The Best Exercise

In the same issue wherein Gary Taubes discussed the evils of sugar, the Times ran a couple of other interesting articles on fitness and health. One was on sleep (get enough) and the other on the best form of exercise. The linked article discusses the best form of exercise. The winner: HIT or High Intensity Training. In other words, go hard, very hard, for brief spurts and lightly in between, whether you talking intervals of minutes or days. If you've read Art De Vany, Dr. Doug McGraw, Mark Sisson, or others in the Primal Community, the answer will come as no surprise. Even before this article I'd incorporated this regimen into my time on the stationary bike, and when weight training (high weight, low reps). Also, think of basketball, a form of play with constant movement punctuated by brief intense spurts. Are any athletes more fit that basketball players? It kept me reasonably fit for many years.

The runner up? The squat. "Air squats" as Tim Ferris calls them. They do well in a pinch.

Preview: Karen Armstrong's The Case for God

Here's the opening paragraph of Armstrong's book in anticipation of a more complete review. With this opening, I knew that I would appreciate this book:

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. “That book was really hard!” readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. “Of course it was!” I want to reply. “It was about God.” But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: The Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don’t understand what we mean when we say that he is “good,” “wise,” or “intelligent.” People of faith admit in theory that God is transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume that they know exactly who “he” is and what he thinks, loves, and expects. We tend to tame and domesticate God’s “otherness.” We regularly ask God to bless our nation, save our queen, cure our sickness, or give us a fine day for the picnic. We remind God that he created the world and that we are miserable sinners, as though that may have slipped his mind. Politicians quote God to justify their policies, teachers use him to keep order in the classroom, and terrorists commit atrocities in his name. We beg God to support our side in an election or a war, even though our opponents are, presumably, also God’s children and the object of his love and care.

Favorite Books & Authors About Christianity

I limit this list to authors who lived during my lifetime (Maurice Nicoll just makes it) and who wrote about Christianity. The list has no particular order other than I started with more recent authors I’ve read (or listened to) and then I looked around my study. The list is much longer than I intended, but I can vouch for all of these books.

Mark Johnston, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. I’ve said a lot about this book, so I won’t say more here except to say that there’s a lot more that I could write.

Karen Armstrong, A History of God and The Case for God. I have said of History that I think that every Christian, Jew, and Muslim should read it. As to The Case for God (which I will review soon), I say simply that everyone should read it. Monotheist, Eastern religious practitioners, non-believers: everyone who wants to understand the religious traditions. This makes the “Christian” list here because it focuses on Christianity more than any other one religion, but it is broadly comprehensive.

Northrop Frye, The Double Vision. See my recent review. In addition, his two books on the Bible, The Great Code and Words with Power are the longer works behind The Double Vision that are most worthwhile. By the way, Professor Frye, one of the great literary critics of the 20th century, was also Rev. Frye, an ordained minister of the United Church of Canada.

Gerald May, Will and Spirit. I have several of his books, and they are all worthwhile. Like most of the authors on this list, he relies heavily on the mystical tradition of Christianity for his inspiration. In addition, he was a practicing psychiatrist.

Helen Luke, From Dark Wood to While Rose. Helen Luke was grounded in the Jungian tradition, and this book of hers on Dante’s Divine Comedy is a superb guide for beginners and those who want to contemplate some of the choicest morsels of this great work (not just the sensational punishments of hell that seem to attract so many readers). A truly lovely book.

Garry Wills. Here it’s hard to pick. I’ll start with one of the two first books by Wills that I read: Bare Ruined Choirs about the (then) contemporary Catholic Church. It’s Wills at his journalistic (as well as philosophic) best. Since then, I’ll pick out only two more titles: Heads and Hearts: American Christianities about the history of Christianity in America and What Jesus Meant, his take on the significance of the life, death, and teaching of Jesus. Very short, but quite worthwhile. (See also his What Paul Meant and What the Gospels Meant.

Jacob Needleman, Lost Christianity and What Is God? The former is his investigation, reflection, and fantasy of the possibilities of Christianity from his perspective, and his perspective is greatly influenced by the tradition of Gurdjieff. His more recent (2010) book, What is God? is an autobiography of his struggle with the idea and practice of God. As always with Needleman, he writes for a general audience, not trained philosophers, and he always incorporates his personal experiences and those of his students.

William Johnston, The Mirror Mind: Spirituality and Transformation. This, and other works by Jesuit William Johnston reflect his time in Japan and his encounter with Zen practice there. In a theme that will run throughout this list, I believe one of the truly fertile encounters in the 20th century has occurred when Buddhists and Christians have shared perspectives. Although Thomas Merton doesn’t have a work on this list, he is certainly among the most well known person in this dialogue, but Johnston, I believe, along with others, has added a great deal in this and several other books.

Kenneth Leech, True Prayer: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality. This book, by an Anglican minister, takes the reader into the world of the earliest Church Fathers to find some essential insights.

Anthony De Mello, Awareness. Like his fellow Jesuit William Johnston, De Mello published a number of books. De Mello spent time in India, and so his perspective is flavored more by his Hindu and Moslem milieu. However, De Mello is a delight to read. I think several years after his death and after the publication of this book, someone at the Vatican decided that De Mello was too far out and put some kind mark against his book. Yeah, it’s that good.

Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity and Behold the Spirit. Alan Watts, when he wrote both of these books, I believe, was an Anglican (Episcopalian) priest. This eventually proved too confining for the free-spirited Watts, but these two books delve deeply into the tradition. Already heavily influenced by his reading of Eastern traditions, these books shed great light on the Christian tradition. If you want to understand what’s going on in the Trivium, read Myth and Ritual.

Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus. By now, Mitchell, a poet and translator, has translated and commented upon just about every major spiritual classic from around the world. His take on Jesus is sensitive and well considered. He, too, is greatly influenced in his reading by Eastern perspectives.

Polly Berends, Whole Child/Whole Parent and Coming Home. In both books, Berends is first and foremost a mom. She studied under the tutelage of European émigré Thomas Hora, who brought to Berends a unique blend of psychotherapy, existentialism, and scriptural understanding. Throw in Berends very down to earth experiences of parenting, and you receive a unique and enlightening spiritual perspective.

Dom Aelred Graham, Zen Catholicism. After our friend Hedecki stayed with us, I started reading about Buddhism, and I began through books by Roman Catholics. Graham’s book was one of the first, if not the first, that I read about Buddhism. (Actually, Huston Smith’s chapter in his book, The World’s Religions was the first book that I turned to.) This Benedictine shared an insightful perspective on the two traditions that I’ve always found very useful.

James W. Jones, In the Middle of This Road We Call Our Life and The Mirror of God: Christian Faith as a Spiritual Process—Lessons from Buddhism and Psychotherapy. Although we might call these psychology books (too literate for self-help), their perspectives are deeply informed by Christianity and other traditions. If a spiritual practice doesn’t touch our daily life, what’s the point? Jones brings this perspective to light with clinical accounts.

Dorothy Sayers, Dante’s Divine Comedy: Translation and Commentary and The Mind of the Maker. This woman, most famous as an English detective novelist, provided a fine translation and a first-rate commendatory on Dante, among the greatest of poets. To understand his Christian masterpiece, you would be hard-pressed to find a better commentary and notes to guide through a reading. The Mind of the Maker is a series of very literate essays.

Maurice Nicoll, The New Man. Nicoll died in 1953, so he just made it to the wire. This book is deeply influenced by the perspectives of Jung and Gurdjieff that Nicoll made his own. Nicoll attempts to make sense of the Gospels as a guide to real metanoia (change of mind/heart). Very interesting and thought provoking. See also his book The Mark.

Andrew Greeley. Unsecular Man and No Bigger than Necessary. Greeley was a prolific writer, not all of it top quality, I think. However, these two books proved to have a lot to inform me. Unsecular Man is about the abiding human quality of religious expression and ties. Remember, Greeley is a professional sociologist (UChicago trained, I believe), as well as a born writer. As to No Bigger, it’s a defense and promotion of Catholic social and political thought, which I found quite persuasive. As a guide to economic, social, and political arrangements, Greeley argues the Catholic tradition has a lot to offer. I found it quite eye-opening back when I read it around 1980.

Robert Short, The Gospel According to Peanuts and The Parables of Peanuts. The first book (Gospel) I received from someone named “C” for Christmas, 1970, and the second one is inscribed to “Spook” from this same “C” July 1971. (Isn’t it wonderful to have girlfriends who buy you books?) These books were fun in one sense because they were filled with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts cartoons, but strange and wonderful because they spoke of Karl Barth, Kierkegaard, Elliott, Luther, Bonhoeffer, and Camus, among many others (and innumerable Biblical references). This theology was deeply rooted in the Protestant tradition of the mid-20th century. Heavy and serious stuff, lightened with wonderful cartoons. High and popular culture complimenting each other.

Rene Girard. I will just share his name here, as I’ve read many shorter pieces by him about Christianity and his unique take upon the significance of Christianity. (See earlier posts.) I haven’t carefully read his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, his big work on Christianity. I should. Beat me to it and you’ll be the better for it.

Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists. Hedges is a modern-day prophet. He thunders against war and oppression, American fascist religion, and he scoffs in this book at the “New Atheists” for their naiveté as much as anything. (Johnston calls them—Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris—the “undergraduate atheists” because they base their arguments on texts read as undergraduates and have skipped crucial texts that would have come in graduate school). In any event, Hedges pulls no punches on any topic, and he does confront you, even as he goes after the subject of his book or article. He is a modern prophet, and you don’t think that you’ll read him for casual consideration. Sometimes I find him too much of a downer, almost too cynical, but maybe that’s how prophets have to be.

