucracy keeps running for four and a half years after their existence has become moot? Oh, never mind...
Mr. Bin Laden, please call your office... on a land-line.
Mobile phones can take as little as ten minutes to trigger changes in the brain associated with cancer, scientists claimed [Wednes]day.
Americans on average use more than four times as many wireless minutes per month as Europeans, according to... an American Consumer Institute study released last week...
In the latest New York Magazine, writer Phillip Weiss takes on the super-difficult challenge of plumbing the mystery of Matt Drudge. The piece ('Watching Matt Drudge') is neither entirely satisfying, entirely fair, nor entirely complete. Like Drudge himself however, it's juicy enough to read through--at which point one is rewarded with this marvelously conflicted series of quotes:
[On his radio show] Drudge said, “I need Hillary Clinton. You don’t get it. I need to be part of her world. That’s my bank. Like Leo DiCaprio has the environment and Al Gore has the environment and Jimmy Carter has anti-Americanism… I have Hillary.” ...Drudge can’t wait for Hillary to be president. “I’m on the record that Hillary Clinton, she’s already in.” ...One night, speaking of his fears of the coming crackdown, Drudge said, “I’m personally looking for a plan-B offshore that Hillary won’t have any kind of Interpol connections.”What Weiss completely fails to grasp is how it is possible for Drudge (or anyone) to size up the megalomaniacal caricature she-devil shoo-in for the Democratic nomination (and many people's shoo-in for president), intuit the truly nightmarish dimensions of such an administration, and yet coolly and objectively conclude that the dysfunctional chaos that would result would be good for his business.
Try for a moment to imagine the following mild, non-judgmental lede buried somewhere deep and obscure in the bowels of a thumbnail story in New York Times:
Republican presidential candidate [whomever] will give to charity the $23,000 in donations he has received from a fundraiser who is wanted in California for failing to appear for sentencing on a 1991 grand theft charge.Now try to stop laughing.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton will give to charity the $23,000 in donations she has received from a fundraiser who is wanted in California for failing to appear for sentencing on a 1991 grand theft charge.There's a reason this is coming out in the deadest possible week of the annual news cycle well before the first primary: Hillary wanted it that way and she had the chits to call in to ensure that it did. Were the subject a Republican, it would have broken three weeks before the general election and stayed on the front page for days.
I've given very little time to discussing NASA's recent Y2K-related revision of historical temperature data on the assumption that it's become well known via other sources. That may be a too-hasty conclusion on my part. Short version: some of the hottest years on record in the U.S. actually took place in the 1930's--well before the bulk of CO2 emissions--not the '90s or this decade as many claim. Oops.
The revision and its implications have become fodder for debate, with the global warming acolytes claiming that 0.15 degrees Centigrade is really not such a big deal and so the prevailing hysteria stands and the rest of us noting that 0.15 degrees is certainly a big deal when the alarmists are talking about it in the warming sense, so why shouldn't it also be a big deal when the numbers are revised down by that much? (Call this the 'ratchet' theory of climate change politics.) Today's WSJ has the money quote:
...environmentalists have been making great hay by claiming that recent years, such as 1998, then 2006, were the "warmest" on record. It's... not clear that the 0.15 degree temperature revision is as trivial as NASA insists. Total U.S. warming since 1920 has been about 0.21 degrees Celsius. This means that a 0.15 error for recent years is more than two-thirds the observed temperature increase for the period of warming.As I've said before: all of this rests on how much faith one chooses to put in the ability of fallible human beings to make predictions over the very long term. Science is on solid ground when it relates itself to historical data, not speculation. Bad news for those subscribing to the Global Warming Religion: the only decent long-term forecasts in human history were divinely inspired via a handful of Jewish prophets over 2400 years ago.
If nothing else, the snafu calls into question how much faith to put in climate change models. In the 1990s, virtually all climate models predicted warming from 2000-2010, but the new data confirm that so far there has been no warming trend in this decade for the U.S. Whoops. These simulation models are the basis for many of the forecasts of catastrophic warming by the end of the century that Al Gore and the media repeat time and again. We may soon be basing multi-trillion dollar policy decisions on computer models whose accuracy we already know to be less than stellar.
