In 1971, the University of Maryland was a popular spot for anti-war rallies. It was close to Washington DC, but offered vast grassy spaces.

I was a student there and attended rallies and protests for the same reason many, if not most, of my fellow students attended: it was exciting. There was music, people passed the pipe and we got to feel righteous at the same time.

Rock music was the bait that drew the crowd. The strident political speeches (”puppet regime” always seemed to come up) were the interruption. One night I got a ride home from some guy who complained about all the talk, “Too many raps, man, too many raps.”

This came to mind reading Lee Harris’s analysis of the Tea Party movement and David Brooks assertion that hippies and Tea Partiers have much in common.

Today many intelligent observers grope to discover what the Tea Party is all about and where it belongs on the Richter Scale of historical events. Does it signal the approach of a catastrophic upheaval, like the 9.0 earthquake of 2004 which sent devastating tsunamis across the Indian Ocean? Or will the Tea Party movement register only as a light quake in the 4.0 to 4.9 range, entailing “noticeable shaking of indoor items, rattling noises,” with “significant damage unlikely”?

When a political, religious, or cultural movement is first stirring, those who try to forecast its future development seize one feature of the movement and attempt to deduce its ultimate historical significance from this one feature alone.David Brooks, the columnist for the New York Times, has recently written an article clearly aiming to put Tea Partiers in their place. Their political movement represents only a minor quake. It may cause some rattling noises but poses no threat to the status quo. It too will pass, and everything will get back to normal again. The two established parties will regain their electoral monopoly and all will be well. According to Brooks, the Tea Party movement is not only similar to hippie movement of the 1960s in terms of its lack of overall historical significance, it is a lowbrow revival of that movement, leading Brooks (or at least his editors) to dub today’s Tea Partiers “The Wal-Mart Hippies”—the title of his article.

The phrase “Wal-Mart Hippies” is certainly attention-getting, as was no doubt intended. After all, who would suspect that there lurked a secret affinity between the carefree flower children of late ’60s and the hard-working folks who shop at Wal-Mart? The two groups would seem a study in antithesis. The flower children of the ’60s put flowers in gun barrels and chanted sweet songs of peace. At Wal-Mart people buy guns to put bullets in and use them to shoot cute and cuddly animals. Hippies scorned work and lived in idleness. The Wal-Mart shopper often works two jobs just to squeeze by. Flower children listened to acid rock. The folks at Wal-Mart adore Country and Western. Hippies celebrated free love. The people who fill the aisles of Wal-Mart marry, settle down, and raise families—often quite large ones. The hippies grooved on Zen or chanted Hare Krishna. The Wal-Mart crowd happily keeps Jesus at the wheel. Flower children opposed war. The Wal-Mart shopper sends off sons and daughters to fight them.

Flower children opposed war. The Wal-Mart shopper sends off sons and daughters to fight in them.But Brooks is not really comparing the Tea Party movement to the hippie movement of the ’60s. Instead, he is comparing it to the New Left of the same decade. In one respect he appears to have made an honest mistake. In his mind, the New Left and the hippie movement have strangely merged. Members of the New Left “went to Woodstock”—didn’t they? Actually, no, they didn’t. We should not confuse the carefree, frolicking hippie movement of that era with the mirthless and dour New Left of the same period. Hippies were whimsical spirits. The New Lefties were mirthless zealots. Hippies smoked pot and had fun. New Lefties read Lenin and plotted revolution. New Lefties regarded hippies as frivolous and fatuous. Hippies looked on New Lefties as the ultimate downers.

Let us concentrate on his main point. According to Brooks, the Tea Party movement should best be understood as a right-wing version of the New Left, and he lists a number of characteristics that they share: the desire to topple the status quo; a taste for conspiracy theories; a fear of being co-opted by agents of the establishment; a belief that human beings are basically good while power and authority are basically evil; a largely negative program based on an antagonism to the current state of things. In addition, Brooks points out that both the Tea Party movement and the New Left “go in for street theater, mass rallies, marches, and extreme statements”

In drawing these comparisons, Brooks scores several good hits. But his argument falls short in two important respects.

Those features shared by the Tea Party and the New Left are the staple elements of all forms of political radicalism.First, the set of characteristics Brooks has noted have been the common features of all the revolutionary movements throughout history, both great and small. The same points could be made about the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, the Puritan Revolution of the 17th century, the American and French revolutions of the 18th century, the myriad revolutionary movements that broke out in Europe during the 19th century, and the Russian revolution of the 20th century. All these movements sought to topple the status quo, believed in conspiracy theories, feared co-optation, distrusted authority, began by tearing down the old order, and employed street theater, usually in the form of riots and violent insurrections. In short, those features shared by the Tea Party and the New Left are the staple elements of all forms of political radicalism. This greatly undermines Brooks’s attempt to minimize the historical potential of the Tea Party movement. True, it shares features of the historically insignificant New Left movement of the ’60s; but it also shares features with historically portentous movements, like the Protestant Reformation and the American Revolution.

Second, Brooks completely ignores the most striking feature of the New Left—the very quality that distinguished it from the Old Left. The Old Left, in good Marxist fashion, based its revolutionary hopes on the men and women who must work for a living, while the New Left went out of its way to culturally alienate working-class Americans by supporting the Black Panthers, attacking patriotism, insulting the police, and demeaning military service. Drawn largely from major universities, and often springing from privileged and affluent backgrounds, the adherents of the New Left were elitist to the core, assuring that the appeal of the New Left would be narrowly limited to only a tiny segment of the American population. But that is precisely the point at which Brooks’ comparison between the New Left and the Tea Party movement falls to pieces. The Tea Party movement has mass appeal; the New Left did not.

I’ve never attended a Tea Party, but can safely guess no one complains about ‘too many raps.”

From Very Short List:

We bet you’d be surprised to learn that the person designated to save the world from all its problems happens to be you. But thanks to the very clever and excellently executed interactive movie The Hero, you’ll see that that’s precisely the case.

All you have to do is upload a photo of yourself and the site will take care of the rest, as your image becomes seamlessly integrated into a convincing-looking film (we won’t spoil the surprise further). Swedish agency Draftfcb came up with this viral concept as a way of convincing a young and metropolitan audience to start paying a broadcast fee as part of the Swedish public-service system. And it’s been successful—there have been 2,500 new broadcasting fee subscribers through the Web site since the launch of the campaign, far surpassing the goal of 500. But while we can’t contribute, we can enjoy this terrific viral marketing for the fun that it is.

Try the Hero site here.

OneCosmos:

We all know that there are economic bubbles that inevitably burst and punish investors for their irrational exuberance and willing suspension of disbelief about the laws of economics.

In fact, it seems that these bubbles are not so much built into the free market system as built into man, since we have more or less averaged about one per generation over the past two or three centuries. Thus, the “law of the economic bubble” is a painful lesson that each generation must learn anew.

I’m not an economist, but it seems to me that a bubble occurs when price outruns value, and it bursts when price returns to value, i.e., its actual worth. In 2006, the price of my house was absurdly higher than its value. In fact, even now its price is too high, but that’s California for you.

