Brad DeLong

Grandmothers Raising Grandchildren Basket Sale Charity Fundraiser

Hear now the words of Rabbi Yeshua Ben Yosef:

Use well your talents for some good purpose. The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, and if you use your talents well:

the LORD will say unto you: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things: enter thou into the joy of thy LORD."

XKCD: The End of the 2005 Hurricane Season

http://xkcd.com/1126/

June Carbone: Emergency Room Free for All: Why America’s Emergency Rooms Are Not the Key to Improved Health Care Access or Lowered Cost - New Economic Perspectives

June Carbone:

Emergency Room Free for All: Why America’s Emergency Rooms Are Not the Key to Improved Health Care Access or Lowered Cost: Mitt Romney has been going around telling newspaper editorial boards that the Affordable Care Act is redundant, that – to quote him in the Central Ohio Dispatch – “you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care; and it’s paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital.”… If it were as simple as showing up at emergency rooms designed to treat the indigent, Romney would be correct that we don’t need the Affordable Care Act to improve health care access.  But… [c]laims of simplicity underestimate the intelligence of listeners and display a striking lack of familiarity with emergency medicine, as most Americans know it.

Buce Embarks on the Quest for the Historical Muhammed

Don't do it, Buce!

Four Twelve things seem to me to be crystal clear about the quest for the historical Muhammed:

Martin Feldstein Accidently Proves Either (i) 152 > 186 or (ii) It Is Mathematically Impossible for Romney to Keep His Tax-Policy Promises

The fact that he sought to prove otherwise and wound up confirming the Tax Policy Center's conclusions purely by accident gives me additional confidence that the TPC knows what it is doing. Martin Feldstein:

Mitt Romney's plan… has been attacked as "mathematically impossible."… this is not the case… IRS data… 2009… cost of the 20% reduction in all tax rates… the Alternative Minimum Tax… the tax on interest, dividends and capital gains for married couples with incomes below $200,000, and for single taxpayers with incomes below $100,000…. This brings the total [dynamically-scored] cost of the Romney income tax cuts to $186 billion… whether this revenue loss can be offset by broadening the tax base of high-income individuals.

It is impossible to calculate the exact effects… since Gov. Romney hasn't specified what he would do… taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes over $100,000… made itemized deductions totaling $636 billion… paid marginal tax rates of 25% to 35%… apply a 30% marginal tax rate to the $636 billion…

Extra revenue of $191 billion—more than enough to offset the revenue losses from the individual income tax cuts proposed by Gov. Romney.

That is Feldstein's point:

• Cost = $186B
• Maximum Possible Revenue = 30% x $636B = $191B
• $191B > $186B

But that point is simply, mathematically, arithmetically wrong.

Taxpayers making more than $100K/year in AGI had marginal tax rates of 25%-35% in 2009--an average tax rate, Feldstein assumes, of 30%.

After Romney's 1/5 reduction in tax rates they will have tax rates of 20%-28%--an average tax rate of 24%.

Multiplying not the wrong 30% but the true correct 24% marginal tax rate by the $636 billion in itemized deductions gets us not $191B but $152B.

$152B < $186B

Note that to get to this point I have already had to give Feldstein four passes--a pass to claim big behavioral responses where they lower his cost number, a pass to claim small behavioral responses where they would raise his cost number, a pass to excuse his failure to use his current bargaining power to get Romney to specify a plan and so commit to good technocratic tax policy, and a pass on his moving-of-the-goalposts in the definition of "high-income taxpayers"--to get this far.[1] I am not happy to give him those four passes. But I am willing to give him those four passes.

This fifth pass, however, I cannot give him.

I cannot let him say that $152B > $186B.

I just cannot.

So I call for the Wall Street Journal to correct the headline. Make it, instead, truthful: "Romney's Tax Plan Can not Raise Revenue without Taxing the Middle Class".

And I call for the Wall Street Journal to further correct the article by adding a subhead: "Martin Feldstein tries as hard as he possibly can to demonstrate that it would not be mathematically impossible for Romney to keep his tax promises, and fails".[2]

And then the last two paragraphs of Feldstein's article needs some editing as well, as part of the correction that I would like to see the Wall Street Journal make:

Since broadening the tax base would not produce enough revenue to pay for cutting everyone's tax rates, it is clear that the proposed Romney cuts would not require any a middle-class tax increase, nor and would they produce a net windfall for high-income taxpayers. The Tax Policy Center and others are wrong to claim otherwise completely correct in their conclusions.

The Romney plan can reduce will increase the current tax system's distortions, increasing national income in the short run and reducing economic growth in the years ahead. That was the key to the very successful Reagan tax cuts of 1986. It was also the tax-reform strategy embraced by the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission in 2010. And it could put the economy back on the right track in 2013.

Toleration and the Public Sphere

Samuel Goldwyn goes too far:

Germany Outlaws Judaism: Well, not quite. But a ruling from a court in Cologne… circumcision is serious physical damage that can be justified only by the informed consent of an adult…. The convenant of Abraham is now against the law in Cologne.

[T]he ruling is the logical consequence of a concept of religion implied by Protestantism and articulated philosophically by Benedict Spinoza and John Locke…. [R]eligion is rooted in private belief. Associations and rituals are legitimate only to the extent that they are submitted to voluntarily by consenting adults, who can withdraw their consent at any time. And religious obligations can never trump the civil law.

There are good reasons that this position was appealing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trouble is, we’ve forgotten not only that it doesn’t fit many older traditions, including Judaism and Roman Catholicism, but that it was specifically designed to exclude them. The understanding of religion’s legitimate sphere that informed the Cologne court’s ruling, in other words, is not theologico-politically neutral. It was, and remains, a polemical concept that elevates state over church, individual over community, consent over continuity in ways that traditional Catholics and Jews find hard to accept….

[M]odern liberalism... requires that every religion transform itself into a variant of Protestantism--or find itself on the wrong side of the law.

I must say that I find Samuel Goldwyn's idea--that a theologico-politically neutral politics of religion would accept as legitimate associations and rituals that are involuntarily imposed on unconsenting adults, who cannot escape no matter what they wish--distasteful.

Your children are not your chattels.

They make their own choices about who to be and what to do.

And if you try to act as though your children are your chattels, then you are the kind of parent who when your children ask for bread give them stones, when your children ask for fish hand them serpents...

More Evidence That Ross Douthat (and Karl Smith) Really Need to Read Euthyphro...

Karl Smith:

Douthat on Secular Morality: A coherent secular morality is a tricky problem in and of itself. One that makes absolute claims even more so, and one that makes absolute claims absolutely seems well beyond our grasp. And, I say this as a secularist…. [T]he claim that slavery is fundamentally wrong in all cases is not controversial among secularists but it is far from clear how one justifies this except by asserting it. And, then of course what is one to say to people who deny it? Intending no disrespect to the underlying issue, the argument seems to devolve into “na-na na-na boo-boo.”…

The ethics-game is an attempt to answer the question, what moral stance “should” I adopt…. What Douthat appears to be saying is that the ethics-game is hard for secularists, and that is correct.

What Karl seems to miss is that playing the ethics-game is much much harder for Ross Douthat than for secularists.

For secularists it is simply the very hard question: "what is good?" For Ross it is three even harder and much more convoluted questions: "what do the priests tell me God commands?", "what reason is there to think that the priests know what God commands?" and "why should I think that what God commands is good?" Cf. Euthyphro, passim.