What's more disturbing is what this incident tells us about the scientific double standard in the global warming debate. If this kind of error were made by climatologists who dare to challenge climate-change orthodoxy, the media and environmentalists would accuse them of manipulating data to distort scientific truth. NASA's blunder only became a news story after Internet bloggers played whistleblower by circulating the new data across the Web.
So far this year NASA has issued at least five press releases that could be described as alarming on the pace of climate change. But the correction of its overestimate of global warming was merely posted on the agency's Web site. James Hansen, NASA's ubiquitous climate scientist and a man who has charged that the Bush Administration is censoring him on global warming, has been unapologetic about NASA's screw up. He claims that global warming skeptics -- "court jesters," he calls them -- are exploiting this incident to "confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change."
So let's get this straight: Mr. Hansen's agency makes a mistake in a way that exaggerates the extent of warming, and this is all part of a conspiracy by "skeptics"? It's a wonder there aren't more of them.
For the record, I don't own a gun and don't plan to. I've shot at targets before and gotten reasonably good at it, so it's not about being afraid of them. For myself, I just don't see the need.
I live in a low crime area in a small city where 911 emergency response is reliable. Still, I'm glad--if only intellectually--to have the choice to own a gun if I want to. If I moved to the country (or to a high crime neighborhood), I might act on that choice.
Apparently the authors of this ('U.S. Most Armed Country...') didn't see things the same way. The undercurrent of the article is the usual, unchallenged notion that guns are bad and thus a country with lots of guns (i.e., the U.S.) is therefore bad. They work the logic the wrong way.
The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report released on Tuesday said.One of the things the article fails to elaborate upon is a what-if scenario that goes something like this:
U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.
About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.
"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.
India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China... had 3 firearms per 100 people.
What if... the numbers were reversed? What if China and not the United States had enshrined in its constitution a Second Amendment two centuries ago? And what if it had been perfectly OK for two centuries for the government of the United States to confiscate any kind of weapon it chose from any private citizen at any time, as is pretty much the case today in communist China?It's impossible to know. Cultural, social, historical, familial and religious factors (among others) play large roles in shaping history. Guns are merely a part of that equation, and probably more result than cause in the greater scheme of things. Nonetheless, as hard as it may be to envision a United States without Constitutional freedoms, it is much easier to envision China sitting still for Mao's mass slaughter during the Cultural Revolution had nine out of ten citizens been armed.
"Firearms are very unevenly distributed around the world. The image we have of certain regions such as Africa or Latin America being awash with weapons -- these images are certainly misleading," Small Arms Survey director Keith Krause said.Did the authors stop to consider that in places like Africa and Latin America it is the non-ubiquity of guns that has led to regular mass violence, revolution and tyranny? I.e., that some people having them and many people not having them creates an inequity that practically invites oppression? (If it weren't for the subject being guns here, I'd almost sound like a liberal!)
"Weapons ownership may be correlated with rising levels of wealth, and that means we need to think about future demand in parts of the world where economic growth is giving people larger disposable income," he told a Geneva news conference.
The two charts below speak volumes about what has been mostly an ungrounded philosophical jousting match about what kind of healthcare system provides the most advanced or broadest coverage or costs the least or is the fastest or most flexible or most 'just'. As in higher education, this kind of analysis stands out for its attempt to cut through a fog of discussion around inputs and processes and cut straight to results. (H/T: No Oil for Pacifists)
The first chart is the most interesting. The data are deeper, richer, broader and ultimately more useful. (Five year survival rates are a well-accepted metric for discussing disease mortality). I like the first chart best also because of the source (the UK Telegraph, via Reason Magazine).
The second chart, while perfectly valid, comes from a more editorial source: a WSJ op-ed ('Sicko in Europe') by Danielle Capezzone, president of the productivity committee of the Italian Chamber of Deputies (courtesy of the CARPE DIEM blog). The data are still perfectly valid. They're just narrower.