Jack Miles, Christ. The former Jesuit brings his erudition, following his Pulitzer prize-winning God: A Biography, to the Gospels. Mile presents a compelling consideration of the Gospel message and its meaning.

Reinhold Niebuhr. Moral Man and Immoral Society and most else of what he wrote. You thought I was going to forget Niebuhr? I think that he is in some sense the 20th century reincarnation of St. Augustine. His perspectives of politics and society are unparalleled for their insights. He, too, is not easy in the sense you can step away from reading him feeling smug and self-satisfied. I don’t know if Niebuhr’s voice would be heard today, as he’s too unwilling to suffer the foolishness of both the Right and the Left. Always highly recommended.

Special Addendum:
Two Buddhist get a special shout out:
1. Thich Nhat Hahn, Living Buddhist, Living Christ. This Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who now lives in France, I believe, but who travels and teaches throughout the world is a wonderful voice of love, compassion, and mindfulness. In this book, he displays those traits in comparing the traditions of Buddha and Jesus. A wonderful work.
2. Alan Wallace, Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity. Wallace is a former Tibetan Buddhist monk who also has studied physics and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford in Religious Studies. He is among the foremost Buddhist scholar-practitioners around. He wrote this book for his stepdaughter, who’d been raised and practiced as a Christian. He undertook this book to show the intersection of these three traditions (as well as some philosophy) to show how all can contribute to a deeper interior life.

Okay, enough now. Go read a book.

Mark Johnston: More on the Significance of the Passion & Crucifixion

Because I find it one of the most thoughtful and thought-provoking meditations on the meaning and significance of the Passion, I’m going to post more quotes from Mark Johnston’s Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. I’m jumping around a bit for my quotes, but all of them are from pages 172-174 in the chapter entitled “Without Spiritual Materialism”.

Why did Christ have to suffer and die at the hands of the legitimate religious and political authorities? Why wouldn’t the viper have sufficed? [This references an earlier discussion of replacing the Crucifixion with a fatal viper bite in the Garden of Gethsemane.] Not, pace Girard, because only then could the suffering and death of Christ be a reduction ad absurdum of scapegoating sacrifice, but because only then could it expose the mechanisms at the heart of false righteousness, this secret love of self-love trying at all costs to put down the anxiety of how we live, even to the point of murder. The Crucifixion discloses how far we are prepared to go in order to defend out idolatrous attachment to one or another adventitious form of righteousness.

. . . .

Of course, it not that the psychological power of self-love and false righteousness is actually diminished by the Passion and Crucifixion. Instead, self-love and false righteousness—that is to say, the central elements of the characteristically human form of lie—no longer make up a defensible realm.

. . . .

Contrast the death of Socrates . . . . Crucially, Plato’s Socrates recognizes the legitimacy of the Athenian state; he accepts its claims upon him and so does not flee even in the face of an unjust sentence. In this way the death of Socrates secretly valorizes the false righteousness of Athenian respectability, by showing that even someone who really understands virtue will bow to this false righteousness in the end. Human ways of going on are secretly redeemed by Plato’s Socrates. The Kingdom of self-love and false righteousness remains legitimated.

 The ordeal of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion is not at all like this. There is nothing noble or “humanly redeeming” about it, beginning as it does with his desperation in the Garden and ending with his despair on the Cross. It is not a cathartic tragedy. It leaves us at a total loss. We can return to human ways of going on only if we forget what happened. If we do not forget, we need to find a way to love that is not some form of self-love and false righteousness. And if we do not forget, we know that we cannot find this in ourselves. Then, and only then, are we prepared to take the two commandments*, the salvation from without, seriously.

. . . .

*Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all they soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength; this is the first commandment. And the second is like it, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

There is it is. That is the choice. Make the safe bet, the one for which you cannot be blamed, because all the others are doing it; take upon yourself some form of ready-to-wear righteousness and gradually have it adjusted to your own proportions. Or radically abandon yourself to the will of God. 

Worldly wisdom says: better to hand one’s life over to a respectable conception of the good.

There you have something to meditate upon this Holy Saturday.

Mark Johnston on Rene Girard: Reflections for Good Friday

Last year I posted a review and extended quote from Mark Johnston's supurb book, Saving God: Religion After Idolatry. Since this book is packed with insight, I can't think of anything better for the occasion than another extended quote. But I'm going with a two-for-one deal here, as the following quote is an explication by Johnston on the work of Rene Girard, whose thinking has become important for many considering the human condition and Christianity's response to that condition. Johnston about Girard's take:

To thus assimilate the significance of Christ’s suffering and death would mean that we can never look at victims, even the victims of so-called legitimate violence, including the juridical violence of the state, in the same way. After the Cross, the face of God incarnate looks back at us from the image of the victim. Victimization, sacrifice, and religious violence have been forever unmasked as illegitimate strategies by which our murderous envy of each other is temporarily discharged, and yet preserved as an ongoing psychological orientation.

Johnston goes on:

Christ offers something more, a new kind of mimesis: “give no thought to the morrow,” that is, abandon the empty life of acquisitive desire, and “love one another as I have loved you”—and so take on the radical risk of being devoured by the others, as Christ was. 

This is the salvation that Christ offers: the naked disclosure of our natural collective hatred and lust for violence, than freedom from the idea of legitimate violence, and finally a new resolution of the internecine mimetic tension, not by way of another temporary sacrificial discharge, but through the availability of a wholly new form of mimesis, the imitation of Christ’s won self-sacrificing love.

For Johnston's riff off of Girard, take a look the quote I posted last year, or better yet, read the book.

Northrop Frye, The Double Vision: Language & Meaning in Religion

My note says I purchased this book in 1992. Unlike some books, it has not simply gathered dust on the shelf while it waited its turn to gather my attention. Instead, this book is full of highlights & pencil notes. I just read it again. In just 85 pages, Frye, in his last published work, provides a grand sense of his vision, his double vision of religion, language, and culture. The title is pulled from Blake, of whom Frye wrote a lengthy book early in his career (and which is well worth reading). Frye takes off from Blake and St. Paul, among others, to give a sense of what the religious books are saying. Not in the literal sense (of only limited importance) but in the moral, allegorical, and analogical senses. (Shades of Dante, here, too.) Religion, like literature, depends on the language of myth and metaphor, while every day language is descriptive of the natural world in what we refer to as a literal sense. The literal, Frye argues, is passive, while the mythical/metaphorical is active. Religion, as opposed to literature, asks "What is to be done?" (using a quote from a less savory character to make the point here).

I don't know if I can think of a book that packs so much perspective, insight, and wisdom into 85 pages. Reading Frye is like reading by lightening flashes, the insights come quickly, almost suddenly, and leave you wondering what you've just seen by this amazing illumination. If the highest compliment that you can pay a book is to re-read it and get something new out of it, well then this book receives very high praise indeed.

David Brooks on Trump

David Brooks writes on Trump in a way that makes some sense out of the Trump phenomenum. Trump is a joke, and I couldn't figure out why anyone would consider him a serious presidential prospect. After all, Sarah Palin only received a nomination for vice-president! If you've been wondering about this as I have, Brooks makes some sense of it. As Brooks notes in his column, Trump himself gave a shout-out to Obama a few years ago (before Trump got into the birther idiocy business). Obama, too, was a brash outsider. Come to think if it, does anyone become president without a high level (although not Trumpian level) of brashness? Probably not. What we need is a real brashness role model, and I have one: TR. Teddy Roosevelt. Almost nuts by most standards, but in a compelling and useful way. Of course, TR was an imperialist, he genuinely seemed to relish war and conflict (his Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding), etc. TR was no angel. But the energy! My, goodness, the shear Energy! A leader needs a high degree of energy to think outside the norm, and even more energy to drag followers into tow. So, of course, Trump, like Palin, is full of outrageous nonsense, an embarrassment, but I think Brooks is right about the need for brashness.

BTW, if you haven't been following Doonesberry's take on Trump over the last few days, you've missed some great laughs. Here's a sample.

Paul Krugman Against Bipartisanship, and Me, too

Krugman hits it with his take on calls for "bipartisanship". Who are our great bipartisan presidents? FDR railing against "economic royalists"? Harry "Give 'em hell, Harry" Truman? Lincoln, who led the nation through a civil war? Of course, each of these leaders could wheel and deal. I doubt that any of them were rude or went out of their way to mistreat their opponents. However, each knew when to give and when to take. Of course we compromise, but we stake out a strong position first, knowing what we can expend and what we cannot forgo. Like lawyers, we learn not to antagonize over the small insignificant details, but to go all out on the merits. So should Obama. Krugman's providing sound advice here, and I hope that Obama heeds it.

Gary Taubes: The Blood Speaks

In this follow-up post to the article that I cited yesterday, Taubes posts his recent blood test results. Read what he eats, and then look at the results. Having lost both grandfathers and one uncle to fatal heart attacks and having a father who suffered CAD & underwent a CABG, I've followed my numbers over the years and done a fair amount of self-education on the topic. These are great numbers for Taubes and they confirm what others have experienced eating a low-carb (or paleo) diet. Heresy? Yes. Is he on to something? Quite likely. (Although he eats more meat than I think that I can.) Love those Con salads, too!

Gary Taubes: "Is Sugar Toxic?"