But this is not a post about economics; or perhaps we could say that it is about “psycho-spiritual economics,” for what I would like to suggest is that what occurs in economics reflects a deeper principle, and that there also exist intellectual and spiritual bubbles that eventually burst and send their investors hurtling to the ground.

To cite the most recent dramatic example, the climate change industry has been revealed to be a classic intellectual bubble. As with economic bubbles, its worth as a scientific theory became absurdly overvalued, to the point that more and more outrageous claims were required to prop it up. People were willing to pay the price, so long as the illusion of value was maintained. But since the bubble has burst, intellectuals who invested heavily in it are left holding penny stocks that even then no one will buy, for they are essentially worthless.

Most people are not scientists, just as they are not economists. Therefore, they rely on economic advisors to tell them how and where to invest, and they rely on science to tell them “what to believe,” i.e., where to invest their credence. But science itself becomes a classic bubble when it morphs into scientism, because it pretends to know things it not only cannot know, but can never know in principle. And because man is everywhere man, this is when science begins taking on all of the trappings of a primitive and poorly thought out, ad hoc religion.

Charles Krauthammer:

…Industrial society produces an astonishing array of mass-produced products — cars, drugs, medical devices — that are at once wondrous and potentially lethal.

The wondrousness sometimes eludes us. Even the lowliest wage earner has an automobile that conveys him with more luxury, more freedom, more comfort than any traveling king ever experienced in all the centuries before the 20th. And modern medicines — why, vaccines alone — have prevented more suffering, more debility and more death than anything ever conceived by man.

But these wonders can be lethal. And sorting out the endless complaints about these products is maddeningly difficult — though sort you must, otherwise every complaint would require shutting down the factories, and we’d have no industrial society at all.

The question is: How do you distinguish the idiosyncratic failure from the systemic — for example, the single lemon that came off the auto assembly line vs. an intrinsic problem inherent in that model’s engineering? How do you separate one patient’s physiology producing a drug side effect vs. an intrinsic problem with a drug that makes it unacceptably dangerous?

Consider the oddity of those drug commercials on television. Fifteen seconds of the purported therapeutic effort, followed by about 45 seconds of a rapidly muttered list of horrific possible side effects. When the ad is over, I can’t remember a thing about what the pill is supposed to do, except perhaps cause nausea, liver damage, projectile vomiting, a nasty rash, a four-hour erection and sudden death. Sudden death is my favorite because there is something comical about its being a side effect. What exactly is the main effect in that case? Relief from abdominal bloating?

And how many sudden deaths does it take until we say: “Enough,” and pull the drug off the market?

It’s not an easy calculation. Six years ago, Vioxx, a powerful anti-inflammatory, was withdrawn by the manufacturer because it was found to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke from 0.75 percent per year to 1.5 percent. The company was pilloried for not having owned up to this earlier, but some rheumatologists were furious that the drug was forced off the market at all. They had patients with crippling arthritis who had achieved a functioning life with Vioxx, for which they were quite willing to risk a long-shot cardiac complication. The public furor denied them the choice.

George Will:

Current economic hardships have had what is called in constitutional law a “disparate impact”: The crisis has not afflicted everyone equally. Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost were held by men. This injury to men is particularly unfortunate because it may exacerbate, and be exacerbated by, a culture of immaturity among the many young men who are reluctant to grow up.

Increasingly, they are defecting from the meritocracy. Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates. The Pew Research Center reports that 28 percent of wives between ages 30 and 44 have more education than their husbands, whereas only 19 percent of husbands in the same age group have more education than their wives. Twenty-three percent of men with some college education earn less than their wives. In law, medical, and doctoral programs, women are majorities or, if trends continue, will be.

In 1956, the median age of men marrying was 22.5. But between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5. A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents’ homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women.

Mike Stivic, a.k.a. Meathead, the liberal graduate student in All in the Family, reflected society’s belief in the cultural superiority of youth, but he was a leading indicator of something else: He lived in his father-in-law Archie Bunker’s home. What are today’s “basement boys” doing down there? Perhaps watching Friends and Seinfeld reruns about a culture of extended youth utterly unlike the world of young adults in previous generations.

…produce nonsense such as this book review in the liberal In These Times

Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain’t pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee—even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, “had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. … Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better.” Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little “self-gift,” an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean “third space” between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.

Or maybe people just liked the stuff.

This week’s Frontline is Digital Nation, a 90-minute survey of how digital technology is affecting the way we live.

There are segments on distracted multitasking kids, IBM employees who only meet in Second Life and Air Force drone pilots who don flight suits and go to war 7500 miles away.

If you missed it, the whole show is available online here, broken into segments.

George Will:

Last week’s Supreme Court decision that substantially deregulates political speech has provoked an edifying torrent of hyperbole. Critics’ dismay reveals their conviction: Speech about the elections that determine the government’s composition is not a constitutional right but a mere privilege that exists at the sufferance of government.

How regulated did political speech become during the decades when the court was derelict in its duty to actively defend the Constitution? The Federal Election Commission, which administers the law that rations the quantity and regulates the content and timing of political speech, identifies 33 types of political speech and 71 kinds of “speakers.” The underlying statute and FEC regulations cover more than 800 pages, and FEC explanations of its decisions have filled more than 1,200 pages. The First Amendment requires 10 words for a sufficient stipulation: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.”

Extending the logic of a 1976 decision, the court has now held that the dissemination of political speech requires money, so restricting money restricts speech. Bringing law into conformity with this 1976 precedent, the court has struck down only federal and state laws that forbid independent expenditures (those not made directly to, or coordinated with, candidates’ campaigns) by corporations and labor unions. Under the censorship regime the court has overturned, corporations were even forbidden to send political communications to all of their employees.

The New York Times calls the court’s decision, which enables political advocacy by (other) corporations, a “blow to democracy.” The Times, a corporate entity, can engage in political advocacy because Congress has granted “media corporations” an exemption from limits.

The Washington Post, also exempt, says the court’s decision, which overturned a previous ruling upholding restrictions on spending for political speech, shows insufficient “respect for precedent.” Does The Post think the court incorrectly overturned precedents that upheld racial segregation and warrantless wiretaps? Are the only sacrosanct precedents those that abridge (others’) right to speak?

Alarmists say the court’s ruling will mean torrential spending by large for-profit corporations. Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the Service Employees International Union — it has spent $20 million on politics in the past five election cycles — says a corporation will “funnel their shareholders’ money straight to a campaign’s coffers.” Wrong. Corporate contributions to candidates’ campaigns remain proscribed.

Cleta Mitchell, Washington’s preeminent campaign finance attorney, rightly says that few for-profit corporations will jeopardize their commercial interests by engaging in partisan politics: Republicans, Democrats and independents buy Microsoft’s and Pepsi’s products. If for-profit corporations do plunge into politics, disclosure of their spending will enable voters to draw appropriate conclusions. Of course, political speech regulations radiate distrust of voters’ abilities to assess unfettered political advocacy.