There's one big caveat that was only lightly treated (and mostly by commenters) in the various articles and posts referencing these numbers and that is demographics. Europe's population is older. I'm not sure how much that affects the expected results (e.g., could it ever fully account for the 50% better survival of male cancer patients in the US vs. the UK?) but it does affect them.
Much as I loathe the idea of government-run healthcare (would any rational person elect to have more things run like the DMV or the IRS?), intellectual honesty demands that one consider other input factors as well. E.g., anyone who's ever spent time in the US and the UK knows that the reduction in smoking rates has lagged in the latter, that drinking to excess isn't exactly frowned upon in the pub culture there and that fiber and exercise are a relatively new concepts in British cooking and leisure time respectively.
That's not a slam on my British friends (many of whom are health-conscious if not health-fanatical). It's merely a comparison of health-related behaviors on the margin. Which is not to say that the US is exactly a paragon of health.
It's just worth being honest about what a health care system can do and what remains (and should remain) in the province of individual behavioral choice. (My small city is about to enact a trans fat ban, leading me, a marathon runner, to contemplate downing a box of donuts on the front steps of city hall in protest against the nanny state.)
But I digress...
If we on the conservative side are eager to trot out demographic and behavioral arguments when it comes to the amply documented socio-cultural suicide and moral drift of Europe, we have to acknowledge those same facts when discussing healthcare system inputs. Older cars fail sooner and more often; so it is with people.
So, with all of those qualifications, one still comes 'round to some difficult facts such as 47.1% five-year cancer survival for men in the Netherlands (or 44.8% in England) vs. an astounding 66.3% in the U.S. The Eastern European stuff is easy to explain away. Those figures are not.
I find the much tighter spread on the female numbers fascinating. Are we looking at cultural factors? At relative investment differences in research on gender-specific cancer? I don't know.
Discuss.
UPDATE: OK, speaking of health outcomes, this is pretty funny.
I've argued previously for a long-term geo-historical approach to understanding climate change, its triggers, its manifestations and its impacts--as against the prospective, model-based approach that's been dominant in the debate so far.
For illustration, it's worth looking at two snapshots I took off of WeatherUnderground this morning depicting different methods for forecasting the track that Hurricane Dean might take.
The first image (below) is what the models (and thus the modelers--i.e., fallible human beings and their assumptions) say will happen. The second is what has actually happened in the past when storms of roughly this size have been at this location.
What the models say
What history saysJose Padilla has been convicted. See if you can guess which lead sentence came from which newspaper. Scroll down for answers. Some may surprise you--as they did me. Choices (in alpha order): BBC, Guardian, Miami Herald, NY Daily News, NY Times, USA Today, LA Times
a) In a significant victory for the Bush administration, a federal jury found Jose Padilla guilty of terrorism conspiracy charges on Thursday after little more than a day of deliberation.*************************************************
b) Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who was held for 3-1/2 years without charge as an enemy combatant, was found guilty yesterday of supporting Muslim terrorism.
c) Jose Padilla's five-year journey through the federal government's murky war-time justice system ended Thursday in conviction on three terrorism support charges in a verdict that offered a boost to the administration's checkered record in terror-related prosecutions.
d) Jose Padilla, a US citizen branded an "enemy combatant" by the Bush administration, faces life in jail after being found guilty yesterday of conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere.
e) A federal jury in Miami on Thursday convicted Jose Padilla on charges of aiding terrorist operations abroad, a verdict that follows a long legal battle that pitted the Bush administration against civil liberties groups over how terrorism suspects are detained and should be prosecuted.
f) US citizen Jose Padilla has been found guilty of plotting to kill people overseas and supporting terrorism.
g) Jose Padilla, a larger-than-life symbol for the Bush administration's war on terrorism, was found guilty along with two other defendants Thursday on charges of plotting to support Islamic extremists overseas.
Blame it all on those late-model SUVs--8,000 years late, that is.
Roseanne Roseannadanna, please call your office.