Another finding courtesy of Farnum Street (otherwise I would have had to wait until I read the NYT tomorrow morning). Gary Taubes writes again on a topic for which he has become a bit of a crusader. However, unlike the negative connotation of that term, I think he does have a righteous cause. His crusade is based on science, its weaknesses and its strengths. Readers of this blog will note that I've written about his work before, and I highly recommend this newest article. It will give you pause. Should I drink that fruit juice? Should I have a piece of pie or a dish of ice cream? I think that the answer, as Taubes provides it, will prove quite challenging, for me at least. Also, although I'm just beginning to watch it, this talk by Dr. Lustig sounds like it will prove quite eye-opening. Enjoy--the article and that sugary delight--or not--at your own peril.

P.S. I found a < 9 minute interview with Lustig on Nightline that I think summarizes (as only network tv can do) his position.

Farnum Street on Best Books Not Well Known

First of all, although this particular post isn't especially representative, I should give a shout out to Farnum Street, an excellent blog site. It's an aggregator (little original material), but it harvests some of the most interesting pieces on the web about the blog's interests. What are those interests? The blogger describes his project:

I'm a no-name guy who started Farnam Street back in 2009 with the goal of posting the best articles from around the internet that relate to psychology, behavioral economics, human misjudgment, persuasion, and other subjects of intellectual interest.

If you're in my business (advocacy & living life on Earth), you'll likely find something relevant to your life and work here.

As to this post, I can't pass by a good book list. How do I know it's a good list? Because I've read some of the books on it: Tuchman's The Guns of August, Richardson's Mind on Fire, Manand's Metaphysical Club, and Campbell's Grammatical Man. All of these were excellent books. So, a fun list to consider.

Nick Morgan on King's "I Have a Dream" Speech

Public speaking coach Nick Morgan writes about MLK’s “I Have a Dream Speech” which he considers perhaps the greatest speech of the twentieth century. (Competitors? Perhaps Churchill’s oratory, although I’m not sure which one. Others?) What I find interesting about the discussion in this particular post goes to King’s movement away from a prepared text to ad-lib (apparently the peroration was not in the text, or so I understand from this blog). How amazing! Did King pull a rabbit out of the hat? Well, no, or least he’d practiced doing so on many occasions as an African-American preacher (where boring “homilies” are not tolerated). Practice, practice, practice: oratory, writing, chess, tennis, or whatever: if you think about it and then practice it relentlessly and mindfully, sometimes you feel it and perform in a whole new sphere, as King did that day.

Garry Wills: Augustine's Confessions: A Biography

Garry Wills continues his life-long fascination and scholarship about St. Augustine with the publication of this new book. Wills has already written a brief biography of Augustine of the Penguin Brief Lives edition, and he's translated the Confessions. Thus, Wills is a veteran of the Augustine scene. The fact that he receives accolades from the premiere Augustine biographer Peter Brown and fellow biographer and Augustine scholar James O'Donnell reinforces my belief that Wills knows whereof he speaks when it comes to Augustine (and on most topics he chooses to write about, for that matter).

Augustine is the seminal figure in the development of Western Christianity. From his life in Late Antiquity, except for St. Paul, Augustine probably had the greatest influence on the development of Western Christianity. The Confessions tells the story of Augustine's conversion (very slow in coming) and his attempt to understand the texts of the Bible, especially those of the Creation in Genesis. Wills points out a couple of very interesting thing about Augustine's work that I found unique in this volume:
1. How he wrote. Augustine worked by dictation. As someone who writes by dictation, I have to admire this. My work usually needs extensive revision if the topic is at all complex or lengthy. How you do this with papyrus—well, you don’t. I thought revising with a typewriter was bad. So the work was difficult, yet he wrote a huge amount.
2. Augustine didn’t first learn about silent reading from Ambrose. Silent reading was not a new invention at that time. Another urban legend bites the dust.
3. Now, something important: The Confessions (or Testimony, as Wills prefers to translate the title) is not the first autobiography. Rather, it is an extended prayer. This gives the book a different look and feel when you think of it that way.
4. Wills addresses the reputation of the Confessions since its writing, even into contemporary times. Among those who have written about Augustine, he notes, is Hannah Arendt. I had an intellectual crush on Arendt during my youth. She wrote her dissertation about Augustine and called him “the only true philosopher the Romans ever had”. I wrote a undergraduate paper on Augustine’s concept of community. Thus, I’ve found this conjunction between two of my favorite authors intriguing. Their mutual admiration of Augustine reinforces my own perception of him as a powerful figure in our tradition. Not always right or edifying, but quite a challenging figure. This short book by Wills adds the significant literature on this amazing figure. Highly recommended.

Maureen Dowd on Asking Pointed Questions

If I was a politician, I'd run screaming in the other direction if I saw Maureen Dowd coming to interview me. She can cut to the quick. Thus, the column she writes here shows that even someone like her, who can take on sitting presidents & cut them to ribbons in print, quakes in the face of asking probing questions of doctors and or giving directions to cab drivers. I think that we can share this reticence in some measure. We want to believe that professionals, whether the holder of a hack license or a medical license or a law license or a teaching certificate, means that the holder knows what he or she is doing all of the time. Wrong. Doctors, lawyers, cabbies: we're all human, all too human. I dislike it when a client questions me, but I know it's smart of them and that they really ought to do it. That person is actually a better client. Sometimes I do miss angles or over look possibilities. We ought to--because we need to--ask tough questions. But, if it's hard for Maureen Dowd, then it must be hard for everyone. (Interestingly, I saw her once on the Daily Show and she came across as almost shy, not the tigress that I expected. I attribute it to print versus personal confrontation.)

Niall Ferguson: Technology as a Two-Edged Sword

Niall Ferguson notes that while technology gets some credit for recent democratic uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, it's not all about sweetness and light. The bad guys (terrorists) use it also, for instance, to recruit, train, plan, and act. Technology make take us to heaven, or to hell (or remain in a sort of purgatory, like watching most television).

The Bane of Iowa: Bob Vander Plaats

This guy is the plague of the Iowa judicial system, and to see him get this kind of publicity disturbs me greatly. His crusade against our judicial system resulted in a vigilante justice for three sitting Supreme Court justices who happened to appear on the ballot last fall. The good news? As I predicted, polling data shows that opposition to gay marriage is not strong in Iowa. Indeed, I maintain that some of the reason for the vote that we saw last fall comes from an I-want-to-vote-out-anyone-I-can attitude. There's a solid 25% or so that will vote against any judge, so it doesn't take a lot to push the number up over 50%. For those of you out of state, Iowa has ilk like this, but it's a close state, and I'm remaining optimistic for the next round of elections.

11 Short Pieces of Wisdom on Health & Nutrician

Courtesy of Art De Vany, I came to this site. De Vany contributed to this piece. Also, Mark Sisson and Frank Forencich, whom I read regularly contributed.I'm an occasional acquaintance of some of the contributors, so some of this is not new, but it packs a lot of good advice in a small space. With the return of warmer weather, the get out in Nature advice sounds even better!

Energy is Eternal Delight

The work of Tony Schwartz on the management of energy is a terrific line of thinking. After all, we all deal with two scarce resources every moment of our lives: time and energy. Schwartz, unlike some who think about personal management, thinks more in terms of energy than in terms of time. This blog provides a good sense of his thinking. Also, I like the idea of naps at work! Really, having a sharp wit about you (think about 2-3 p.m.)is a terrific insight. Yes, I'm better a few hours at full steam than a bunch more hours at 1/2 speed. That's why I never want around a tired doctor. Recommended.

Bombing Libya: The Right Thing?

In another damned if you do, damned if you don't quandary, President Obama decided to go forward with bombing Qaddafi's forces in Libya. Bleeding heart liberalism gone ballistic? Return of the neocon's? Realist blunder? I must say that these issues aren't easy. We get ourselves into some awful pickles. Is this the right choice? I don't know, but lots of writers and bloggers think that they do know.

More on Nuclear Energy & the Japanese Disaster

This post by anthropologist Hugh Gusterson, brought to my attention by Farnum Street, expresses my concerns about nuclear energy. I don't think that we, as a society, really grasp the risks that we run, as this author suggests. We still have a very flawed financial system, and we don't know how to deal with nuclear disasters because we can't predict them very well. On the other hand, nuclear energy is very tempting because it comes as a low carbon price.

Let me hearken back to an earlier post & exchange with follow blogger Frank Robinson. Mr. Robinson gave a very succinct account of the liability issues associated with nuclear energy, including an acknowledgment of the possible application of the principles of strict liability to the nuclear industry. I disagree with him in that I believe that the nuclear energy industry should be subject to strict liability, while he does not. However, I believe that all of this begs a much greater issue: whether born by the public or a private company, can we afford, or are willing willing to afford, the losses that we risk. Let me provide a historic example. Fire, the Promethean gift, has burned down many, many great cities: Chicago, San Francisco, Tokyo, London, to name just a few that pop to mind. These societies bore these losses and recovered. We now have control of fires, at least in our cities, such that we don't think that huge swaths of cities will fall in a fire. But what if we suffered a nuclear accident, if, for instance, Fukushima went even further out of control? What level of destruction--although it may prove silent and virtually invisible--are we willing to suffer? If the potential loss is too great for any one company or insurance scheme, should we as a society allow this risk? I'm not sure where we draw the line, but I don't know if these questions are being asked widely enough. That's one reason I enjoyed the cited post.
Thoughts?