And consider:

Ephesians 6:5-8: Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.

When asked "what have you to say to slaves?" St. Paul responds: "Slaves! Obey your masters! And do so enthusiastically, diligently, and lovingly--that way you will have treasure in heaven!"

That's a considerably worse "argument" on the proper place of slavery in this fallen sublunary sphere than "na-na na-na boo-boo".

Plus there is always Genesis 22:1-10 to deal with. The idea that when God commands evil we must attempt to do HIS will because HE will somehow make it come out all right in the end is very unattractive...

Χριστός ἀνέστη! Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!

Good Friday

Maundy Thursday Blogging: Saint Paul Says: Be Excellent to Each Other!

Andrew Sullivan does not appear to have gotten the memo.

The point is not to flagellate oneself because one is not and does not particularly want to be St. Francis.

The point is to be excellent to each other.

Andrew Sullivan:

alicublog: I have had good moments in this struggle and terrible, lasting failures. This Lent has forced me to consider my constant failures more than my intermittent moments of grace. That I confess. As a practical matter, I have not had the strength to live as Saint Francis, without possessions, without a home, without sex, without anything but a subsistence diet, reliant entirely on physical labor and begging on the streets as a last resort.

Roy Edroso:

Oh well, maybe next year, Sully.

Indeed. It is no sin not to be St. Francis.

St. Paul:

Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, whether prophecy, let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith; Or ministry, let us wait on our ministering: or he that teacheth, on teaching; Or he that exhorteth, on exhortation: he that giveth, let him do it with simplicity; he that ruleth, with diligence; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.

Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another; Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality…

'Tis a Gift to Be Indoctrinated...

ZunguZungu on Santorum:

Santorum’s Gifts – The New Inquiry: [T]he change in rhetoric from the original speech is worth noting. In conversation with Stephanopoulos (on TV), he wants to be seen as fighting back against liberal indoctrination, speaking for a religious blue collar moral majority against a secular liberal elite that disdains its accomplishment and desires, as complaining that they do not represent us (but they hold us to their standards). As such, it’s actually kind of a liberal complaint, if only in the classical sense: a rigid hierarchy is stifling the individual will and a political system is operating in an unrepresentative manner. But to get to this point, he’s backtracked so far that what he’s saying is almost indistinguishable from Obama’s own stated position: while Stephanopoulos points out that Obama simply said that he wanted ”every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training,” Santorum calls for “technical schools…additional training, vocational training…skills and apprenticeships” (and as TPM notes, Santorum is attributing to Obama a position that Santorum has also advocated).

But Santorum’s hypocrisy is boring. What’s interesting to me is the fundamental shift in philosophy he has to make between the two rhetorical moments, between a speech in front of Tea Party types in Michigan and a conversation with a Democratic talk show guy in Washington. For example, in phrases like “Not all folks are gifted the same way” and “Some people have incredible gifts with their hands” he’s calling on a specific kind of Christian discourse, one that indexes a quite non-liberal vision of the human…. [W]hile the quote from his chat with Stephanopoulos is a complaint against constraints on self-determination, his speech in Michigan gives us the raw and uncut Santorum, the language of obligation that makes his heart swell proudly: against a secular world that wants to liberate and free us to do as we desire, he wants to re-focus our efforts, as workers, back onto the obligations of God’s plan. The problem is no longer that we are being indoctrinated (and remember, the problem with “indoctrination,” traditionally, is that it runs against the liberal notion of education, that instead of teaching us to be free, it enslaves us). In Michigan, the problem Santorum is complaining about is precisely this, that we are being un-indoctrinated, taught or permitted to do as we please. The secular world is the false god of a permissive society; literally, a society that permits us to be misled by our desires, rather than one which enforces legal strictures on morality.

This is not hyperbole, by the way; via IHE, let’s enjoy this bit of rhetoric from a speech about why Satan is destroying America by starting with academia:

The place where [Satan] was, in my mind, the most successful and first — first successful was in academia. He understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different — pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell. You say, well, what could be the impact of academia falling? Well, I would make the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall. And so what we saw, this domino effect, once the colleges fell and those who were being educated in our institutions….

[T]his shot at Obama is not only that Obama is a false god and false father — though it is this — but also that he represents, as such, a permissive society’s too-modern sense of the parent and authority, in which the purpose of higher education is not to make you a better worker, but precisely to free the individual from social obligations, and in which parents enable their children to be led astray by the kind of self-gratification (and self-determination) that will lead them to hell. Too much freedom.

When liberation is the problem — and when a “permissive society” becomes a bad thing — indoctrination ceases to be the problem, and becomes the solution. The problem with Obama is that his is the wrong indoctrination…. Santorum’s solution is for parents to take their power back, and this leads him to argue — quite distinctly — that it should be parents who (metaphorically) play God with their children…

Ed Kilgore: Rick Santorum's Jihad Continues…

Ed Kilgore:

Political Animal - Santorum: “You’re Not A Christian”: Defenders of Rick Santorum are very angry that anyone would suggest his “phony theology” comments about the president represented an attack on a fellow Christian’s beliefs. Turns out he was a bit more direct about it in an appearance in 2008, as reported at the time by Beliefnet founder Steve Waldman (who passed along a link to his post):

After he’d accused Obama and other Democrats of religious fraudulance for a few minutes, journalist Terry Mattingly of GetReligion.org asked whether it’s possible that rather than being fake, perhaps, Obama was sincerely reflecting a form of liberal Christianity in the tradition of Reinhold Neibuhr. Santorum… he questioned whether liberal christianity was really, well, Christian. “You’re a liberal something, but you’re not a Christian.” He continued, “When you take a salvation story and turn it into a liberation story you’ve abandoned Christiandom and I don’t think you have a right to claim it.” In other words, Obama’s faith is fraudulant in part because liberal Christianity is….

[Santorum's] now famous speech at Ave Maria University… concluded that mainline Protestantism, which was “gone from the world of Christianity,” had already been lost to His Infernal Majesty…. As Waldman noted, this is not that unusual an attitude for self-consciously conservative Christians to have these days, but it’s unusual to hear it from a politician. Rick Santorum cannot have it both ways, though. If he feels so strongly that Christians who don’t share his particular “world view” aren’t really Christian at all, then he should be loud and proud about it…

Adele Stan on Going All-in Against Contraception

Adele Stan:

Adele Stan: [T]he perception remained that there was a "Catholic vote," one the bishops could deliver, even if those voters ignored the bishops' backward sexual edicts. But the events of the past week reveal that the bishops command no one, not even the leaders of Catholic institutions.

In offering the bishops an "accommodation" they refused to accept… the Obama administration effectively exposed the powerlessness of the bishops when the rest of the church rose to accept the offer…. [T]he bishops, who now stand marginalized in their own church, as major Catholic organizations, most of them led by clergy -- the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Catholic Health Association (which represents Catholic hospitals), Catholic Charities, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious and the Sisters of Mercy -- signed onto the administration's plan over the bishops' objections.

Adding insult to the bishops' injury are the polls, which show majorities of Catholics in favor of the healthcare plan's mandate for contraceptive coverage by employer-provided health insurance, even if the employer is an institution, like a hospital or university, that is affiliated with the church….

And the disagreements don't end with contraception. On gay marriage, too, the laity is at odds with the clergy….