Last week, NASA corrected an error in its data of temperature records, apparently caused by a Y2K bug. Global warming alarmists are now enduring a fault line in their argument, and anti-warmers have another arrow in their quill.Oh. That's very different. Never mind.
The problem was discovered by Toronto-based Steve McIntyre, who runs the blog climateaudit.org. He found that the hottest year on record in the U.S. is 1934, not 1998 as NASA previously claimed. After making adjustments to NASA’s data, McIntyre concluded about the hottest years in the U.S.:
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
...NASA quickly made corrections when McIntyre pointed out the faulty data.
[Since it's such a major change to the accepted wisdom and therefore "fit to print", the NY Times will surely make the correction... any day now. Ed.]
Who is to say that warming is more important than any other widespread problem that we face? The answer to the 'who' questions keeps bringing me back to people who are against economic development on principle, who believe that the earth would be a better place if all these filthy people were not on it, and those who believe that their rules for how people should live trump any individual's preferences. The kind of people who would scratch a large SUV with a key to show their disapproval. There are legitimate environmental / public health issues which get little debate, and no publicity...
GW has become a religion. There are believers and non-believers, and the debate that we experience is a religious debate between fanatics and heretics.
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds yesterday, on global warming:
...the whole debate seems to me to be a religious sideshow. Regardless of what you think about global warming, there are lots of good reasons to avoid burning fossil fuels. But the global-warming discussion in the media is a consensus identity narrative designed to achieve political ends, not an effort to find facts or protect the environment. [emphasis added]H/T: Ged/JH
French President Nicolas Sarkozy's remarks on his arrival in Kennebunkport today:
"When we see, on the edge of the Atlantic, all the cemeteries with white crosses, those are the young Americans who came to die for us. That is more important than Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Bush"I might just have to revisit my personal boycott of French products. Just please Mr. Sarkozy, don't go yelling in your native language at reporters trying to take pictures of you in New Hampshire.
Check out this great explanation, excerpted from Tod Lindberg's new book, The Political Teachings of Jesus, of the Christian Beatitudes (aka, Sermon on the Mount) as a brilliantly integrated (but radical) self-solving political system,
From even the highest point in the Jesusian hierarchy of the “good person,” [in the Beatitudes] it is but a single step to the lowest, the poor in spirit. It’s the difference between bearing one’s persecution gladly and breaking under its weight. And it’s not necessarily within your control...The piece is long but rewarding for those--like me--who have read the Beatitudes repeatedly and found them to be strangely paradoxical, even as they are strangely inspiring.
Jesus confronts the “bad person” not with something so simple — and easy to reject — as a competing model of how to live a better life. Rather, he forces a radical confrontation within the “bad person” over the very possibility of his or her continued existence...
His ambitious political agenda is to rid the world of both persecuted and persecutors — opposite sides of the coin of persecution.
"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."
Aug 11, 2:58 PM (ET), CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - An Egyptian Muslim who converted to Christianity and then took the unprecedented step of seeking official recognition for the change said he has gone into hiding following death threats.
Mohammed Hegazy, who sparked controversy when pictures of him posing with a poster of the Virgin Mary were published in newspapers, was shunned by his family and threatened by an Islamist cleric vowing to seek his execution as an apostate.
"I know there are fatwas (religious edicts) to shed my blood, but I will not give up and I will not leave the country," the 25-year-old Hegazy told The Associated Press from his hideout Thursday...
Hegazy, who took the Christian name Beshoy after an Egyptian monk, converted to Christianity nine years ago and began attending church in his hometown of Port Said on the Suez Canal.
"I started readings and comparative studies in religions," he said. "...The major issue for me was love. Islam wasn't promoting love as Christianity did."
He said after his conversion was discovered, police detained him for three days and tortured him. He said he was harassed several more times.
Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor... [creating] constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. "The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages," ...concluded [Dr. Gregory] Clark [of UC, Davis].The article doesn't touch the difficult but obvious conclusion that--if this theory is true--the welfare state (and to an even larger degree, socialism) creates an environment in which the values that were antithetical to the creation of the modern industrialized world (over-spending, impulsiveness, violence and love for leisure--aka, laziness) are actively selected-for instead.
