Postings from December 2002
[Note: Some now-dead links have been removed from archived items.]

THE RELIGIOUS LEFT: It gets a big New Year's plug in the NYT business section. [Posted 12/31.]

COUNTING CARBS: InstaPundit is telling readers I have a posting on low-carb diets. I don't. Or at least the diet posting below isn't about low carbs. But I'll use the excuse to link to this piece by Michael Fumento, debunking the Atkins' Diet. (Editors in the market for a feature-length piece should contact Mike, who has much, much more on the subject.) Update: Mike Fumento tells me Reason will be running his feature-length analysis. [Posted 12/31.]

LAST-MINUTE GIFTS: If you're looking for last-minute tax-deductible contributions, I recommend The Institute for Justice, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and, of course, my old pals at Reason. (These links are all to the donation pages, but the sites also provide information about their work.) [Posted 12/31.]

BOOK BY ITS COVER: No, that's not the real Look and Feel I'm reading in the picture. It's a mockup of the very cool jacket wrapped around Rob Campbell's Plato's Garage. [Posted 12/31.]

ETHICS CHECK: Jacob Levy, who eviscerated NYT Mag "Ethicist" Randy Cohen in a Reason article, corrects the record Cohen misstated in last Sunday's whining and self-centered remembrance of Ann Landers. I've always thought Jacob's original piece changed the Ethicist column. It seemed to get better, or at least to avoid the particular pathology Jacob identified, after Reason brought the piece to Cohen's attention. Obviously it bugged Cohen. A lot. [Posted 12/31.]

CLONE WARS: As the cliched title suggests, it's hard to find something to say about cloning that I haven't said numerous times before. (I notice that my friend Ron Bailey mostly recycles the usual arguments in his most recent Reason Online piece.) I disagree with Matt Ridley that a Raelian baby clone will be to therapeutic cloning what Chernobyl was to nuclear power. In the unlikely event that the Raelians present a demonstrably cloned baby, the child is likely to be healthy. Why go public otherwise? When presented with real families, the public has far greater sympathy for parenthood, even unusual parenthood, than intellectuals expect. A healthy cloned infant with loving parents is at least as likely to defuse concerns over reproductive cloning as to fuel a furor over research cloning. Or, I suppose, a cloned baby could have both effects, igniting pro-life efforts to protect reproductive cloning but to ban destroying blastocysts for research. David Frum makes an argument along those lines:

But if human-cloning technology becomes feasible, only a tiny handful of the embryos we clone will be born alive—the vast majority of them will be killed. And it is exactly the possibility of such an outcome that "anti-cloning" legislation like [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein's preserves.

Under her bill, scientists can clone all the babies they want—but they will face hefty fines if they fail to abort them within a specified period of time. This is a very strange sort of medical ethics.

One reason this debate is so heated and often so frustrating is that the various sides (and there are more than two) start from different ethical concerns and assumptions. Feinstein et al. believe reproductive cloning is bad per se; why exactly isn't clear, but those reasons, too, probably differ from person to person. They don't believe blastocysts that are never implanted in wombs have special ethical status—cells in a petri dish can't be "aborted"—so they're at pains to make sure the blastocysts are destroyed. David, on the other hand, isn't terribly worried about reproductive cloning, which he sees as a sideshow. He's concerned about killing embryos. But he, too, differs from the traditional blastocysts-are-people position. Like a surprising number of smart and ethical writers (Andrew Sullivan is another example), he has little problem with killing fetuses to allow sex without risks. It's destroying undifferentiated cells to find cures for devastating diseases that he can't justify:

I cannot bring myself to blame a woman who ends an unwanted pregnancy in its first 8 or 10 weeks. But there is a big difference between accepting abortion as a sad outcome to a personal problem and accepting the extinction of millions of early human lives as a legitimate element of medical research and development.

I like and admire David Frum, but I find this argument contemptible. Having sex is a choice, and most women are keenly aware of its possible consequences. Having Parkinson's disease is not a choice. If you think blastocysts have such high moral status that medical research using them should be a crime, then surely you should believe that far more developed fetuses are worth legal protection. Or does sex just trump other values? To be fair to David (though this does not apply to Andrew), he appears less concerned with laws than with attitudes: We see abortion as unfortunate. Medical research would be unfettered by such a stigma. But is that claim true? A lot of women have abortions without considering them tragedies. And much existing medical research, which involves inflicting pain or death on animals, is "legitimate" but nonetheless "sad." Researchers recognize the tragic tradeoff when they use the word sacrifice to describe killing a research animal. (As for the "millions of early human lives," that number is wildly optimistic unless someone comes up with an alternative to human eggs. Harvesting human eggs is extremely difficult, and they come in small numbers.) On a related note, Charlie Murtaugh analyzes the recent news that Israeli scientists have grown miniature human and pig kidneys in mice by transplanting "kidney precursor cells" from early-stage fetuses. (Charlie notes that reports calling these cells "embryonic stem cells" are misleading, since that term applies to very early stage cells that can become any type of tissue.) Obviously this work is basic developmental biology, not applied medical research; nobody's looking for mini-kidneys. As Charlie notes, with a mixture of concern and playfulness, the cross-species transplants suggest both great promise and ethical questions far stranger than the ones surrounding cloning. As he writes in this post on hormone therapies, one of Charlie's continuing themes is the bioethical importance of Blade Runner. He's worried about the deliberate creation of sentient beings who, because they aren't "human," can be treated as slaves or worse. In his earlier discussion of the Blade Runner problem, he wondered why neoconservatives keep harping on Brave New World when they could draw on Ridley Scott's more powerfully disturbing vision. Charlie suspects the problem is neocon cultural snobbery. In fact, there's a more fundamental reason. Both neoconservatives and traditionalist pro-lifers accept the Blade Runner definition of "humanity": We are human, and therefore free, because we have the right DNA and were born without "manufacture." As I've written elsewhere, "They are the ones who measure the worth of human beings by the circumstances of their conception and the purity of their genetic makeup. They are the ones who say 'natural' genes are the mark of true humanity." The Blade Runner scenario is what you get when you combine conservative definitions of legal personhood with the science and commerce that produce manufactured nonhuman persons. (Contrary to Charlie's assumptions, government is not absent in Blade Runner. As in real life, the legal regime that defines property and personhood is part of the background.) The danger lies less in the research itself than in crabbed definitions of who's fully human. Defining personhood as something more than the right set of genes is not permissive. It merely sets different—and more humane—limits. (For background on the personhood arguments, see Ron Bailey's article here and his NRO debate here.) [Posted 12/31.]

ASYLUM FLAW: The Dallas Morning News has been following the sad story of Amina Budri, a 29-year-old Afghan woman facing deportation as an illegal immigrant. Everyone else in her family, including eight siblings, was granted asylum in the United States or Canada, but for reasons that aren't clear Budri's petition was denied. Having overstayed her visitor's visa, she's been fighting deportation since August 2000:

"They said there was no danger to me," she recalled. "I said, 'No, I can't go back.'

"I couldn't go to work or go to school. I would have to cover myself," she said, referring to the dress restrictions for women, allowing only the hands to be uncovered in public. "If I stay here, I will be free."

Budri's case, which dates back back to Taliban days, illustrates a flaw in asylum law, which is supposed to protect individuals from persecution. She's asking for a review of her case based on her family's political ties. But she's actually been afraid to return to Afghanistan because of she's a woman. Under the Taliban, a woman (especially a single woman with no male relatives to protect her) faced oppression we'd recognize as persecution if similar restrictions applied to an ethnic or religious miniority. But asylum law doesn't recognize persecution on the basis of gender. That's not surprising. After all, asylum law rarely recognizes the kind of oppression that affects everyone. It's designed to protect dissidents and (in the post-Holocaust world) ethnic and religious minorities, not to give every ordinary person in a dictatorship the chance to escape. Belonging to a persecuted "minority" that makes up half the population (or more) is too close to being an ordinary citizen. [Posted 12/31.]

BLOGGER DIET PLAN: John Ellis has resolved to lose weight and get fit. To make himself stick to his resolution, he pledges to post his weight on his blog every day starting January 3. It's a great idea for imposing self-discipline, and I could stand to lose a few pounds, but there's some information I don't think I'll share. [Posted 12/31.]

ATRIOS VS. INSTAPUNDIT: In response to my citation below of Gary Farber's results, UCLA political scientist and blogger Mark Kleiman writes:

Since the Lott business, every Atrios mention I have gotten has generated something like 1000 hits over a couple of days, fully comparable to Instapundit. In one case, the two mentioned me, equally casually, within minutes of each other, and Atrios actually produced more hits. Not sure why the other case came out differently; maybe more of Glenn's readers than of Atrios's knew who Gary Farber was, which would make sense if Atrios has mostly recently-acquired readers.

Who knows? Two data points don't tell much, except that Mark and Gary are worth visiting. [Posted 12/30.]

THANKS: Thanks to everyone who sent in comments on my potential author photos. There's no consensus on a single photo, but I appreciate all your comments. I've got to finish my NYT column and start proofing my book galleys. But I promise to post some real stuff within the next 24 hours. [Posted 12/30.]

POWER AND SUPERPOWER: Back from his semi-hiatus, Gary Farber notified a bunch of fellow bloggers. Both Glenn Reynolds and Atrios posted links within a few minutes of each other. Gary tracks the results. [Posted 12/24.]

