Matins

¶ Whenever we think of consciousness, and what it might be (if it means anything at all, which it probably doesn’t, by virtue of meaning too much for one word), we put ourselves in the place of Ramses II, who clearly thought that he was doing well. Knowledge has a history, people — which means that it has a future. Trust in us to get there without wasting time anticipating what will be found. Soul dust, indeed! (BBC Today; via MetaFilter) ¶ All things considered, we’re not terribly worked up about the recent decision in the Bombay High Court that upheld astrology as a science. The law itself is no more scientific than astrology. (Short Sharp Science) Leave astrology to Carl Sagan. (Bad Astronomy)

Lauds

¶ We’re inclined to agree with Wayne Anderson, that “what Marcel Duchamp did to the history of art is comparable to the impact of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs.” That doesn’t mean that we want to read Anderson’s book, which, in Francis Naumann’s utterly and completely unfavorable review, sounds crochety and undigested. We’re grateful to Christopher Higgs for raising the subject, and we agree with him, that any book that makes you fighting made is some kind of success. (Toutfait; HTMLGiant) ¶ Anne Yoder explores the “alignment” of Arthur Rimbaud and David Wojnarowicz, as “miscreants, meddlers, thieves, deranged to the point of seeing, i.e., visionary.” We’re glad that they weren’t too deranged to get their work done, even though we wouldn’t have wanted to have them to dinner. ¶ But who cares about art anymore? It’s the artist that’s the thing. Felix Salmon writes about oligarch Victor Pinchuk flew Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons into Davos just to have them show up at a big non-WEF lunch. The meteor has definitely killed the dinosaurs.

Prime

¶ The incomparable Michael Lewis travels from Greece to Ireland — one begins to worry that airport officials will brand him as a terrorist before he can enter Spain or Portugal — and delivers a Vanity Fair piece, “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” that makes a conclusive case that the Irish were as vulnerable to the ravages of optimism as Native Americans were to that old Irish staple, firewater. Most delicious sentence: “The politicians in Ireland speak Gaelic the way the Real Housewives of Orange County speak French.” ¶ At Crooked Timber, Henry Farrell surveys Irish politics and recent history. He offers three forecasts for the long-ruling Fianna Fáil, which may have outlived its historic combination of “nationalist ideology and right-of-center populism.”

Tierce

¶ Noting a political likeness between “Metternich and Mubarak,” Bob Cringely reminds us that Europe was swept by revolutions in 1848 without any help from modern communications technologies. When the people are dissatisfied enough to rise up, they do so faster than Facebook can keep up. ¶ Cam Hui, at The Humble Student of the Markets, is also reminded of 1848, noting that discontent in China is becoming more open than ever. Tim Wu argues eloquently for dropping US charges against Julian Assange. (Foreign Policy)

Prosecution of WikiLeaks would hurt, if it not destroy, the credibility of the United States in claiming to be the world’s most vital advocate of an open Internet. It would send the dangerous signal that the United States only claims to uphold the virtues of an open Internet and free speech — until it decides it doesn’t like a particular website. There could hardly be a worse moment to send that message, to be telling the Arab world:  Do as we say, not as we do.

¶ Writing about Montaigne and the very different wars of his time, Saul Frampton ventures a few speculations on mirror neurons that argue for the importance of physical proximity in human affairs, further dampening the effectiveness of remote communication in exciting times. (Guardian; via The Rumpus) ¶ Simon Roberts, we suspect, doesn’t know much about the producers of the little video that he showcases, but, much as we object to AARP as a special-interest group, we’re willing to trust its numbers for the sake of fun. Old people really do need Facebook; they can’t get out anymore. (We should know!) (The Ideas Bazaar)

Sext

¶ We congratulate our friend JRParis upon the award of a medal from his employer, marking 25 years’ service. He’s a good sport about the fact that he ought to have received it in 2007. There is no TGV, apparently, in the administration of SNCF. ¶ According to the British Toilet Association, Britain’s toilets were once “the envy of the world.” James Ward wants to know whose toilets are the envy of the world today. If that’s a bit too gross for your reading pleasure, James has also visited the Web site of the British Plastics Federation, where you’ll find the bastard word, “pultrustion.”