Back in the first half of the 20th century… Catholics comprised a largely urban population whose members were defined by the ethnic identities of the countries either they, their parents or grandparents had left behind. The bishops were their advocates…. But you'd be hard-pressed today to find a vote delivered by a bishop… the voting behavior of Catholics is virtually indistinguishable from that of the public at large…. So if the bishops can't deliver the votes of their flock or control the leaders of the church's institutions, do they have any power left? Well, yes, they do -- for the time being. They have money -- money from the collection plates of their parishes, which they've been diverting to campaigns against gay marriage, often in states far away from those in which the money was collected. Those dollars, according to a report by Dominic Holden in The Stranger, a Seattle area newsweekly, are contributed by parishioners who are largely unaware of their ultimate use….

The bishops won't go down easy, of course. At Salon, Sarah Posner writes of a hearing scheduled for today, convened by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., at which the bishops, along with allies from other denominations, will answer this question: "Lines Crossed: Separation of Church and State. Has the Obama Administration Trampled on Freedom of Religion and Freedom of Conscience?" (Gee, I wonder what the answer will be.)…

It is fitting that the bishops, who once reveled in their unilateral power over their own flock, secure in the power of their own lobby, now seek allies among the most regressive factions of the church's rivals on the roster of the world's great religions, most notably among the Protestant evangelical right…. In this sense, the bishops' remaining political power is in a revisionist history of their own disempowerment…. The bishops now stand on the edge of a chasm, wide and deep, shouting to their theologians, institutional leaders and their very flock on the other side, only to hear nothing but the sound of their own voices echoing back at them.

Kevin Drum's "Peak Crazy" Republican Presidential Poll Share Graph

Each time I look at a graph like this, I think: "Why doesn't Romney pick up any ground in the polls as these clowns successively collapse?"

I would have expected some of the Bachmann people, and sue of the Perry people, and some of the Cain people, and some of the Gingrich people to switch over to Romney as their poll shares collapsed. (The Paulites are another kettle of fish entirely.) But they don't.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that there are an awful lot of people out there I do not see who are putting downward pressure on the Romney poll share: a lot of preachers throughout the land standing up on Sundays and saying: "DON'T VOTE FOR THE MORMON!!"

For the first time, I find myself thinking that Romney might not win the Republican nomination...

Taking Your Bible Much too Seriously Department

Kevin Drum sends us to:

Gog, Magog, and George Bush : Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East.... The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”… Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”… [T]he puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal…

From Chapter 20 of the Book of the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine:

Revelation 20 KJV: Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire…

I don't know that George W. Bush was in some sense hoping for a nuclear exchange in the Middle East that would destroy Israel in order to bring the Day of Judgment closer. But I don't know that he wasn't: and his reported conversation with Chirac is a piece of evidence that he was.

Moderate Muslims

Clair Berlinski:

Moderate Islam and the Things People Miss: I posted a link to our conversation about whether Islam itself is the enemy to my Facebook page. Some of my friends here in Istanbul (who are Moslems, and, as the word "friend" suggests, not my enemy) weighed in with responses that I think confirm my assertion that the Islamic world is not monolithic. In particular, my friend Babür left a long, thoughtful response....

I later left this comment: I've just walked down a street filled literally with thousands of Moslems of exactly the kind many people are seriously arguing do not exist. I saw them with my own eyes, as I have every day for the past five years. With so many other questions in the world, why waste time debating this? Book a ticket to Istanbul, spend an afternoon here, have a lovely time, drink some tea, meet friendly, tolerant, warm, welcoming Moslems (mostly), and see for yourself. They exist! They're my neighbors and my friends! Babür, is there anyone at our gym, for example, who would not describe himself as a Moslem? Would any member of our gym endorse terrorism, honor killing, forcing me to wear the hijab, or subjecting me to a dhimmi tax? The idea is so absurd it's beyond discussion -- and yet we're discussing it.

Theo Spark found the conversation sufficiently interesting to link to it in his blog. He described the discussion as a "raging debate." I notice that his post has been picked up at Right Wing News. So now this chat among my friends is a raging and somewhat public debate, I guess. The odd thing is that the "raging debate" is about whether moderate Moslems exist. That they do is a proposition so easily verifiable that I don't even have to leave my apartment to do it. I can just look out the window.

But no one even noticed the snake pit of controversy embedded in Babür's claim that Shi'a Islam is a heresy. Now, as people who know the Islamic world well will tell you, that is--what is it Andrew Sullivan calls it?--the money quote. You just watch and see how much more blood is yet to be spilled over that claim. And no one even noticed it--their attention was elsewhere.

Some Very Practical Knowledge...

Teresa Nielsen Hayden sends us to:

Doctrine and Covenants 129: THE DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS OF THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS, SECTION 129: Instructions given by Joseph Smith the Prophet, at Nauvoo, Illinois, February 9, 1843, making known three grand keys by which the correct nature of ministering angels and spirits may be distinguished. HC 5: 267:

1. THERE are two kinds of beings in heaven, namely: Angels, who are resurrected personages, having bodies of flesh and bones—
2. For instance, Jesus said: Handle me and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.
3. Secondly: the aspirits of just men made perfect, they who are not resurrected, but inherit the same glory.
4. When a messenger comes saying he has a message from God, offer him your hand and request him to shake hands with you.
5. If he be an angel he will do so, and you will feel his hand.
6. If he be the spirit of a just man made perfect he will come in his glory; for that is the only way he can appear—
7. Ask him to shake hands with you, but he will not move, because it is contrary to the order of heaven for a just man to deceive; but he will still deliver his message.
8. If it be the devil as an angel of light, when you ask him to shake hands he will offer you his hand, and you will not feel anything; you may therefore detect him.
9. These are three grand keys whereby you may know whether any administration is from God.

The Revelation of St. John the Divine 20 Blogging...

Mark Frauenfeder: Former French President says Bush invaded Iraq to thwart Gog and Magog's apocalyptic mission picks up:

James Haught: Chirac recounts that [George W. Bush] appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him [at the start of 2003]:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.... This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins...

Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”... [Chirac's] staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that... Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report. Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon...

Revelations 20:

And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.

I confess I don't know what is more amazing:

1. That "Bush Gog Magog Chirac" gets only five hits on Google News--all of them in the past 48 hours.
2. That George W. Bush gets Revelations so wrong--you see, Gog and Magog do not arise until 1000 years after the "first resurrection." It won't be time for Gog and Magog to show until 1000 years after an angel comes down from heaven and binds the Devil and casts him into the bottomless pit, and those who were beheaded for their witness of Jesus are resurrected and reign with Christ for a millennium.

DeLong Smackdown Watch (Joint New York Times Death Spiral/Edward Luttwak/Clark Hoyt/David Shipley/Greg Mankiw Edition)

Bruce writes:

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: I do think this really encapsulates the way that Brad's obsession with the press corps sometimes borders on, well, obsession (by which I mean that it's unreasonable in the standard of behavior it demands, even if based on real failings and legitimate frustrations)....

[T]he New York Times... [is] just [a] newspaper, after all--one that puts it pants on one leg at a time. The editors went to a leading academic, who has both a deep knowledge of policy and a sterling reputation among his peers (not to mention a long trail of peer-reviewed publications). And they published (after Mankiw wrote) a piece that contained no factual errors--just a logical flaw. Is it really the job of a press corp to correct the best and the brightest among economists when they make logical errors? Should the science reporters be checking all the equations of a string theorist before reporting on an important new paper?