HIGH INTEREST RATES: I was surprised to read in The Dallas Morning News that the highest money market account interest rate in the country (a whopping 1.6%) is on the PayPal account I've been using to park the donations you fine readers send me. I'd never thought of it as a serious investment, but now I've moved some free cash into it as well. Since PayPal also offers a debit card that looks like a MasterCard and gives me a rebate on purchases, it's a great deal. If you don't have a PayPal account and want to open one, use this link and I'll get $5.00. This Wired story from September 2001 provides an interesting tour of PayPal's struggle to create a new financial institution. Unlike its less successful predecessors, however, PayPal didn't try to start from scratch. Rather, as writer Steve Bodow explains, the company built on existing mediums of exchange, including currency and credit cards.

The emoney graveyard was already strewn with headstones when PayPal came along. Services like DigiCash and CyberCash, which launched in the mid- and late '90s with complicated schemes involving encryption-software downloads and electronic certificates, amassed little volume. More recent attempts such as Beenz made it easy to open an account, but their novel currencies - sort of gift certificates, sort of frequent-flier points - proved too hard to get and spend.

PayPal's approach is far less ambitious, and far more effective. PayPal is based on established standards, starting with the popular and time-tested networking device known as the dollar. By providing a Web front end to existing channels for moving money electronically, PayPal extends them into places they didn't previously reach. Understanding how PayPal works requires knowing a bit about the existing payments infrastructure. Credit and debit card transactions flow through separate networks, and merchants pay a fee known as interchange - the aggregate of several small vigs distributed to various intermediaries between buyer and seller, such as the merchant bank, card association, and card issuer - that comes to between 2 and 5 percent. Checking account transactions travel through another network. They cost vendors only pennies but take a few days to clear. PayPal simply acts as an additional intermediary, initiating transactions and sending confirmation notices. The difference - a mere technicality, to a person sending money - is that PayPal pays the interchange. As long as it's low, the company eats the expense. When it becomes significant, PayPal charges the recipient. For small merchants, charities, football pools, dues-collecting treasurers, and so on, PayPal's fees compare favorably to the price of a credit card merchant account, which carries initiation, equipment, and maintenance costs on top of transaction fees. All it takes to open a PayPal account is a name, email address, and password. Once you've signed up and furnished a credit, debit, or checking account number, you can send and receive money free of charge.

The result: viral proliferation. The service's simplicity and low cost attract people seeking payment. They persuade payers to open their own accounts, and when these new users want to receive funds, they, too, ask others to get onboard.

On a related subject, I recommend one of my favorite books, Joseph Nocera's A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class. It's a lively journalistic narrative of how bank credit cards (especially Visa) and money market funds brought convenient credit and high-interest investment to middle Americans (and the rest of the world). These quotidian institutions were once the crazy ideas of visionaries who made a lot of mistakes, and fought a lot of business and political battles, before their creations succeeded. Nocera also does a great job of capturing the intense financial anxieties of the 1970s—essential historical reading for anyone under 35. [Posted 12/24.]

SEASONAL RESOLUTION: Continuing a mostly futile campaign against cliches, I'd like to ask all my journalist readers and fellow bloggers to promise never to write the words, "Yes, Virginia," unless they are actually addressing someone with my name. There is no Santa Claus. But there are a lot of lazy writers. [Posted 12/24.]

PHOTOS, CONT'D: In my continuing quest to find an appropriate author photo for Look and Feel—one that's interesting and attractive without being distractingly artificial (oh yes, and one that looks like me)—I got photographer Kris Hundt, another D Magazine contributor, to do some studio shots. She worked in color, and it looks great, but the author photo has to be black and white. So I've posted a selection of black-and-white versions here and would appreciate any comments from readers. [Posted 12/24.]

LOTT LEAVES: Trent Lott does the right thing, stepping down as majority leader without quitting the Senate in a huff. I'm sure he still doesn't understand what happened or why an apology couldn't fix it. The issue wasn't about whether Lott is a "racist," in the sense (as he himself defined it) of a white person who thinks black people are inferior. I doubt Lott feels he is, by virtue of ethnic heritage, the innate superior to Colin Powell and Condi Rice. That much represents substantial progress from the world Lott was born into. His failure as a person and hence as a political leader was, as Shelby Steele so eloquently explained it in an article whose insights go far beyond race, the failure of imagination and identification—the failure to partake of the bourgeois sympathy that underlies classical liberalism and the free societies it has created. That explains also why Lott's vision of public service is so limited; he justifies himself by helping the home folks with goodies from Washington, not making good rules that allow everyone, Mississippian or not, to create a better life. All Americans aren't created equal in this vision. Some count for more than others; the only question is which ones. I was stuck by the divide between the parochial and the principled when reading this TNR piece on how Mary Landrieu won her Senate race. She told Louisianans she'd serve their parochial interests with sugar protectionism, never mind the good of the country as a whole. She gave voters the old southern pol's promise: to use government to help her tribe against outsiders. That promise is what connects the segregationist politics of the past with the pork-and-protection policies of the present. Hence the transformation of Strom Thurmond from a segregationist to someone who got federal dollars for black colleges in South Carolina. In neither case is government to be a neutral arbiter between equal citizens. The difference is merely who counts as an insider worthy of privilege. If you haven't read it already, today's Peggy Noonan column does a good job of explaining why so many conservatives and Republicans rallied against Lott. And, for the record, I appreciate Jonah Goldberg's recognition of my writings on this story, and I agree with him about Charles Krauthammer's column crediting "neoconservatives" as the sole principled Lott opponents. (There's also a generational divide that both overlook.) But I am, as I've explained in another context, an old southern liberal. The one and only political campaign I've ever worked in was against Strom Thurmond. Many of my policy views have changed over the years, but not my take on Thurmond and what he represents. [Posted 12/20.]

ECONOMIC PLAY: Contrary to the impression you may get from InstaPundit, Paul Krugman is the good guy in Daniel Drezner's post on bad economics. In fact, Drezner pulls a great Krugman quotation that made it into The Future and Its Enemies as well:

"You can't do serious economics unless you are willing to be playful. Economic theory is not a collection of dictums laid down by pompous authority figures. Mainly, it is a menagerie of thought experiments—parables, if you like—that are intended to capture the logic of economic processes in a simplified way. In the end, of course, ideas must be tested against the facts. But even to know what facts are relevant, you must play with those ideas in hypothetical settings. And I use the word 'play' advisedly: Innovative thinkers, in economics and other disciplines, often have a pronounced whimsical streak."

One of the great fallacies rattling around the public-intellectual world is that progress depends on grim, self-denial—what I call the "repression theory of progress." Here's a lecture I gave on the subject, derived from ideas in TFAIE. It's got something whimsical for everyone, from Newt Gingrich's affection for beach volleyball to W.H. Auden's love of lead mining. [Posted 12/19.]

WARTIME LEADER: My radio pal Hugh Hewitt's initial reaction to the Lott controversy was to say Lott's comments were stupid and then to focus his own attack on Al Gore:

Gore's psyche can't let him score just the points allowed following a gaffe. Gore had to add a late hit, had to invent a slander on Lott. No one else in official Washington is saying that Lott attacked integration. Just Gore. Just weird Al. Alone again with his own reality.

The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes, in a fine piece that jumped on Lott hard, described Gore's comments as "opportunistic." This is too gentle. Way too gentle. Al Gore is running for president and he is already making up stuff on a weekly basis. This is not normal behavior. It wasn't normal in 2000, and it isn't normal now.

Now Gore is out of the race and my faith in Hugh's ability to combine partisanship with principle is restored. This week's column is tough. Lott is, he writes, "to Washington, D.C., what the prevent defense is to the NFL. If I believed in reincarnation, I'd swear we'd found the new location of Gen. George McClellan." That's just the warmup. Here's the conclusion:

Far more important than the political calculations, however, is the stark fact that a country at war deserves its best leadership in every significant post. There is just no way that Sen. Lott is the best qualified individual to lead the Senate at this time. Not after such a massive, self-inflicted wound.

He has himself recognized the huge error involved even as he has struggled to persuade the country that it was a mistake of the head and not the heart. He will have many years of public service left in which to add to a record that is in many respects admirable, but he should not insist on trying to do so from the post of majority leader. Those who warn that Sen. Lott might quit the Senate rather than be embarrassed by a demotion slander Lott. He screwed up, yes, but leaving his job in the middle of a war and ceding control at least in part to the Democrats would be craven, and there is no serious evidence that he would do such a thing. Senate at this time. Not after such a massive, self-inflicted wound. Sen. Lott should simply do what is in the best interest of the country which he has served in high office for many years, and which is now a country at war which doesn't have time for sideshows. He should gracefully step aside and promise to work on behalf of the country and the party from a new post.

The next GOP leader might be more or less conservative, more or less confrontational. But he or she would not be the story. And that is the bottom line.

Unfortunately, Hugh probably gives Lott too much credit. One thing that Trent Lott has made painfully obvious in recent days is his disregard for interests any broader than his career and pork for his constituents. But maybe partisans with megaphones like Hugh's national radio show can convince him to do the right thing. [Posted 12/19.]

PENNSYLVANIA RUMBLINGS: My friend Alan Kors, professor of history at University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (a great organization that deserves your financial support), sends a copy of his family's letter to Pennsylvania's senators:

Dear Senator Specter,

Our family—four registered Pennsylvania Republicans who believe in individual rights, economic growth through low taxation, limited government, and a strong national defense, and who have voted proudly and repeatedly for you in Senatorial elections—is appalled truly beyond measure both by Senator Lott's version of history and by his distortion of our Party. We have concluded that he is categorically unfit to speak for the Republicans of the U.S. Senate and for Republicans in general. It is unthinkable that he could be your choice or the choice of Senate Republicans to be in a leadership position. In these momentous times, when every American is acutely aware of both the fragility and moral strength of our being as a people, it is an insult and injury for Senate Republicans to foist this man upon our Party and, more importantly, our nation. We expect you to do absolutely everything in your power to unseat Senator Lott from a position of leadership to which he has forfeited all political and, more significantly, all moral claims. Please let us know of your intention in this matter.

