Ricochet member Duane Oyen posted this astonishing item on Facebook. (Sooner or later we're going to add a few features to the Ricochet software, making it possible for members to originate conversations, not just join them. But for now--and trusting that Duane won't mind--I'm simply dropping his item right here.)

"It appears," Duane wrote, "that the majority of the BP oil leak may well have been the fault of Uncle Sam." From the website of the Center for Public Integrity:

 The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig, according to interviews and documents.

Astonishing.

Or maybe, come to think of it, not.

Our member Duane Oyen left an interesting comment on an earlier thread:

I confess that I hadn't explored Robert Zubrin's ideas, but now I have. Zubrin wants Congress to require that all new cars be flex-fuel--that is, capable of running on ethanol as well as gas. He claims this would cost only another $100 per vehicle. (Is that true? Seems implausible to me--wouldn't you have to completely redesign a lot of cars, retool plants, etc?)

Zubrin writes:

Filling stations don't want to dedicate space to a fuel mix used by only three percent of all cars and consumers are not interested in buying vehicles for which the preferred fuel mix is extremely difficult to find.

He thinks this is one of those problems the government should solve by passing a law. If you build the cars, he believes, the free market will take care of the rest.

I wonder. Is there some other reason consumers don't want cars that run on ethanol? What's the down side to his suggestion?

There's an article in Foreign Policy this week about the real lessons of Afghanistan's history. Contrary to received wisdom, argues Christian Caryl, Afghanistan has not generally been the graveyard of empires; the idea that great and arrogant powers are doomed inherently to wreck themselves on Afghan soil is based upon a series of myths:

One of those myths, for example, is that Afghanistan is inherently unconquerable thanks to the fierceness of its inhabitants and the formidable nature of its terrain. But this isn't at all borne out by the history. "Until 1840 Afghanistan was better known as a 'highway of conquest' rather than the 'graveyard of empires,'" Barfield points out. "For 2,500 years it was always part of somebody's empire, beginning with the Persian Empire in the fifth century B.C."

After the Persians it was Alexander the Great's turn. Some contend that Alexander met his match in the Afghans, since it was an Afghan archer who wounded him in the heel, ushering in a series of misfortunes that would end with the great conqueror's death. Ask anyone who believes this is why Greek coins keep cropping up in Afghan soil today -- in fact, Alexander's successors managed to keep the place under their control for another 200 years. Not too shabby, really. And there were plenty of empires that came after, thanks to Afghanistan's centrality to world trade in the era before European ocean fleets put an end to the Silk Road's transportation monopoly.

What about the popular accounts that insist, awe-struck, that even Genghis Khan was humbled by the Afghans? Poppycock, says Barfield. Genghis had "no trouble at all overrunning the place," and his descendants would build wide-ranging kingdoms using Afghanistan as a base. Timur (know to most of us as Tamerlane) ultimately shifted the capital of his empire from provincial Samarkand to cosmopolitan Herat, evidence of the role command over Afghanistan played in his calculations. Babur, who is buried in Kabul, used Afghanistan to launch his conquest of a sizable chunk of India and establish centuries of Muslim rule. Afghans seemed pretty happy to go along.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with Afghan history easily to be able to evaluate this argument. Are any of you? Does it sound right?

Time has a horrifying story out about a rash of infanticide that has cropped up in France as a result of something that psychiatrists are calling "pregnancy denial." In the latest case, six tiny bodies were unearthed by authorities in the garden of Dominique Cottrez, and two other bodies were found in the garden of Ms. Cottrez's parents.

Experts explained [this case] as resulting from pregnancy denial, an often misunderstood and minimized condition. According to Michel Delcroix, a former gynecologist...pregnancy denial is a quasi-schizophrenic condition in which women either don't realize or cannot accept that they are with child — not even enough to have an abortion. Whether these women are afflicted with the condition before they deliver or as they're suddenly giving birth, Delcroix explains, the psychological denial is so strong that they refuse to believe they're pregnant even when the reality confronts them.

Some experts in the medical community argue that women who kill their babies as a result of pregnancy denial should not be subject to the criminal justice system, but should instead be treated for a mental condition. Yet, in order to treat pregnancy denial, doctors must understand its cause.

[I]n some cases, it can...be a matter of women simply failing to see themselves as mothers. "Some women never manage to update their self-identity during pregnancy, [while others] want to become pregnant without wanting to procreate," psychiatrist Pierre Lamothe told Le Parisien on Thursday. "When the child arrives, it doesn't really exist for them. They don't give it life, in psychological terms. If they saw it as a [real] baby, they wouldn't kill it."