I think the relevant concept here is division of labor. The Times's job is to find interesting writers who have established themselves in their fields as people worth listening to. And then the writers are supposed to live up to the standards of excellence they are thought to embody.... [T]he New York Times isn't peer reviewed. And no daily newspaper could be.... [T]he Times is a fine paper, [but] it's still, on a very good day, only the first draft of history. And the first draft of argument too....

It's way way too easy to criticize the press everytime the press publishes something stupid. But the fallacy here comes back to the division of labor.... Even a team of 10 polymaths... could not really have the knowledge to seriously engage a bunch of subject-matter experts to push them to state all hidden premises and address all lurking counter-arguments. And even if ten such people could be found... is their highest and best use really editing the New York Times op-ed page...?

[T]he Times I think pretty reasonably reflects the slice of reaonably well-educated, affluent, and over-self-satisfied America that comprises its primary readership.... [W]ould we really want to live in a world of a "better press corps?" What it boils down to is the very best and brightest devoting themselves to popular journalism--and not specialization. If all the best aircraft engineers are fact-checking the occasional op-ed piece on flying, would you trust the planes that the former fact-checkers are engineering?

It is, I think, a matter of line drawing. For thirty years now Republican politicians have been proposing tax cuts and claiming that either (a) they don't need to be funded because America today is on the far sie of the Laffer curve, or (b) they can be funded via a magic asterisk in the budget--by cutting federal spending "waste, fraud, and abuse." Surely this argument is past its sell-by date? Surely it is thirty years' rotten, and stinks? Surely there are four questions that an editor should ask:

• He or she should ask the writer: Is what you are describing actually McCain's proposal? (Answer: no.)
• He or she should ask the writer: Isn't the gasoline tax--which you have in the past used to pay for (a small part of) the extension of the Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D, the structural long-term deficit, and now want to use to pay for a corporate tax cut--performing the function of the spoiled and rotten magic asterisk in your argument? (Answer: yes.)
• He or she should ask his or her peers: Given what we know, would publishing this tend to inform our readers and raise the level of the debate? (Answer: no.)
• He or she should ask himself: Given the answers to these first three questions, should we publish it? (Answer: no.)

If the New York Times has a role in the future, it is as a trusted intermediary that warrants the quality of what it publishes and thus brings to its readers' attention. If it cannot figure out a way to accomplish this trusted-intermediary function, it should die--and die as quickly as possible so that other organizations that can perform this trusted-intermediary function should begin capturing its revenue flows.

The second example in my original post is if anything more egregious: Edward Luttwak is not qualified to write anything about Islamic apostacy. David Shipley is not competent to select op-ed writers. And Clark Hoyt is right to call him out.

The problem is Shipley's reaction--it is not to say "I blew it; New York Times readers have a right to demand more competent performance from their trusted intermediary; I will try to do better." Shipley's reaction is:

Entitled to Their Opinions, Yes. But Their Facts?: David Shipley, the editor of the Op-Ed page, said Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because “we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,” he said...

And:

[David Shipley] said he did not think the Op-Ed page was under any obligation to present an alternative view, beyond some letters to the editor...

On which Clark Hoyt comments:

That’s a pity...

Indeed it is.

This isn't rocket science I am demanding: this is the simple application of basic intelligence.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

It tells us--both the handling of Luttwak's and the handling of Mankiw's piece tell us--that the New York Times editors don't think that they have a responsibility to try as hard as they can to carry out their trusted-intermediary function. Unless the editors get a clue soon, I can't think of a reason to keep the organization around.

One last point: Note that by the end of Clark Hoyt's article calling out both the author Edward Luttwak and the editor David Shipley, they are both uneasily blaming and pointing fingers at each other:

Luttwak said... he was not out to attack Obama and regretted that, in the editing, [David Shipley cut] a paragraph saying that an Obama presidency could be “beneficial”...

[David] Shipley, the Op-Ed editor, said he regretted not urging [Edward] Luttwak to soften his language about [the] possible assassination [of Barck Obama], given how sensitive the subject is...

The European Seaborne Empires I: "To Serve God, to Win Glory for the King, and to Become Rich"

The European Seaborne Empires I: "To Serve God, to Win Glory for the King, and to Become Rich"

From David Abernethy (2000), The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 1415-19890 (New Haven: Yale), p. 242 ff:

The multifaceted nature of Europe's assaults is highlighted when contrasted with the overseas activities of the Chinese and the Arabs. The ideal site for comparison would be a place distant from Europe, China, and Arabia, hence unlikely to be controlled by any of them, where people arriving by sea from all three areas were present at about the same time. That such stringent conditions could be met seems highly unlikely. But in fact they do apply to one case: Malacca during roughly the first century of [European imperalism] phase 1. This city, located on the Malayan side of the narrow strait named after it, was founded in the late fourteenth century and rapidly became the principal center for maritime trade among Indian Ocean emporia, the Spice Islands, and China. Malacca benefited from the weather as well as from its location. Because of monsoonal winds, vessels sailing from the Indian Ocean to China (and vice versa) had to lay over for a few months before continuing the journey. An alternative was for ships to unload their wares in Malacca, returning to their respective home ports with goods from the others' ships as well as gold, spices, and precious woods from the offshore islands.

The city and strait of Malacca were extraordinarily cosmopolitan places several centuries ago. A well-placed Portuguese observer wrote in the 1570s: "One may well and truly say that Malacca, in point of fact, and merchant trade, is the most extensive place in the world." The city was visited by Cheng Ho [pinyin Zheng He] on at least two of his voyages and thereafter by many Chinese sailors and traders. The great Arab traveler Ibn Battuta passed through the strait in 1345-6, and several thousand Muslims, including some from Arabia, resided in the city in the early 1500s. Ibn Battuta's Italian conterpart, Marco Polo, passed through the Malacca Strait in 1292 on his return to Europe from China. As noted in chaptert 3, the Portuguese captured Malacca in 1511, holding it until the Dutch replaced them in 1641. Thus people from all three regions converged around the start of [European imperalism] phase 1 on the same small area.

By studying Malacca in 1511 one comes as close as possible to a historical laboratory experiment. Are sectoral features of European countries present as well in China nad in Arab (and, more generally, Muslim) societies? If so, for reasons given in chapter 2 my argument about the importance of sectors is weakened. If not, the argument is strengthened.

The Chinese government's impact on Malacca was far more limited in scope and duration than might be expected given the country's wealth and size. Cheng Ho's armada of hugh junks, with thousands of well-armed soldiers aboard, was designed to ensure attention and respectful deference to China's rulers from elites elsewhere. Presumably Admiral Ho was instructed to urge monarchs to establish symbolic tributary relaions with the Celestial Court. But the admiral was unwilling to use the military might at his disposal to conquer Malacca, there being no plans to administer distant lands as integral parts of the emperor's domains. Moreover, as noted earlier, the impressive voyages undertaken by Cheng Ho ended abruptly in 1433. The emperor politely received the king of Malacca when the king later journeyed to Beijing, bearing tribute. But assertion of China's superior political status was made by the inferior party visiting the Celestial Court, not by the latter reaching out aggressively beyond its borders. The contrast with the European pattern is obvious.