Sincerely,

Alan Charles Kors
Erika Kors
Samantha Kors
Brian Alexander Kors

A reader who describes himself as a "registered (and very partisan) Pennsylvania Republican in the Philadelphia area" writes (with more detail than I'm at liberty to pass on) of "rumblings of discontent among Pennsylvania Republicans."

The Government Executive article you link to reports that "Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., told The Philadelphia Inquirer he plans to back Lott even though 'I know I'm losing political skin on this.'" I don't know whether Senator Spector realizes the depth of feeling on this issue and that he may lose more political skin than he realizes. In fact, he may get flayed.

Republican support for Sen. Specter in Central Pennsylvania is weak due to his stance on social issues, and if he loses support in Southeastern Pennsylvania because of his support for Lott there is a good chance he would lose to a centrist Democrat.

[Posted 12/19.]

DIXIECRATS TRIUMPHANT: The great Chuck Freund examines the real history of a Dixiecrat-style presidency. Here's the lead:

It was Inauguration Day, and in the judgment of one later historian, "the atmosphere in the nation's capital bore ominous signs for Negroes." Washington rang with happy Rebel Yells, while bands all over town played 'Dixie.' Indeed, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who swore in the newly elected Southern president, was himself a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. Meanwhile, "an unidentified associate of the new Chief Executive warned that since the South ran the nation, Negroes should expect to be treated as a servile race." Somebody had even sent the new president a possum, an act supposedly "consonant with Southern tradition."

This particularly ugly history, and the policies that followed from it, is, shall we say, something they don't talk a lot about at Princeton, where the man who brought Jim Crow to the federal government is regarded as a saint. (Via VodkaPundit.) [Posted 12/19.]

FAIR USE: Joining the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Lawmeme, Blogcritics is formally requesting an exception from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act so that the site's reviewers can use DVD clips to illustrate their points. "Seeing that DVDs often contain material exclusive to the DVD—interviews, behind the scenes, background on the subject, outtakes, etc.—the fact that we can't legally host clips of these DVD-exclusive segments in conjunction with reviews is a grievous disservice to our readers and to the site," writes Blogcritics Eric Olsen. Quoting works in reviews is a classic "fair use" under copyright law but using DVD clips as such quotes is prohibited by the DCMA. Blogcritics is essential to the request because it demonstrates that a theoretical argument—reviewers should be able to quote, including clips—has real-world consequences In the exemption request, Lawmeme's Ernest Miller writes:

As two of Blogcritics' contributors pointed out, rather than harm the market or value of copyrighted works, an exemption for the prohibition on circumvention of CSS for ancillary works would likely increase the value of the underlying copyrighted works.

For the first time since the advent of movies, citizen-reviewers have the opportunity to engage at a deep level not only with film, but also the many ancillary elements previously unavailable. More important, they can share their insights and experience with others via the Internet. Consequently, film literacy is increasing and that too, can only be beneficial to the value of the underlying works. Rather than dismissing these elements because ancillary materials have not traditionally been available to the general public, we should be celebrating the fact that the volunteer commentators of Blogcritics have taken on this important task of increasing film literacy.

In any case, contrary to the initial determination, there is no harmful effect on the market for or value of copyrighted works.....

I can't imagine trying to write serious work without quoting sources. Telling online movie reviewers that they can't show readers what the reviewers are talking about is a perversion of copyright's intent. [Posted 12/18.]

BUSH VS. LOTT: Jeb Bush tells Peter Wallsten of the Miami Herald that January 6 is too long to wait: "Something's going to have to change. This can't be the topic of conversation over the next week."

"It doesn't help to have this swirling controversy that Sen. Lott, in spite of his enormous political skills, doesn't seem to be able to handle well," Gov. Bush said.

"To have this get in the way is damaging to the Republican Party," Bush added. "And while we've made major efforts to reach out to minorities, it doesn't help in that regard, either."

Jeb tactfully couches the matter in terms of practical politics, but I think there's more going on. Inclusion isn't just politics for the Bushes; it's central to how they see themselves and their role in public life. If the matter doesn't resolve itself quickly—nd only Trent Lott's resignation as majority leader can make that happen—tensions between the White House and Biloxi could get pretty nasty. Lott flatly tells NBC that he won't resign. Government Executive names 18 senators who've indicated they support Lott. Georgia-based reporter Charles Oliver writes coyly, "I believe that at least one incoming senator will likely support Lott, so he has 19 votes, just seven away from the number he needs to remain in power." But the GovExec list includes Pennsylvania's two senators, and I wonder how solid their support will stay. Santorum is a possible Lott successor, which means he has sound political reasons to make nice in public and vote no in private. The longer the Lott story lingers, the more it hurts Specter's reelection hopes in 2004. Pennsylvania voters tend not to like "extremes," and , NRO's Ramesh Ponnuru has suggested that Specter should face a primary challenge from his right. [Posted 12/18.]

THE LONG WAIT: I guess any vote is good news, but waiting until next year to hold a Senate Republican vote on Lott's future seems like a long, long time. [Posted 12/16.]

LOTT, LYNCHING, AND LYRICS: Over at Blogcritics, Eric Olsen has an interesting post with important history and a musical angle. The horrific history of racial terrorism in this country is too little remembered in our general culture. [Posted 12/16.]

PIVOTAL S.C.: John Ellis notes the pivotal role of South Carolina in presidential primary season. Now that Gore is out, he thinks it will be a Kerry vs. Gephardt race after South Carolina. Whatever happened to North Carolinian John Edwards? I find it hard to take a freshman senator seriously as commander-in-chief, but Edwards sounds like a pretty salable candidate, a lot more so than Gephardt. Republicans tend to pooh-pooh trial lawyers, but there's a reason they win before juries. Ellis doesn't note that the SC primary is open to all voters, and I'm not sure exactly how that will play out for specific candidates. But with Bush running uncontested, the primary there will certainly resemble a general election. [Posted 12/16.]

MORAL PANICS: I'm looking for readings, online or off, on the public/media/political panics that tend to greet new technologies, institutions, economic arrangements, etc. Obviously TFAIE has plenty of examples, but I'm looking for other accessible texts I can assign to a seminar of busy people (in other words, nothing too time-consuming). Old examples are particularly valuable; I'll be using historical documents on credit cards, for instance. Please email any suggestions. [Posted 12/16.]

WHY BOB JONES? Partisan Democrats, baffled Republicans, and some sympathetic foreigners keep asking the same thing: "If George W. Bush is against racism, why did he campaign at Bob Jones University?" I explained it here, with an assist from Alan Ehrenhalt's excellent book, The United States of Ambition. One thing a lot of critics just don't get is that, with a few notable exceptions like the BJU administration (as opposed to the students), the South-based Christian right is not a racist movement. Billy Graham won that debate. Bob Jones lost it. (To see what contemporary evangelical Christianity looks like, check out these photos from Graham's recent Dallas mission.) The Christian right has a lot of nasty qualities, but race hatred isn't one of them. As David Frum noted on Friday, "As the Republican right has become more and more explicitly religious, it has become more and more influenced by modern Christianityÿs stern condemnation of racial prejudice as a sin. My own guess is that the kind of talk Lott engaged in is much more likely to be acceptable at a Connecticut country club than it would be at the suburban evangelical churches in which the Republican base is found." [Posted 12/15.]

FARM WELFARE: Rick Henderson blogs (and editorializes) on the western variety of farm welfare. [Posted 12/15.]

NO MORE GORE: Yay! Al Gore says he won't run for president in 2004. Good news for Democrats. Bad news for Republicans. Very good news for those of us who just don't want to hear his voice any more. Oh yeah, and speaking of good riddance, I'm glad Kissinger quit the 9/11 commission. I never quite believed he'd really been appointed to it. Seemed like a joke from someone with an overdeveloped sense of irony. [Posted 12/15.]

LOTT'S A GONER: This is the end. Don Nickles is too canny to call for Lott's ouster unless he knows Lott can't win a vote of Senate Republicans. (Via Chris Lawrence, your one-stop blog for Mississippi news.) Charles Oliver has also been all over the story with good links. He had an early heads-up on a Jonathan Karl CNN report that Lott threatened to quit the Senate, leaving Mississippi's Democratic governor to appoint his successor, rather than remain without his leadership job. Charles notes this Weekly Standard wrapup, which confirms Karl's story and reports on Lott's unsuccessful attempts to threaten grassroots activists into backing him. One such party activist, James Haney, a precinct chairman here in Texas, calls my attention to his anti-Lott blogging. And Freeside's Rush Carskadden tells me he had Bill Quick beat with his reaction to Lott's abyssmal speech. [Posted 12/15.]

POPULUXE: I was wrong. Happily, Thomas Hine's classic Populuxe is not out of print but is, in fact, available in an inexpensive hardcover reprint. Hine, who wrote me with this good news, responds to my earlier posting about his new book, I Want That!:

It seems to me that the celebration of the sensual and the aesthetic has been woven into everything I write. And when, for example, I wrote that the space program has foundered, in part, because the space shuttle is ugly and its mission not thrilling, this tendency provoked a certain amount of derision. But I've always believed that the main way that a writer promotes pleasure is by writing things that are a pleasure to read. Thus I hope that you and your readers will take a look at I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers and not depend on the Times's uninspired account.

I haven't yet read the new book, but based on his previous work (and, of course, the fact that authors know their work better than reviewers), I certainly trust Hine's account more than the Times review. [Posted 12/15.]