Mitchell says the court’s decision primarily liberates nonprofit advocacy groups, such as the Sierra Club, which the FEC fined $28,000 in 2006. The club’s sin was to distribute pamphlets in Florida contrasting the environmental views of the presidential and senatorial candidates, to the intended advantage of Democrats. FEC censors deemed this an illegal corporate contribution.

Barack “Pitchfork” Obama, in his post-Massachusetts populist mode, called the court’s ruling a victory for, among others, “big oil” and “Wall Street banks.” But OpenSecrets.org reports that in 2008 lawyers gave more money than either of them, and gave 78 percent of the donations to Democrats, who also received 64 percent of contributions from the financial sector.

Even if it were Congress’s business to decide that there is “too much” money in politics, that decision would be odd: In the 2007-08 election cycle, spending in all campaigns, for city council members up to the presidency, was $8.6 billion, about what Americans spend annually on potato chips.

As much as liberals, particularly the urban upscale variety, proclaim their solidarity with the middle class, at heart they regard it with disdain and pity.

Consider Neal Gabler’s LAT’s essay on the excellent NBC drama, Friday Night Lights. First, Gabler indulges in hyperbole:

…at a time when NBC is being vilified, here is one thing it has done right. Despite paltry ratings, it has continued to support what may be the best dramatic series in the history of television. That’s right: history.

Umm, did Gabler not see The Wire? The Singing Detective?

But never mind — the show is excellent. Set in a fictionalized version of Odessa, Texas, it follows various characters as they make their way through life.

High school football is a key source of entertainment in those parts, much as basketball is in Indiana (see Hoosiers).

Or, as Gabler puts it:

The provenance of “Friday Night Lights” is H.G. Bissinger’s now-classic 1990 book of the same name that followed a year in the life of Odessa, Texas, and of the oil town’s perennially superb high school football team, the Permian Panthers. Bissinger’s Odessa was desolate – physically and spiritually parched.

It was racked by boom-and-bust oil cycles, by bigotry and racial division, by misplaced educational priorities and by a general sense of doom. What it had was the Permian Panthers to fill its existential void as they filled its 20,000-seat stadium on Friday nights during football season. As Bissinger quotes one booster, “Life really wouldn’t be worth living if you didn’t have a high school team to support.”

One wonders if the booster wasn’t just enjoying a bit of hyperbole at the author’s expense. After all, how do folks get by the other two-thirds of the year when there’s no football to distract them from their purported misery?

Do suicides spike after the playoffs?

Back to Gabler:

Friday Night Lights” may owe as much to Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 film “The Last Picture Show” as to Bissinger’s book. Everyone in Dillon seems to realize, even if only subconsciously, that those football highs are temporary and that the miasma of Dillon may be permanent. Everyone seems to realize that the very best of life may be those four years playing Panthers football with a crack at the state championship, and that everything after that is anticlimactic. And everyone seems to realize that the dreams they harbor are likely to be unfulfilled.

Texas is a big place with a lot of “Dillons” but only one can be state champion. Does the rest of the state stumble about in gloom? Judging by the health of the Texas economy, I’d say no.

Hope comes hard. Like the town in which they live, nearly all of the characters are thwarted: Jason Street, the all-state quarterback headed to Notre Dame, breaks his neck on the first show; his replacement, sophomore Matt Saracen, is tentative about football and most other things; Street’s best friend, fullback Tim Riggins, is a handsome and bighearted but promiscuous lout with no ambition; Riggins’ former girlfriend, Tyra Collette, coasts through life trying to shake her bad-girl reputation; Street’s girlfriend, town beauty Lyla Garrity, has her life derailed by his injury; Smash Williams, the star running back, wrestles with whether he has the size to succeed at college football, his only ticket out of Dillon.

To Gabler, small towns are only for escaping. He cannot imagine that millions of small town people actually enjoy fulfilling lives: raising kids, loving each other, going to the movies, going fishing, and yes, watching/playing sports.

If life cannot be good in Dillon, where is the hope? The suburbs? Oh, heck no — the suburbs are routinely mocked by the elite left.

That leaves the urban areas where the have-nots live as sullen, often criminal wards of the state while the haves go to out to sushi restaurants, gallery openings and (oops!) therapists. Oh, the miasma!

Who, then, can be happy in Gabler’s world? Boring and stifling as he may find small town America, the people living here are filthy rich by global standards.

My hunch is that the left projects its own unhappiness on others. They’re miserable, so everyone else must feel that way, too. If you think you’re happy, you must be too dumb to know otherwise.

Pity locally, pity globally.

Byron York:

A new study by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reveals some startling differences between Republicans and Democrats on issues of spirituality and supernatural phenomenon.

The study, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” reports that a significant number of Americans practice a mixture of religious beliefs, and “many also blend Christianity with Eastern or New Age beliefs such as reincarnation, astrology and the presence of spiritual energy in physical objects.” The report is not specifically about partisan differences, but the results of the study are broken down by party affiliation, among many other categories. And the news on that front is that Democrats are far more likely to believe in supernatural phenomenon than Republicans.

“Conservatives and Republicans report fewer experiences than liberals or Democrats communicating with the dead, seeing ghosts and consulting fortunetellers or psychics,” the Pew study says. For example, 21 percent of Republicans report that they have been in touch with someone who is dead, while 36 percent of Democrats say they have done so. Eleven percent of Republicans say they have seen a ghost, while 21 percent of Democrats say so. And nine percent of Republicans say they have consulted a fortuneteller, while 22 percent of Democrats have.

From the Pew study:

Daron Acemoglu in Esquire:

Say you’re a world leader and you want your country’s economy to prosper. According to this Clark Medal winner from MIT, there’s a simple solution: start with free elections.

We are the rich, the haves, the developed. And most of the rest — in Africa, South Asia, and South America, the Somalias and Bolivias and Bangladeshes of the world — are the nots. It’s always been this way, a globe divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine, though the extent of inequality across nations today is unprecedented: The average citizen of the United States is ten times as prosperous as the average Guatemalan, more than twenty times as prosperous as the average North Korean, and more than forty times as prosperous as those living in Mali, Ethiopia, Congo, or Sierra Leone.

The question social scientists have unsuccessfully wrestled with for centuries is, Why? But the question they should have been asking is, How? Because inequality is not predetermined. Nations are not like children — they are not born rich or poor. Their governments make them that way.

You can chart the search for a theory of inequality to the French political philosopher Montesquieu, who in the mid-eighteenth century came up with a very simple explanation: People in hot places are inherently lazy. Other no less sweeping explanations soon followed: Could it be that Max Weber’s Protestant work ethic is the true driver of economic success? Or perhaps the richest countries are those that were former British colonies? Or maybe it’s as simple as tracing which nations have the largest populations of European descent? The problem with all of these theories is that while they superficially fit some specific cases, others radically disprove them.

It’s the same with the theories put forth today. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, attributes the relative success of nations to geography and weather: In the poorest parts of the world, he argues, nutrient-starved tropical soil makes agriculture a challenge, and tropical climates foment disease, particularly malaria. Perhaps if we were to fix these problems, teach the citizens of these nations better farming techniques, eliminate malaria, or at the very least equip them with artemisinin to fight this deadly disease, we could eliminate poverty. Or better yet, perhaps we just move these people and abandon their inhospitable land altogether.