China's private sector had a more substantial and long-lasting impact on Malacca. One indicator was the existence, as of the early 1500s, of a separate section of the city reserved for Chinese merchants. These traders were on their own when residing overseas. This was manifestly the case after 1433 when they could not count on even an intermittent visit of ships to demonstrate the home government's power. If anything, Malacca's Chinese merchants carried on their business despite the imperial court, which launched periodic efforts to restrict economic ties with the outside world. The court controlled government-to-government trade, expressed through the tributary system. Nonofficial trade, which it was unable to regulate, was perceived as an unwelcome challenge to its power and authority. That many Chinese merchants in Malacca were long-term residents did not signify that they were overseas agents of Chinese power. On the contrary, it reflected recognition of obstacles that bureaucrats would have placed in theiur way had they based their international operations on the Chinese mainland. A common pattern for th Chinese in sixteenth-century Malacca and elsewhere in southeast Asia was to conduct clandestine commerce with the home country. Alternatively, they concentrated on trade among ports scattered about the Nanyang (Southern Seas). In both cases they tried to avoid contact with Chinese officials rather than to work with them.

The imperial court disapproved of Chinese settling elsewhere because this meant abandoning the graves of their ancestors. The court took this view to its logical conclusion in 1712 with an edict forbidding its subjects to live or trade in Southeast Asia. Though poorly and inconsistently enforced, the edict nonetheless expressed an attitude toward overseas settlers diametrically opposed to that of western Europe's rulers.

China's public and private profit sectors thus had minimal contact with each other in dealing with Malacca. When cross-sectoral contact did occur it tended to be competitive and conflictual rather than cooperative. The profit-sharing and chartered-company options were ruled out. This stands in sharp contrast to the European pattern of linking the two sectors in mutually beneficial ways.

The Chinese did not carry a missionary religion to Malacca because they had none. As noted in chapter 8, the imperial court's Confucian creed was a civil religion, not available for export or readily separable institutionally from the public sector. Cheng Ho was dispatched as a diplomatic emissary of the court. But he could not have served as a Confucian missionary, had this unlikely possibility ever been considered, because he was Muslim. Chinese merchants in Malacca practiced their own religious faiths but kept to themselves when oing so. No basis existed for an outeward-looking coalition between leading practitioners of China's religions and its rulers or merchants.

Arabs visited Malacca as long-distance merchants, staying in a quarter of the town set aside for Muslims. Unlike the Chinese they did bring a missionary religion. They used their wealth and their external connections to persuade Southeast Asia's political elites to let them build mosques and invite mullahs to lead the Islamic community's religious life. In many instances Muslim merchants pressured local rulers to convert. Malacca's rulers had been Muslim for about a century before the Portuguese arrived. One may thus speak of an alliance between Arab mercantile and religious interests resembling the European pattern.

But Arabs in teh Indian Ocean basin were not like Europeans. First, they were not agents of a polity eager to assert itself overseas. Home bases for the Arab seafareres were port cities--Jiddah, Adan, Muscat--along the periphery of a vast, thinly-populated desert peninsula not effectively governed by anyone. These cities faced outward to the sea. But they were not linked to a densely-populated, economically-productive, politically-controlled hinterland in the way that western Europe's port cities were. They were urban areas on their own, not urban areas embedded in states. Their prospects for profitable trade were most favorable if none of them advanced political calims beyond its immediate domain. Traders and sailors moved on monsoonal winds from one trading center to another, intermediaries among several autonomous units rather than agents of any particular one.

Second, Arabs were not the only--or even the principal--propagators of Islam in southeast Asia. The central role they played in the religion's formation and explosive early spread into the Fertile Crescent and across North Africa was diluted in later centuries. Islam's steady advance eastward by land and sea was due mainly to initiatives by non-Arabs. Its increasingly cosmopolitan character can be seen in Malacca. The Portuguese chronicler Tome Pires reports that shortly aftert the city was founded "some rich Moorish merchants moved from Pase [in Sumatra] to Malacca, Parees, as well as Bengalese and Arabian Moors, for at that time there were a large number of merchants belonging to these three nations.

The successes of traders as proselytizers meant that diffusion of Islam in southeast Asia did not depend on soldiers and administrators brought in from outside. If public-sector support was deemed necessary it was provided on site: once Malacca's ruler converted, Islam become in effect the kingdom's official faith. Further, the spread of Islam did not depend on full-time specialists in conversion recruited, dispatched, and reporting to an institution headquartered in Arabia or any other Muslim country. Islam indigenized itself as it expanded, rather than serving the ambitious designs of a distant state or missionary agency.

To summarize, the Chinese public sector had only a fleeting interst in reaching out to Malacca, no interest in conquering the city, and competitive rather than cooperative relations between itself and private profit sectors; the religious sector had no will or autonomous institutional capacity to assert itself overseas. China's impact on Malacca as of the early sixteenth century was confined to the activities of a single sector functioning on its own. Arabs had two sectors interested in influencing the outside world, hence the potential for a sectoral coalition. But Islam's spread to Malacca and elsewhere in Southeast Asia was not essentially an Arab activity. Neither was it directed by religous agents accountable to their own sectoral institutions, as in the European pattern. Most importantly, the Arabs' mercantile and religious interests were not backed by a state able or anxious to expand overseas. What initially appears as a two-sector alliance turns out to be a phantom alliance because it lacked institutions stretching outward from a territorial base.

The limited, functionally diffuse character of Chinese and Arab/Muslim relations with Malacca posed an isoluble dilemma for the city's sultan when he encountered Europeans. Teh first ship sent out in 1509 from Goa, capital of Portugal's Estada da India, consisted of traders. But Muslim merchants resident in Malacca who came from Gujarat and other Indian ports knew from experience that the Portugese flag accompanied trade and that the Portuguese were Christians implacably hostile to Islam. Warned in effect that the Portuguese constituted a triple threat to his regime, the sultan imprisoned and mistreated serveral members of the trade mission. His actions precipitated the very attack by Portuguese soldiers two years later than he hoped to forestall. But the Muslim merchants could offer only warnings. None of the cities from which they came was in any position to supply military aid, even to coreligionists threatened by Christian infidels.

The only powerful polity to which the sultan could turn was China. But if he was able to contact the Chinese emperor his efforts were in vain. The tributary system binding Malacca to the Celestial Kingdom symbolized superior/inferior relations and did not contain a mutual defense clause. Help was not forthcoming. At a critical moment in world historoyk wehn Europeans first intervened in Southeast Asian affairs, the Chinese court was unwilling to assert its stake in a nearby region. The sultan faced toward Mecca when praying and toward Beijing when oferring tribute. But for quite different reasons he could count on neither to help counter the new foe.

Beijing, in other words, was the capital city of a powerful state lacking both an expansionist foreign policy and an expansionist religion. Mecca was the central city of an expansionist religion but not of a state. Lisbon was the capital city of a state with an expansionist foreign policy and a strong commitment to spread an expansionist religion.