BRITISH CRIME: A number of blogs have on occasion noted the rising crime rate in the U.K., often in connection with opining about gun control. If you have any doubts that British streets aren't safe, check out this item from the Design Council about these crime-reduction products. One example:

Karryfront Screamer A laptop bag with a two-way strap allowing users to carry it safely across their front while on the street or on their back while cycling. A flexible Knitwire steel mesh layer resists slashing, while a steel coil with combination lock foils lifting by fixing the bag to stationery objects. The strap detaches if an attacker pulls the bag hard, but the action triggers a 138 decibel alarm fitted inside.

NEVER MIND: Steve calls this the "best correction I've ever seen," from today's NYT Magazine:

An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), "Beginning Again," by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.

[Posted 12/15.]

BRAZENING IT OUT: Trent Lott had me going there I actually started to think about writing something nice about how he'd faced the music and done the right thing. After all, he said he was going to make "an announcement" after his prepared remarks. Then he said the things about segregation that he should have said a week, or decades, ago. But then he started with the long-winded self-justifications about his sharecropper roots and his deep belief in public education. The announcement turned out to be that he's going to do a one-hour Black Entertainment Television townhall special. (The Trent Lott Hour, now that's entertainment.) In the Q&A, he emphatically said he's not going to resign. He claimed that no senator has privately asked him to. I guess Lott figures if Bill Clinton can brazen out Monicagate, he can do the same. He may be right. But Trent Lott's no Clinton, segregation's no Monica, and Senate Majority Leader has no term limits. Do Republicans really want to tell voters that the only way to get Trent Lott out of the leadership is to give Senate Democrats a majority? Update: Bill Quick is the first other blogger I've seen responding to Lott's press conference, calling it "arrogant and smarmy." Commentor Dave D. has a less diplomatic way of putting it. I agree with them both. The WaPost account is here. [Posted 12/13.]

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: Brad DeLong follows up on my cheap-flour posting below with the comparative statistics I was too lazy to dig up. "On the bags-of-flour standard, we today are 450 times richer than our ancestors of 1500. This is something to be tremendously amazed and excited about—an important piece of headline news of the past millennium." [Posted 12/13.]

LOTT MUST GO: Andrew Sullivan and David Frum are great on Lott today. This is not a typical Washington feeding frenzy. It is, as the president's own speech suggested, about the soul not just of the Republican party (as Andrew puts it) but of America itself. Ending Jim Crow was not just a victory for blacks, although it was, of course, that. It was a triumph of American ideals over indefensible injustices. Jim Crow degraded not only the oppressed but the oppressors and the nation that tolerated them. Anyone who doesn't understand that does not deserve to be a leader in the U.S. Senate. Anyone who doesn't understand that does not deserve to speak for our country. As Thomas Sowell puts it in this week's must-read column: "Does Senator Lott have any idea what racial segregation meant to black Americans—and, indeed, to many white Americans, whose support was essential to passing the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s that did away with Jim Crow in the South?" On CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer last night, NRO's Byron York made an astute observation: When George W. Bush wants to praise someone, he always uses the phrase, "He's a good man." The president didn't use that phrase about Lott. He implied instead that Lott is a bad man. Lott's history supports that conclusion. (If he was so all-fired concerned about states' rights and the decentralist ideas behind them, why did young Lott fight to keep northeastern chapters of his fraternity from voluntarily admitting black members? Answer: Jim Crow was never about voluntary actions; it was about preventing voluntary integration.) Mississippi poli-sci blogger Chris Lawrence points out that even Lott's supposed do-gooding includes a recent case of racially tinged injustice, which was successfully fought off by my friends at the Institute of Justice (who deserve your financial support). Chris writes in an email:

As for the Nissan plant in Madison County, cited as one of his "black causes" in today's AP reporting, it's disingenuous to say that plant's "in the Delta"; it's in the middle of the mostly-white bedroom communities north of Jackson, hardly a poverty stricken area. One of the controversies surrounding the plant was the state's effort to take land from black landowners on the cheap; the case was taken up by the Institute for Justice. He's grasping at straws and it shows.

If Lott had done damage control on Monday, before this stuff was widely known, he'd probably be OK. But, as I discuss in my blog today, he couldn't do that without risking his tacit ties to his base in the Council of Conservative Citizens; a forthright repudiation of Thurmond wouldn't have played well then, and I doubt they're too happy about his half-hearted apologies now.

Put a fork in him, he's done.

I sincerely hope Chris is right and press reports of yet another apology without consequences are wrong. [Posted 12/13.]

HISTORY LESSON: Richard Brookhiser writes in NRO's The Corner: "It's hard not to see Justice Thomas's comments on cross burning as a private message, hidden in plain sight, to Trent Lott. A history lesson, which Lott badly needs, and is too old and too to stupid to absorb. Lott must go." Whatever his critics may think, Clarence Thomas is acutely aware of the history and consequences of domestic racial terrorism. (For background, start here.) Note that Thomas invoked the now-obscure Knights of Camelia in both his confirmation hearings and in yesterday's statement; that's the sort of reference you don't get by picking up history from the general, and generally white and northern, popular culture. [Posted 12/12.]

SELLING OUT: David Frum is, as always, a must-read today. On Lott, he warns conservatives: "All those bold, unapologetic conservatives who believe that Republicans should rally around Lott and not yield the Democrats an inch should understand: The party will probably be able to save him—but only by selling you out." David argues, and I agree, that nobody will challenge the Senate leader. He who strikes at a king must kill him, and the Senate is not exactly full of would-be regicides. That means Republicans are stuck with Lott, his baggage, his damaged ability to lead, and his inevitable attempts to buy friends with tax dollars and policy compromises. (Hey, Mickey: Time for the Kausfiles analysis of what Lott means for the reauthorization of welfare reform.) Look, too, for Lott to hang onto conservatives by pandering to the nonracial aspects of their social agenda, especially on this site's pet issue, the criminalization of cell cloning. (More on that subject, where the Reynolds-Kopel federalism approach is producing interesting results, later.) Only the White House can save us, and the Bush "mandate," from another Lott term. [Posted 12/12.]

GREEN REVOLUTIONARY: The Dallas Observer, our alt-weekly, features a sympathetic cover story on Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. Why, it asks, are environmental activists so hostile to feeding the world? Pull quote from Borlaug: "These people have never been around hungry people. They're utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don't live in the real world." [Posted 12/11.]

BETTER LATE...: It's tomorrow in New York and the NYT, which didn't bother to cover the original story even after it had been in the WaPo, now boldly editorializes: "Fire Trent Lott." They're right about this much, however: "No one has put more effort than George W. Bush into ending the image of the Republican Party as a whites-only haven. For all the disagreement that many African-Americans have with his policies, few can doubt Mr. Bush's commitment to a multiracial America. But unless the president wants to spend his next campaign explaining the majority leader's behavior over and over, he should urge the Senate Republicans to get somebody else for the job." [Posted 12/11.]

COUNTRY LIFE: Nebraska blogger Geitner Simmons (who actually hails from North Carolina) takes up my challenge below to respond to the Sunday NYT piece on his state's poor and shrinking. Read and learn: Not all Nebraska farm land is created equal. Eugene Volokh takes to task my semi-serious suggestion that shrinking farm states be forced to merge. Yeah, I know it's unconstitutional. But maybe you could shame these states into it, or convince them, Texas-style, that it's better to be big and have fewer senators. For the record, and to assuage Clayton Cramer's fears, I'm not in favor of turning the Senate into another House of Representatives. But, as a thought experiment, what would happen if there were only three people left in North Dakota? And there's something deeply unhealthy not just about farm subsidies but about local pols desperately scrambling to keep voters down on the farm. I also disagree with Cramer's suggestion that Farm Belt senators are a bulwark against gun confiscation. Tom Daschle? [Posted 12/11.]

CHEAP STAPLES: I bought a five pound bag of Gold Medal flour yesterday for 69 cents. I find that amazing. [Posted 12/11.]

PHOTO THANKS: Thanks for all the feedback on the photos, which was quite helpful (not to mention largely flattering). I'll be taking the transparencies in for professional scans today, after which we can play with cropping, Photoshop cleanup, etc., and see how they look in black and white, which my book cover will require. Since the middle one was the overwhelming favorite, I'm leaving it up. Selecting photos is an interesting process. A photograph is by its nature a static snapshot (hence the term), which means even the most candid shot is inherently artificial and no photograph is entirely satisfactory. One of my Dallas correspondents, with whom I've had lunch a few times (so he knows what I really look like), had the following comment on the photos:

I always thought that the previous photo on your Website didn't look like you, and I'm afraid the new ones don't either. There are two extremes; glamour photos and academic photos (the ones with the bookshelves in the background). The way you look in real life is about 75% glamour, with an aura of iconoclatic academia. The new photos try to be 100% glamour. That's not the way you really look.