This rationale, the "they don't see it as a human being, or else they wouldn't kill it" argument, seems an awful lot like what we hear from "pro-choice" advocates. The fetus is not viewed as a human, but rather as a mass of tissue, and its inhumanness somehow makes doing away with it morally acceptable to some. Yet, for many of us who describe ourselves as pro-life, we have a hard time seeing a moral distinction between aborting a life at three months post-conception and nine months post-conception. On the one hand, why should one woman have to face a criminal sentence or even medical treatment simply for aborting her child six months later than another who did so with the full protection of the law? On the other hand, why shouldn't these women who commit infanticide be hit by the full force of the law? After all, denying the personhood of another individual, has been the essence of murder since the beginning of time.

Ursula's post about summer reading for teens got me thinking about this, and now that several of us--notably, of course, Rupert Murdoch--have mentioned our own summer reading, I thought I'd mention it: There are still some books--quite a lot of them, actually--that I'd rather read have between covers than on the Kindle or iPad. Not that I disdain ebooks. I bought a Kindle about a year ago, and I went through a dozen ebooks before thinking twice about it. Then I downloaded the ebook version of Dostoyevsky's great novel on atheism and revolution, The Devils.

After I got a few pages into the novel, though, I began realizing that having each page simply evaporate the moment I turned to the next made me feel...cheated. I wanted something to show for the effort. If I was going to read 700 pages, at the end I wanted a prize. I wanted a book I could put on my shelf and keep there--an object that would say, if only to me, 'Whatever ills and disappointments befall you, dear Reader, remember this: You are a man of determination and accomplishment, for you once read this entire fat book." I bought the Penguin edition, read the whole novel, and then put The Devils on my bookshelf, between The Brothers Karamazov and War and Peace.

But that, I figured, was just me.

Then I read David Brooks's column earlier this month on the importance of summer reading for children. One passage stopped me:

[T]here was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

The change in the way kids see themselves as they build a home library. Gosh, I thought, maybe it wasn't just me. Maybe there's something really basic going on here. Maybe people really need the sense of accomplishment that a bookshelf--a bookshelf containing physical objects in three dimensions; actual books--conveys. There and then, I made a resolution. No ebooks for my kids. No library books either. I'm buying the books my kids are reading this summer, then commanding them to clear their bookshelves of baseballs and mitts and all the sorry accumulated detritus of teenaged existence to fill them, instead, with the books they've read. (I'm not rich, but my kids are hardly going to get through enough books to pose any challenge to the family finances, believe me.) At the end of the summer, they'll have something to show for their reading.

Somebody, tell me this isn't just dad going off on another one of his self-improvement jags. Tell me, if you would, that this makes sense.

Doug Mataconis at Outside the Beltway:

[...] tucked into the health care reform law is a change to the tax laws that will vastly increase tax reporting requirements for businesses nationwide. Despite several complaints from small business that this will require unreasonable administrative costs to be incurred by small businesses, Congress has failed in an effort to repeal the new law.

I've been reading Charles Flood's 1864: Lincoln at the Gates of History. It is almost surreal to be reminded of how -- in the midst of the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the ongoing slaughter in Virginia (the Army of the Potomac took 60,000 casualties in three months) -- the real Lincoln haters, from Fremont on the left to Greeley on the right, schemed to do him in, only to see all of these setbacks dissipate in early September as Sherman took Atlanta and Sheridan pushed his scorched-earth raids into Virginia. It is a depressing reminder of how fickle the public is, and how eager it is to identify with a winning cause. In reaction to all this, Lincoln himself was not above firing and hiring entirely on political considerations and doing the sort of horse trading that puts modern Congressmen in the pokey.

Although a classicist, I had never read Procopius's The Wars before, either in English or Greek--a much better work than the more popular Secret History. What Belisarius achieved in North Africa in a few weeks--destroying the Vandal Empire in toto--seems almost to read as if fiction, especially how he conquered Carthage with small, often unreliable forces, far from home, and with a jealous emperor in Justinian. Procopius writes (ca. AD 540-550s) in a very clear Greek that deliberately emulates classical authors like Xenophon, nearly a millennium earlier--reminding us how long-lived Hellenism really was (and Constantinople would last nearly another 1,000 years after Belisarius, its authors still emulating 5th-century BC Attic prose.)

Michael Barone has been writing a series of insightful articles -- here's his latest -- about how Obamism is increasingly at odds with the majority of voters and his own favorability is waning and no longer can carry through an unpopular agenda. We know this by a variety of different barometers. November 2010 will be a reckoning that we have not quite seen in our recent past. I think Barone is right, especially since the tendency of more conservative voters in off-year elections is not fully reflected in the polls.