Jared Diamond, the famous ecologist and best-selling author, has a different theory: The origin of world inequality stems from the historical endowment of plant and animal species and the advancement of technology. In Diamond’s telling, the cultures that first learned to plant crops were the first to learn how to use a plow, and thus were first to adopt other technologies, the engine of every successful economy. Perhaps then the solution to world inequality rests in technology — wiring the developing world with Internet and cell phones.

And yet while Sachs and Diamond offer good insight into certain aspects of poverty, they share something in common with Montesquieu and others who followed: They ignore incentives. People need incentives to invest and prosper; they need to know that if they work hard, they can make money and actually keep that money. And the key to ensuring those incentives is sound institutions — the rule of law and security and a governing system that offers opportunities to achieve and innovate. That’s what determines the haves from the have-nots — not geography or weather or technology or disease or ethnicity.

Put simply: Fix incentives and you will fix poverty. And if you wish to fix institutions, you have to fix governments.

How do we know that institutions are so central to the wealth and poverty of nations? Start in Nogales, a city cut in half by the Mexican-American border fence. There is no difference in geography between the two halves of Nogales. The weather is the same. The winds are the same, as are the soils. The types of diseases prevalent in the area given its geography and climate are the same, as is the ethnic, cultural, and linguistic background of the residents. By logic, both sides of the city should be identical economically.

And yet they are far from the same.

On one side of the border fence, in Santa Cruz County, Arizona, the median household income is $30,000. A few feet away, it’s $10,000. On one side, most of the teenagers are in public high school, and the majority of the adults are high school graduates. On the other side, few of the residents have gone to high school, let alone college. Those in Arizona enjoy relatively good health and Medicare for those over sixty-five, not to mention an efficient road network, electricity, telephone service, and a dependable sewage and public-health system. None of those things are a given across the border. There, the roads are bad, the infant-mortality rate high, electricity and phone service expensive and spotty.

The key difference is that those on the north side of the border enjoy law and order and dependable government services — they can go about their daily activities and jobs without fear for their life or safety or property rights. On the other side, the inhabitants have institutions that perpetuate crime, graft, and insecurity.

Nogales may be the most obvious example, but it’s far from the only one. Take Singapore, a once-impoverished tropical island that became the richest nation in Asia after British colonialists enshrined property rights and encouraged trade. Or China, where decades of stagnation and famine were reversed only after Deng Xiaoping began introducing private-property rights in agriculture, and later in industry. Or Botswana, whose economy has flourished over the past forty years while the rest of Africa has withered, thanks to strong tribal institutions and farsighted nation building by its early elected leaders.

Now look at the economic and political failures. You can begin in Sierra Leone, where a lack of functioning institutions and an overabundance of diamonds have fueled decades of civil war and strife and corruption that continue unchecked today. Or take communist North Korea, a geographical, ethnic, and cultural mirror of its capitalist neighbor to the south, yet ten times poorer. Or Egypt, cradle of one of the world’s great civilizations yet stagnant economically ever since its colonization by the Ottomans and then the Europeans, only made worse by its post-independence governments, which have restricted all economic activities and markets. In fact, the theory can be used to shed light on the patterns of inequality for much of the world.

Read it all.

A repost from Maggie’s Farm

Probably yes.

While I am quite pleased and content with my own (first) marriage, when I talk with unhappy people, which I do all day, I am often reminded that the nuclear family is a very recent invention, that the notion of romantic love is also recent, that arranged marriages and marriages of convenience or necessity were the norms of the past, and that humans are not “naturally” monogamous – whatever I might mean by “naturally”.

When you put the nuclear family together with dreams of enduring romantic love, it’s a set-up for disappointment. The nuclear family, unlike the extended family (or the tribe), is isolating and does not provide a broad base of support in life. Intense romantic love, unlike plain old-fashioned strong attraction and desire, is a regressed state of mind - some shrinks half-jokingly call it a form of insanity. Not that it isn’t great fun, but it gives way to reality in time, although the best marriages can rekindle the old feeling from time to time.

One thing that is probably not talked about enough is how many marriages are not founded in “true love,” but instead are founded on loneliness, desire for companionship, desire for babies, desire for security, fear of becoming an old maid, friendship, desire for a social foundation, etc. This is not a bad thing, but I sometimes wonder whether the contrived and ridiculously costly fairy-tale trappings of the typical American wedding is designed to obscure those facts. Young folks these days often talk about having “friends with benefits” while they await true love, without realizing that “friends with benefits” can be one description of one kind of satisfying marriage.

But to get back on track here, yes, I believe that we tend to wish that a marriage could meet all of our emotional and physical needs. Shrinks term that a regressive, ie childish, wish – not just because it is unrealistic, but also because if emphasizes the “meeting my needs”  aspect of a relationship rather than emphasizing ”how can I try to give these people (wife, kids)  a good life”.

read on.

Once again, ignorance marches on with the full force of Big Baloney. This week we are  being treated to summaries of the past decade.

Trouble is, the current decade still has a year to go. Just as the millenium didn’t really begin until 2001 (Arthur C. Clarke chose that date for a reason), the new decade will not begin until 2011.

Here’s an explanation even a newspaper editor can understand. Count your fingers. When you get to ten is that finger the last of a complete set or an extra?

Some history:

For New Year’s Eve 1900, New Yorkers pulled out all the stops to welcome the new century with fireworks, a lineup of bands and speakers, and blazing displays of electric lights. It all followed a mountain of hype in the media about the coming of the 20th century and the passing of the 19th.

It’s 100 years later. A few cities are planning big celebrations.

By and large, though, we’ve been there, done that.

Like us, our 1800 and 1900 ancestors aired the debate on the start of the new century. And like us, scientists and scholars insisted upon the conclusion that the new century begins in a year ending with the number one.

But perhaps 1900 was a more deferential time. Back then, the scholars won out, and the media and public actually had the patience to wait until 1901 for their big blowouts.

That headline used to be a punchline. Alas, soon the joke could be on us.

In his new book, “Eating Animals,” the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who “waffled among any number of diets” to “committed vegetarian.” Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be “strict ethical vegans” like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than “outright murder,” he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “eternal Treblinka.”

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to “committed vegetarians” and “strong ethical vegans,” we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants “forage” for resources like light and soil nutrients and “anticipate” rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground “rhizosphere” and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

“Plants are not static or silly,” said Monika Hilker of the Institute of Biology at the Free University of Berlin. “They respond to tactile cues, they recognize different wavelengths of light, they listen to chemical signals, they can even talk” through chemical signals. Touch, sight, hearing, speech. “These are sensory modalities and abilities we normally think of as only being in animals,” Dr. Hilker said.

Plants can’t run away from a threat but they can stand their ground. “They are very good at avoiding getting eaten,” said Linda Walling of the University of California, Riverside. “It’s an unusual situation where insects can overcome those defenses.” At the smallest nip to its leaves, specialized cells on the plant’s surface release chemicals to irritate the predator or sticky goo to entrap it. Genes in the plant’s DNA are activated to wage systemwide chemical warfare, the plant’s version of an immune response. We need terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics — let’s move.