Two Disappointments: The Adjustment Bureau & Unknown

I saw two mediocre movies this weekend:

The Adjustment Bureau with Matt Damon & Emily Blunt. The story comes (to what extent I question) from a Phillip K. Dick story. Frankly, it just didn't work. Guys running around in 1960's era hats, part aliens, part angels. The story was all plot, and not so great on that. Very little in the way of characterization. Damon plays an impulsive politician who goes against the grain of these creatures and their "chairman". No, it just didn't work for me.

Unknown with Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger & January Jones. Let me say that the plot conceit of this would-be thriller has been done recently and much better. Okay, a pair of beautiful women and well-regarded actors can get us in the door, but this does not a worthwhile movie make. Oh, it has the obligatory incredible car chase scenes (which I find a bore anymore; did we ever do better than Steve McQueen's Bullit, anyway?). So pat, so little character. Why did anyone make this movie? I'm pissed and I only spent $5 to see it!

Richard Overy: 1939: Countdown to War

This is my year (or more) of reading "big history", the long-terms trends that have marked the world. However, the narrative of microscopic history still holds a strong lure for me. In the hands of a capable historian, such as Richard Overy, the work can prove eye-opening. In this short book (only 124 pages of text), Overy shows how both sides to some degree stumbled into the war. Hitler, Overy concludes, expected Britain and France to back down over Poland. When they came into the war, changing it from a regional war to a European war (to to some extent a world war), Hitler was surprised and shaken. We are reminded that Hitler, for all of the magnitude of his evil, was a mere mortal, a political actor on the international and national stage. He had gambled and won during earlier crises, but here he was forced to lay a larger bet than either he or his military wished to place. Also, as Overy points out, Hitler wasn't planning to "conquer the world". This is the stuff of later Allied propaganda and a mis-reading of his intentions. He did, of course, have his eye on "living room" (sorry, I'm not going to try to spell the German) in the east, and he did assume that his Nazi regime would someday enter into a show down with the Soviet Union (which of course did happen, and Hitler lost). Overy also provdies a sympathetic portrait of Neville Chamberlain, who bears to burden of Munich, but who, in the end, led his nation into war.

The leaders involved all recalled the history of 1914 at the outbreak of the Great War. Each tried not to make the same mistakes. Nevertheless, a whole new conflagration broke out. Does this show, as Emerson suggested, that "events are in the saddle and ride mankind"? Overy thinks that the actions of individuals in the crucial days leading up the the full outbreak of war could have made a difference, and this always remains an intriguing question. The see-saw back and forth in historical judgment between free will and determinism, the great issue of Tolstoy and his critics, remains a challenge, with one side scoring a strike, and then the other counter-punching with gusto. This is, perhaps, why good history remains so intriguing. But rather than ending on my peroation, let me quote Overy, who says this better than me, and with more authority:

However large or long-term the forces making for war, there was a moment when those forces had to be confronted and harsh decisions taken by the principal historical actors involved. In the story of those dramatic days immediately before the outbreak of war, much still stood in the balance. Great events generate their own dynamic and their own internal history. The outbreak of war now sees a natural consequence of the international crisis provide principally by Hitler's Germany. What follows is intended to show that nothing in history is evitable. The stage dialogue between system and actors is at the heart of the historical narrative. Events themselves can be both cause and consequence, none more so than the events that led Europe to war seventy years ago. (From the Preface, x).

Energy & Frankenstein

This is a very brief but thoughtful essay on the perils of our energy regime. Last summer we had the Gulf oil spill and now we have the Japanese nuclear disaster. Are we digging our selves a hole that we can't dig out of, or at least that will trap us--in terms of health and wealth--for decades? The Frankenstein myth should still hold some resonance for us. Again, I have to point to Thomas Homer-Dixon and his The Ingenuity Gap as a prophet about these issues. Of course, let me be clear: I'm not a Luddite. I really, really enjoy my electronics. Life would be much poorer with electricity. However, we'd better think of some very good answers to our energy future or we're in for more and more problems.

On the other hand, Frank Robinson at the Rational Optimist points out that nothing is risk free, that we've not had very many deaths from nuclear power, and that we need nuclear power if we're going to reduce carbon emissions. All very valid points. Here's the question that is not answered: can the nuclear industry operate under tort standards of conduct? Should nuclear power adhere to strict liability standards (I say "yes", and I think that may be the current law). If the industry can't live with that standard; if they can't provide that degree of protection; if that can't pay the level of damages that they might cause, then should we use this source of energy? How much in damages might we be talking about? I don't know, but how much did BP pay for its Gulf clean-up? Tough issues.

Great Tip for Reading Blogs

This site, Readability.com, provides a great service if you read blogs. It converts pages into much more readable formats (thus the name). I highly recommend it. You can get it free, or for $5/month you can save and archive. A very useful tool if you read blogs.

Garry Wills on All Things Shining (Or Not)

I noted this book here. Now Garry Wills weighs in, and he's having none of it. While I found the book had some merit, Will really finds it lacking. They talk Homer & St. Augustine, and you don't venture into this territory without the classicist Wills to deal with, and deal with them he does. I must agree that their idea of being taken up or in by "the gods" strikes me as an uncertain thing, as there are many false gods out there. And sports as the equivalent of deep religious practice? I don't think so either.

David Brooks on Ike & Obama

David Brooks makes an interesting comparison of Obama to Kennedy and to Eisenhower. Brooks notes their two most important speeches: Kennedy's inaugural and Ike's farewell. Of the two, I think that Ike's speech may prove--or already has proved--the more enduring of the two. Check it out here.

Is Obama cautious? Vacillating? Wise? Fearful? It's very hard to say from these seats. However, I agree that normally we want to err on the side of caution.

Dan Pink on Teacher Incentives

Just a short note: money isn't everything. No, teachers and the rest of us can't do without it, and it sure can help in many cases, but sometimes it's just not the full motivator. See Pink's book Drive for a fuller account of how traditional economic incentives don't tell the whole story. This is just another example.

The Genie: Capitalism & Human Values by Frank S. Robinson

Fellow blogger Frank Robinson has posted a link to a spirited and well-argued defense of capitalism that he published (link above). Robinson makes what I consider a Churchillian argument. As Churchill is reported to have said about democracy--"it's the worst form of government, except when compared to all of the others"--so Robinson seems to be arguing for capitalism. (Side note: I prefer the term "market economy" to "capitalism" because of the strong emotional valance "capitalism" holds in some quarters, left and right, but this is a small quibble.) Robinson readily admits the shortcomings of capitalism, but it has brought us untold wealth. It has not brought us heaven on earth, but we should not expect it to do so. By the way, neither has any other form of economy, socialism, mercantilism, or the agricultural society that dominated humankind up until about 225 years ago. Compare yourself the the most powerful and wealthiest persons in history and it's likely that you enjoy a higher standard of life than any such person. A Vanderbilt, a Rothschild (19th century version), not to mention a Napoleon, any king, a caesar: all pale compared to the standard of life and wealth that the average American enjoys today, albeit without all of the social prestige. Do you want social prestige or a medical system that can treat you and a car or jet to travel rather than a horse and buggy?

So is there anything to further to ponder? The genie of capitalism, or more broadly the fruits of capitalism, economic growth, has given us a whole new way of life, full of opportunities and brave new worlds. But can we control this genie? Having unleashed the genie of unprecedented economic growth in the last 225 years or so, can we continue to live with it? As Ian Morris discusses in The Why the West Rules, we can imagine at least two very different scenarios of the future that might play out: one "nightfall" and the other, "the singularity". Which scenario will likely play out? Or will we continue to muddle through? I question whether we can continue to dump growing amounts of carbon into our atmosphere with impunity. I'd begun to think that nuclear energy might be an answer, but now the catastrophe in Japan demonstrates how the best laid plans can not anticipate all of the threats. (Fire, by the way, posed similar threats and wrecked havoc on earlier civilizations on a huge scale, but not on a scale for area and duration that compares to nuclear catastrophes.) As I'm of an age to recall Three Mile Island (not really so bad), Chernobyl (really bad), and "The China Syndrome" (scary and kind of relevant to what's happening here), I can't rest easy with this situation.

Considering the perspectives of Thomas Homer-Dixon, I wonder if we've developed an ingenuity gap that we may not prove able to bridge, or that our energy needs, the lifeblood of any human group, have grown too large and chaotic to manage and continue. During the the first 40 or so years of my life, I feared the genie of atomic weaponry, which seems to be back in the bottle, but really it's only resting in silos--we hope. Can we control the fruits of modernity and capitalism, such as atomic energy? The problem stems from the fact that we as a species haven't changed all that much since leaving the savannas of Africa about 100,000 years ago. We still have most of the same instincts and biases, the same perspectives and limitations. We've come a long way, but have we come far enough?

Can we continue to grow in knowledge and power? Can we continue to grow something that we call "the economy"? I hope so, but we should be considering how we can tame this genie lest it get the better of us.

Andrew Bacevich: Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

I finished listening to this extended essay on the history of American foreign policy since the beginning of the Cold War. The short summary that I might use: Ike was right. Bacevich, a retired military officer turned IR professor, provides an extended tour over the time span following the Second World War, when the U.S. decided to extend its military presence throughout most of the world, to our current entanglements in Iraq & Afghanistan. The view is not a pretty one. Viet Nam, CIA dirty tricks, the pretty crazy thinking of Curtis LeMay (the first head of SAC), the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes. Ike did warn us about this in his farewell speech, but he did little during his administration to stop the ideology and cabal of interests that established these Washington Rules that came to dominate our thinking about foreign involvements. This is a bracing and well-written critique. What I would like now from Bacevich is an alternative way of seeing and acting in the world. This is bad, but what can serve us better? I despair that we can change our current mentality, but perhaps we can, eventually. Perhaps circumstances will limit our willingness to enter into foreign ventures. But we have to have an alternative vision to counter-act the current Washington Rules, and I don't think that we get that from this book. It's a start, not a finish.