As the progeny of the rich pervaded all levels of society, Dr. Clark considered, the behaviors that made for wealth could have spread with them. He has documented that several aspects of what might now be called middle-class values changed significantly from the days of hunter gatherer societies to 1800. Work hours increased, literacy and numeracy rose, and the level of interpersonal violence dropped.
Another significant change in behavior, Dr. Clark argues, was an increase in people’s preference for saving over instant consumption, which he sees reflected in the steady decline in interest rates from 1200 to 1800.
“Thrift, prudence, negotiation and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent and leisure loving,” Dr. Clark writes.
Around 1790, a steady upward trend in production efficiency first emerges in the English economy. It was this significant acceleration in the rate of productivity growth that at last made possible England’s escape from the Malthusian trap and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution.
Historians used to accept changes in people’s behavior as an explanation for economic events, like Max Weber’s thesis linking the rise of capitalism with Protestantism. But most have now swung to the economists’ view that all people are alike and will respond in the same way to the same incentives. Hence they seek to explain events like the Industrial Revolution in terms of changes in institutions, not people.In other words, there's something about the values-driven, behavior-driven explanation for economic success that just won't go away no matter how much liberal academics try to bury it. They'd prefer to avoid the once well-accepted Weberian explanation that points resoundingly at Protestantism in general and to 18th-century Protestant resurgence in England in particular (e.g., John Wesley and others).
Dr. Clark’s view is that institutions and incentives have been much the same all along and explain very little, which is why there is so little agreement on the causes of the Industrial Revolution. In saying the answer lies in people’s behavior, he is asking his fellow economic historians to revert to a type of explanation they had mostly abandoned and in addition is evoking an idea that historians seldom consider as an explanatory variable, that of evolution.
It's only a small step forward, but man, is this ever overdue (from David Wessel's 'Capital' column in today's W$J):
The American medical and higher-education systems regularly boast, with some justification, that they are the best in the world. But in recent years they have been forced to confront tough questions: How do we know we're getting our money's worth? How do you know you're doing such a good job? Is there some way to measure your performance that the rest of us can understand?He can say that again. Having just written the first of what will be many big checks to an elite school for the first of my two kids, this subject has been on my mind. Shopping for college is an odd experience for those used to shopping for things like houses, cars and groceries. One gets the sense that things have always been this way (opaque) and that any real movement for change is barely nascent.
...the spotlight [has] moved to colleges.... state schools are designing a template for college Web sites that, for those that opt to use it, shows in standard format: (1) details about admission rates, costs and graduation rates to make comparisons simple; (2) results from surveys of students designed to measure satisfaction and engagement, and (3) results of tests given to a representative sample of students to gauge not how smart they were when they arrived, but how much they learned about writing, analysis and problem-solving between freshman and senior years. [emphasis added]
The last one is the biggie.
Ever since the 2008 Olympics were awarded to Beijing, on July 13, 2001, I've felt vaguely ill whenever I think of it--hoping without reason that the unthinking conventional assumptions behind the award (e.g., that the games would make China more 'open' and 'free') were not as unreasonable as they have clearly turned out to be. Funny thing about turning off one's common sense: reality eventually creeps in. Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch has a sobering op ed ('Olympic Word Games') in this morning's Wall $treet Journal:
...as we enter the home stretch before the games, the prospects for media and free expression reform are not good.The feeling is not unlike how I've regarded the Tour de France this year now that it's clear that doping is pervasive and permanent. It's a pitifully small issue by comparison, I know; but it's illustrative--at least for me. Until recently, I was a live-coverage TDF junkie every July. This year, I didn't watch even a minute. I couldn't tell you who contended, much less who won. An event once I revered with belief-suspended wonder had been permanently spoiled.
This spring, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television's Propaganda Administration Department announced a ban on, among other topics, discussing whether the media should be free. Franz Kafka would have smiled at this stunning act of auto-censorship, which means that Chinese citizens now can't even publicly argue in favor of a controlled press.