I read carefully Angelo Codevilla's American Spectator essay on the nation's elite. He makes a good argument that the Ivy League liberal technocracy (and its counterparts in the West) is not merely hypocritical, but corrupt as well. They differ from creators of capital and those who build things, largely in that they are interpreters and modifiers but hardly creators of real things. Here I note how John Edward's "two nations" ends up in a 4,000 sq ft. "John's room" within an even larger mansion--all the fruits of ambulance chasing; John Kerry's egalitarian sermons on taxation devolve into cheating on the sales taxes due on his $7 million plaything yacht, itself purchased with someone else's money; Al Gore, of recent "digital brownshirts" fame, who parlayed green alarmism into a near billion dollar fortune, seems an unapologetic mansion-collector and energy hog; Timothy Geithner lectures on the need for higher taxes after ducking out on his FICA obligations and using rather tawdry and unlawful write-offs. We go from Duke Cunningham and the "culture of corruption" to Rangel and Dodd in a blink of an eye.They all remind us of the money schemers among the hierarchy of the Medieval Church. What Codevilla's targets have in common are three general traits: Ivy League or elite school certification (I say certification rather than education because it is mostly a question of a diploma rather than any quantifiable acquisition of knowledge or inductive reasoning); a tendency to lecture the entrepreneurial classes on their greed; and an insatiable appetite for those delights and goods that they scorn in others. I note much of the elite NY-DC media shares this profile. It is all quite unsustainable, as we are seeing in the strange implosion of Barack Obama, who once both lapped up Jeremiah Wright's pop class and race hatred, and yet was intrigued with the nice things that a Tony Rezko might bring to the table—all under a proper Harvard veneer.

But this summer has also seen a lot of bad journalism. Perhaps the most pathetic has been the sudden outrage over criticism of Obama, allegations of racism, and the lamentation over partisanship--this after the left wrote novels, made movies, and did stand-up comedy about killing George Bush. We are in unreal times: suddenly Bush's frivolous aristocratic golfing has become a much needed breather for an overworked President; natural disasters like Katrina are as much referenda on the President as unnatural one's like the BP mess are not; filibusters once good, now bad; recess appointments once bad, now good. All the old commandments on the barn wall have been crossed out and rewritten. There is almost no self-awareness on the part of the Obamians that the past tearing down of the president in ways that transcended good taste and decorum have established protocols that they now resent most deeply--almost as if to say "God, I pray they don't dare do to Obama what we routinely did to Bush". A bunch that gave us sordid lies about the Palin pregnancy, Checkpoint, 'the war is lost' and Guantanamo as a Gulag suddenly seem shocked that any might remember any of that in this new age of 'can't we just get along?'.

As noted here on Ricochet the other day, the very name of the proposed mosque at ground zero, "Cordoba House," represents a provocation.

Question: In its story on the mosque this morning, "Debate Heating Up on Plans For Mosque Near Ground Zero"--a story that appears on the front page, above the fold, in the space reserved for the most important news--how many times does the New York Times mention that name?

Answer: Not once.

At Overlawyered, Walter Olson flags Duane Oyen's "story of ADA’s arguably perverse effects on a shuttle bus service in Minneapolis-St. Paul."

Andrew Sullivan likes Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry's take on the way low culture leads you to high culture on the internet.

There's been much discussion here of late about happiness and the disconnect between contentment and imminent doom, the latter with particular reference to Claire's and my neighborhood. Well, it turns out that either things really are swell in Israel or we are truly masters of denial. Gallup conducted a study of the happiness levels of 155 countries that surveyed thousands of respondents over four years. The results are in: Israel tied Canada, Switzerland and Australia as the eighth happiest country on earth.

Mt. Airy, NC: The name of this place is Brintles Truck Stop. One of the few mom and pop truck stops that isn't completely dilapidated, the staff is thoroughly friendly. Then again, what else could one expect in Andy Griffith's home town? Mt. Airy was the inspiration for Andy's town of Mayberry on The Andy Griffith show. Floyd's Barber Shop really does exist here. In fact, a portion of the truck stop is reserved for Mayberry paraphernalia. Everything from Mayberry coffee cups, Aunt Bea's Cookbook, Mayberry bibs, back scratchers, travel mugs, sheriff badges, thimbles, water bottles, dvds, and more can be found here. The restaurant has been remodeled, the rodents evicted, and flat screen televisions set to Fox News Channel adorn the walls. Supper last night was great. They don't serve dinner here, only supper, and that suits us just fine.

Reluctantly, I have to leave this quaint little place in a few minutes. The good thing about being a long haul trucker is that I get to spend some time in wonderful towns like this. The bad thing is, I invariably have to move on. But its been that way most of my life, from being a minister's kid and moving from church to church, to transferring from one base to another in the military, so that the nomadic existence of a trucker fits like a glove.

But I wonder, as these quintessential American small towns fade in my rig's rear view mirror, are we losing these wonderful little places, or might we be wittnessing a revival of small town ethos in America? Something to think on, as the highway hums beneath 18 wheels, on my way to Maryland today.

So I'm thinking into the future here about Ricochet's answer to the National Review cruise. Why, you ask? Isn't that a little premature? Well, yes, but I've got another deadline, which always inspires me to apply my mind to any problem but the one I'm supposed to be solving.