Joshua Foer: Moonwalking with Einstein

I finished this delightful, fun book. As I believe I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the book was condensed into a NYT Magazine article a couple of weeks ago, and I couldn't resist the book. If you've read much about memory before, I don't know that you'd learn much new. But if you agree with St. Augustine that sedi anima est in memoria ("the seat of the mind is in the memory"), then you realize that remembering is no small thing. Of course, different events or sources of information have different degrees of inherent memorability and value, so we can pick and choose to some degree. But what we are as persons is in some sense simply the sum of our history, our memory. Some of this history is genetic, some personal, what happened to me from infancy until now. Well, this books goes more to issues of remembering information, but even in this age of instant computers, having knowledge in one's head has value that we can't off-load onto computer disc. The review that I've linked to provides a fair assessment of the book, so you can determine if you'd like it.

Memorizing Poetry

I've been getting back into memorizing poetry after earlier bouts, and the linked article is a nice encouragement, plus reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I have some chunks of poetry and verse that I carry around in my head from earlier forays into this area. I think more and more it is valuable, as an older form of reading such as the lectio divina, we "chew" and contemplate the words, something that you have to do in the process of memorizing.

I also like this article because I howled in protest at the demand that we memorize the funeral oration in Julius Caesar for 10th grade English class. One classmate (who will remain unnamed, but I've kept in touch with her over the years) positively reveled in the assignment. I think I resisted because I thought it too much work. Well, another folly of my youth!

So far:
1. The opening stanza of Eliot's Four Quartets ("Time present and time past. . ..")
2. The closing stanza ("We shall not cease from exploration . . . and the fire and the rose are one")
3. Prospero's speech in the Tempest (Be cheerful sir, . . . and our little life is rounded with a sleep")
4. Macbeth's speech (already had this one)("Out, out, brief candle. . . ")

In tap: George Herbert, Gerald Manley Hopkins, more Shakespeare (of course)(some Henry V portions I know pretty well), and John Donne (the love poems, although I'll never match the voice that Richard Burton gives them).

Suggestions?

Tony Schwartz's List of 30 We Need More of & 30 We Need Less of

This list strikes me as hitting on some very worthwhile points. Not comprehensive, not definitive, but useful. I will use it as a means of support for weeding the garden of my mind. Suggestions for further inclusions?

Ash Wednesday: The T. S. Eliot Poem

As most of Elliot, enigmatic and evocative. Something to ponder for the Lenten season.

Gary Taubes Meets Dr. Oz

An interesting post from Gary Taubes about his recent taping with Dr. Oz. Insightful about TV, conventional wisdom (CW), science, and a terrific summary of what Taubes is about from his friend Bob Kaplan. Go the the end of the Taubes post to see Kaplan's very interesting summary. This is something to read as you consider any Fat Tuesday binge (like your truly).

James Zogby on Arabs & the U.S.

Mr. Zogby, of polling fame, spoke today @ the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council about Arab-U.S. relations as he discussed them in the book I've lined to. His main points:

1. We don't listen--as a nation, as leaders, and as a people--to Arab voices. (The same could be said, as he noted, for individuals and concerning other groups.)

2. Most Arabs care about what we care about: jobs, family, education, health care, etc. Most are not oil sheiks or terrorists. We have a very skewed view.

3. Many, like Newt Gingrich (specifically mentioned), speak with authoritatively but know really nothing. Perceptions don't match realities.

4. At the beginning of the Iraq War 11% of Americans could find Iraq on a map. Now 36% can find it. Wow.

Fine talk, and he seems like an astute and thoughtful fellow.

Sleep More Important than Food

Tony Schwartz via the terrific blog site Farnum Street. If learning is the key to improving--along with mindful practice--and since sleep is key to learning, this all makes sense. Now quite reading this & go to sleep!

Chirs Coyne & the Middle East & U.S. Foreign Policy

Coyne, another from those blog-crazy folks @ GMU, makes some good points:
1. We didn't predict what would happen in the Middle East, this outbreak of popular dissatisfaction. How good can anyone be at this, or is just the government poor at it? (I think most everyone. Societies and history are complex.)
2. Why do we say we're all about democracy and then give big dollars to dictators? Maybe we should just tell the truth: we want them for strategic allies, or their better than a feared alternative. Look how well that worked in Iran.

Geoge Will on Republican Craziness

I used the think that George Will had some independence of thought, and then I came to think that he'd simply turned into an crank, so for some time now I haven't read him. However, with this article I have to give him a shout-out. He calls on the carpet Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich for their false and deceitful statements about Obama and his upbringing. How sad that person considered (by some) to be viable candidates for the presidency in the Republican Party would be either so duplicitous or so stupid as to say these things. Neither alternative is attractive. Thanks, Will, for speaking some truth the power. I hope that the other candidates that he mentions have some character and integrity. Heaven knows that candidates for high office don't increase in integrity along the way, so they'd better start with a huge supply before then begin their journey.

Tyler Cowen on Fiscal Irresponsibility

Speaking of Tyler Cowen, his article in the NYT today is interesting. First, I agree with him. Two, he cites James Buchanan, someone I vaguely remember hearing about in an undergraduate course on taxation and government finance (and in which I got a B grade and I'm not sure at all what I learned). Anyway, since then Buchanan won a Nobel in economics, and his work on "public choice" seems very interesting. But back to the point: do democracies spend too much--almost always? I does seem that Keynes's insight has been badly abused. We should only run deficits in times of real need, not endemically, as we have mostly since WWII. However, to cut now is perhaps to risk jolting a delicate economy with a shock that it can't very well withstand. In fact, to hell with "the economy". Remember, we should really be concerned about people, living human beings will families to feed and bills to pay. I think that we have to make some very tough choices indeed.

Cowen expands on his argument & brings in some comment from his spot @ Marginal Revolution.

Seth Roberts on Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation

Seth Roberts has posted (and will post) some comments on Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation, which I read recently. Both the original by Cowen & Roberts comments to date are very worthwhile. Cowen argues that we've picked the "low hanging fruit" and therefore we may see some degree of economic stagnation in the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Roberts follows up with the pertinent comments, including citing one of his favorites, Jane Jacobs. Interesting and thought-provoking stuff.
I posted a comment on down the line, citing one of my favorites, Thomas Homer-Dixon, who covers similar territory.

Dr. Kurt Harris, M.D. & PaNu

In my post yesterday about the Nightline segment, I should have also given a shout-out to Dr. Kurt Harris. First of all, he's a UI grad as both an undergraduate and from medical school, so of course this speaks well of him! But more importantly, he, too, provides a rich and thoughtful resource in his blog about nutrition and health. Each of the persons that I normally mention in this realm has a slightly different take on what is best, but a couple of really regular and standard points stand out: grains and sugars (especially fructose in high doses) will be the death of us. Really, the death of us. Dr. Harris is another excellent resource for this perspective. Check out his "Get Started" link, which is short and to the point.

P.S. The "PaNu" should be pronounced "pay new", but I lack the diacritical marking for a long "a". He's shortening "paleo nutrition".

Krugman on Trains: We Love 'Em

There seems to be an argument that we Americans don't and shouldn't like the idea of trains. BS! Krugman makes the practical arguments in his usual deft & slyly ironic manner. I've been infatuated by trains since I was a youngster. I rode in the engine of a train between Shenandoah and Essex courtesy of connections of my grandfather. (This places the trip no later than 1959, the year that he died.) Since then I've always loved to travel by train. It was great having a train connection between Champaign and Chicago, and traveling on the TGV from Paris to Geneva--wow! A truly sweet ride! Also, we enjoyed a fun family vacation traveling via Amtrack from Galesburg (IL) to San Francisco, on the Yosemite, LA, and Santa Fe, before completing the loop back to Galesburg. The trip was a wonderful site seeing tour. Iowa Guru & I are supporting the effort to get train service between IC & Chicago, but things are dicey, as Brandstad and the Republicans don't seem to like the idea. Let's hope (and write) that they change their minds.

Two more points:
1. A short Krugman follow-up post: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/02/trains-planes-and-automobiles/

2. Planes, alas, used to seem quite fun and an adventure, but this is no longer so.

Fountain of Youth? Maybe Exercise

Some good news. Some evidence, laboratory testing on mice, that exercise deters aging. In my experience, exercise keeps me feeling better. Will it help me to live longer? Maybe, but mostly, I want to enjoy whatever time I have. Besides, I enjoy exercise. I don't do painful, boring stuff. Today I played basketball. Crazy? Maybe, but I impressed myself. I'm not what I was, but I still can do a good deal. I shoot very well (if not guarded too closely by some young buck) and I pass extremely well (if you go the bucket, I get you the ball). Anyway, it feels good (although a bit sore tonight). Well, here's to the mice & me!

Art De Vany, Robb Wolff, and the Cave Man Life

Only network television could take a really cutting edge and interesting perspective like that held by De Vany & Wolff and turn it into something cutesy. On the other hand, while I didn't learn anything really new in this piece, I hope that others will. I think De Vany, Wolff, along with Sisson, Cordain, Taubes, and our own local Dr. Terry Wahls, are really on to something very important. While I am not a perfect convert (I confess to a birthday celebration cupcake today), and therefore my sinfulness notwithstanding, I think that this way of living--eating "paleo" or "primal" and working out this way--really is the right way to go. I've become more diligent in my adherence to these principles, and as a result, I'm looking better (Iowa Guru says so, it's not just my usual vanity) and feeling better.