As Muslim merchants predicted, the Portuguese launched a tripole assault on Malacca. The city was captured in 1511 by an armada of ships carrying fifteen hundred soldiers whose commander, Vicery Afonso d'Albuquerque, saw himself as an extension agent of the Portuguese state. That the invaders intended to assert permanent political control soon became cleear. Albuquereue allegedly cried out to his men in the heat of battle that "We [should] build fortress iin this city... and sustain it, and... this land [should] be brought udner the dominion of the Portuguese, and the King D[om] Manuel be styled true king thereof." Construction of a stone fortress was begun as soon as the battle was won, and it was kept well supplied with soldiers and cannon. The city was a Portuguese possession until the Dutch took it in the seventeenth century. Once secured, Malacca became a vital outpost used to establish other Portuguese enclaves in the Moluccas and on the China coast...

This is a sophisticated and powerful rendition of the argument that what mattered most from 1500-1850 was the triple-threat reinforcing nature of European imperialism--the importance of all three parts of the Spanish hidalgo's explanation of why they had left Iberia: "to serve God, to win glory for the king, and to become rich..."

Wingnuts Triumphant!

Mishan Jabouri on Al-Jazeera http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5c128f4eac:

As you know, Saddam executed my own brother and many of my relatives. He executed the uncle of my children. But the way he was executed proved Saddam was a brave man. He has truly become our martyr, and we will visit his grave like the graves of the righteous....

[...]

They sentenced him to death and executed him on the holiday. The people who executed him are the same people who executed ibn Al-Khattab [the Rightly-Guided Commander of the Faithful Omar]. These are the same people who killed [the Rightly-Guided Commander of the Faithful] Abu Bakr.... Sorry, the same people who hate Abu Bakr and all the prophet's companions....

[...]

The heroic martyr Saddam Hussein has become an imam for resistance fighters all around the world...

The political class of the Iraqi Traditionalists appears to be following a flawed strategy. Their strategy is to annoy the Americans with booby-traps and car bombs until the Americans withdraw from Iraq, at which time the Iraqi branch of the Party of the Prophet's Son-in-Law Ali and the Iranians will kill them all.

Believe in a Loving God, or Die! Department

Yeshua ben Yosef would not be filled with joy by this video game, which seems to miss the point in a particularly pathetic way:

Blood & Treasure: convert or die: The war over Christmas, it seems.

Liberal and progressive Christian groups say a new computer game in which players must either convert or kill non-Christians is the wrong gift to give this holiday season and that Wal-Mart, a major video game retailer, should yank it off its shelves.... Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a PC game inspired by a series of Christian novels that are hugely popular, especially with teens...

...Plugged In, a publication of the conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, gave the game a "thumbs-up." The reviewer called it "the kind of game that Mom and Dad can actually play with Junior -- and use to raise some interesting questions along the way."

---

'Convert or die' game divides Christians / Some ask Wal-Mart to drop Left Behind: A Wal-Mart spokeswoman said the retailer has no plans to pull Left Behind: Eternal Forces from any of the 200 of Wal-Mart's 3,800 stores that offer the game, including just seven in California. The nearest are in Chico and Redding. "We look at the community to see where it will sell," said Tara Raddohl. "We have customers who are buying it and really haven't received a lot of complaints about it from our customers at this time."... In Left Behind, set in perfectly apocalyptic New York City, the Antichrist is personified by fictional Romanian Nicolae Carpathia, secretary-general of the United Nations and a People magazine "Sexiest Man Alive."

Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story. When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game. "That is so obvious," he said.... Frichner said that... his company's ultimate goal in offering the game: to bring parents and kids together to talk about the Bible. He said most teens are playing video games, so it was natural to turn the books into one...

A Cultural Shift in Progress

Mark and Period, "The Vineyard," 4314 Redwood Highway #200, San Rafael, CA invites us to their:

Christmas Special New Shipment Warehouse Sale

Huge selection of: antique and contemporary jewelry, silver, coral, glass, jade beads, Buddha and GuanYin statues, paintings, furniture, feng shui, crystals, cashmere, Italian garments...

Let us all now meditate upon Avelokiteshvara, The One Who Hears the Cries of the World, in her form standing in her reindeer-drawn chariot, and chant chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra--The one that begins: "Ho! Ho! Ho!" and

Why Oh Why Are We Ruled by These Liars?

Josh Bolten used to have a reputation. Not any more:

Think Progress: Bolten Defends Rove's False Claims on Stem Cells: Rove recently told the Denver Post that "recent studies" show researchers "have far more promise from adult stem cells than from embryonic stem cells." The Chicago Tribune contacted top stem cell experts who all said Rove's claim was inaccurate... the White House "could not provide the name of a stem cell researcher who shares Rove's views on the superior promise of adult stem cells." Today on Meet the Press, Tim Russert gave White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten an opportunity to repudiate Rove's claims. Bolten refused, saying Rove "knows a lot of stuff." Bolten added, "there are alternatives ways to get to the promise of that embryonic stem cells have." This view is not shared by stem cell researchers....

Transcript:

RUSSERT: Is there any evidence that you are aware of or that the President is aware of that says adult stem cells show far more promise than embryonic.

BOLTEN: Adult stem cells have already demonstrated in the amelioration of disease.

RUSSERT: So you agree with Mr. Rove.

BOLTEN: Like I said, I'm not a scientist.

RUSSERT: I don't think Karl Rove is either.

BOLTEN: Well, he knows a lot of stuff. The point here is that there are alternatives ways to get to the promise of that embryonic stem cells have. The president with his announcement this week on stem cell policy also announced we are going to put extra effort within our scientific community, at NIH, into pursuing stem cell research that does not involve the destruction of human embryos.

The Bells of St. Martin's

Boing Boing gives a rave review to Jo Walton's very good Farthing:

Boing Boing: Farthing: Heart-rending alternate history about British-Reich peace: Jo Walton's new alternate history novel Farthing manages the incredible, heart-rending trick of being a quiet little story about quiet, brave people while simultaneously conjuring the kind of haunting dystopia that rips your guts out.

In the Farthing timeline, Britain made peace with Hitler, through the intervention of a faction within the Tories called "the Farthing set," for the Farthing manor house on which they gather. Hitler has taken Europe and is warring on Russia, while Britain barely tolerates the Jewish refugees that have come to its shores.

The story opens with a weekend on the Farthing estate in 1949, and Lucy, the sole surviving child of the family that owns the estate, has come back to her girlhood home with her husband, David, a Jewish banker who escaped Hitler's France. David is cordially loathed by all present -- the Farthing set -- who nevertheless tolerate him with hypocritical good cheer.

Then the architect of the peace with Hitler is found murdered in his bed in Farthing manor, and all suspicion turns to David. Even those who suspect that this is a setup nevertheless choose to believe that it isn't, preferring to blame the interloping Jew to one of their number.

The story proceeds in chapters told by Lucy and chapters told by a likable, sharp Scotland Yard detective, but this is no detective story. It's a thorough study on evil, a meditation of how people betray that which is good for that which is expedient, or self-serving. It is never cynical -- the world of Farthing has at least as many heroically selfless angels as cheap sellouts, but where this book really goes on a tear is in showing how even the good can be easily boxed into doing ill.

Farthing is clearly a parable about Britain and America in the wake of the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks, when commonsense, humanism, and a commitment to liberty and justice has been easily set aside in a fury of bloodlust and a dismal, shrugging apathy. Walton's deft touch is like Orwell's, tender but unflinching, and it's easy to see why she won the Campbell Award and the World Fantasy Award.