My train of thought went like this. I found this great link to the best magazine articles ever written, and if you've got a deadline, too, I suggest you not click on it, because there goes your weekend. So instead of working on what I'm supposed to be doing this morning, I ended up re-reading, among other things, David Foster Wallace's essay Shipping Out, which is about his one-week trip on the cruise ship M.V. Zenith. It was later published as A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. That was the first piece I ever read by David Foster Wallace, and I remember reading it and feeling thrilled to see proof that America could, indeed, still produce that kind of incandescent talent, because for a time I wasn't sure. Now, of course, it's impossible to read his work without sadness.

But that's not my point. My point is that after reading that, I just lost all my enthusiasm for cruising, not that I ever had much of it in the first place. Anyway, cruises are National Review's market niche, and while I love National Review as much as any red-blooded American woman, all the more so since they publish me, I just don't see a cruise as a Ricochet kind of thing. For one thing, I don't think our exuberance could be contained to a seafaring vessel, particularly since I imagine one is not allowed to bring firearms on board. For another, a lot of us are pretty broke. So I figure we need to put our minds to the problem of creating a more appropriate Ricochet signature event, or at least I need to, right now, because the alternative is doing gainful work. So here's what I've come up with so far:

Ricochet Goes to Burning Man! I've always wanted to go to that. Don't you think we could build a great Ricochet "Art of the Free Market" theme camp? I get the sense that a lot of people there don't realize it yet, but they're actually on our side. They just need a gentle, inspiring nudge.

Right-wing Yoga Retreat! Wouldn't it be terrific to go on one of those great-looking yoga retreats you always see advertised in the yoga journals--the ones in some subtropical paradise in Costa Rica, with all those pretty birds and flowers--in the full knowledge that no one's going to give you that look when you finish your savasana and tell your favorite Ronald Reagan Cold War joke?

Ricochet Self-Defense Seminar! Honestly, the way I'm envisioning this is we all go out to the desert and shoot things and blow stuff up.

Ricochet Shakespeare Camp! I want Ursula to lead this--I loved her description of coaching her students through their performance of Romeo and Juliet. For a bonus, we could reenact the Peloponnesian War with Victor Davis Hanson, in period costume. Family-friendly!

Ricochet Safari! We may have to wait until we take back the government and the economy improves for this, but I'm seeing us stalking the lions on the grassy plains of the Okavango Delta, the elephants watering themselves in the lagoon, the huge blood-red sun, big as half the sky, setting over a grove of mangosteen trees, a flock of swirling kingfishers darkening the horizon, the impala, the zebra, the giraffes, the lechwe, the tsessebe--although I'm a little worried that none of us will be paying attention because we're all looking anxiously at our Blackberries and fretting over the lack of high-speed Internet access.

Ricochet Bumper Cars! Just a simple outing to the adventure park. Low budget. Lots of you have kids, right?

Classical Liberal Square Dance! Whatever happened to square-dancing, anyway?

The Ricochet "See it While it's Still There" Tour! Come visit Judith and me in Israel and Turkey! You never know how long these countries will still be here! I'll personally show you the elusive moderate Moslem, and then we can all hang out and shoot the breeze in Judith's bomb shelter.

Anyway, those are just a few ideas off the top of my head. They all sound a lot more fun than a cruise to me. Not that there's anything wrong with cruising, if that's what floats your boat, but I just don't think it's Ricochet.

Drudge is excitedly linking to this strange piece on Investors.com that asks rhetorically--but with more than a hint of enthusiasm--whether Americans might not be ready to overthrow their government by force. At least, that's how it reads to me.

The Internet is a large-scale version of the "Committees of Correspondence" that led to the first American Revolution — and with Washington's failings now so obvious and awful, it may lead to another.

People are asking, "Is the government doing us more harm than good? Should we change what it does and the way it does it?"

I don't disagree with many of the authors' observations about the failings of the Obama presidency. But they appear to be suggesting that if the upcoming elections don't succeed in getting rid of him, the emergency is such that other--unspecified--means of unseating the government might be considered. They ascribe this thought to unnamed "people," but you know, I rather doubt there are all that many Americans, named or unnamed, who are seriously discussing the virtues of a coup. (And yes, that's what they must mean: What else could topple an elected American government?)

If this is indeed what they're suggesting, even obliquely, they should wash their mouths with soap. We are a democracy. We do not do coups. I can't believe I even need to say this about the United States, but apparently I do.

This? In the New York Times? Yes, I know. I'm behind the cycle here--I'm only just now getting to the morning newspapers. But jeepers. A column that subjects to the most withering ridicule the Obama administration, environmentalism, the stimulus package, and the overhyped Chevy Volt--all in the pages of the grey lady. Get a load of this:

...G.M.’s vision turned into a car that costs $41,000 before relevant tax breaks ... but after billions of dollars of government loans and grants for the Volt’s development and production. And instead of the sleek coupe of 2007, it looks suspiciously similar to a Toyota Prius. It also requires premium gasoline, seats only four people (the battery runs down the center of the car, preventing a rear bench) and has less head and leg room than the $17,000 Chevrolet Cruze, which is more or less the non-electric version of the Volt.