That's probably right. I tend to think both the old photo(s) and the new one(s) look like me. But I don't see myself very often. Here's a candid photo Steve shot of me in my office last summer. Not book jacket material, especially when you consider the lighting and general desk mess. But if you want a more realistic picture (with no makeup), here it is:

LOTTS AND LOTTS: After a mellow Monday, InstaPundit is now all over the Lott story, so go there for periodic roundups. The Washington Post is reporting that Lott's supposed 100th birthday off-the-cuff joke is in fact a recycled political-speech line, which is exactly what it sounded like. I never bought the defense that Lott was joking. Racist jokes can be funny, and they can certainly be recognizable as jokes, even if you find them offensive. But jokes have a certain structure and humorous quality. There's no attempt to be funny in saying, "Life in the United States would be better if such-and-such real-life candidate had won the presidency." That's just a flat statement about politics. Where's the punch line? As far as I can tell, Jonah Goldberg was absolutely correct when he observed that it's hard to find anyone who actually likes Lott. Even Lott's strident defenders usually resort to attacking Democrats for similar transgressions, not praising Lott for either his accomplishments or his character. Partisanship, not admiration, drives them. (I'm ignoring the people who wish Thurmond had won in 1948.) TurkeyBlog seems more representative of grassroots Republicans who are following the story: "The senator's remarks should prompt reflection among Republicans, however, as to whether Lott is sufficiently reflective, thoughtful—even sentient—to lead. The last six years demonstrated—well before this fiasco—that he is not." (TurkeyBlog also has an interesting insight into Lott's use of discarded in his apology, which makes Lott look better.) Reader Atlee Parks, a self-described Mississippi conservative, writes:

In response to your question about whether Trent Lott's a "New South Republican", the answer is that he's the direct political descendant of the legendary Jamie Whitten (of whom Robert Byrd is a pale shadow, both pork-wise and racist-wise). In addition to his connections to the Conservative Citizens Councils and his support of the Confederate flag, Lott is instrumental in keeping the billions flowing to the Ingalls Shipyard in Pascagoula (his hometown) and has his fingerprints on just about every transportation boondoggle in the state. Though the national Republican party is positioning itself to make tort reform a major issue, Lott's opposition to the trial-lawyer lobby has been non-existent, though the tort situation here in Mississippi is arguably the worst in the nation. His brother-in-law and close friend is Dickie Scruggs, the driving force behind the first and largest of the tobacco industry lawsuits, and Lott didn't exactly exert himself to rein in Republican attorney general Mike Moore, Scrugg's partner-in-crime. He's been of no assistance in the tort-reform battle that's gone on all fall in the state legislature, hasn't even taken a public stand on the issue as far as I'm aware, despite the fact that it's probably the biggest crisis Mississippi currently faces. Considering that Lott is one of the most powerful Republicans in the nation, I think this non-barking dog is awfully loud.

As a Mississippi conservative, I'm saddened that Lott is all but undefeatable, because he does very little for this state other than bring in the tax dollars. I'm tired of him ignoring the non-monetary needs of the state, while periodically making a racist embarrassment of himself and of us all by extension. However, no elected sitting senator in the entire history of the state has ever been defeated, and I don't have high hopes of Lott's being the first. [In a followup message, he corrects this statement, "I forgot about Senator Hubert Stephens, who was defeated in the 1934 election, so Lott would be the first since then."]

[Posted 12/11.]

CHINESE TFAIE: If anyone would like a Chinese-language copy of TFAIE, email me. I have three to give away. [Posed 12/10.]

IDLE QUESTION: Why is the new Reason Online blog on Eastern time? [Posted 12/10.]

HUH? II Howard Kurtz has a mostly good piece on the huge gap between the blogosphere's coverage of Lott's comments and the mainstream media's silence. But I'm utterly baffled by his claim that "Virginia Postrel doesn't want to see Lott go." Huh? I read it six times, and that's what it says. The only way to understand it is to assume that I'm a partisan Democrat (I'm actually a Republican-leaning independent). But long before (by Internet standards) Andrew Sullivan jumped in with his "Lott must go," I wrote the same words. See the December 7 item, "Out, Out Damned Lott" below. And speaking of Andrew, he's right on when he questions Lott's description of segregation and lynching with the mild, neutral word "discarded." Andrew dissects Lott's smarmy non-apology apology:

Everyone deserves a break for a "poor choice of words" but it wasn't the words that really offended. It was the plain meaning of the words. What other words would have sufficed? Notice also the adjective Lott now uses to refer to segregation: "discarded policies." Not immoral. Not wrong. Not abhorrent. Merely "discarded." And notice too the weasel politician way of not apologizing: only "some" were offended; and it's only those to whom Lott feels obliged to apologize. And of course, his position as the Republican spokesman in the Senate remains unchallenged by his fellow partisans. It's at times like this that I realize why I'm not a Republican. I could never be in a party that included someone like Trent Lott.

There are a lot of other conservative-leaning voters who would agree. Again, if Mississippi voters want to send Lott to the Senate, that's democracy. But there is no reason for a Republican party that supposedly rejects racism, and racist nostalgia, to make him its leader. There is something sick about a (bipartisan) Washington establishment that can't see the problem. [Posted 12/10.]

HUH? Why is Andrew Sullivan saying that ending farm subsidies and textile protectionism means becoming a "big government liberal." OK, Tom Friedman is a little confused about the relation between the war and tax policy. But U.S. trade hypocrisy is bad domestic economics and stupid foreign policy. If big government liberals want to hold the administration to its stated free-trade principles, bravo for them. [Posted 12/9.]

POOR CHOICE: Trent Lott claims he was misunderstood. The A.P. reports:

"A poor choice of words conveyed to some the impression that I embrace the discarded policies of the past," Lott, R-Miss., said in a statement. "Nothing could be further from the truth, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by my statement."

Glenn Reynolds marvels that Tom Daschle is defending Lott. It's hardly a surprise. Aside from the Senate's version of the thin blue line, Daschle has good partisan reasons to stand up for his GOP counterpart. As long as Lott's in the leadership, his segregationist ties will periodically embarrass the GOP. In 1999, I remember being shocked that revelations of Lott's ties to the groups formerly known as the White Citizens Councils (groups I naively thought had vanished long ago) had absolutely no effect on his political career. In Washington, they don't give a damn about these things, at least not if you have power. (Via Atrios, I read this 1999 column by a frustrated Stanley Crouch on the earlier Lott flap.) That was long before blogs, and if there'd been no blogosphere, I doubt we'd have heard today's apology, certainly not on Internet time. Bloggers on the left first pushed the story and were quickly joined by pretty much everyone else, including National Review Online and a lot of outraged grassroots Republicans. Meanwhile, Big Media conservatives like Bob Novak and Rush Limbaugh were making light of the matter. Charles Oliver skewers Rush Limbaugh's formulaic defense that "when you're going to be all high and mighty and claim somebody should resign for impropriety, you'd better not be dirty yourself when it comes to these kinds of things." Says Charles, "Okay, Rush, what do you have to say to Jonah Goldberg and David Frum and Bill Kristol? Are they clean enough to criticize Lott?" This isn't a partisan issue. It's a matter of right and wrong, concepts that fit better in the online world than in Red Team vs. Blue Team Washington media mudwrestling. (OK, so that's a bad metaphor. You get what you pay for.) According to Washington formulas, this story ends with Lott's apology. Until next time.... [Posted 12/9.]

PLEASURE AND MEANING: Reader Joseph Stirt sends a comment on Laura Shapiro's review of Thomas Hine's I Want That in yesterday's NYT Book Review:

"At the root of all shopping, Hine finds a psychic stew of motives. Insecurity is one: that's what sent him rushing for the Wedgwood. The others are power, responsibility, discovery, convenience, celebration, self-expression, attracting attention, and having a feeling of belonging."

I don't know about you, but for me, the pleasure and wonder of my occasional trips to Bed, Bath and Beyond or Wal-Mart when I'm not looking for anything in particular are much more about encountering originality, elegant thinking, creativity, and beauty in the most unexpected, incongruous places. Shapiro and Hine are missing our boat!

Hine's Populuxe, now available only as a used book, is a revisionist classic. Its analysis and enthusiasm changed how many critics look at the exuberant "populuxe" aesthetics of America from roughly 1954 to 1964. But even Hine, whose work I generally like, overemphasizes meaning at the expense of aesthetic pleasure. Most analysts do, whether they praise, criticize, or find wry amusement in material consumption. (The brilliant fashion historian Anne Hollander, who has roots in art history, is a notable exception.) In such writings, "meaningless" is usually a synonym for "valueless"; in fact meaningless pleasure—pure sensory enjoyment, including the love of novelty—is a major source of aesthetic value. At least Hine knows there's more to meaning than status anxiety, and that gives him a huge advantage over most commentators on the subject. For lots more on the complex dynamics of (biologically based) pleasure and (socially/experientially based) meaning, check out Look and Feel when it's published in June. [Posted 12/9.]

WARTIME INSULT: A reader who wishes to remain anonymous points out a wartime angle on the Lott story: "Roughly one fifth of the Army [and one third of the president's "war cabinet"—vp] is now black. Lott owes them and us an abject apology." Truman desegregated the military. Thurmond was against such race mixing. Is an integrated military one of the problems Lott thinks we could have avoided? (Or does he just dislike Halle Berry as a Bond girl?) Geitner Simmons has lots of useful historical context on his Regions of Mind blog. [Posted 12/9.]

RURAL POVERTY: As the blogosphere's Nebraska correspondent, Geitner Simmons owes us a comment on the NYT's hand-wringing article on how people in extremely poor rural counties are leaving for better chances elsewhere. The story's lead: "LOUP COUNTY, Neb., the poorest county in the nation, is down to 712 people—a third of the population it had nearly a century ago. A four-bedroom house goes for $30,000." Contrary to the story Timothy Egan is trying to tell, if the poorest county in the country has only 712 people in it that's good news, especially since it sounds like a lot of people can afford good-size houses. If the poorest county in the country included a major city, that would be an indicator of massive poverty, which most sane people consider bad. That more and more people are escaping the misery of rural poverty is bad news only for politicians dependent on rural voters. In an attempt to make a crisis out of the ongoing move to the cities, Egan includes this non sequitur graf:

Equally telling is a growing wage gap that finds people who work in rural areas making just 70 percent of the average salaries of workers in urban areas. The cost of living, of course, is much lower outside the big cities. But workers in rural areas are 60 percent more likely to earn minimum wage than urban wage-earners.

The ongoing emptying out of the rural midwest does raise a serious political question: How long do these shrinking states get to keep all those senators, who seem to exist mostly to vote their constituents subsidies that take money from the rest of us and food and opportunity from the truly poor people of the developing world? A while back, there was talk that North Dakota should change its name, possibly to "Dakota," to improve its image. It would make more sense for the Dakotas to merge into a single state. Not that I expect any such thing to happen. [Posted 12/9.]