I might also note that despite all of the cuteness and lack of substance contained in this segment, the authors that I list above all provide very well researched and considered proof supporting their positions. De Vany, for instance, a retired economics professor, uses his knowledge of complex systems and economics models to understand the human body. Taubes is a science writer from Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia. Of course, these degrees don't guaranty that he's correct, but he's not ignorant. (However, I think that he is mostly correct.) The others have similarly impressive credentials, and most importantly, commitment to seeking what is true and useful.

Okay, I gotta go home & eat me some meat (or fish) & greens!

Bryan Caplan on Amy Chua on Markets & Democracy: Not Always a Great Couple?

Very nerdy.

Caplan provides a brief description of Chua's World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. Chua argues that while ethnic minorities often are economic leaders in a society, and are thereby subject to resentment, they benefit most from market reforms.However, because of resentment, they suffer when majority voters promote punitive policies toward them. Caplan challenges her assumptions. However, either way, its a brief reminder that markets and democracy isn't all sweetness and light when it roles in. Think of the North African nations: whither will they go? (I don't know if they have much in the way of ethnic minorities, however.) Thought-provoking.

Joshua Foer on Memory

Rating: Moderately nerdy (although Iowa Guru would consider it really nerdy).

Joshua Foer published the above cited article in the NYT Magazine that heralds the publication of this book Moonwalking with Einstein, which is set to come out in a couple of days. The topic of memory and mnemonic devices has fascinated me for decades. From Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas's book to the work of Francis Yates (The Art of Memory), this intrigues me. As I sit here, I have a pretty good memory of what I've read and learned. I can recall narratives and facts for work pretty well, at least when a case is active. As for history, I think that I have a pretty good memory. Why so? I think that I like to make sense of things. One of my earliest memories (and I kid you not about this), when we lived on Pioneer Avenue (i.e., before 3rd grade), I wanted to know who came first, the Kaiser or Hitler? (Maybe this really is very nerdy.) Anyway, I think that I really have a sense of narrative as a explanatory and mnemonic device. Well, anyway, learning to memorize more has some interest, and, as I'm sure Foer discusses in his book (as well as the article, which seems a lead in for the book), it is a fascinating tale of its own. Thus, my interest. On the other hand, Iowa Guru can testify to very many instances of very bad memory!

If you want to get a further sense of Foer's project and book, Amazon has both a interview and a brief video interview. I'm looking forward to the book.

Paul Krugman on the Myth of Useless Bureaucrats

Have private contractors that take over government functions done such a great job? Krugman says "no", and from what I know, I agree. Think of the private juvenile detention center with the corrupt judges, Blackwater, etc. Come to think of it,are government workers any less skillful & efficient than private sector workers? One wonders.

Perhaps the most important point Krugman makes: the same proposition told over and over again becomes "true" regardless of any factual accuracy to support it. Remember: you must keep your crap detector on 24/7! (Thank you, Neil Postman.)

Easterly on Growth, Poverty & Aid

Nerd Alert!

Another podcast that I enjoy is Russ Roberts's EconTalk, which comes out weekly, and has done so since at least 2007. Roberts takes about 1 hour to discuss a topic of interest with economists, political scientists, and others with similar interests about topics in economics and public affairs. The discussion led by Roberts is always interesting, and even when Roberts disagrees with the perspective or contention offered by his guest, he doesn't get on a high horse or simply toot his own horn. He lets his guest talk. Roberts is a part of the blog-crazy economics department at George Mason University, which, I must say, as a group, probably does more to promote and stimulate thinking about economics and public affairs than any other group that I know. For instance, Tyler Cowan and Alex Tarrock's Marginal Revolution comes out of GMU.

Now the podcast: William Easterly of NYU is a major critic of the traditional development aid regime that includes the IMF, the World Bank, Jeffrey Sachs, Bono, and so on. Easterly worked at the World Bank, so he's seen things from the inside. His main contention: aid hasn't worked for several reasons. These reasons include a lack of feedback (market mechanism) to measure success and need; lack of standards, institutions and culture for economic development in the recipient countries; bureaucratic imperatives of the providers that trump the needs of recipients; and corruption among governments receiving or administering aid. Easterly doesn't want to cut billions loose just to fend for themselves or starve. He does recognize gains. He believes, however, that small scale, direct giving (to projects and not necessarily governments) works best.

It's a thought-provoking discussion, and I know that his books have attracted a lot of interest because they attack the reigning paradigm (of which Jeff Sachs is seen as the current intellectual champion). Having read Sachs, this provides another important perspective. The problems are real, and how we address them can prove a matter of life and death, not to mention poverty, disease, and limited life for millions around the world.

Phillip Pettit on Group Agency

First of all, I should ask you to take note of the podcast Philosophy Bites, a delightful podcast out of the UK. Two philosophers take turns hosting guest philosophers to discuss a wide range of topics. These podcasts are great while doing the dishes, mowing the loan, going for walks, etc. Each one is about 20 minutes long. You feel like your listening to a couple of philosophers discuss a subject, but they avoid (or explain) philosophical jargon, so the conversations are aimed a lay persons. It's quite often very high quality, indeed.

Nerd alert! (I'll post this for anyone who wants to avoid a really nerdy type subject.)

The linked podcast is a discussion with political philosopher Phillip Pettit on group agency. The idea that groups can form intentions and take actions. Plain, right? Well, not so easy. Such group powers were little known outside of the State in antiquity, but institutions in the Middle Ages, like guilds, the Church, monasteries, etc. gave rise to thinking about how groups may act. More recently, but only seriously since the 19th century, we developed the idea of corporations. Corporations: good or bad? Well, this is not so easy to answer. I'm having doubts about the power of such remote, single-purpose (pecuniary profit), long-lasting, and uber-rational agents. Do corporations do what no individual would do? Should corporations be held to criminal liability? Where's the "intent"? Can we have a group intent? Here's where we get into the other part of Pettit's talk: how can we decide a group intent? Although he doesn't mention it, I think that he's getting into issues of Condorcet's theorem, Arrow's theorem, and those of others who deal with the paradoxes of group choice. (Garry Wills addresses the issues in layman's terms in Confessions of a Conservative, if you want to check it out.) What this means is that groups have even more problems than individuals (to the extent that we are individuals--are we?) forming intent. The interview covers this topic all too briefly, but we can think of it as a teaser for Pettit's book! Really, it's an interesting problem.

Mary Beard on Oratory

Courtesy of Farnum Street (an interesting blog that I discovered), classicist Mary Beard writes an interesting reflection on oratory as occasioned by the wide acclaim give to the King's Speech. This is a fascinating topic, especially if one has to persuade others (and we all do). Speeches in the public arena are challenging or uplifting or most often, awful. But when one hears a great one, say Churchill or Martin Luther King, Jr., one can be moved and one's mind and disposition changed. However, the flip side of this coin is demagoguery, and now it comes in large quantities of sound bites from hideously small minds. Perhaps TV has ruined the art, and now we only get foul noise.

Krugman on Central Planning

This is a quick piece on economics & organization. Why do we have central command and control organizations if the free market works so well? In this piece, Krugman talks about Boeing, but it's true throughout our economy. And although many so-called conservatives would be loath to admit it, their favorite organization, the military, is very command and control. A very informative piece for about 30" of reading!

Warfare/Welfare State: Ralph Benko

Just a short piece that I think says a huge amount. We spend most government money on "defense" (military) and transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid). Other the other stuff--like teachers, weather forecasting, foreign aid--is peanuts. Most people--often the loudest voices--don't know this (or don't care). We do need some fundamental reforms, but all the energy now seems aimed at public employees and their unions, not at the real issues of long-term deficits. We need some new ways of thinking about a lot of things, but the public conversation becomes easily warped by those seeking partisan political advantage.

Barnett on George Friedman

I quit listening to The Next 100 Years. Now, Thomas Barnett tells us why I did so. Thanks, Tom. If I read this earlier, maybe I'd have saved my self some time.

Stephen Walt on Double Standards for Dictators

The Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, but its op-ed page is like listening to O'Reilly, Beck, or Limbaugh but with a better vocabulary. And it usually makes about as much sense as they do.

Walt takes on the WSJ today, something that needs to occur more often so far as I can tell. (I don't normally read it, although we have a subscription here at the office; too much on business & politics to the right of Mr. A.T. Hun.) I this instance, Walt suggests that calling our dictators "good", or in any sense better than others, is, well, nonsense. Examples provided.

Barnett Takes Ferguson to Task

Tom Barnett's interesting perspective on the world and the U.S. role in it provides a very thoughtful perspective. In this piece he takes down Niall Ferguson's dissing of the Obama Administration's handling of the Egypt situation, which I've been posting about of late. I like Barnett's perspective, which balances economics, geopolitical strategy, and military concerns better than anyone else currently, although I think Fareed Zakaria usually has a worthwhile and justified perspective on events. Also, I note that Barnett makes a passing but disparaging remark about George Friedman's work. Interestingly, I had to stop listening to Friedman's The Next 100 Years because I thought it too limiting, too 19th century. It's all geopolitics with no nukes or globalization. I get the impression that Barnett doesn't think too highly of it either.