I doubt the author intended it this way, but he's not merely providing automotive commentary. He's illustrating an ontological truth. Common sense is impossible to suppress. It pops up in the oddest places.

In an extremely rare move, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., has announced she'll go to trial rather than accept the ethics charges against her from a House ethics subcommittee. From The Hill:

Waters is accused of helping facilitate $12 million in Troubled Asset Relief Program funds for OneUnited Bank, of which her husband was a director and stockholder. OneUnited Bank executives had also contributed to Waters' campaigns.

More details in Politico, which broke the story. This Wall Street Journal story shows a role Barney Frank had in the scandal as well. This is probably the last thing Democrats want or need facing a tough 2010 election. Will President Obama ask Waters to resign like he none-too-subtly suggested to Rep. Charlie Rangel today?

On the Katie Couric show today, President Obama made his first public statement about the ethically-challenged Charlie Rangel, calling the more than dozens of ethics charges levied against him "very troubling."

Here's Obama:

He's somebody who's at the end of his career...I'm sure that what he wants is to be able to end his career with dignity. And my hope is that it happens.

Meanwhile, House dems--perhaps worried about what toll the Rangel effect will take on them in November--are calling on the him to resign:

Calls for Rep. Charlie Rangel's resignation rained down on Capitol Hill late Friday from House Democrats who said more than a dozen ethics charges against the 20-term lawmaker showed a disregard for the rules and undermined the public's confidence in Congress.

What should Rangel do?

But when they have to state their preference to other human beings, it seems they get paranoid.

I would have given this excellent, common-sense article by Warren Meyer a different headline. It's called "Why Keynes Was Wrong," but I think the real point, the interesting point, is the importance of economic policy being formed, or at least informed, by people who have actually had experience of running a business. I remember talking to Sir John Hoskyns, who headed the Prime Minister's Policy Unit in Thatcher's first term, about just this. "Something critical about the Thatcher revolution," he said, was

the introduction into government, for the first time, of people who have an idea of what happens inside a business. Britain is, compared to the United States, extraordinary because there had been, until Thatcher, such a limited number of people with any exposure to the business world in government.

He himself had founded and run his own information technology company. Recalling the early battles in Thatcher's cabinet over economic policy, Hoskyns--who was savagely dry on economic policy--complained that

none had business experience, and … some of them were very good, a few like Nigel Lawson, Nick Ridley--I knew Nigel better than I knew Nick, I didn’t know Nick well--but there were various people like that, who really understood the importance of the environment in which business functioned. What they didn’t have--and it isn’t necessarily all that important--they didn’t know what it was actually like, being in business, just how difficult it is, just how well things have to run, the methodology, the systems, the mindsets, the way people think, the way people communicate, the need to have groups who understand the big picture so they don’t have to end their sentences and they can cover the ground fast, and respond to threats quickly, all that. It’s all highly skilled, at its best, and very difficult, and very good people are needed to do it. I think politicians as a whole never quite grasped that. They would be shocked to think that anything was remotely difficult compared to what they were doing. And politics is in many ways, because of its unpredictability and its range, probably as impossible as anything.

As I was looking through my notes from our conversation to find that quote, I happened upon these remarks, which now look quite prescient:

I think that some of the economically literate politicians do have a reasonable understanding of the importance of this, some of them of course don’t--you do get a tendency to think, “Business is a sort of unskilled labor for people who aren’t as clever as I am, you know, I got a First in PPE and therefore I’m naturally going to be in the Cabinet, and I’m going to be running the world, even though I’ve never done anything.” I mean, David Cameron is a classic example of this. He may be–-far too early to form any views, good or bad about him, but, you know.

It's not too early anymore, and I do think he put his finger exactly on what we're seeing in Cameron: the mark of a man who's never done anything. And needless to say, neither has Obama. Among other lessons to take away from this presidency is that yes, experience counts.

A Ricochet reader sent this along, and I--well, I simply couldn't resist. My, but I loved that man.

It's a different take than many of those we've heard so far on Ricochet:

The controversy which has emerged regarding the building of an Islamic Center at this location is counterproductive to the healing process. Therefore, under these unique circumstances, we believe the City of New York would be better served if an alternative location could be found.

In recommending that a different location be found for the Islamic Center, we are mindful that some legitimate questions have been raised about who is providing the funding to build it, and what connections, if any, its leaders might have with groups whose ideologies stand in contradiction to our shared values. These questions deserve a response, and we hope those backing the project will be transparent and forthcoming. But regardless of how they respond, the issue at stake is a broader one.

Proponents of the Islamic Center may have every right to build at this site, and may even have chosen the site to send a positive message about Islam. The bigotry some have expressed in attacking them is unfair, and wrong. But ultimately this is not a question of rights, but a question of what is right. In our judgment, building an Islamic Center in the shadow of the World Trade Center will cause some victims more pain -- unnecessarily -- and that is not right.