The state broadcast authorities also imposed new regulations on performing artists and Internet users to ensure the promotion of only a "healthy socialist culture."
...[recent] guidelines forbid... journalists from reporting on corruption issues, legal reform and efforts by activists to protect human rights. They also prohibit coverage of past political catastrophes, such as the Cultural Revolution or the Anti-Rightist Movement. The 1989 Tiananmen Massacre is so taboo it couldn't even be discussed in the meeting to decide what was taboo.
I'm writing this post to start a discussion. For those without cable, feel free to move on to more conventional fare. For those who've seen either of the first two episodes of "Saving Grace" on TNT (third one coming tonight), I'd welcome your views.
The show--headlining Holly Hunter--seems to me a tremendously mixed bag. The two episodes I've watched so far on Tivo seem to showcase all of the most cynical Hollywood dreck turned up on full, and yet... there's plenty of more interesting spiritual content.
Let's start with a few easy swipes. Holly Hunter is billed in all of the trailers, plus half of the media hype on the show, as bringing 'feistiness' to it. Uh, yeah... and your point would be?
Anyone who's seen Holly Hunter in anything knows she could bring 'feistiness' to reading the phone book. She virtually defines 'feistiness'. It would have said about as much if George Lucas had observed that casting Alec Guinness as Obi-Wan Kenobi brought gravitas to that role (or any other) or that Christopher Walken has brought creepiness to virtually everything he's ever been in. So what? She's a type. The show needs to be more than that to keep my attention.
Another quick swipe: the show obviously intends to tap into a spiritually interested audience and yet the content is far more mature than most secular shows I've seen. Yeah, I know God's interest is in reaching sinners, not the righteous, but really... Does Ms. Hunter's character need to be a wildly alcoholic (bourbon in the morning), chain-smoking, hair-trigger, perennially angry, pistol-waving, rule-breaking, drunk-Porsche-driving, vehicular-homicide-committing fight-hungry, marriage-busting nymphomaniac slut who swears and lies at virtually every opportunity in order to make the very basic point that she--like the rest of us--is desperately in need of a savior?
It all has struck me as overkill--a way to get in all of the skin and violence and craziness Hollywood usually gets in but under a spiritual headline, covering all of their bases. I think they started with the edginess and worked back to the spiritual rather than the other way around.
The show has also struck me--and here's where I'm handicapped by my geography and some of my mid-continent readers may be able to weigh in more authoritatively--that the show's setting in semi-rural Oklahoma is more than a bit grafted on. The characters seem caricature-ish--like Manhattanites or denizens of Los Angeles told to affect Oklahoma mannerisms, which is probably closer to the truth than the idea that the show was written, staffed and directed by Oklahoma natives. Again, please weigh in, even if you're from say, Arkansas or Nebraska. I'm totally disqualified to comment on this one by virtue of my proximity to Harvard Yard and Beacon Hill. It just doesn't ring true somehow and I can't put my finger on it.
Finally (or rather, not finally--I billed this as a discussion and I meant it), the show is totally anemic in its theology--a point that even an agnostic or skeptic couldn't fail to notice. The version of God we're treated to is a kind of Unitarian, progressive, kumbaya blur-the-edges all-around nice guy who doesn't make any distinctions whatsoever between the world's major religions and doesn't stand for or against anything in particular other than nudging Ms. Hunter's character (Grace) away from her insanely over-the-top lifestyle of compulsive licentiousness.
About the closest we get to anything remotely Trinitarian or orthodox (or even boring mainstream Christian for that matter) is a brief visit with her brother (a Catholic priest) who sits in front of a half-veiled out-of-focus crucifix. Grace's sister wears a crucifix and goes to Mass but always talks in vague terms about 'God'. We don't seen an identifiable evangelical at all, which seems odd. Improbably for those characters and those settings, the name 'Jesus', much less 'Christ' is never mentioned. Both names, it seems, are more dangerous in TNT's view than any of the blue language we get from Grace herself... which is disappointing.