I remember this from the giddy days of the Whole Earth Catalog when there were so many cool utopian ideas floating around.

Then most of us grew up. Byron York explains:

In the high desert of central Arizona, more than five thousand miles from the global-warming summit in Copenhagen, sits an aging and unfinished vision of the enviro-friendly, sustainable life that some climate change activists foresee for us all. It’s called Arcosanti, created in 1970 by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri, and it is the prototype of a green community of the future.

The only problem is, it doesn’t work. And it never did.

Arcosanti is an “arcology,” a word Soleri coined by combining “architecture” and “ecology.” In Soleri’s vision, an arcology is a self-contained city in which hundreds of thousands of people live in a small space, their needs met by green energy sources, recycled and sustainable products, and carefully planned social and cultural events. There are — G0d forbid — no cars.

In a Soleri design, masses of people are packed into the small-footprint arcology so that the land surrounding the community can remain pristine, unpolluted by human touch. It was an idea much in fashion a few decades back. “As urban architecture, Arcosanti is probably the most important experiment undertaken in our lifetime,” wrote Newsweek in 1976.

Soleri designed models of many futuristic communities, guided by his intense dislike of U.S.-style development. “The ‘American Dream,’ as physically embodied in the single-family house,” he once wrote, “has to be scrapped and reinvented in terms which are coherent with the human and biospheric reality.”

Despite his many designs, the only community Soleri ever attempted to build is here, on the edge of the Agua Fria River canyon about 70 miles north of Phoenix.

Still, Soleri managed to win the National Design award for Lifetime Achievement.

Steven Den Beste captures the essence of liberal thought in this brilliant essay.

_______________________

Way back in the depths of time, Greek philosophers ended up with two basic and incompatible ways of looking at the universe. One way was materialism, which says that there is a material universe which behaves in a consistent way, and if you study it you can learn the way it works.

That’s the world view of engineers and scientists — and businessmen, for that matter. It’s the world view of people who understand and use mathematics, and statistics. It is a place where cause leads to effect. It’s the place that game theory studies. It isn’t necessarily inherently atheistic; a lot of religious people live in the materialist world.

But there are people who don’t. A different epistemological view is teleology, which says that the universe is an ideal place. More or less, it
exists so that we humans can live in it. And human thought is a fundamental force in the universe. Teleology says that if a mental model is esthetically pleasing then it must be true. Teleology implies that if you truly believe in something, it’ll happen. Wikipedia says:

A teleological school of thought is one that holds all things to be designed for or directed toward a final result, that there is an inherent purpose or final cause for all that exists.

And in its modern form that final result is presumed to be creation of a world of peace and harmony, a utopia, in which all men live in peace and brotherhood, in harmony with nature.

At least, that’s the distorted form of Teleology that has come down to some of us in the modern era, mainly on the left wing. Aristotle probably wouldn’t recognize his red-headed step child as it exists today, though. Like many philosophically pure ideas adopted into popular culture, it’s gotten mutated nearly beyond recognition and almost all the mutations were negative.

One way to compare and contrast those two world views is to consider what they think about socialism. Materialists look at history since Marx and point out that socialism has been tried many times, in many nations, in various forms, and it has always failed. In places where it was fully implemented the result was decline and economic collapse. When it was only partially implemented you got slower decline. It often looks like it’s working in the early stages, but in the longer term it has never succeeded.

So to materialists, it’s apparent that socialism is a nice idea, but one that doesn’t work and shouldn’t be adopted.

To teleologists, none of that matters. What matters is the fact that it’s a beautiful idea. It’s how things should be. (more…)

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker says the guvmint tempts us to borrow.

Of course, as the previous post shows, you don’t have to say yes.

John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that all financial crises are the result of “debt that, in one fashion or another, has become dangerously out of scale.” The recent financial crisis was no exception, with everyone—homeowners, private-equity investors, our biggest banks—taking on enormous amounts of debt. If it’s frustrating that the government is footing the bill to clean up the mess, it’s even worse that the government helped pay for the debt binge that created the mess in the first place, thanks to a tax system that actually subsidizes borrowing. Debt didn’t get dangerously out of scale because the system was broken. It got out of scale, in part, because the system worked.

The government doesn’t make people go into debt, of course. It just nudges them in that direction. Individuals are able to write off all their mortgage interest, up to a million dollars, and companies can write off all the interest on their debt, but not things like dividend payments. This gives the system what economists call a “debt bias.” It encourages people to make smaller down payments and to borrow more money than they otherwise would, and to tie up more of their wealth in housing than in other investments.

Likewise, the system skews the decisions that companies make about how to fund themselves. Companies can raise money by reinvesting profits, raising equity (selling shares), or borrowing. But only when they borrow do they get the benefit of a “tax shield.” Jason Furman, of the National Economic Council, has estimated that tax breaks make corporate debt as much as forty-two per cent cheaper than corporate equity. So it’s not surprising that many companies prefer to pile on the leverage.

Megan McArdle tried out Dave Ramsey’s personal finance plan, The Total Money Makeover, and likes it.

Ramsey offers some investment advice (much of which would have struck horror in my business-school professors), but for most of his followers, the main attraction is a simple program: give 10 percent of your income to charity, save 15 percent for retirement, build up a sizable emergency stash and a college fund for your kids, and above all, stop borrowing money.

Ramsey devotees pay cash for everything they can. They are allowed only one exception to the no-more-debt rule: a 15-year fixed-rate mortgage. He is so serious about shunning debt that his Web site takes only debit cards; try to pay with a Capital One Visa, and the system rejects the card, then tut-tuts at you. These simple, austere, unbreakable rules are, as Ramsey likes to say, “the advice that God and Grandma gave you.”

Living beneath your means can be liberating.

At the beginning of August, I had dutifully sat down with Peter, my fiancé, to draft a budget. Once we’d given every dollar a name (as the book puts it), I drove to the bank and withdrew 1,800 of them. Huddled over the wheel to hide this stupendous wad of cash from prying eyes, I doled out the money among various envelopes for groceries, parking, entertainment, clothing, and so on, as recommended by Ramsey—and, funnily enough, by my grandmother, who invented a nearly identical system to manage my grandfather’s meager earnings from delivering groceries during the Great Depression.

When you pay for something with a credit card, or even a debit card, you can easily spend a few extra dollars here and there. But as Ramsey explained—while waving a handful of hundred-dollar bills to illustrate the point—if you have to actually hand over some of your dwindling cash supply, you tend to ponder every purchase. That impulsive latte buy becomes a little less enjoyable when every time you haul out your wallet, a quavering voice inside your head asks, “You want to send Uncle Abe away?” And sure enough, though we thought we’d budgeted conservatively for just the necessities, we nonetheless finished the month with extra money in every envelope.

Ramsey mixes a bit of Jesus into his program, not McArdle’s thing.

Though I did take the audio CD of Ramsey’s personal witness being handed out free at the exit, I’m afraid that Jesus and I aren’t really any better acquainted than we were before. Nonetheless, Ramsey has made a convert out of a secular journalist with one of the pricey M.B.A.s he likes to poke fun at.