David Brooks on Egypt & the Quest for Dignity

I owe this one to Frank Robinson's excellent post on Egypt @ his blog The Rational Optimist. Robinson incorporates insights from Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (a great source for understanding the Hegelian tradition, Plato, and Nietzsche and which I think has been unfairly maligned), as well as from Brooks. In any event, Robinson and Brooks have reasonable hopes for the Egyptian movement. Societies can improve, and while backsliding does occur, we have reason for hope. I hope that they're both right.

Tyler Cowan & David Brooks: The Great Stagnation

I'm getting two birds with one stone here. I read Tyler Cowan's e-book and being late to review it, I now have the benefit of David Brooks's review. Cowan's argument that we have picked a great deal of the "low-hanging fruit", makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly our economy has changed a great deal, but have I lived through the changes that my parents or grandparents lived through? Personal computers and the internet have changed a great deal, but I don't know if the changes are as profound as those of the period 1850 to 1950.

Brooks makes a good point: our quality of life may have improved, although not our wealth necessarily.

Both sources provide thoughtful commentary on our current position.

David Rock @ GoogleTechTalks on Your Brain at Work

I don't know how I came across this, but it proved very interesting, and it should prove very useful. In short, Mr. Rock talks about how our brain works and how we can use our knowledge about how it works to improve our lives. He talks about 4 primary topics:

1. The rational is overvalued. It's only a small part of our brain, it processes serially and rather slowly, and it uses a lot of energy. On the other hand, it's most important function may be to say "no" to motor or emotional impulses.

2. Emotions are misunderstood. We color everything in our world with either a positive or a negative valence. We can change our attitude toward the outside world to some extent.

3. The social world is our main concern. We are social animals through and through. We depend on each other for survival, not just our individual wits. We have the following concerns as social animals: SCARF
Status
Certainty
Autonomy
Relatedness
Fairness

4. Attention. As we learn to pay attention, as we learn mindfulness, we learn to change our brain. We can develop brain skills that enhance our lives.

This was quite an interesting talk. I've seen a couple of GoogleTechTalks, which are very much like TED Talks, in that they have excellent presenters. These talks are a bit longer and have less production glitz than many TED Talks, but the quality of the presentation and topics (well, the two that I've seen) have impressed me.

Rock also cited these two articles that further examine his thinking:
"Managing with the Brain in Mind" and "The Neuroscience of Mindfulness"

Good stuff!

Ferguson: Historian as Commentator

This long interview of Ferguson about his cover story in Newsweek about the Obama Administration's actions in Egypt raises a really interesting background question: does a deep knowledge of history give one a deeper insight into current events? Does Ferguson, who certainly is well versed in the history of the last couple of centuries, have greater insight into current events? Some random thoughts:
1. Ferguson loves controversy. I think this love of controversy may cloud his judgment.
2. As I mentioned in a comment to my last post (yes, I'm down to commenting on my own posts!), the author of Virtual History should know better than to criticize those who fail to forecast events.
3. I think that he is right in pushing the idea of scenarios. That is, consideration of multiple futures, not knowing which will prevail. Acknowledge the limitation of knowledge.
4. Is the Muslim Brotherhood so strong and so reactionary? I don't know. Does he, really?
5. He mocks Obama for calling Islam and religion of peace, and certainly a lot of evidence that it's not. But would he mock anyone if they said Christianity is a religion of peace? Certainly a lot of evidence that it's not. Religion, for a great many people, is considered no more seriously than their choice of language. They're born with it, enough said. This allows those who want to, to manipulate people rather easily toward violence. Violence and religion have an awfully long history. (See Rene Girard's works.)
6. I have some sympathy for Ferguson's argument that we need some greater sense of grand strategy.
7. One more interview on Parker-Spitzer: http://parkerspitzer.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/14/niall-ferguson-obamas-handling-of-the-egyptian-crisis-was-a-foreign-policy-debacle/.
8. Perhaps U.S. policy was wise to play it both ways? Ferguson is quite critical of this, but I'm not convinced that it will necessarily prove so bad. You play both sides of the street, hedge your bets. If you don't screw the winner, the winner can forget easily enough if you offer the right attitude following. On the other hand: Iran 1979.

Ferguson on Obama's Egypt Policy--or Lack Thereof

Niall Ferguson has apparently taken up a column at Newsweek, which is good news. He's a first-rate historian and a very much a controversialist. I don't always agree with him, but I think that one has to take his arguments seriously. In his first column, he skewers the Obama administration for remaining behind events in Egypt, thereby alienating both the powers that be (or were) and the protesters. It does give me a scary reminder of the U.S. and Iran in 1979, a very bad precedent indeed. Jimmy Carter's policies and actions addressing the fall of the Shah were not a success. I think that Ferguson, according to other sources that I've heard, may be overestimating the sway of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, I'm not certain that democracy will prevail, by any means. Also, while Kissinger isn't necessarily the best role model, he does think in terms of global strategy, and that's a must for foreign policy. I don't know that Obama has that instinct, and the voters were looking at someone to address the economy, not foreign policy in the grand scheme.

Ian Morris: Why the West Rules--For Now

I like big history and I cannot lie.

Almost famous rap

Okay, that’s a bit of a misquote, but for yours truly, it works. As someone who has declared his own year of big history, this book provided a great start. The full title of this book tells a lot: Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. Quite a mouthful, and quite a claim, but Professor Morris (Stanford Classics & Archeology) backs up his claims. Let me unpack it a bit.

Morris starts with a tale of counter-history: a tale of Prince Albert traveling to Beijing in the mid-nineteenth century, held virtually captive to the Chinese hegemon. Of course, almost the opposite was true, except the Chinese emperor sent a small dog, Looty, to Balmoral Castle, as a form of homage and tribute. How did this happen? How did the West come to dominate the globe in the nineteenth century? This is the guiding question of this book, and to answer it, Morris goes back, way back.

Morris goes back to the first journeys of humans out of Africa. There were multiple migrations and multiple forms of humanoids that evolved in Africa and that migrated out. Morris retraces all of this to arrive at solid beginning for his account: race (as biology) does not account for human differences. We’re all birds of a feather genetically (Although some hanky-panky in Europe mixed some Neanderthal genes in with the homo sapiens. Neanderthals eventually died out.) After the beginning of humans, and then with the development of agriculture (about 10,000 years ago), divergences began between East and West. Note: Morris notes that distinctions between East and West are in some sense artificial and to some extent limit the human populations that he considers. By “East” he means China and its civilization, of which Japan became the most prominent offshoot. By “West”, he means that world that started in the “Hilly Flanks” of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and then migrated west into the Mediterranean, then into Northern Europe, and then across the Atlantic. He does not consider other human civilizations, such as those of the Americas.

Morris tells how, using an index of social development that he created, East and West went back and forth over the millennia in the lead for development. The West began in the lead and continued up through the time of the Roman Empire, then the East lead (around 1100 during the Song dynasty), and the two were nearly even up into the late 1700’s, when the West shot into a lead and changed the game. Up until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the empires and nation-states of both East and West would hit a ceiling of social development that neither the Romans nor the Song could break. Each time this ceiling was approached, at least one of the “five horsemen of the apocalypse” would ride: epidemic, famine, state failure, climate change, and migration. However, in the 1600’s China on the East and Russia in the West (and East geographically) closed the “steppe highway” that allowed the horsemen of Central Asia (think Ghengis Khan and Tamarlane) to move from East to West, wrecking havoc on civilizations in the West. These horsemen are the barbarians who helped bring down Rome, and in the East they were the reason for that lovely wall the Chinese have.

The weakness of the book lies in the fact that Morris doesn’t give as definitive and persuasive answer to the question of why the West shot out ahead via industrialization. Perhaps he knows of very important and provocative literature out there. For instance, he praises Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence on several occasions, but I think that he could have done more, as this change in humanity—the Industrial Revolution—is the most significant change in the human condition since the advent of agriculture and the resulting development of cities (and thus civilization). But perhaps I quibble. To get another take on this issue, see Timur Kuran’s review in Foreign Affairs.

After bringing the tale up to today, and after some discussion of China’s growing influence and how it might take the lead in social development back to the East, Morris ponders the future. In an essay that Niall Ferguson rightly praised in his brief note on the book in Foreign Affairs, Morris contemplates to divergent paths that humanity may take. First, the possibility of the rise of The Singularity, where humans and machines sync-up for a brave new world. The other path that he contemplates is the possibility of Nightfall, a phrase borrowed from Asimov’s Foundation series, where civilization collapses and the five horsemen ride again. Climate change, anyone?

The great reluctance that I have to write a review of this book comes from the inadequacy of my review to do this book justice. It’s a very learned undertaking, yet its written with a light and engaging hand. Morris blends analysis and narrative in a pleasing manner. He carefully lays out his premises and supports his conclusions. He finds patterns in history, but not laws. He does about everything right that one could hope for in such a book as this. If you want to know where humankind has been and where we might be going, you’d be hard pressed to find a better book than this one.

726 pages, published 2010.

Exuberant Animal Essentials

I mentioned this site a few blogs ago, and today I find a new post that lists "essentials". I wouldn't bother to post it as a health or fitness matter, but I have to list it because the "essentials" aren't about just health and fitness, but about life. I strikes me that if you apply these essentials to your whole life, in all of its various manifestations, you're going to be doing very well for yourself and those around you. Good thoughts to keep in mind.

Art De Vany on The Superbowel Diet

Art De Vany, one of my diet & health gurus, wrote this provocative piece on Super Bowel diet habits. In a word, most people eat terribly when consuming what most consider appropriate Super Bowel fare. Okay, okay, I have an occasional beer, and I'm not a purist. However, De Vany makes an important point: if the athletes we watch ate this way, they wouldn't be worth watching. Ironic, indeed. So, if you must watch the Super Bowel, keep this information in mind.