APT ANALOGY: Joe Klein on "Meet the Press" draws on another 1948 candidacy to put Lott's nostalgia in perspective:

I think that if a Democrat had made an analogous statement, like if Henry Wallace had been elected in 1948, we would have had a much easier road with the Soviet Union because we would have just given them everything and there wouldn't have been a Cold War, you would have been jumping up and down. And I think that this kind of statement in this country at this time is outrageous, and it should be called that.

(Via TNR's &ct. blog.) Reader Howard Litwack writes, "Although this should be a nonpartisan issue - no one should be allowing Trent to get away with this - I do see it as an ethical question for the modern conservative movement in particular." [Posted 12/9.] Reader E. Palmeri asks the tough question: "I agree that Lott is awful in the leadership role. He's smarmy and a leftover from the "Go along to Get along" days we hope are never to return, but if it were up to me to name his successor, I would be hard put to come up with a name. Whom would you nominate?" Just about any likely candidate would be an improvement; I don't have a favorite. The real question isn't whom I would nominate but who's got the guts, and the votes, to challenge Lott. He (or she) who strikes at a king must kill him. (But White House backing would help a lot.) [Posted 12/9.]

LOTT AND LAW: Chuck Watson and David Ross have an interesting exchange in the comments section of Shoutin' Across the Pacific, in response to Chuck's commment (mentioned below) suggesting that the GOP will close ranks like the Catholic hierarchy:

Chuck, when I first read that analogy I thought "sheesh what an asshole", but now I read it again I think you're right.

You could take it further. The average Catholic is disgusted with the scandals and is trying very hard to get the hierarchy shaken up. Down here in Republi-land, I'm seeing a lot of Joe Bloggers standing up and screaming for Lott's head. It's not the Republican voters who are trying to spin this, it's the Republican Senate.

Believe me, most Republicans are shocked and embarrassed by Lott's comments... rather like most Catholics nowadays. David Ross

David - that's the point I wanted to make, and your comments make it better than my original. The phrase "shocked and embarrassed" is spot on in both situations. In the case of the Republican leadership, the failure to call Lott to account is to me just one of a series of other failures such as the disgraceful farm bill, the growing Federal budget, USA Patriot, or the homeland security bill, etc. The R's say one thing, but do another. Yeah, there are "practical" considerations to each of these, but at some point you sell your soul, betray your principles, and lose your moral authority. Same thing for the Church. Given the anti-Catholic anti-Christian bent of much of the media, and I can understand the desire to keep instances of misconduct by priests quiet. But the heirarchy, embodied by the disgraceful and disgusting actions of Cardinal Law, lost sight of their primary duty to the faithful and, quite frankly, to God. Again, the "practical" consideration of protecting the institution from shame due to the misconduct of a few won out over principles.

If my comments are blunt, it's because in both situations, I feel betrayed. Lott and Law should both go.
Chuck Watson

[Posted 12/9.]

LOTT MORE CONT'D: Blogger John Hinderaker at Powerline has exceptionally thoughtful comments on the Lott fiasco. A sample:

Thurmond's early career, viewed from the perspective shared by nearly all twenty-first century Americans, was a disgrace. His political rehabilitation coincides more or less with his leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican. For the Republicans to be seen as unqualifiedly embracing Thurmond is a needless tactical blunder. It exposes the Republicans to the slander that, as the party now supported by the majority of Southern whites, they have merely inherited the racist mantle once worn by the Democrats—thus leaving the Republicans holding the bag for the Democrats' embarrassing past. The truth is the opposite: the ascendancy of the Republican Party in the South has largely coincided with white Southerners' rejection of their region's segregationist past, and their desire to create a "New South" unsullied by the unsavory aspects of the region's history. For Republicans to give up this moral high ground by failing to take the opportunity to distinguish between Thurmond's inglorious past as a Democrat and his mainstream present as a Republican was unforgivably stupid.

Powerline also has a link to this Mark Steyn column on Strom, which demonstrates the range of tributes one can pay to the randy old guy without praising his anti-anti-lynching past. [Posted 12/9.]

PHOTO FAQ: So far the middle photo is the overwhelming crowd favorite. I've gotten too many responses to reply at length individually, so let me answer a few common questions here:

1) Are those photos you? Yes.
2) Are they for the jacket of Look and Feel? Probably, in a black-and-white version. If I have time, money, and opportunity, I may also get outside shots (hard to do in Dallas this time of year) or shots in a brightly lit interior.
3) What's that red thing? It's a long banquette in a local club, but the idea is to get an abstract shape, not an identifiable object. Because the book is about aesthetics, I wanted an interesting setting.

Thanks for all your kind and helpful comments. I welcome any further ones. Keep in mind that the photos can be cropped differently and that my scans aren't professional quality. [Posted 12/9.]

LOTT MORE CONT'D: David Frum's tough, thoughtful comments deserve reading in their entirety. Here's an excerpt: "What came out of his mouth was the most emphatic repudiation of desegregation to be heard from a national political figure since George Wallace's first presidential campaign. Lott's words suggest that one of the three most powerful and visible Republicans in the nation privately thinks that desegregation, civil rights, and equal voting rights were all a big mistake." That puts it well. (Jonah Goldberg adds an intelligent, and cutting, conservative condemnation of Lott.) It's important to note the difference between Lott's comments and the typical insensitive politico's gaffe. Lott didn't use an epithet, however offensive. He made a statement about policy. Epithets indicate bad character; they may or may not indicate political goals. Lott's comments alluded to a philosophy of government, something usually missing from his public pronouncements. And, David Frum's generous sentiments to the contrary, he has given us no reason to think he didn't mean it. What sort of conservative is Trent Lott? Does he belong to the New South Republican coalition, which is distinguished by its evangelical religion and "enterpriser" economics? Or does he belong to an older tradition distinguished by its state-sponsored racism and share-the-wealth (with whites) porkism? Does he favor a color-blind government or think things were better in the good old days? The other important difference between Lott and, say, that repulsive old Klansman Robert Byrd is that Lott holds a position in his party congressional leadership—the top position. Nobody, as far as I know, is calling for Lott to resign from the Senate. If the people of Mississippi want him, they can keep him. But Republicans from the rest of the country don't have to retain him as their leader, and if they choose to do so they're sending a disconcerting message about what they stand for. Blogger Chris Lawrence, a Ph.D. student in political science at the University of Mississippi, is following the story, which isn't getting much coverage in Mississipi. He reminds readers that "Lott has been caught with his proverbial pants down before." This New York Post editorial about the retirements of Phil Gramm, Jesse Helms, and Strom Thurmond is worth reading against the background of the Lott story: "Along with still-serving Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) - a former member of the Ku Klux Klan - Thurmond is a relic. No politician carrying similar racial baggage could be elected today." Except, perhaps, Trent Lott. [Posted 12/9.]

LOTT MORE: Reader James Blakey writes:

You are right about Lott. He should go. He should have been gone a long time ago. I just e-mailed the White House and my senators (Santorum and Specter).

I didn't see his quote mentioned on Fox News Sunday or ABC's This Week. Russert brought it up and I was appalled the way Robert Novak just dismissed it by saying Lott was "winging it" in his remarks.

If Conservatives and Republicans want to ever get more than 10% of the black vote again, they have to make it clear, there is no place in their party for this sort of thinking.

Black voters aren't the only ones turned off by Jim Crow nostalgia. The best way to position Republicans as intolerant barbarians is to keep Lott around as Senate leader. Plus he's smarmy. While the networks and NYT ignore his Jim Crow nostalgia, the blogosphere is rallying against Trent Lott. (Lots of stuff on InstaPundit, but you've probably already read it.) Blogger Fritz Schranck of Sneaking Suspicions emails, "It would be...great if other Southern or border state bloggers, as well as newspapers, took up the cause of removing this idiot from his leadership position. They are the most likely folks to know their local history, and how incredible this comment truly is. It's the kind of crusade that makes sense." Amen to that. Sneaking Suspcions has good roundup posts here and here. My Georgia friend Charles Oliver asks, "Where are the conservatives?" In the comments, his co-blogger Chuck Watson replies that conservatives won't denounce Lott "for the same reason that the Catholic Church has problems with the past sexual misconduct of a very few of its priests. Protecting the institution becomes more important than doing what's right, even though, in the long run, that strategy almost never works. Reader Bernard Yomtov writes, "It seems to me that a good strategy is to ask other Republican senators about Lott's statement. After all, Lott has to run for majority leader in January. I'd like to ask people like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Chuck Hagel, etc., whether they will vote for a leader who thinks like Lott." Arthur Silber of The Light of Reason recalls an earlier Lott stupidity here, with a link to an old Reason piece of mine. Reader Jason Shaffer puts it well: "The man must go to the back bench, where he has always belonged." [Posted 12/8.]

OUT, OUT DAMNED LOTT: Trent Lott must go. He's a disgrace to the South, to the Republican Party, to the U.S. Senate, and to the United States of America. Where's Howell Raines's crusading southern liberalism when it's needed? (Mark Kleiman notes that the NYT is AWOL on the story; I guess country clubs are more important than the Senate.) Why isn't every reporter, at every press conference, asking Lott or his spokesman what the Senate leader meant when he said a Thurmond victory in 1948 would have meant "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years"? Exactly which problems? How would Thurmond have been better? Hector the man. Make him answer. Again and again. Ask every other Republican elected official whether he or she agrees. Ask Ari Fleischer what the president thinks. Every day. Make the White House embarrassed to be associated with a party leader who appears to wax nostalgic for lynching and segregation. There's a small window here, but if Lott looks weak, and the White House doesn't want him, it's possible the Republicans might replace Lott with someone decent. [Posted 12/7.]