Sen. Graham, the Republican of South Carolina, has proposed a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to the children of illegal aliens. In the fractious, many-sided debate on immigration, Sen. Graham has achieved something rare: unanimity. As best I can tell, everybody agrees that his proposal is nuts. Over at Contentions, Jennifer Rubin, who is very much in favor of comprehensive immigration reform, quotes Mark Krikorian, who very much isn't--and does so approvingly:

Although we agree on practically nothing concerning this issue, I fully concur with Mark Krikorian on this one….“I’m exactly against changing this,” [Krikorian] said. “I think it’s sort of a stupid thing. You would end up with lots of U.S.-born illegal immigrants. There’s something like 300,000 kids born here to illegal immigrants every year.”

This one's a head-scratcher. If Sen. Graham has contrived to offend both Jennifer Rubin and Mark Krikorian, just whose approval, exactly, was he hoping to attract?

I’ve always been an optimist when it comes to the ability of human beings to better their lives and their societies if only they are given the freedom to use their talents and abilities. That’s one reason News Corporation has always seen new technology as an asset (look at how the Wall Street Journal has embraced the iPad, for example) rather than a threat.

I have been reading two books that make a strong case that we ought to be even more optimistic today. Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist, which is out, offers a compelling argument that the increase in exchange and communications is accelerating improvements in the human condition because it is bringing together many more people – in other words, many more brains – to solve our problems. I don’t want to spoil the debut of Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation – which will be out in October – but he suggests the operative question is, How do we create the optimum environment for encouraging this innovation? I won’t give away his answers, but I can guarantee Ricochet members that you will find it a fascinating read.

The word is that China is now the world’s second largest economy, overtaking Japan this year and on track to surpass the United States in another fifteen or so.

China's economy expanded 11.1 percent in the first half of 2010, from a year earlier, and is likely to log growth of more than 9 percent for the whole year, according to Yi.

China has averaged more than 9.5 percent growth annually since it embarked on market reforms in 1978.

The United States embarked on its own set of market reforms in 1981, but these have lately been reversed. Can you tell?

Chinese growth is a good thing. What worries me is the cumulative impact of US capital flight from punitive domestic policies for friendlier climes.

California continues its trend-setting role, this time spearheading the decline of US leadership in high-tech entrepreneurship. For example, Sequoia Capital, the venerable Silicon Valley venture firm that backed such iconic high-tech firms as Apple, Yahoo, and PayPal, is focusing elsewhere. The firm now has three offices in China, three more in India, another in Israel, and a single legacy office in the US. Another bellwether fund, New Enterprise Associates, is joining the parade. Dow Jones VentureWire Lifescience reports:

New Enterprise Associates is increasing how much of its main fund will go to investments in China and India, even as it considers raising a local currency vehicle in China.



The latest $2.5 billion New Enterprise Associates venture and growth capital investment fund will be doubling its allocation for investments in India and China, Jiang Xiaodong, NEA managing director and head of China operations, said in an interview.



Jiang said the firm will be committing approximately 25%, or $625 million, of the fund to investments in the two countries, compared to about $300 million of its previous fund. NEA has offices in Beijing and Shanghai in China, and in Bangalore and Mumbai in India.

Your computer and iPhone may be “designed by Apple in California,” but they sure aren’t built here anymore. One wonders how much longer until the latest must-have gizmos are designed in Shanghai or Mumbai for local consumers and those Americans lucky enough to have government jobs.

Everyone, it seems, hates for-profit education. The Democrats, led by Senator Tom Harkin, are trying to regulate it by tightening up the federal rules on student loans. Famous hedge fund investor Steve Eisman has schools like University of Phoenix and DeVry in his sights. He's testified in Congress about shady loan practices at some of these places; about loose standards for job placement; about the practice of overburdening students with loans while preparing them for low-paying jobs.

(Eisman is also a major short-seller in the sector. So having him publicly run down the industry is not only good for Senator Harkin and the regulation-happy Democrats, it's also going to make him rich. Richer, I mean.)

No one, of course, worries that federal student loans are going to students at, say, Yale, with its sky-high tuition and plentiful course offerings in the -- how do I put this? -- less job-centered disciplines. Put it this way: they don't teach anything like "(Re)-Presenting the Modern: Studies in Gender Identity and Power in the 18th Century French Lyric" at DeVry. They teach things like how to maintain an office IT system and how to be a veterinary assistant.

Heather Smith at the Daily Caller brings it into perspective:

Not everyone is cut out to spend four years in a dorm at State U. Some must work as they attend college. Others spent the traditional college years on other pursuits and are trying to catch up and get a degree while juggling family and career responsibilities. Still others don’t get serious about doing the work it takes to obtain a degree until they’ve spent a few years in the workforce.
As a result, they are looking for different things in a college than other students. They like the convenience of online courses or night school. They have no use for the traditional accoutrements of campus life – the student union, expensive climbing walls, student activities, ball games and the like.