One other note: maybe it's just me, but I can't help seeing most television and film these days as derivative. It doesn't take long to come up with the mash-up one-liner. I thought I'd had a semi-original insight in observing that the high concept of 'Saving...' was Closer Touched by an Angel with a dash of CSI. No such luck.
Lest this sound completely negative, it isn't. I plan to watch episode three. Despite all of the show's problems, I'm rooting for Grace to be saved, even if it's a terribly hesitant-to-speak-its- name, watered-down theist version of what I would hope for her character. I'm captivated by the death-row inmate (I won't spoil it by revealing how he knows Grace). And I'm definitely amused by the angel; without the self-deprecating Earl, the whole thing would fail completely.
Your thoughts?
Thomas Sowell, reflecting on a July 30th editorial by two scholars from the liberal Brookings Instition in the almost-goes-without-saying liberal New York Times, articulates what ought to be both common sense and common ground for when (not if) U.S. troops leave Iraq.
(The latter option--'if'--has always been a fantastical strawman, specifically designed for the purpose of criticizing the president's policy. As one of my common-sensical, centrist friends likes to note, last he checked, U.S. troops were still in Germany. Perhaps that's ten or fifteen years too long (maybe even eighteen), but it's certainly not sixty years too long.)
Sowell writes:
American troops do not need to stay in Iraq until the last vestige of terrorism has been wiped out. The point when it is safe to begin pulling out is the point when the Iraqi military and police forces are strong enough to continue the fight against the terrorists on their own. That point depends on how much and how long the current progress continues, not on how much the Democrats or their media allies need an American defeat before the 2008 election.H/T: The Anchoress
The books I would carry over thirty miles and a vertical mile on my back into the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming needed to be as small and rich as the samples one gets at the most exclusive city confectioneries. Harry Potter was definitely out, as was everything else on offer at the airport. My mini-bible (Psalms, Proverbs & NT--two by three inches and under three ounces) was definitely in for the second year in a row.
But what else to bring for afternoons pinned down in the tent by above-treeline thunderstorms? My library obliged: A dog-eared, 1959 copy of G.K. Chesterton's 1908 masterpiece, "Orthodoxy". I sealed it carefully in a heavy-duty quart-sized Ziploc bag and wedged it into a corner of my pack where it wouldn't be crumpled.
The book's small stature (seven by four-and-a-quarter inches; four ounces exactly) was only part of the calculation. Reading Chesterton, I discovered, is like eating butter-creme frosting. One cannot resist the temptation to devour it all, yet to achieve that end, one must do so slowly, savoring each morsel. It is highly caloric in the intellectual and spiritual sense. Chesterton doesn't waste paragraphs. One senses that some sentences may have been a full day's work of polishing and distilling. The temptation to apply the highlighter is almost irresistible. I won't even attempt to summarize. Just read it.
The sense I got from it mixed futility with elation. Elation at coming home to a set of ideas I'd sensed were right but had never known went so incredibly deep. Futility at the effort involved in persuading what Chesterton calls "free-thinkers" that they are anything but free. He's brilliant in taking on something I've hammered since starting this blog: Are 'progressives' moving towards a fixed and valid truth they can define or are they constantly moving the goal-posts? In other words: progessing... towards what, exactly?
Chesterton is quoted on many conservative blogs because he writes like a top-drawer blogger: not just pointing out where his critics are wrong, but utterly eviscerating any basis they might have imagined they had for believing what they do. Chesterton is not one for ineffectual slaps about the face; he goes straight for the feet, felling socially conventional points of view by challenging their deepest underpinnings. (Here's just one modern-day example.)
One can't help reading Chesterton and getting a sense for how there's nothing new under the sun--and discovering that that's a good thing, not a reactionary one, because in solidity one finds divinity and eternity.