NEW PHOTO: What do you think of my new photos? They were taken Thursday by photographer James Bland, who does some work for D Magazine when he's not shooting bands. Which do you like better (or do you hate them both)? Let me know. (These are cheesy home-computer scans, with minimal color correction.) Update: Early returns suggest that readers aren't nuts about the top photo, which is a bit too posed. (Steve heartily agrees.) So I've added a third choice. Thanks for all your comments! Update II: Some of you are under the misimpression that I used to be a brunette (or a redhead!) and have "gone blonde." Wrong. I've been blonde since I was a few months old—I was born with a thick thatch of dark hair—and I have the annoyingly pale eyelashes to prove it. I have always thought of myself as a blonde, and so have most of the people who know me. But my hair used to be darker blonde. Now, thanks to nature's whitening ways, it's naturally lighter and artificially blonder. [Posted 12/7.]

REASON BLOGS: Reason Online will launch a group blog called "Hit & Run" on Monday. [Posted 12/6.]

EMPTY MALLS: Retail sales may be perky overall, but I wouldn't want to be in the mall business. Yesterday I made a rare trip to the famous Dallas Galleria. It was empty and has been since September 11, according to a shop owner. I knew Plano's Shops at Willow Bend was hurting. But Willow Bend opened in August 2001 and is ambitiously upscale for its suburban locale (which has been hard hit by the telecom slump). Without further information, you might chalk its emptiness up to special circumstances. Apparently, however, Willow Bend is not alone. Two points don't make a trend, but these particular two aren't reassuring for local retailers—or for the Dallas city budget, which is facing a $95 million deficit largely because of a fall in sales taxes. The Dallas Morning News is begging readers to shop within the city limits. [Posted 12/6.]

ONLINE EDITIONS: The complete (and searchable) text of David Hume's Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary is now online at Liberty Fund's EconLib site. This essay, "Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences," which was cited in Joel Mokyr's Gifts of Athena, makes a good followup to my NYT column. And it contains this charmingly obsolete sentence: "There may frequently be readers where there are no authors." A facsimile text of the entire Talmud is online here (via Jesse Walker). Unfortunately, the traditionalist Talmudists didn't use any hyperlinks, and if ever there were a work that called for links, it's this one. [Posted 12/6.]

LATE ADOPTER: My friend Rick Henderson has started blogging. Many readers will remember Rick from his days as Washington editor and managing editor of Reason. For the last several years he's been an editorial writer at the Las Vegas Review Journal. His blog, The Deregulator, is subtitled "Musings from a Tar Heel in Sin City." [Posted 12/6.]

KNOWLEDGE REVOLUTION: My latest NYT column discusses Joel Mokyr's fascinating new book The Gifts of Athena, focusing on his idea of the "Industrial Enlightenment." Joel is an economic historian who studies the past, not the present, but his ideas about how knowledge sharing drove economic growth raise interesting questions about the present and future. The good news is that more people have more access to knowledge than at any time in history, making global prosperity a real prospect. And one aspect of his analysis I didn't discuss in the column—the importance of new tools—also promises continuing advances. "What the telescope did for astronomy and the microscope did for biology, the computer is going to do for everything," he said in our interview. As computer power grows, so does the ability to crack formerly unsolvable problems through simulation. On the other hand, Athena's analysis suggests that raising the cost of "useful knowledge" could stifle economic growth. Perhaps the U.S. government wasn't so bright to save $200,000 a year by closing down the Energy Department's PubScience project, a website that let visitors search and access 2 million scientific articles for free. The DOE said it was closing the site because commercial publishers offer similar paid services. (Background articles here, here, here, and here.) The argument that tax dollars shouldn't undercut market efforts is reasonable, but in this case most of the articles come out of tax-funded research to begin with. That research is funded because of the belief that the knowledge it generates makes everyone better off, a claim that's more likely to be true if the knowledge is widely shared. [Posted 12/5.]

INQUIRY VS. IDEOLOGY: This competently researched NYT article on Martin Feldstein's influence among economists and policy makers is marred by a common media bias: the refusal to take economic inquiry seriously as scholarship rather than ideological axe-grinding. The article presents absolutely no evidence that Feldstein draws his conclusions to fit his prejudices and, in fact, it cites numerous serious economists (and Robert Reich) to the contrary. But the Times nonetheless repeatedly suggests that he's "ideological." He is, after all, a Republican. He must be biased, no matter how many former students say he isn't. Political leanings, among other factors, can certainly influence the questions scholars, including economists, find interesting. Someone with a deeply held commitment to highly progressive income tax rates is less likely to investigate "optimal tax rates" (those that raise the most revenue at the lowest cost to the economy) than is someone who questions whether high taxes are good per se. But that doesn't mean a tax skeptic's research is either "ideological" or flawed. To figure that out, you have to look at the research methodology itself, not merely its conclusions. In my years editing Reason, I threw away countless "studies" that were nothing more than pre-determined ideological garbage. The garbage does exist, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between real research and trash. Contrary to NYT innuendo, however, you can't do so just by knowing the political affiliations of the researchers. No political stance has a monopoly on either good or bad research. In fact, some of the most interesting research I've read (as well as some of the most tendentious and horribly written) comes from leftist, postmodern scholars of "material culture." If you want to know about the history of shopping, about women's beauty culture, about what ready-made clothes meant to turn-of-the-century immigrants, or about the relation between modernist ideology and domestic ideals, you have to find scholars who think those questions are worthy of study. If the work is good, it doesn't matter what political leanings may have originally inspired their inquiry. Curiosity about reality is incompatible with political litmus tests. And if you want to know how taxes really work, as opposed to how people wish they'd work, the best place to start is with Martin Feldstein. Here's a column I wrote on the research of Nada Eissa, a former Feldstein student whose conclusions about tax rates and labor force participation don't fit anyone's political script. [Posted 12/2.]

EPSTEIN ON RAWLS: Richard Epstein, who is probably today's most important libertarian theorist, remembers John Rawls fondly. More surprisingly, Richard also finds Rawls's theoretical approach congenial to a far more limited view of the state than Rawls himself had in mind:

The hard question for the future lies in the extent to which Rawls's general veil approach can be disentangled from the particular prescriptions that he defended or which were subsequently defended by his many followers on the left. My own admiration for Rawls's work stems from the strong conviction that this separation can in fact be made. What is needed here is an insertion of some modest degree of social realism about the general facts of human nature which could help inform us on how to apply the veil-of-ignorance apparatus. In particular, I would stress three points. The first is that political institutions are often occupied by people with a strong sense of self-interest, with little respect for anything other than external restraints. It is to constrain and guide their behavior that is the prime objective of political institutions. The good people will take care to rein in their own appetites. The second is that trade produces gains to both parties in the exchange. Rawls never fastened much attention on its positive effects, and never saw the expanding pies that resulted from the successive application of this principle in a wide range of organized markets and informal social settings, including those that foster freedom of association, with which he became ever more concerned in his later years. The third is that politics in general, and the politics of redistribution in particular, implies large losses for each small gain, in a process in which the people with political power and leverage will often do far better than the poor and dispossessed to whom Rawls accorded pride of place. To open the door to state redistribution for good ends is to provide a passageway through which all sorts of dubious characters will rush. Keeping it shut and relying on voluntary mechanisms of social support should not be ruled out of order simply because they have displaced in recent years.

It is important to note how these three concessions to social realism influence the direction of Rawls's argument. At no point do they require abandonment of the fundamental insight that just social practices can be understood by asking actors to choose from behind the veil of ignorance. Quite the contrary: The more realistic behavioral assumptions lend greater predictability to the enterprise and help warn us off social experiments of great promise that are sure to fail in our hurly-burly world. Nothing that Rawls wrote repealed the law of unintended consequences: The road to hell can still be paved with the best of (philosophical) intentions.

There is, however, light at the end of the tunnel. Once we introduce a measure of institutional realism into the Rawlsian framework, we can come to appreciate this final philosophical irony. Rawls and Nozick adopted very different analytical approaches and reached very different conclusions about the proper size and function of the modern (welfare) state. In the end, I do not think that the intuitive philosophical approach of Nozick towards libertarian ideals will carry the day. But no matter, the strongest defense of his principles comes from a resuscitation and application of the Rawlsian principle of ignorance from behind the veil which Nozick, had so stoutly opposed. Therein lies the greatness of Rawls. In his relentless pursuit of finding the right way to design political and social institutions, he articulated a system that could be used with great power to defend a set of political and social arrangements that he had no intention of defending. Political philosophers, policymakers, and lawyers are all in the debt of a modest man who mistakenly thought himself to be one of Keynes's obscure academic scribblers, only to turn out to have been a genuine leader in philosophical and political thought.

This substantive, quick-turn-around article from an intellectual heavy-hitter that demonstrates how well the National Review Online team understands the Internet's possibilities. Real-time blogs are great, and so are strong, even reckless voices like Jonah Goldberg's. But intellectual heft is also important, something NRO's editors understand. [Posted 12/1.]

GOOD NEWS: In today's NYT, Dan Akst puts the current economic gloominess in perspective, reminding us that even in the current slump the economy looks more like an earlier era's dream than the nightmare too often portrayed in media account. By historical standards, things are looking awfully good: "low interest rates, affordable energy, full employment without inflation and broad access to home ownership." We've even learned to compete with the Japanese. Why the disconnect? One reason "may be the sharp advertising downturn that started in early 2001. The resulting media recession, including layoffs and other cutbacks, has produced a grimmer-than-usual attitude in the perennially gloomy fourth estate. The industry's concentration in New York and Washington, both of which were struck by terrorists last year, has further darkened the industry's outlook." Dan is no outsider taking cheap shots at reporters. He's a long-time journalist acknowledging a psychological truth: We all grant more salience to facts we experience directly. And journalists know lots and lots of people who've lost jobs in this recession. [Posted 12/1.]