Garry Wills on Football & Violence

Only Garry Wills could find St. Augustine apropos in an article about football. The point Wills raises--about the violence of the game--is a disturbing one indeed. I loved playing high school football. While being tall and (then) somewhat lanky, basketball seemed a natural calling, but football really captured something primal. Perhaps so many guys on a field engaged in what was a form of a war game. I enjoyed it when I could hit and move somebody (overweight defensive linemen or over active linebackers), and as an offensive lineman I became pretty good at it. (I never found a consistent spot on defense. I never found the technique to make it work for me, or perhaps I didn't have enough of the animal spirit.) I enjoyed the contact, but I didn't want to hurt anyone. Rough-housing without hurting, I thought. But I must say, not having had a son, I was relieved of my growing concern that football involves too much violence and risk of injury to justify it. (Volleyball, I learned, has injuries enough of its own. Instrumental music--not so much, thankfully.)

I don't follow pro football, and for the umpteenth year in a row, I doubt I'll watch any of the Super Bowl (some snippets, maybe). I do love to watch the Hawks or high school ball if I know the players, but I do cringe at the injuries. Like Wills, who has written eloquently about Raymond Berry, the great Baltimore Colts receiver who played with Johnny Unitas, also appreciates the game. But perhaps we should start saying "no". Okay, this is probably the most heretical thing I've written on this blog, but I don't have a good answer. Too many fans seem to revel in the violence and not the beauty of athleticism.

Movie Tip: Trouble in Paradise

Iowa Guru & I saw this film tonight, and it proved a delight. We've always been quite fond of 1930's romantic and screw-ball comedies, but this one has escaped me before (she'd seen it before and just recently again on TCM). Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, it if full of innuendo, sly sophistication, and exquisite charm. (Fortunately, it was made before the Hollywood Code came into effect and limited adult takes on movies.) A film that most anyone would enjoy.

Frank Bruni on Jack LaLanne: A Dour Take

Both Iowa Guru & I thought that this was a dour take on Jack LaLanne's legacy. For me, living in the body brings great delight (for the most part). Exercise is second only to sex for physical delight (although a great meal or fine wine has many sensual delights). In any event, to think that exercise is something that we must do out of a sense of guilt or vanity is a truly sad and unnecessary take on the experience. While sometimes I moan and groan about going to yoga or going to lift, when I've done it, I inevitably feel better about everything. And I love games: basketball was a form of meditation and recreation for me for decades, and now I meet some of that need for the delight of competition by playing volleyball. I do agree that too many forms of exercise appear to be a matter of drudgery. How many runners have I seen that look genuinely pained? And treadmills--well, they do remind me a bit of hamsters. I now prefer a bit of stationary bike with faux countryside to give the ride some interest. Also, thanks to the likes of Art De Vany and Mark Sisson, I keep workouts relatively short & intense. For play on the other hand, I can take as much time as I want (although my body now limits me). Also, Frank Forencich of Exuberant Animal and Erwan Le Corre of MovNat show us how we can use and enjoy our bodies in the most primal and delightful ways. I wish I was young and agile enough to learn parkour or gymnastics like Damien Walters, but the yoga has been a true delight--and think what one might do there. So, Mr. Bruni, get out of your chair and smell the sweat. I like to read and watch more than the next person, but sometimes you got to go shake it, and you'll love it.

Mark Sisson on Jack LaLanne

This a wonderful celebration of Jack LaLanne, someone whom everyone in our generation remembers. Iowa Guru swears by him (I mean in praise of him). The fact that he was full of vim and vigor up to the time of his death at age 96 is quite a deal. Could he have done better? Perhaps. I think some of the folks that I read, like De Vany and Sisson certainly would recommend some different practices (on diet and variety of exercise), but it's hard to argue with his success. I'm going to follow-up with a different post, but let me be clear: here's to you Jack!

Meditation: Growing Understanding

This is just one of many studies that show the benefits of meditation. I think that the author doesn't probably know how much work has been done already on this topic by people like Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, to name but one researcher that comes quickly to mind. (If you want more information, you should check out the Mind and Life Conferences sponsored by the Dalai Lama, where he brings together scientists with Buddhists to share perspectives and common concerns. They have some very interesting exchanges and the scientists have provided some very interesting information about meditation, the practice of compassion, emotions, and so on.) Anyway, this article might whet your appetite to meditate. My willpower waxes and wanes on this. I do find that a great night of sleep is the very best thing for the brain.

Stephn Walt on Eygpt: A Realist Perspective

Walt gives a realist argument about why the U.S. should allow Mubarak to go and why to the U.S. should hope to see democracy gain a foothold. By doing so, Walt shows that "realist" thinkers do not concern themselves only with matters of military and economic power, but that the legitimacy and popularity of a regime count for a great deal also. Thus, this gives some insight into not only a crucial foreign policy decision, but also it displays a more sophisticated realism.

Ross Douthat on Egypt

Douthat raises all of the right questions and lists all of the possible trade-offs if the U.S. backs Mubarak or if it sees him go. He notes in the end--and this is the real significance--what happens in the streets of Egypt will control the outcome. The U.S. is more of a bystander than a participant. There are limits to power.

On Egypt

I'm now watching Fareed Zakaria's Global GPS about Egypt. In general, this is the best public affairs program on TV, and today is no exception. The discussion about developments from participants in Egypt and by U.S. diplomats and academics. The discussion is intelligent and articulate. Speakers are sharp enough to note that we should worry more about the Russian revolution precedent than the Iranian revolution precedent. A really insightful take. And no one else gets current power holders on to speak like Zakaria--David Cameron interview coming up!

BTW, the site changes from time-to-time. A great place to see the show without commercials. The site usually changes on Monday to reflect the show from the day before.

More on the Financial Crisis

This article by NYT financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson reinforces what I saw last night & reinforces my belief that we haven't done nearly enough to address these problems. However, this article by Frank Partnoy (whom I think was interviewed in the film) suggests that we might find some accounting yet for the numerous misdeeds that occurred.

Movie Review: Inside Job

Iowa Guru & I went to see this Oscar-nominated documentary film tonight. It tells the story of the 2008 financial crash from its from its roots in the 1980's to its current repercussions (or lack thereof). The film takes a complex subject and makes it comprehensible to a wide audience. I didn't learn anything especially new, as I've read a fair amount on the topic already. However, it's well done, and it carefully documents its conclusions. Some sub-themes, for instance, like the academic conflicts-of-interest, were especially well explored.

Don't go for any reassurance that the world has been set aright. Essentially, we established a perverse incentive system, moral hazard, totally insufficient regulations, and a culture of greed, and then we expected smoke and mirrors to make us rich. In the past I've commented on how traditional, "free market" economics has demonstrated its shortcomings during this crisis. Here, we hear and see the actual economists, like Alan Greenspan, who sold this bill of goods. It wasn't just an error in knowledge and modeling, we have some serious ethical corruption as well.

I will not sleep better tonight for having seen this movie. One of the really puzzling aspects of Obama's response to this was his appointment to so many insiders to positions in the Administration who had some hand in setting up and maintaining this corrupt system. C & I believe that he felt he could not afford to appoint rookies or outsiders when the system was on the brink of collapse. Perhaps this is a wise decision, but it comes at the cost of maintaining the status quo, for the most part. The filmmakers don't see much fundamentally changed by the financial reform bill. Better than nothing, but not enough. I suspect very much that the filmmaker is right. BTW, the film was written and directed by Charles Ferguson. I hope that they win the Academy Award for Best Documentary! See this film!

What To Do in Egypt?

Yesterday, in response to 1HP's questioning of Obama Administration policy about Egypt (to have been delivered by her White House contact), I raised these questions:
1. If the U.S. believes that Islamic radicals—anti-democratic & theocratic—would replace Mubarak, should we then determine that it would be better to wait for other reform?
2. If the U.S. believes that Mubarak is a better strategic partner than any likely replacement (and who knows who might emerge in power if wide spread disruption occurs), should we practice realism over an ideology of democracy?
3. Given Egypt’s current state of development, can we expect some worthwhile (i.e., more than plebiscite) democracy take root in Egypt? To what extent is the U.S. foolish to encourage democracy in places where the social & economic conditions make its success unlikely? See, for instance. F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home & Abroad.
4. To what extent should we see Mubarak as like the Shah of Iran? Will continued U.S. support only flame resentment against the U.S. for propping up an unpopular dictator? Or is Mubarak different, less odious?

Then I read this article by Leslie Gelb, foreign policy big wig. Well, at least by him I was asking the right questions. But I'm not sure either of us have "the right" answers. Politics always seems a matter of trade-offs.

Nick Morgan on Public Speaking Tips

This is a fine piece, a sound-bite size tip on giving great presentations. Just enough to whet the appetite. If you have to present (and who doesn't?), then its worth < 3 minutes to consider these simple points.

Robert Wright on the U.S. as Global Cop

Robert Wright makes a good point here, one that others have made before him and that we continue to ignore at our peril. We pay a huge cost for being (we think) the "sole superpower" and de facto global cop. We pay for it financially and in our standing in the world. We do need more collective efforts, which we used in the Cold War (think NATO). We were always the biggest contributor, but never the only one. Maybe, to some extent, we've always been suckers. However, it's time to stop. We have to get beyond the paranoia of shared sovereignty. We need to work our real collective action strategies.

Well, one can hope.