That's putting it nicely. What's really going on here is snobbery. Pure and simple. And power. Even purer and simpler. For-profit colleges aren't part of the vast network of teachers' unions and community college organizations that feed the corrupt, failing, indefensible Democrat-Education Complex.
Harkin, and the Obama administration, should be ashamed. No, not ashamed: they should be punished. They should be forced to a lifetime of haircuts, computer repair, IT help, veterinary care, and basic bookkeeping all performed by political science majors from Princeton.
Got a problem with your flat screen? Call a poetry major.

Beware, writes David Brooks:

What would happen if Obama sidestepped the fruitless and short-term stimulus debate and instead focused on the long term? He could explain that we’re facing deep fundamental problems: an aging population, overleveraged consumers, exploding government debt, state and local bankruptcies, declining human capital, widening inequality, a pattern of jobless recoveries, deteriorating trade imbalances and so on.

These long-term problems, Obama could say, won’t be solved either with centralized government or free market laissez-faire [...] the president could lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies. [...] A chill sweeps over me: Gosh, what if the Democrats really did change in that way?

Conventional wisdom on the right is in danger of hardening into a kind of grim glee, certain that Obama will triple- and quadruple-down on policies so unpopular and deeply leftist that he'll be run out on a flaming rail come 2012. Forgotten are the abysmal lows of Bill Clinton, who had to take to the bully pulpit to insist that the Presidency was "still relevant," only to bounce to glorious heights on the backs of -- yep -- a Republican resurgence; stashed in the background is the pressure Obama faces from the not-dead-yet Clintonista wing of the Democratic party -- more 'centrist' in some respects, largely as a consequence of being politically more savvy (whatever, indeed, that's worth).

Krauthammer, as Rob has observed, fears that Obama's second term might achieve a total transformation of American life. Brooks reminds Obama's critics that there are other, less nightmarish, things to worry about -- many more years of popular Democratic government, cheerily nudging a more or less happy America ever further away from a world in which powerful Republican majorities will rematerialize any time soon. Triangulation with a vengeance.

What is it about this era that we seem to be surrounded by such hubris? Whether it’s Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, oblivious to the danger in which he puts the lives of Afghans who trusted us, or Dr. Donald Berwick and his blithe willingness to be the arbiter of everyone’s medical decisions and practices, or the proposal --- coming from the same Congressional clowns who created the mortgage mess -- that it’s the mortgage brokers ought to be finger printed, there’s an entire class of people that is convinced that they are smarter, wiser, and more moral than the rest of us – when in fact precisely the reverse is likely the case.

I attended the Newt Gingrich speech that James Pinkerton writes about below, and had a slightly different reaction. I thought Gingrich's presentation and bearing clearly signaled he intends to run for president. (He could always get cold feet before next spring, though.) He was serious, he was clear, and he had his wife introduce him to the audience in what seems to have been a way to raise her (appealing) profile. Watching Gingrich, there was no question in my mind that he takes ideas seriously and would be a formidable contestant in any debate. That's the good Newt.

The bad Newt shows up when we discuss his style. Gingrich's rhetoric is tart, sarcastic, and occasionally pedantic. He has a tendency to ramble -- the speech went on for more than an hour. You'd be forgiven for having the impression that Gingrich likes to hear the sound of his own voice.

On substance, there are similar problems. Gingrich has clearly adopted the most-right-wing critique of radical Islam, framing the debate in terms of the threat sharia law poses to the United States. I'm sorry, but I see no danger of sharia coming to America anytime soon (things are different in Europe). The larger threat continues to be the possibility that Islamic terrorists gain access to weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, some of Gingrich's tropes -- the idea that American conservatives are somehow in the same position as Solidarity activists in 1980s Poland, for instance -- are a little far-out.

And while the speech gave Gingrich the opportunity to expand on and explain his stance on the Ground Zero Mosque, his talk also made me realize that the people expected to run for the Republican nomination in 2012 do not differ much on substance at all. And if that is the case, then wouldn't primary voters go for the candidate who appeals to them personally, whose personality is sunnier and less acerbic, and who does not -- because she cannot -- make continual reference to her phD in European history?

The Ricochet discussions here, here, and here reminded me of an article I read last year in The Atlantic and which I found incredibly moving. It’s the kind of article that I continue to send, apropos nothing, to friends and family and I am not exaggerating when I say that this piece—the most viewed online article in The Atlantic’s history—is a literary masterpiece. But you judge for yourself.

It asks, simply, what makes us happy?

At Harvard, in 1937, psychiatrists decided to answer this question by tracking nearly 270 well-adjusted, confident Harvard sophomores (all men) from their college days through the following decades. The Grant Study, as it is called, "is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history." The study tracks the likes of a former member of the presidential cabinet, a best-selling novelist, a US president--John F. Kennedy Jr--and longtime Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee,

From their days of bull sessions in Cambridge to their active duty in World War II, through marriages and divorces, professional advancement and collapse—and now well into retirement—the men have submitted to regular medical exams, taken psychological tests, returned questionnaires, and sat for interviews.