The dark side of that personally, as I've noted, is a creeping sense of futility in reflecting on the fact that those of us blogging for conservative principles ('orthodoxy') in religion, social relations and politics may be fighting a battle others have fought much more eloquently for generations--and lost. Not because the principles are unjust or incorrect, but because deep, cross-disciplinary, faith-filled, foundational thinking of the kind Chesterton did has been drifting out of fashion for a very long time.
One thing one notices in reading Chesterton is how well he managed to formulate those kinds of arguments without the common 20th-century reference points for evil and social decay we now take for granted (WWII, Vietnam, the 60's, etc.). Human nature is unchanging. Chesterton's ability to make modern points with century-old examples proves that out.
If that all sounds terribly arrogant, read it and decide for yourself. Just be sure to read it slowly. They both may be British, but JK is no GK.
Great firsthand piece in today's OpinionJournal by Romanian expat Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the highest-ranking intelligence official ever to have defected from the Soviet bloc:
...many of Mr. Bush's domestic detractors... claim the president concocted the war on terror for personal gain. But as someone who escaped from communist Romania--with two death sentences on his head--in order to become a citizen of this great country, I have a hard time understanding why some of our top political leaders can dare in a time of war to call our commander in chief a "liar," a "deceiver" and a "fraud."Lt. Gen. Pacepa elaborates further on how the left--in Europe as well as the U.S.--has taken many pages directly out of the cynically anti-American communist propaganda playbook he helped to pioneer in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Deliberate or accidental, it's a fact that's hard to avoid. Worth reading in full.
I spent decades scrutinizing the U.S. from Europe, and I learned that international respect for America is directly proportional to America's own respect for its president...
Now we are again at war. It is not the president's war. It is America's war, authorized by 296 House members and 76 senators... if America's political leaders, Democrat and Republican, join together as they did during World War II, America will win. Otherwise, terrorism will win...
On July 28, I celebrated 29 years since President Carter signed off on my request for political asylum, and I am still tremendously proud that the leader of the Free World granted me my freedom. During these years I have lived here under five presidents--some better than others--but I have always felt that I was living in paradise. My American citizenship has given me a feeling of pride, hope and security that is surpassed only by the joy of simply being alive. There are millions of other immigrants who are equally proud that they restarted their lives from scratch in order to be in this magnanimous country...
For once, the communists got it right. It is America's leader that counts. Let's return to the traditions of presidents who accepted nothing short of unconditional surrender from our deadly enemies. [emphasis added]
Wyoming, that is. Here are a few pics from my recent trip. Yes, that's yours truly in the red bandana, fishing (successfully) for trout at 10,000 feet. (The new header is also from the trip.)
From the NYT political blog yesterday:
Mr. Romney was interviewed on Thursday morning by Jan Mickelson, of WHO, who essentially challenged him on whether he was really a devout Mormon... Much of the exchange occurred when they are not on the air, but the radio show had a camera that was taping Mr. Romney, something he clearly did not know. In the video clip, Mr. Romney seems clearly irritated that Mr. Mickelson is trying to inform him of the particulars of his church’s beliefs.Although I believe the Mormon faith is fundamentally misguided (many Mormons aren't; including some truly centered and good-doing former roommates and colleagues) this story instinctively irritated me. I spent some time yesterday afternoon pondering why.
After a two week break from blogging (only nine days of which can be excused by physical absence, plus a fingernail-chewing computer crash), I thought it time to weigh in, starting with the well-known Mark Twain quote that titles this post. To my dismay, I discovered it is apocryphal. The original quote was penned in May, 1877: "...the report of my death was an exaggeration". Close... but twisted by time.
Either way, I have been neither ill nor dead. Far from it.
I returned last week (this time with the eldest Maru child, now 18 and about to head off to college!) to the sublime off-trail high-altitude back-country in the Wind River Range of Wyoming that I visited last year. Six days completely off-grid does a great deal to reset one's mind and spirit. For four of those days, we didn't see another human soul--only moose, eagle, wolf(!), antelope, trout (in my frying pan) and the tracks and signs of many elusive elk. Pictures to follow.
Eternal Stuff
--which I'll admit I haven't read... and don't plan to. The reviews and endorsements are enough.
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