I have never felt as serenely in control of my finances as I have during these months of knowing that every single dollar is where it is supposed to be: either in the bank, or on a well-chaperoned date with our envelope organizer. The process has been surprisingly painless but, even more surprisingly, pleasant.

Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute:

About six weeks ago, I engaged in an exchange about Glenn Beck, arguing that he makes it harder to convert the unsaved to the cause of limited government, and got an earful in return, mostly in the form of thoughtful but forceful emails saying I hadn’t given him a chance. So I set up my Tivo to record his show and have spent many cocktail hours since then watching. Last night’s opening shot encapsulates everything that has driven me nuts about the experience.

Beck was, as usual, standing in front of his blackboard. Chalked on it was:

“The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” Thomas Jefferson

It is a sentiment with which I completely agree. I’ve written whole books with that sentiment as the subtext. The problem: The quote is a fake. Thomas Jefferson never said it. Jefferson would have been sympathetic to the idea, as other writings clearly imply. But he didn’t actually say it. In front of a national television audience, Glenn Beck put up a quote that his researchers would have discovered is a fake if they had done the slightest bit of Googling.

It’s been like that for six weeks of watching. Beck is spectacularly right (translation: I agree with him) on about 95 percent of the substantive issues he talks about. He is a full-throated libertarian in a world of wishy-washy Republicans. The man is a gifted communicator. His style doesn’t happen to be one I like, but many times I’ve sat there on my sofa wishing I could make the same point as effectively.

But Beck uses tactics that include tiny snippets of film as proof of a person’s worldview, guilt by association, insinuation, and occasionally outright goofs like the fake quote. To put it another way, I as a viewer have no way to judge whether Beck is right. I have to trust that the snippets are not taken out of context, that the dubious association between A and B actually has evidence to support it, and that his numbers are accurate. It is impossible to have that trust.

So here’s the unbearable paradox. Beck really has had important effects on the way the Obama administration and its legislation is perceived. It is conceivable that if healthcare goes down to a razor-thin defeat, Beck will have made the difference. If that turns out to be the case, he will have made a far greater contribution to the survival of the American project than ink-stained wretches like me can dream of having. And I want to shut him up?

I don’t really want to shut him up. I want him to change. Take those enormous talents and make all the arguments that he can legitimately make. Keep the cutesy gimmicks (I understand that we’re talking entertainment here), but have an iceberg of evidence beneath the surface. Fox is making so much money from the show that it can afford the staff to do the homework.

Absent that change, and I’m not holding my breath, let me suggest to my colleagues who want a better public policy debate that we’ve got to avoid the if-I-were-God fallacy. It’s not in our power to decide whether Glenn Beck’s show continues. He will save the Republic or fail to save it whatever we do. All we can do is be honest about what we think. I’ll go first. I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. What Beck does is propaganda. Maybe propaganda has its place, but let’s not kid ourselves. Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann are brothers.

Tom Bunzel writes about his fascination with esoterica.

A close friend of mine with whom I often talk about esoteric subjects once commented on how I get to positions that require leaps of faith. He said I work from a place of rationality first, and go as far as I can with scientific or factual notions, and then I extrapolate inside to a place that cannot necessarily be validated scientifically, but which grows within me truth.

That’s why I loved the Da Vinci Code and am looking forward to reading Brown’s latest work, The Lost Symbol. Last night I watched Stargate for the first time in years, and had forgotten the beginning, where a discredited Egyptologist (James Spader) suggested that the Great Pyramid had no hieroglyphics, wasn’t a tomb at all, but instead a repository of ancient wisdom inspired by visitors from somewhere—when someone said the word “Atlantis” everyone walked out of his lecture.

My own fascination with these notions began in my early twenties. When I worked in Cancun a bellman at my hotel actually turned me on to a book about the Great Pyramid by a Mexican writer, Rudolfo Benavides. This was incredibly ironic since I was daily dispatching my tourist clients on tours to see the Mayan pyramid, and the Pyramid of the Sun (Aztec) was in a nearby state.

All this has a long history. The Oct. 12 New Yorker has a long article about people’s search for mathematical explanations for just about everything.

One day, in a newspaper, the young Martin Armstrong came across a list of financial panics between 1683 and 1907. He found that, on average, there had been a panic every 8.6 years. As he read more, he began to suspect that 8.6 was a highly significant number. In the early seventies, Armstrong became a trader and dealer in gold, and began compiling forecasts about commodities and currencies, which he sent out to clients.

Over time, forecasting became his business. He constructed what he called an Economic Confidence Model, which he relied on to predict an upturn in the price of commodities in the early days of 1977. It worked. Later, he realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand.

If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets. Pi suggested some future dates of significance, which Armstrong watched carefully as they approached: December, 1989, which marked the Nikkei’s peak before it crashed; July, 1998, the high point in the S & P, just before a Russian default broke the giant hedge fund Long Term Capital management. In 1999, Armstrong published a report explaining the part pi had played in his calculations. That year, he was charged with defrauding Japanese investors of billions of dollars. Armstrong has now spent more than nine years in jail.

Jonah Goldberg:

There is much gnashing of teeth and rending of cloth these days about the death of civility.

Apparently, like Cupid with his arrow or a pixie with fairy dust, some magical sprite used to enchant America’s political combatants, ensuring that all public discourse was full of beg-your-pardons and please-and-thank-yous. But we have offended our little leprechaun. He’s taken his Lucky Charms and gone home, leaving Americans angry, cranky, and rude.

Or at least that’s what I gather from all this talk of lost civility. Personally, I’m not sure I know what people are talking about. When was this Golden Age of civility?

Was this glorious era of politeness during George W. Bush’s presidency? Funny, that’s not how I remember it.

So maybe the 1990s was the last great outpouring of loving kindness? Hmmm, no. At least I don’t think Clarence Thomas would say so. Nor do I think anyone who watched the Clinton show would claim it was a hallmark of sober debate on either side. Clinton’s minions attacked victims of his sexual aggression or revelations about his accomplices in his adultery as “bimbo eruptions.” Was civility the norm when Rep. Charlie Rangel said of Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America, “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things”?

Was it the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was routinely dubbed a nuclear-trigger-happy “amiable dunce”? I was young then, so I’ll check with Robert Bork and see what he thinks.

Perhaps it was in the 1960s and 1970s? Sure, there was admirable civil disobedience in the beginning, but there was a lot more uncivil disobedience, what with all the domestic terror attacks and the protesters asking LBJ how many kids he killed today.

The 1950s? Who knew the McCarthy era was such a high-water mark of domestic tranquility? What about the 1930s? America saw its worst labor violence, and FDR had to put up with demagogues like Huey Long and Father Coughlin (who attacked him from the left, by the way). How about the 1910s, when Woodrow Wilson threw political opponents in jail? Or in 1919, when he dubbed “hyphenated Americans” (i.e. German-Americans) traitors? “I cannot say too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic. . . . If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest I will know that I have got an enemy of the Republic.”

Okay, enough of all that.