Nones

¶ The editors of The Morning News have the great good sense to refer us to a tour d’horizon of Egyptian politics by Adam Schatz that appeared last May. Despite its titles, “Mubarak’s Last Breath,” it was written at a time when the temperature of Cairene politics was set determinately at “business as usual.” Schatz is particularly good, toward the end, at placing Mohamen El-Baradei. ¶ Justin E H Smith recalls the style dictatoire that he encountered in Egypt, where young men made “menacing attempts at immediate friendship” — an almost comical phrase that, we’re nonetheless certain, ought to be taken at naive face value. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Henriette Lazarides Power writes about Ismail Kadare’s chilling version of a widespread Balkan folk tale, “The Three-Arched Bridge.” Ms Power already knew the story from her family, in Northern Greece. She had even crossed the very bridge itself, said to contain, in its foundations, the body of an immured volunteer. ¶ If Kyle Minor, stuck in Toledo, is going to miss the AWP thing in Washington, you can bet that he’s going to dream up a conference worth missing missing. The things that he’s sorry to have been left out of will be the envy of AWP attendees as well. Sing to us, Svetlana. In a nearby entry, Jimmy Chen soliloquizes for a lost soul who assumed that “Washington, DC” means “Deep Creek, Spokane, Washington,” and who wonders where everybody is. (HTMLGiant)

Compline

¶ The (depressing) state of play in the development of high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor. John Mica, the new chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is chasing the chimera of “private investment,” which is just about exactly 100% wrong-headed. We agree that Amtrak’s record is poor-to-terrible, but we attribute this not to government sponsorship (such as it is) but to the legacy of the old railroad companies that devolved into it. We need to send a troop of smart yong engineers, accountants and administrators to Europe and insure that they replace current managers upon their return. (The Infrastructurist) ¶ Why Republicans hate mass transit — as if you didn’t know. They may say that they’re against subsidizing enterprise, but, as Ben Jervey points out, that doesn’t stop them from providing massive support to automobile-related transport (roads, especially). Republicans like to help people who don’t need help. (GOOD)

Have a Look

¶ Lily Pons, glamour girl with a voice. (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

¶ Galaxy Quest — the 20th Reunion documentary! (via MetaFilter)

¶ Dominique Browning at the Taj Mahal. (Slow Love Life)

Noted

¶ Geoff Dyer loves Friedrich Nietzsche. (Guardian; via Maud Newton)

¶ Twilight on the syllabus at Ohio State. (GOOD)

¶ David Leonhardt talks to Tyler Cowen about necessary cultural changes. (NYT)

¶ Ayn Rand depended on government handouts in her battle, after a lifetime of smoking, against lung cancer. (GOOD)

¶ “Why I Am A Socialist” — In this moving testament, Wallace Shawn never uses the term. (Guernica; via MetaFilter)

It’s almost too perfect: How Ronald Reagan saw himself, notwithstanding the realities of the situation.

The main voice of reason is that of Reagan’s son Ron, who is interviewed by a swimming pool, describing his father with affection, but also critical distance. He traces his father’s worldview to his success as a young lifeguard, despite his terrible eyesight. (Nearsightedness kept Reagan in Hollywood making propaganda and training films during World War II.)

“He grew up seeing himself as somebody who saved people’s lives,” Ron Reagan says. “I think that carried through into his later years as well, the sort of roles he liked to play in movies. He wanted to be the hero.”

And that yearning to be America’s lifeguard helps explain Reagan’s thinking in the Iran-contra affair, which darkened the second term of his presidency. He denied trading arms for hostages in Iran, then later admitted it in a televised address. The film cites the secret diary of the former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who recorded that when warned that the deal was illegal, Reagan said he didn’t care.

The Mechanic is a bouncy film about a hit man. You wouldn’t think to call him a killer, really, because killing implies passion and hit men are, apparently, all business. Arthur Bishop (Jason Statham) is one of the best: he can make a death seem accidental, or he can “send a message.” He develops his fastidious plans in a modernist aerie lost in the Louisiana bayous, and likes to listen to Schubert on a very high-end LP player. (For fun, he soups up an old Corvette.) Determined to have none but satisfied customers, Bishop is perhaps overly inclined to believe what his paymasters tell him. Even though anyone in the audience over the age of ten can see that Tony Goldwyn is the bad guy, we have to admire Bishop’s ability to put assignment ahead of sentiment.