OUR GOOD FRIENDS THE SAUDIS, CONT'D: If I were the Saudi royals, I'd be afraid, very afraid. It's not just that Americans keep digging up evidence connnecting Saudi cash directly to the 9/11 terrorists. It's that every such revelation provides another opportunity to make the larger connection: Even "good" Saudis fund the spread of the Wahhabi fanaticism that declares Islam the enemy of all that free societies hold dear. The WaPo's Jim Hoagland captures the emerging conventional wisdom:

America's war on terrorism and the disappearance of abundant petrodollar surpluses bring the Saudi rulers to a traumatic moment of choice. To survive in the 21st century, they must actively help put the extortionists and terrorists out of business rather than fund and shield them.

The biggest change must come at home: The House of Saud must end the Faustian bargain it originally made with the country's extremist Wahhabist sect, which was given significant sway over the kingdom's social, economic and political life in return for supporting the monarchy. Wahhabi clerics have used Islamic charity as a cover to promote terrorism and hatred in the Middle East and Central Asia. The Saudi monarchy must disown and de-legitimize the extremists or remain mired in a disappearing world.

Assuming we do eventually achieve "regime change" in Iraq, the Saudi oil weapon will become even less relevant, since Iraq's oil supplies will rejoin the world market. I suspect the Saudis have figured that out. Has the Bush administration? [Postd 12/1.]

DEMOCRACY FOR ALL: In a passionate and reasoned speech, Natan Sharansky calls on the United States to demand democracy for all—even Arabs in the Middle East. And he offers a definition of "democracy" more fundamental than mere elections: "the ability of people to express their views, thoughts, and beliefs freely, without the fear that they will be imprisoned as a result." The entire speech deserves reading, but here are some excepts to provide context.

But we know well that it is not a tribal war between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. We are in the midst of the first world war of the twenty-first century, waged between the world of terror and the world of democracy, between a civilization in which human life is held in the highest value and one for which human life is merely an instrument to reach certain political aims.

The world of democracy will win this struggle. But in order for the victory to be everlasting, it is crucial, but not sufficient, to destroy the terror. It is imperative to expand the world our enemies try to destroy, to export democracy.... Let me take you back to 1972. It was a time of grave concern for us dissidents in the former Soviet Union. We felt that we were about to witness the free world's acceptance of the Soviet Union, its appeasement of the country that we knew to be the Evil Empire. The West was on the verge of recognizing the borders of occupation of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union's privilege to control the peoples of the Baltic Republics. The West was about to accept the Soviet Union's right to exist as a communist dictatorship—and, at the same time, to receive its friendship by bribing it with most-favored-nation trading status and a great amount of economic assistance. Very few spoke out against this tendency. It seemed to us that the clarion call of the late Andrei Sakharov to the West could not have been clearer: Do not trust governments more than governments trust their own people. Link all ties with the Soviet Union to the encouragement of democracy and human rights inside Soviet Union. But very few heard him.... Since you have to live with this dictatorship, our friends in the West told us, let's make sure that it is a friendly one, that it does not threaten the stability of the free world. A friendly Russia will have most-favored-nation status and military agreements that will make Moscow feel secure. There will be more stability in the world, and then we in the West will also be able to help you. Our response to them was clear: Do not be concerned about us; be concerned about the future of the world. Despite what you think, communism will not last forever, but will inevitably crumble and in the near future.... But how sad it is that almost immediately [after the fall of Soviet communism], the leaders of the free world abandoned the Sakharov principle: Do not trust governments more than governments trust their own people. When I met President George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s, he asked me what needed to be done to keep the Baltic republics and Ukraine inside the Soviet Union; how should the United States prevent them from separating from "Mother Russia"? His point was that we have this guy, Gorbachev, on whom we can rely—so why open ourselves up to someone with whom we do not have a relationship and who may be dangerous to us? I was shocked. How could it possibly be—just when it had become clear that the idea of trying to build peace with friendly dictators had failed, when the concept of strengthening global security by linking democracy to international relations had triumphed, when we were living in a world with only one source of power—that we were suddenly rushing back to rebuild the old concept? Do we want to give friendly dictators the opportunity to control the entire second and third worlds? In the same vein, after saving the Saudis and Kuwaitis from impending doom following the Iraqi invasion of the Gulf War, when these countries were entirely dependent on the United States, one would have expected America to use just a drop of its immense political capital to demand the beginning of democracy in these countries. But there was nothing. "Saudi Arabia is not about democracy. Saudi Arabia is about oil; it is about stability in that part of the world," we were told. "We need Saudi Arabia because that's what can guarantee our stability." Again, relying on the friendly dictator and the personality of the given dictator.... Democracy is for everybody. Of course, encouraging democracy does not mean that people's lives, mentality, and culture need to be transformed. "Democracy" means one simple thing—the ability of people to express their views, thoughts, and beliefs freely, without the fear that they will be imprisoned as a result. Notwithstanding all these historic examples, some still resist the notion that democracy can work. They argue that elections will bring extremists to the fore.

It is true that if Yasser Arafat is given the opportunity to hold elections immediately, or in four months as he has declared, there is no doubt that he will be back in power. Elections are not, and cannot be, the starting point for democracy; they are the end of a lengthy process. Free elections must be allowed only after the necessary institutions are in place to guarantee that the people are free to express their views—and not sooner.

Unfortunately, as Sharansky's account reminds us, Bushes have a nasty preference for short-term regime stability over long-term freedom. And, as the WSJ's Rob Pollock reminded me shortly after 9/11, Condi Rice was a Russia expert on the Bush 41 team. Maybe Saudi despots have less to worry about than they should. [Posted 12/1.]

OUR GOOD FRIENDS THE SAUDIS, CONT'D II: On my many recent trips, I've had occasion to talk to smart, pro-American Europeans (and some Americans) who oppose U.S. action against Iraq and, independent of one another, raise the same question again and again: Why attack Iraq when Saudi Arabia is the source of our problems? There's a good reason to act first against Iraq—we're racing the weapons clock—but the operative word is first. The Bush administration can't publicly say, "We'll deal with Saudi Arabia when we're done with Iraq." That wouldn't be prudent. But Congress can push the issue. [Posted 12/1.]

THANKSGIVING: We made our own Thanksgiving pilgrimage to Massachusetts, joining Steve's family at his sister's house outside Boston. Whenever I'm in New England at this time of the year, I wonder how any Pilgrims at all survived that first winter. It's bad enough in the age of central heating. More conscientious bloggers (some with good archival commentary to recycle) have reflected on Thanksgiving as the quintessential American holiday. Thanksgiving sparks no fights over the public square, because it creates no sense of exclusion. It manages to be religious without being sectarian and, because it affirms a universal sense of gratitude for life's blessings, it's as friendly to atheists as to believers. No one harrangues us to remember the "true meaning" of Thanksgiving, because remembrance flows naturally from the celebration itself. By providing only the loosest ritual template—a few foods native to the American continent—Thanksgiving permits endless customization within a common experience, an apt metaphor for the mystery of American identity. This WSJ piece on how new immigrants adapt Thanksgiving cuisine sparked some conversation at our Thanksgiving dinner, which was actually held on Friday afternoon and blended smoothly into Hannukah. [Posted 12/1.]

DEAD HAND, DEAD ECONOMIST: Reviews of loosely connected books rarely work well, but David Frum's excellent joint review of Brink Lindsey's Against the Dead Hand and the latest volume in Robert Skidelsky's biography of Keynes proves the exception to this rule. Here's a bit of the discussion of Brink's book:

Against the Dead Hand is the most important book yet published on the whole subject of globalization—brilliantly original, superbly well informed, and most important, unflinchingly honest. Honesty is a surprisingly rare virtue in writing about globalization. An unpleasant odor of hucksterism and salesmanship lingers upon too many of the words published in the 1990s about emerging markets and the global economy. Remember those television commercials showing little Paulita in Montevideo e-mailing chess problems to little Ming in Shanghai? The hucksters wanted to convince American investors that it was technology that was changing the world—and that there was still time to get in on the ground floor.

Brink Lindsey urges us to understand globalization in a radically new way: politically, not technologically. That understanding illuminates with clearer light the progress we have made toward a more open world—and the reaction against that progress in both rich and poor nations....

In careful studies of countries from Argentina to Thailand, Lindsey shows the tight grip of the dead hand of the past: countries that opened their markets to imports of goods, while trying to keep tight state control over their financial sector; countries that linked their currency to the dollar, while pursuing policies that made the link unsustainable; countries that sought foreign investment, while refusing to protect foreigners' lives and property.

Against the Dead Hand is a devastating critique of the 1990s fantasy that global economic reform was an unstoppable force, over which humans could exercise no control. (A popular joke in Central Europe in the early 1990s asked how many Poles or Czechs or Hungarians it would now take to change a light bulb. Answer: none. The market would do it.) Progress is never more than an option, and can always be thwarted by human folly, enviousness, or indifference. The Brazilians may be about to discover that lesson the hard way—again.

I'll leave the rest of the review for you to read, with one exception—an almost-passing meditation on medical progress:

Keynes died in 1946. He was only sixty-three. It is strange to look at photographs of this man in clothes that look almost contemporary standing in front of hotels that one could stay in today—Keynes especially liked the Mayflower in Washington—and realize that when his heart began to fail, the only remedy his doctors could offer for his pain was for him to pile bags of ice upon his chest.

[Posted 12/1.]

TRADE DISPUTE: Brad DeLong polices anti-trade "dreck" among his political allies an