And yes, let me offer a sincere denunciation of rudeness for rudeness’s sake. Let me also concede that there is no shortage of bilious, nasty rhetoric on the right.

But here’s the thing. First, it was ever thus. American democracy has always been a hurly-burly. More important, a lot of the complaints about incivility today are really complaints from the people in power or their supporters in the media, aimed at the folks who won’t shut up and get with their program.

And there’s something distinctly undemocratic about that.

The civility caterwaulers claim that Obama’s opponents are trying to “delegitimize” the president, often suggesting that such efforts are racist. But what some see as delegitimization, others see as criticism. What strikes me as truly uncivil is the effort to demonize critics of the president with racial bullying.

In fact, I think Obama really does have a problem with dissent. In August he said: “I don’t want the folks who created the mess to do a lot of talking. I want them to get out of the way.  . . . I don’t mind cleaning up after them, but don’t do a lot of talking.”

Victor Davis Hanson:

Norway is a tiny country that was born lucky. It is weak and defenseless (and was quickly overrun in World War II [while neighboring, neutral Sweden sold the Third Reich 40% of its iron ore, that went for everything from Tiger tanks to kill Americans to the ovens at Auschwitz—with free shipping across the Baltic included as a favor]. In the late 1940s it would have been Finlandized during the Cold War, if not for American-led NATO. And the world’s largest military is still pledged to its defense, in case any of the nations, to whose icons it bestows awards, some day decides to send terrorists or nukes its way

Second, it sits on or near enough oil to allow what is otherwise a rather insignificant country to be the wealthiest per capita oil producer in the world, and enjoy the influence that many in the Gulf have grown accustomed to. Throw in minerals, natural gas, timber, and fish and the nation sits on a bonanza of natural wealth. No wonder there are philosophers who ponder how to dispense the largess and absenteeism is a national crisis (one receives almost ad infinitum the same cash whether “sick” at home or well on the job). The population of under 5 million is largely homogeneous (90% Nordic), and is thus stable, and both rich and safe beyond its wildest dreams. It does not border a Third World country; “difference” and the “other”—even with recent Islamic immigration—is still defined as speaking Swedish or Danish.

Hollywood Nation

In other words, Norway has the leisure to be utopian, and cannot quite understand why other countries are not as liberal as it has proven. So Norway loves to give award to all sorts of right-thinking frauds (Menchu), scoundrels (Elbaradei), terrorists (Arafat), Stalinists (Le Doc Tho), Elmer Gantrys (Jimmy Carter) and hucksters (Gore)— as it sits in judgment of others from Lala land.

Remember, though, the Norwegians privately would not like to live under Central American communism of the Ortega brand, or right next to nutty nuclear Iran, or have Palestinian terrorists on their borders, or in general live the real life that the nation sanctimoniously advocates in the abstract. It sees what happens to neighboring Denmark’s cartoonists when they exercise free speech. It once saw what Neville Chamberlain wrought for its own neighborhood.

Norway is, in other words, the Hollywood nation. Imagine it is as the son or daughter of a movie star, one who grew up in Malibu, and feels so terribly about it that he lectures the U.S. about everything from global warming to George Bush’s assorted sins—confident that he will never have to work at Ace Hardware, and never have to live near South Central LA. That’ sums up  Norway.

T-Ball Awards

Effort and intention, not achievement, matter to these pious Europeans. We should honor preseason favorites, not 20-game winners; praise dazzling book proposals, not best sellers; gush about on-the shelf Pentagon plans not battle victories. Don’t dare end the Cold War, or save millions in Africa from AIDs, or get rid of Milosevic; but most certainly do dare to convince the world that the Muslims jump-started the Renaissance. For that brave assertion, global peace will surely follow.

Read it all.

The LA Times’ Robin Abcarian writes about Irene Vilar’s book, “Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict.”

She describes her abortions as part of a misguided quest to free herself from the burdens of a complicated and tragic family, then as part of an immensely dysfunctional dynamic with her first husband, a professor of Latin American literature whom she met at Syracuse University when she was 16 and he was 50.

“We could be a couple as long as I relinquished my desire for children,” she said of her husband, “a disturbingly handsome man” who taught her that “families are nests of suffering” and informed her that he preferred young women because they are “unformed . . . unfinished, with not too many wounds.” Children, he told her, were incompatible with freedom. (Her ex-husband, Pedro Cuperman, did not respond to an e-mailed request for comment.)

Again and again during their 11-year relationship, she rebelled: “Forgetting” her birth control pills, she would get pregnant, feel the thrill of self-determination, then panic that she would lose her husband, seek an abortion and collapse in relief and despair.

“Of course, this did not mean I wanted to do it again and again,” she said. “A druggie also wants to stop every time.”

Vilar’s “back story” is fascinating. Her material grandmother was Lolita Lebron, who:

In 1954, Lebrón and three other nationalists shot up the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five congressmen. Convicted of attempting to overthrow the U.S. government, Lebrón spent 25 years in prison, and was pardoned by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

When she was 8, Vilar’s mother leapt to her death from a speeding car. She tried to restrain her mother from suicide. Then there is this:

Puerto Rico, at the time, was a living laboratory for American-sponsored birth control research. In 1956, the first birth control pills — 20 times stronger than they are today — were tested on mostly poor Puerto Rican women, who suffered dramatic side effects.

Starting in the 1930s, the American government’s fear of overpopulation and poverty on the island led to a program of coerced sterilization. After Vilar’s mother gave birth to one of her brothers, she writes, doctors threatened to withhold care unless she consented to a tubal ligation.

The “American government” in this case was “progressive” and eugenically minded, something the American left has never been called to atone for.

LBJ’s Great Society programs were just taking hold as I entered college. It was a time when many believed that science, properly applied to people, could solve social problems.

These were the “soft sciences” of  sociology and psychology. I remember well the feeling, that wonderful frisson that came with grasping a theory that explained so much, so elegantly. My classmates and I would buzz with the sense of understanding something important, something that not everyone knew.

Later, as I took a few courses in real life, I came to understand that the neat theories I’d absorbed in college didn’t always hold up.

Open classrooms were an educational fad at the time. Instead of having the teacher dictate the curriculum, students were allowed to study what interested them. Classrooms were set up with learning centers and teachers worked in teams to man them.

My college class visited one of these experimental classrooms on a field trip, and I remember coming away very impressed — this was the future of education and I was there to see it happen!

Today, open classrooms are a dead idea. But as that idea died, many others sprang to life. Our universities today churn out thousands of kids — yeah, you’re still a kid at 21 — with heads full of exciting, liberal theories on how to remake our lives.

This all came to mind after reading a recent Thomas Sowell column that summed up the dangers of intellectualism.

Many people, including some conservatives, have been very impressed with how brainy the president and his advisers are. But that is not quite as reassuring as it might seem.

It was, after all, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brilliant “brains trust” advisers whose policies are now increasingly recognized as having prolonged the Great Depression of the 1930s, while claiming credit for ending it. The Great Depression ended only when the Second World War put an end to many New Deal policies.