At the burial of Bishop’s mentor, McKenna (Donald Sutherland), our hero runs into  McKenna’s ne’er-do-well son (Ben Foster), who has so many issues that he can’t hold a job — but he can shoot. Bishop adopts him as a partner while Junior (his actual name is Steve) thinks about how to run down the man who killed his father — who is of course &c. Hair-raising adventures climax in the only possible way, and then go onto climax, once and for all, from there.

The Mechanic is not a mannered movie, but it is all about style — the masculine style of speaking softly while carrying deadly weapons. For that reason, it’s good to get Donald Sutherland out of the way early, just as it was in the remake of The Italian Job; Mr Sutherland has always been a scarily expressive actor and is not about to retire as such. And, again as in that film, he is once again closer to one of his colleagues in crime than he is to his own flesh and blood. Steve McKenna’s sulking is tolerable because it’s laced with astringent and even cocky self-hatred. Also, unlike his father, he is not wheelchair-bound. Mr Statham inhabits a role that was obviously conceived with him in mind — brooding, stoic, afflicted with painfully good mental health, and impressively articulate at those times when he has something to say. If Jason Statham is a favorite actor of mine, it’s precisely because he is able to make this bundle of masculine attributes interesting, and I admire his director, Simon West, for creating a film in which swaggering would be in bad taste. Mr West is also to be applauded for deploying the story’s weaponry and other matériel without showing off.

I had the feeling of watching a James Bond movie in 3-D, for full-dimensional characters. Even Bishop’s targets, odious as they may be, come to us as fully realized human beings. They don’t “deserve to die,” and there is nothing cartoonish about their deaths. (Their bodyguards are of course another matter.) Only an odd person would call The Mechanic a “feel-good” film, but its pieces come together with a very satisfying click — even if it’s a click that goes “boom.”

According to trustee Irving Picard’s newly-unsealed complaint against JPMorgan Chase, Bernard Madoff’s principal bankers had their doubts about his activities over a year before his arrest — yet they did nothing beyond limiting the bank’s exposure. 

What emerges is a sketch of an internal tug of war. One group of senior Chase bankers was pursuing profitable credit and derivatives deals with Mr. Madoff and his big feeder-fund investors, the hedge funds that invested their clients’ money exclusively with him. Another group was arguing against doing any more big-ticket “trust me” deals with a man whose business was too opaque and whose investment returns were too implausible.

For much of 2007, the tide was with the Chase bankers designing and selling complex derivatives linked to various Madoff feeder funds. By June of that year, they already had sold at least $130 million worth of the notes to investors, and they sought approval for deals that would have pushed that total to $1.32 billion, the lawsuit asserted.

The committee agreed to increase the bank’s exposure to Mr. Madoff only to $250 million, but by 2008, the bank’s risk management executives were gaining, backed up by suspicions raised by the “due diligence” teams visiting the large hedge funds that invested with Mr. Madoff.

Also juicy: the string of 318 transfers, all in the round number of $986,301, that ought to have set off the bank’s money-laundering alarms.

Thanks to an overzealous decision by a yahoo judge, masterpieces held by Russian museums won’t be visiting the United States. We hope that the Chabad Lubavitchers are happy about that.

In recent years the organization has taken its case to court in the United States, and on July 30, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, a federal judge of the United States District Court in Washington, ruled in favor of the Chabad organization, ordering Russia to turn over all Schneerson documents held at the Russian State Library, the Russian State Military Archive and elsewhere.

Russian officials, saying that an American court had no jurisdiction, had refused to participate in the proceedings. And after Judge Lamberth’s decision, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced it as a violation of international law. The ministry said an American court had no right to get involved in a case concerning Russian assets on Russian soil.

Russian cultural officials reacted more slowly, but by autumn they began warning Russia’s state-controlled museums that any artwork lent to the United States was at risk of being seized by the American authorities to force Russia to abide by the decision.

Before dinner last night, I was sitting here in the living room with my friend Eric. We were talking about a new novel that we had both read, and all of sudden I felt flush, because I’d just heard Eric tell me that he had written a blurb for the book’s dust jacket. How had I missed this? I don’t read blurbs; I may glance at the names of the blurbers — and in this case, I’d  recognized two names but unaccountably missed Eric’s. It was probably just as well; if I’d know about his blurb while I was reading the book and talking about it to friends, I’d undoubtedly have dropped a lot of fatuouscomments about knowing someone who’d written a blurb &c a friend of the author &c. But my reputation as an observer was severely dinged.