Once I hit the home stretch, the last hundred pages, I couldn't put this down. Like the last act of 1984, Farthing's conclusion inspires a simultaneous round of dread and hope that I couldn't walk away from. Few books have moved me as much as Farthing, it's one of those novels I'll be recommending to friends and returning to many, many times.

As a political novel, it is superb. As a novel novel, it is--I found, YMMV--a hair below Jo Walton's other (excellent) work: the principal narrator grows a bit too much a bit too fast during the course of the book, and while my disbelief remained suspended there were some red lights on the control board and some stomach-unsettling fluctuations in the local antigravity field.

Nevertheless, highly recommended.

From TOR, as is an increasingly large proportion of high-quality smack-for-the-eyes-and-brain these days.

Origins of Blue State Culture

Hal Varian writes about an article forthcoming in the *Journal of Economic Perspectives: Ed Glaeser and Bryce Ward on American political geography:

Red States, Blue States: New Labels for Long-Running Differences - New York Times: A recent working paper, "Myths and Realities of American Political Geography," by two Harvard University economists, Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, challenges this conventional wisdom http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=874977.... [D]ifferences in political attitudes across states are nothing new: the Civil War and Roaring Twenties had much larger geographic variation in political views than we do today.... America is not becoming more polarized. Of course, Republicans have a more positive view of the Republican Party than the Democratic Party, and vice versa, but attitudes have hardly changed since 1978.... Thirty years ago, income was a better prediction of party affiliation than church attendance, but this is no longer true....

These cultural divisions have been around for a long time. In the 1936-37 Gallup poll, residents of New England and the Middle Atlantic states were far more likely than citizens elsewhere to support federally financed health measures aimed at venereal disease, to support a free press and to be willing to vote for Catholic or Jewish candidates.... It turns out that the degree of industrialization 85 years ago is an "astonishingly good predictor of Democratic support" among today's voters, as is the fraction of the population that is foreign-born.

But the biggest effect seems to be the correlation between religion and Republicanism. Among white voters who attend religious services at least once a week, 71 percent voted Republican in the last election, according to the Pew survey...

Here are Glaeser and Ward:

The extent and permanence of cultural divisions across space is one of America’s most remarkable features.... [I]n... April 2004... twenty-three percent of respondents in Oregon, Washington and California thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. Forty-seven percent of respondents in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas had that view. In the 1987-2003 PEW Values surveys, 56 percent of Mississippi residents think that AIDS is God’s punishment for immoral sexual behavior. Only 16 percent of Rhode Island residents share that view....

We find little support for the belief that these cultural differences represent long-standing differences in religiosity or the legacy of slavery. Instead... Blue State culture reflects primarily the legacy of different ethnicities working together at high densities: the most important historical explanatory variables are the share of the labor force in manufacturing in 1920 and the share of the population that was foreign born in 1920 in predicting liberal beliefs and voting for John Kerry. We interpret these results as suggesting that the liberal views that reduced traditional social divisions came about because there were gains to reducing economic and religious conflicts that could derail interactions in the marketplace.

The second important truth captured by the red state/blue state framework is that political parties and politicians have had an increasing tendency to divide on cultural and religious issues rather than on economic differences. Again, in historical perspective, cultural politics is not unusual. In the late 19th century, “Rum, Romanism and rebellion” were the core issues that determined the Republican Party. The true aberration was the mid-twentieth century era of economic politics...

One State, Two State, Red State, Blue State

With 46 blue states right now, red/blue loses must of its punch. But Glaeser and Ward have some very interesting things to say:

Mark Thoma reports:

Economist's View: Myths and Realities of American Political Geography: Edward Glaeser and Bryce Ward on myths and realities regarding changing political geography over time in the U.S. and the validity of the "red state/blue state" paradigm: "Myths and Realities of American Political Geography," by Edward L. Glaeser and Bryce A. Ward, NBER WP No. 11857, December 2005:

But despite the myths surrounding the red state/blue state paradigm.... America is a country with remarkable geographic diversity in its habits and beliefs. People in different states have wildly different views.... The distribution of states along all dimensions is continuous, not bimodal.... Moreover, America's ideological diversity is not particularly new.... The extent and permanence of cultural divisions across space is one of America's most remarkable features... twenty-three percent of respondents in Oregon, Washington and California thought that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. Forty-seven percent of respondents in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas had that view.... 56 percent of Mississippi residents think that AIDS is God's punishment for immoral sexual behavior. Only 16 percent of Rhode Island residents share that view....

We find little support these cultural differences represent long-standing differences in religiosity or the legacy of slavery.... Blue State culture reflects primarily the legacy of different ethnicities working together at high densities: the most important historical explanatory variables are the share of the labor force in manufacturing in 1920 and the share of the population that was foreign born in 1920 strongly predict liberal beliefs and voting for John Kerry. ...

The second important truth captured by the red state/blue state framework is that political parties and politicians have had an increasing tendency to divide on cultural and religious issues rather than on economic differences. Again, in historical perspective, cultural politics is not unusual. In the late 19th century, "Rum, Romanism and rebellion" were the core issues that determined the Republican Party. The true aberration was the midtwentieth century era of economic politics...

The Whig History of Holland

The end of C.V. Wedgwood's William the Silent:

The work to which [William] had devoted his life, and for which he had died, was never to be accomplished. The Netherlands, as he had known them, were never to be one nation. The struggle for their liberation had transmuted the past and destroyed the possibility of its revival. What he had done was to create a new State, the United Provinces of the coming century, the 'Holland' of the future. Even though it fell short of what he had wanted, his achievement was very great. For it was a hard and desperate task, to restore the self-respect and freedom of a people borne down by apparently inescapable doom, to fight a great power with such small instruments, and to fight it for five years without hope and alone.

It was a strange, almost a unique, thing to be the idol of a nation and remain uncorrupted, to be yourself the guardian of the people's rights sometimes against the emotional impulse of the people themselves. In times of emergency and war, in political crisis and national danger it is often expedient to sacrifice the forms--even the spirit--of popular government. Was not this one of the chief reasons why popular governments [have] withered in so many lands during this stormy [twentieth] century?

There lies his greatest claim to recognition: he sought not to impose his own will on the embryo nation, but to let the nation create and form itself. He belonged in spirit to an earlier, a more generous and more cultured age than this [late sixteeth century] of narrowness and authority, and thin, sectarian hatred. But he belonge also to a later age; his deep and genuine interest in the people he ruled, his faith in their development, his toleration, his convinced belief in government by consent--all these reach out from the mediaeval world towards a wider time.

Few statesmen in any period, none in his own, cared so deeply for the ordinary comfort and the trivial happiness of the thousands of individuals who are 'the people'. He neither idealized nor overestimated them and he knew they were often wrong, for what political education had they yet had? But he believed in them, not merely as a teoretical concept, but a individuals, as men. Therein lay the secret of the profound and enduring love between him and them. Wise, wary, slow to judge and slow to act, patient, stubborn, and undiscouraged, no other man could have sustained so difficult a cause for so long, could have opposed with so little sacrifice of public right, the concentrated power of a government that disregarded it. He respected in all men what he wished to have respected in himself, the right to an opinion.

There have been politicians more successful, or more subtle; there have been none more tenacious or more tolerant. 'The wisest, gentlest and bravest man who ever led a nation', he is one of that small band of statesmen whose service to humanity is greater than their service to their time or their people. In spite of the differences of speech or political theory, the conventions and complexities which make one age incomprehensible to another, some men have a quality of greatness which gives their lives universal significance. Such men, in whatever walk of life, in whatever chapter of fame, mystic or saint, scientist or doctor, poet or philosopher, and even--but how rarely--soldier or statesman, exist to shame the cynic, and to renew the faith of humanity in itself.