FDR himself said that “Dr. New Deal” had been replaced by “Dr. Win-the-War.” But those today who are for big spending like to credit wartime big spending for bringing the Great Depression to an end. They never ask the question as to why previous depressions had always ended on their own, much faster than the one under FDR, and without government intervention or massive government spending.

Brainy folks were also present in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, especially in the Pentagon, where Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s brilliant “whiz kids” tried to micro-manage the Vietnam war, with disastrous results.

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Reader Richard Bauman brought this video to our attention. It’s a concise 10-minute summary of how two disparate views of human nature have yielded wildly different societies and underscores how much ideas do matter.

VIDEO HERE.

Paul Graham:

I bet you the current issue of Cosmopolitan has an article whose title begins with a number. “7 Things He Won’t Tell You about Sex,” or something like that. Some popular magazines feature articles of this type on the cover of every issue. That can’t be happening by accident. Editors must know they attract readers.

Why do readers like the list of n things so much? Mainly because it’s easier to read than a regular article. Structurally, the list of n things is a degenerate case of essay. An essay can go anywhere the writer wants. In a list of n things the writer agrees to constrain himself to a collection of points of roughly equal importance, and he tells the reader explicitly what they are.

Some of the work of reading an article is understanding its structure—figuring out what in high school we’d have called its “outline.” Not explicitly, of course, but someone who really understands an article probably has something in his brain afterward that corresponds to such an outline. In a list of n things, this work is done for you. Its structure is an exoskeleton.

As well as being explicit, the structure is guaranteed to be of the simplest possible type: a few main points with few to no subordinate ones, and no particular connection between them.

Because the main points are unconnected, the list of n things is random access. There’s no thread of reasoning you have to follow. You could read the list in any order. And because the points are independent of one another, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship. If you get bored with, or can’t understand, or don’t agree with one point, you don’t have to give up on the article. You can just abandon that one and skip to the next. A list of n things is parallel and therefore fault tolerant.

There are times when this format is what a writer wants. One, obviously, is when what you have to say actually is a list of n things. I once wrote an essay about the mistakes that kill startups, and a few people made fun of me for writing something whose title began with a number. But in that case I really was trying to make a complete catalog of a number of independent things. In fact, one of the questions I was trying to answer was how many there were.

Read on.

The father of Germany’s Green movement was a Nazi and frequent visitor to Dachau.

Harvest time is here again on Germany’s 1.2 million allotments: potatoes have to be hoisted out of the soil and the last of the peas must be plucked.

In the shed, next to the trowel and gloves, there will almost certainly be a well-thumbed copy of the gardeners’ bible written by Alwin Seifert, the country’s organic guru.

Now it emerges that at least some of Seifert’s useful tips in his bestselling book Gärtnern, Ackern-ohne Gift, (Gardening, Working the Soil without Poison) may have been gleaned from his observation of the experimental gardens set up on the grounds around Dachau concentration camp.

Tended by half-starved slave labourers, at least 400 of whom were killed, drowned in the carp pond or trampled into the mud of the latrine trenches, the Dachau gardens were established at the behest of Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s security chief, and stretched to 211 blossoming hectares.

Seifert, who after the war became a founder of the Green movement, was one of the top landscape gardeners of the Nazi era. He even had the title Reichslandschaftsanwalt — advocate of the Reich’s Landscape. It was Seifert who managed to persuade the Nazi autobahn planners to make the motorway curve, following the natural contours of the German countryside. The well-connected gardener was also opposed to artificial fertilisers poisoning German soil and went to Dachau, apparently oblivious to the emaciated prisoners, to see what could be done in the gardens and arable fields of the Fatherland.

“The question has to be how much of the information that flowed into his book derived from the research being done in Dachau,” says the Munich-based cultural historian Daniella Seidl, who has been digging in the Bavarian and federal archives. “He was a regular visitor, maintained a correspondence with the head gardener Franz Lippert, and even arranged for a couple from the camp to work in his own household.” Some of the ideas being tried out in the Dachau gardens were certainly adopted by Seifert for use in his own garden in the Tyrol.

Thomas Sowell:

Britain’s release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi — the Libyan terrorist whose bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 270 people — is galling enough in itself. But it is even more profoundly troubling as a sign of a larger mood that has been growing in the Western democracies in our time.

In ways large and small, domestically and internationally, the West is surrendering on the installment plan to Islamic extremists.

The late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put his finger on the problem when he said: “The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.”

He wrote this long before Barack Obama became President of the United States. But this administration epitomizes the “concessions and smiles” approach to countries that are our implacable enemies.

Western Europe has gone down that path before us but we now seem to be trying to catch up.

Read it all. Then check out American Digest’s The Strong Horse vs. My Little Pony

Lost on the western media and assorted schmos from the blogosphere is the obvious fact that these macho pictures of Putin were not released for their amusement, but for Putin’s benefit. And, in the current international climate, they benefit him quite a bit.

They benefit Putin and Russia because, for most of the world unblotched by the the crippling “sophistication” of the West, Putin is compared, inevitably, to Barack Obama. And when that happens, it’s like comparing a Wild Mustang to My Little Pony.

Heather MacDonald in City-Journal:

Standing in the well of a jail on New York’s Rikers Island as profanities rain down on you from the cells above, you realize the absurdity of academia’s most celebrated book on incarceration. Discipline and Punish, by the late French historian Michel Foucault, criticized jails and prisons for subjecting inmates to constant, spirit-crushing surveillance. The truth is that surveillance goes both ways in correctional facilities. Inmates watch their keepers as intensely as they are watched—and usually much more malignly.

Jails are the ideal testing ground for romantic myths about incarceration. As policing has gotten more efficient at nabbing wrongdoers over the last decade and a half, it has pumped a growing volume of increasingly troubled individuals into the jail system. Governing that population is a management challenge more complex than that faced by any other criminal-justice institution. Yet jails, unlike prisons, remain largely out of sight and out of mind. This public ignorance is unfortunate, because jails have been evolving important principles for controlling criminal behavior of late, ideas that directly contradict the Foucauldian critique.

To understand the difficulties of running a large jail, imagine that your job is personally to shepherd each of the thousands of commuters streaming through New York’s massive Penn Station to their trains safely and on time . . . except that the commuters are all criminals who keep changing their travel plans, and their trains, to which they don’t want to go, have no fixed timetables. A cross-section of the entire universe of criminal offenders, from the most hardened murderer to the most deranged vagrant, cycles through the nation’s 3,365 jails. But the majority of jail inmates show up with no predictable release date, since they have as yet only been charged with a crime and are awaiting a trial that may or may not occur and whose duration is unknown. Even before their trials begin, they may make bail at any moment and be released. Planning for pretrial detainees is therefore no easy task. “The ones who stay less than 36 hours drive you out of your mind,” says Michael Jacobson, a former corrections commissioner in New York City. “You think: ‘Couldn’t you have made bail ten hours ago rather than coming into my facility?’ ” Prisons, by contrast, hold only post-conviction defendants who have been found guilty or pleaded guilty and have been sentenced to a known term of more than a year. (Prisons and jails differ as well in their government overseers: the former are run by states and the federal government, the latter by cities and counties.)