Then, this afternoon, I couldn’t find the American Express bill. I hadn’t seen it come in, and my suspicion is that it was misdelivered; there’s been a lot of that going on lately, whenever our regular mail deliverer is off duty. After a lot of dithering — I hate to talk to credit cards company representatives, doubtless the long-term aftereffect of decades-old impecunious traumas — I called American Express and arranged for a replacement to be sent. No problem. Meanwhile, the outstanding balance that was due this month, which I also asked for, seemed very high. Without the bill in hand, I couldn’t analyze the figure, and I experienced a variation of another old waking nightmare, not being able to remember what I did last night. It took a while to calm down enough to remember some hefty up-front expenses at the dermatologist’s. This brought the balance due into line.

I’m not going to bleat about senior moments or incipient dementia. The plain truth is that this sort of thing used to happen all the time, because I paid little or no attention to things that didn’t interest me. Tedious details were a crime against nature. The consequences of this lackadaisical outlook were not pleasant, and I was often put into quite a fugue state by the fruits of my shambolic disregard. I don’t know when I discovered that life was a lot more agreeable if I made an effort to put things where they belonged, and if I made a point of paying the bills once a month. But it doesn’t come naturally, and if I couldn’t rely on slowly but surely developed habits, I’d break down every day.

I expected, back in 1985, that the personal computer would make a good substitute for the personal secretary, and it took about twenty years for me to realize that that was never going to be the case. Ever. I can’t tell you how much time and wretchedness I poured into teaching desktops and laptops how to manage my home. Beyond using Quicken to write checks — but wait, you say; you’re still writing checks? Oh, yes, indeed; without the bits of paper hardcopy, I wouldn’t know from one week to the next where I stood. I have become a heavy user of pads and pencils.

When Kathleen got home last night, we had a very nice dinner — but one that would have been better if I’d remembered to season the sauté de boeuf à la Parisienne with salt and pepper.

It figures. The Securities and Exchange Commission nets the federal government about $300 million in fees and fines, after its own expenses), but it is so poorly organized that, according to GAO audits, “basic accounting continually bedevils the agency responsible for guaranteeing the soundness of American financial markets.” Is this what “starving the beast” comes down to?

“It’s almost as if the commission is being set up to fail,” said Harvey L. Pitt, who was S.E.C. chairman from 2001 to 2003 and who now is chief executive of Kalorama Partners.

Dodd-Frank did authorize a doubling of the commission’s budget, to $2.25 billion, over the next five years — without providing the money for it. It also authorized the commission to spend as much as $100 million beyond its operating budget for new technology systems.

Ms. Schapiro said that buying new technology was crucial because it helped to attract specialists in mathematics and financial systems that the S.E.C. needed to help police the rapidly evolving financial markets.

“It’s very hard to attract great people if they think that there’s not going to be the opportunity to use technology to get the job done, which can make us so much more efficient,” she said.

It’s a pity that Edward Wyatt’s story doesn’t offer an explanation of where the SEC’s budget bloat — its funding doubled during the first GW Bush administration. Money isn’t everything; it can’t solve problems by itself, especially if administrators (such as former Chariman Christopher Cox) are not interested in solving them.

In an important development, pepperoni is showing up on artisanal pizzas. Julia Moskin reports.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.
Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

Our own preference is for prosciutto and no tomatoes. How we miss Loui Loui!

What with one thing and another, it has been difficult to settle into a pattern of reading. I seem to have regressed as a reader; either I’m consumed by a book and drop everything else while I finish it, or I’m not consumed, and the book may never get read past the first thirty pages. If I weren’t aware of my own delusional tendencies, I’d say that I’ve been good lately about buying books, ie not buying them. And perhaps I’ve slowed down a bit. But I could go without buying another book this year and never get near the bottom of my pile.