Of this number was William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, called the Silent.

Whig history. The straight stuff. 200 proof. Very, very good to the taste.

Ken Macleod on the Liberalism of Fools

Crooked Timber directs us to Ken Macleod's (why isn't the "L" capitalized?) thoughts on the Liberalism of Fools:

The Early Days of a Better Nation : Anti-semitism, said Bebel and Engels, is the socialism of fools. The rage of the small property holder - the peasant, the artisan, the stall-keeper - against his inexorable ruin by the competition of bigger capital is given a face and a race to hate: a physical particularity that stands in thought for the abstractions of 'finance' and 'the market' and 'the banks'. 'The Jew' becomes the concrete embodiment (in fantasy) of exchange value. So goes the Marxist tale, anyway, though it has many more subtle twists than that.

Is there another hatred that might be called 'the liberalism of fools'? The progressivism of fools? The libertarianism of fools? If anti-semitism is, in an important aspect, a rage against the machine, against progress, is there an opposite rage: a rage against reaction, a fury at the recalcitrance of the concrete and the stubbornness of tradition? A rage against what is sacred and refuses to be profaned, against what is solid and doesn't melt into air, against ways of life that resist commodification, against use-value that refuses to become exchange-value? And might that rage too need a fantasy object?

In the 1930s and 40s, a number of progressive intellectuals found that object in the Roman Catholic Church. Granted all the good reasons there were, in that age of the dictators, for identifying the RC Church with militant reaction, the fury seems oddly disproportionate. H. G. Wells's wartime Penguin Special Crux Ansata starts with the cry 'Bomb Rome!' and goes on from there.... [T]here it was: a religion identified with reaction, and progressives with a blind spot about a powerful state that they saw as that religion's most formidable foe....

[A]nti-Catholicism is gone as a burning-glass of progressive rage. One wonders what new lens might focus that rage now. Is there some religion or people that has come to represent all that is backward in the world, and in need of a sound and salutary thrashing from the forces of progress? Orthodoxy, perhaps? Zoroastrianism? Tibetan Buddhism? Hinduism? None of them seem to quite fit the bill. There must be one out there somewhere. Because the rage still burns.

Metaphysical Cage Match!

In this corner, Mark A.R. Kleiman, assisted by an anonymous professional philosopher!

Mark A. R. Kleiman: Wittgenstein on religous belief: A reader who is a professional philosopher writes:

...Wittgenstein held a view of religious belief quite similar to your own. From Culture and Value.... "Christianity is not based on a historical truth; rather, it offers us a (historical) narrative and says: 'now believe!' But not, 'believe this narrative with the belief that is appropriate to a historical narrative', rather: 'believe, through thick and thin, which you can do only as the result of a life'. Here you have a message!--don't treat it as you would another historical message! Make a quite different place for it in your life.--There is nothing paradoxical about that!

"[...]

"Queer as it sounds: the historical accounts of the Gospels might, in the historical sense, be demonstrably false, and yet belief would lose nothing through this: not, however, because it has to do with 'universal truths of reason'! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief..."

In that corner, St. Paul, who thinks that the truth of the historical narrative has everything to do with belief!

Douay-Rheims Bible Online, First Epistle Of Saint Paul To The Corinthians: He rose again the third day... was seen by Cephas... after that by the eleven... by more than five hundred brethren at once: of whom many remain until this present.... After that... James, then by all the apostles. And last of all... by me....

[I]f Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God: because we have given testimony against God, that he hath raised up Christ; whom he hath not raised up.... [I]f Christ be not risen again... you are yet in your sins... they also that are fallen asleep in Christ, are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable...

To those who say that his teachings are historically false but metaphysically true, St. Paul gives this answer: "[I]f Christ be not risen again, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God..."

Nino Scalia, by Grace of God Justice and Lord

Don Herzog is weirded out by Nino Scalia:

Left2Right: Justice Scalia's blooper: News flash, or, dubious blast from the past:  like the medieval theorists, like the Stuart monarchs, Justice Scalia doesn't believe that political authority ascends from the people.  Here's what follows his joke.

JUSTICE SCALIA:  And when somebody goes by that monument, I don't think they're studying each one of the commandments.  It's a symbol of the fact that government comes — derives its authority from God.  And that is, it seems to me, an appropriate symbol to be on State grounds.

. CHEMERINSKY:  I disagree, Your Honor.  For the State to put that symbol between its State Capitol and the State Supreme Court is to convey a profound religious message....

JUSTICE SCALIA:  It is a profound religious message, but it's a profound religious message believed in by the vast majority of the American people, just as belief in monotheism is shared by a vast majority of the American people.  And our traditions show that there is nothing wrong with the government reflecting that.  I mean, we're a tolerant society religiously, but just as the majority has to be tolerant of minority views in matters of religion, it seems to me the minority has to be tolerant of the majority's ability to express its belief that government comes from God, which is what this is about.

There are different claims here.  Justice Scalia appeals to 'our traditions.'  He urges that the 'vast majority' may 'express its belief that government comes from God.'  (This blatantly implausible claim about what the vast majority believes reminds us why the law is reluctant to let judges take judicial notice of facts not on the record.)  But — it bears repetition — he asserts in his own voice 'that government comes — derives its authority from God.'  That, he tells us, is a 'fact.'

Nino Scalia's views on this are profoundly--there is no other word for it--UnAmerican. Here in the United States, we are all children of Thomas Jefferson. God does not give us rulers. Instead, God gives us rights: to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We then institute governments to secure these rights, and they derive their just powers from our consent, not from God's decree. Moreover, it is not the YHWH of Revealed Religion but instead "Nature's God" and Nature itself that are the source of these rights.

Where does Scalia's anti-Jeffersonian belief that God gives us not rights but rulers come from? It comes from Paul, whom Scalia likes to quote with approval:

Paul (Romans 13:1-5): Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: for he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake.

Note what Paul is saying in this passage. The government that is "ordained of God" and that one has a duty to obey is not a representative democracy or a merciful Christian king but the Principate--the government of the Roman Empire under the Julio-Claudian dynasty: Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. To fail to obey that government is contrary to the will of God: not just a crime but a sin.

What is the payoff from this belief of Scalia's that power comes from above? In his speech "God's Justice and Ours," Scalia says that God hates not just crime and open revolt but peaceful campaigns of civil disobedience which are, in Scalia's view, based on the false assumption that "what the individual citizen considers an unjust law... need not be obeyed."

Thus from Scalia's point of view for Blacks to sit at an all-White lunch counter when the law decrees they shall not--that is not just a crime but a sin. And the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday--a celebration of his civil disobedience campaigns--is blasphemous: hateful to God, because it teaches people that there are circumstances in which they should disobey those whom God has commanded them to obey.

Now this is a free country. And Nino Scalia is allowed to break with those like Jefferson, Madison, and Lincoln who think that legitimate power ascends from the consent of the people. It's a free country. He can take his stand with those like James I Stuart, Innocent III, and Khomeini who think that legitimate power descends from God.

But does such a guy have any business being a Justice of the Supreme Court of a free country? No.