This morning, more in desperation than anything else, I fished out a slim volume from the more recent strata of acquisitions, Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. Not only did it promise to be a quick read, but Dot McCleary, who recommended it to me at Crawford Doyle, has asked me at least once what I thought of it, and I’ve been embarrassed to admit that I haven’t gotten to it. Pullman’s conceit is that Mary gave birth to twins, one of whom grew up to be Jesus, the radical preacher and example of virtue, while the other became the Christ, the founder of the insitutional church that Pullman abominartes, as does his Jesus, whose prayers in Gethsemane implore the Lord God, if He exists, to prevent the rise of precisely the sort of organization that came to be headquartered at the Vatican. Christ is not really a scoundrel; but he believes more in justice than in mercy, and he eagerly colludes with an angel’s request to write down Jesus’s words as they ought to have been, not as they really were.  This gives Pullman an opportunity to “correct” a number of famous parables and anecdotes — most shockingly, the story of Mary and Martha. I can’t wait to finish the book, which I’d be doing right now if I weren’t writing about it here, which gives you some idea of my warped priorities.

Alice Munro had a story in last week’s New Yorker, but I didn’t get to it until last night, when I saved it for bedtime. Which was perfect, because when I finished it, I didn’t want to read anything else; I was ready to turn out the lights and let my mind drift among the four young people, two of whom appear in middle age at the end. Although there is nothing in the least bit ornate about the story, I couldn’t help thinking of a courtly dance, or at least a pas de quatre in a grand ballet, in which the lovers are mismatched.

In the early summer, Royce got on  a bus and went to visit Grace on her parents’ farm. The bus had to pass the down where Avie lived, and by chance from his window he saw Avie, standing on the sidewalk of the main street, talking to somebody. She as full of animation, whipping her hair back wen the wind blew it in her face. He remembered that she had quit college just before her exams. Hugo had graduated and got a job teaching high school in some northern town, where she was to join him and marry him.

Grace had told Royce that Avie had had a bad scare, and it had caused her to come to this decision. Then it had turned out to be all right — she wasn’t pregnant — but she had decided she might as well go ahead anyway.

Avie didn’t look like anybody trapped by a scare. She looked carefree, and in in immensely good spirits — prettier, more vivid, than he ever remembered seeing her.

He had an urge to get off the bus and not get on again. But, of course, that would land him in more trouble than even he could contemplatge. Avie was sashaying across the street in front of the bus now anyway, disappearing into a store.

Getting off the bus, as the story works out, would have landed Royce and Avie in what, in retrospect, certainly looks like a better chance at happiness. But that is how Munro holds us: she makes us feel those might-have-been blues as poignantly as if the missed chance had been our own. 

Medieval monarchs quarreled with territorial grandees and local customs to raise armies and taxes in a struggle for state power that it took the French Revolution (and an end of monarchy) to win. Who knows what corresponding trauma will end the conflict between the United States’ laws and the special interests that work hard to neutralize them. Joe Nocera in the Times: 

Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

{snip}

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

A corporation that isn’t paying roughly a third of its profits in taxes is cheating the body politic that nourishes it.

According to Jenna Wortham’s report, the world of online publishing is getting closer to sustaining itself financially — and without advertising. Richard Ziade’s Readability is set to offer apps that distribute micropayments to publishers.

“Asking someone to pay 45 cents to read an article may not be a big deal, but no one wants to deal with that transaction,” he said. Marco Arment, an adviser to Readability and the creator of Instapaper, a service for saving and reading online articles, made a version of his Instapaper app that will essentially be Readability’s mobile component. Mr. Arment said he thought the most likely customers for Readability’s pay service were “online power readers.”

“It’ll be the types who buy print magazines even though the same articles are online for free, just because they want to support the publication,” he said.

“On the Web, it’s not that people aren’t willing to pay small amounts for things; it’s that there is no easy way to pay,” he added. “If a service like Readability comes along and makes it easy, I think people will be willing to pay.”

[snip]

Mr. Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab said that the interest in these services was driving “an increasing realization among publishers that not all customers are created equal, and some will pay for different experiences without advertisements.”

Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Slate Group, the online publisher owned by the Washington Post Company, said Slate had not talked to Readability but would “be happy to cash their checks.” Mr. Weisberg added that “if the numbers became meaningful, we’d of course want to negotiate” a deal.

They said it couldn’t be done.

Forty-odd years ago, it seemed that, week after week, the Notes and Comment piece that opened the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker  (now just “Comment”) launched a new attack on the conduct of the Vietnam War; failing that, the administration of the day was taken to task for bungling the Cold War. This scolding seemed brave and daring at the time; national magazines didn’t the government in a relentlessly unflattering light. It wasn’t the magazine’s disagreements with specific policies that one remembered. It was its impatience with the clutch of morons who seemed unaccountably to be in charge of things. In the end, The New Yorker turned out to be right: Vietnam was a pointless waste — we are doing business today with the same government that we sought to crush for nearly twenty years — and when the Cold War came to an abrupt end in 1989, it was clear that George Kennan’s modest policy of containment would have been sufficient to halt the spread of Russian influence in the world — without the need for bellicose imagery. But the fact remains that  nobody in power paid attention to The New Yorker while the war was underway, and nobody in power is paying attention to it now, when climate chance poses a far greater menace to the American way of life than Communism ever did, and the magazine is still at it, scolding away, week after week, in pieces that are signed, usually, by Hendrick Hertzberg. 

It’s not enough to be right; what’s wanted is persuasiveness — persuasiveness aimed at the unpersuaded. What would such exhortation look like? It would not look like this: 

Meanwhile, the “overwhelming evidence” that Obama used to cite continues to mount, relentlessly and ominously. The decade just ended was the warmest since systematic recordkeeping began, in 1880; the year just ended was tied (with 2005) for the warmest on record, and it was the wettest. The vast energies released by moister air and warmer oceans are driving weather to extremes. Hence epic blizzards as well as murderous heat waves, unprecedented droughts alongside disastrous floods, coral reefs bleached white and lifeless while ice caps recede and glaciers melt. 

We may ask, what is the point of this paragraph? Aside from the pleasure, which for Mr Hertzberg, we imagine, must be considerable, of delivering the thwack of a sound, articulate rebuke, we can’t imagine what sort of effect the passage is supposed to have on those who peruse it. No individual reader is in a position to do anything about moister air or bleached coral reefs. Surely no one at The New Yorker is naive enough to suppose that Mr Hertzberg’s words would serve their purpose if the magazine’s readers were motivated by them to vote, en bloc, for a slate of candidates committed to reversing the dire trends herein outlined. Any such candidates, once elected, would be mown down by representatives of the much larger portion of the electorate that wants to muddle through, with as little inconvenience as possible — the majority of Americans who will never be prodded into constructive action by being made to feel ashamed of themselves. Nor will ordinary homeowners ever worry more about faraway environmental problems than they do about their own real estate; they won’t even worry half as much. 

Maybe concern for the environment isn’t much of a prod when it comes to reducing the consumption of energy and the production of waste. Complaining about the callousness of the general public isn’t going to accomplish anything. Fear isn’t much of a spur, either; it makes people either sullen or escapist (or unhelpfully crazy: remember those bomb shelters!). It’s unlikely Americans will do much of anything about the environment until they feel good about trying, and can see that their efforts are making their own territory a better place. Just how to make them feel good about visible results — that’s probably as daunting a challenge as actually reversing global warming. (It is certainly not the job of the President of the United States, whose principal duty is to hold the country together, or at least to prevent it from flying apart.) But reversing global warming isn’t going to happen first. And for my part, instead of rapping the knuckles of politicans who oppose the progressive environmental agenda, and spanking their supporters, I prefer to bemoan Hendrik Hertzberg’s failure to write something useful. 

On the vexed subject of “stability,” words of great good sense from Senator John Kerry.

The awakening across the Arab world must bring new light to Washington, too. Our interests are not served by watching friendly governments collapse under the weight of the anger and frustrations of their own people, nor by transferring power to radical groups that would spread extremism. Instead, the best way for our stable allies to survive is to respond to the genuine political, legal and economic needs of their people. And the Obama administration is already working to address these needs.

At other historic turning points, we have not always chosen wisely. We built an important alliance with a free Philippines by supporting the people when they showed Ferdinand Marcos the door in 1986. But we continue to pay a horrible price for clinging too long to Iran’s shah. How we behave in this moment of challenge in Cairo is critical. It is vital that we stand with the people who share our values and hopes and who seek the universal goals of freedom, prosperity and peace.

For three decades, the United States pursued a Mubarak policy. Now we must look beyond the Mubarak era and devise an Egyptian policy.

And a shot of real realism from David Brooks.

First, the foreign policy realists who say they tolerate authoritarian government for the sake of stability are ill informed. Autocracies are more fragile than any other form of government, by far.

In other words, the modern democratic world has no room for junior Kissingers.