These men were destined for success. But what happened to them ten years out of school, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy? The often tragic lives of these once happy men reveal the deep truths of human nature, human suffering, and human happiness. Their stories are Shakespearean.

The psychiatrist running the study, Dr. George Vaillant, "described the study files as hundreds of Brothers Karamazovs." Answering the journalist's questions about whether people change, what makes us happy, how we lead the good life, Vaillant wryly responded, "Why don’t you tell me when you have time to come up to Boston and read one of these Russian novels?"

Here's the story of one man:

Case No. 141

What happened to you?

You grew up in a kind of fairy tale, in a big-city brownstone with 11 rooms and three baths. Your father practiced medicine and made a mint. When you were a college sophomore, you described him as thoughtful, funny, and patient. “Once in awhile his children get his goat,” you wrote, “but he never gets sore without a cause.” Your mother painted and served on prominent boards. You called her “artistic” and civic-minded.

As a child, you played all the sports, were good to your two sisters, and loved church. You and some other boys from Sunday school—it met at your house—used to study the families in your neighborhood, choosing one every year to present with Christmas baskets. When the garbageman’s wife found out you had polio, she cried. But you recovered fully, that was your way. “I could discover no problems of importance,” the study’s social worker concluded after seeing your family. “The atmosphere of the home is one of happiness and harmony.”

At Harvard, you continued to shine. “Perhaps more than any other boy who has been in the Grant Study,” the staff noted about you, “the following participant exemplifies the qualities of a superior personality: stability, intelligence, good judgment, health, high purpose, and ideals.” Basically, they were in a swoon. They described you as especially likely to achieve “both external and internal satisfactions.” And you seemed well on your way. After a stint in the Air Force—“the whole thing was like a game,” you said—you studied for work in a helping profession. “Our lives are like the talents in the parable of the three stewards,” you wrote. “It is something that has been given to us for the time being and we have the opportunity and privilege of doing our best with this precious gift.”

And then what happened? You married, and took a posting overseas. You started smoking and drinking. In 1951—you were 31—you wrote, “I think the most important element that has emerged in my own psychic picture is a fuller realization of my own hostilities. In early years I used to pride myself on not having any. This was probably because they were too deeply buried and I unwilling and afraid to face them.” By your mid-30s, you had basically dropped out of sight. You stopped returning questionnaires. “Please, please … let us hear from you,” Dr. Vaillant wrote you in 1967. You wrote to say you’d come see him in Cambridge, and that you’d return the last survey, but the next thing the study heard of you, you had died of a sudden disease.

Dr. Vaillant tracked down your therapist. You seemed unable to grow up, the therapist said. You had an affair with a girl he considered psychotic. You looked steadily more disheveled. You had come to see your father as overpowering and distant, your mother as overbearing. She made you feel like a black sheep in your illustrious family. Your parents had split up, it turns out.

In your last days, you “could not settle down,” a friend told Dr. Vaillant. You “just sort of wandered,” sometimes offering ad hoc therapy groups, often sitting in peace protests. You broke out spontaneously into Greek and Latin poetry. You lived on a houseboat. You smoked dope. But you still had a beautiful sense of humor. “One of the most perplexing and charming people I have ever met in my life,” your friend said. Your obituary made you sound like a hell of a man—a war hero, a peace activist, a baseball fan.

So what's the lesson to be learned? What ultimately makes us happy? To Vaillant, love and intimacy are the key to human happiness.

...the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he [Vaillant] writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. The men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than any other variable, except defenses. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger. In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

Like Ursula, I don't generally think of myself as a precious girly-girl. But while scanning through our local newspaper so better to serve you with valuable insight into Turkish high politics, I came across this item, to which I am not having the most manly and stoic of reactions:

Istanbul residents are facing concerns about the quality, not just the quantity, of the drinking water in the city’s dams following a report of dark, foul-smelling liquids flowing from a pipe into a key reservoir.

The origin of the pipe has not yet been identified, reporter Tahsin Aksu wrote in daily Milliyet on Thursday, noting that the body of a sea gull was found on the shores of the Alibeyköy reservoir near where the liquids were being discharged, and that white foam was observed on the water as well.

I pause now to shriek, call for the smelling salts, and fan myself until I regain my composure. That is disgusting beyond words.

In other news from the daily Turkish news blotter, the General Staff is refusing to hand over the 102 allegedly coup-plotting military officers--including some 30 active-duty generals--for whom arrest warrants were issued last week. Supposedly, the officers were part of the shadowy subversive Ergenekon clique that allegedly planned to crash Turkish jets and bomb Turkish mosques during prayer time as a pretext for staging a coup against the AKP. Where are these officers now hiding? No one knows.

Meanwhile, the new head of the main opposition party, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, is blustering about accusing the AKP and the former chief of the General Staff of being in cahoots; he's claiming Erdoğan and General Büyükanıt made a secret deal, in 2007, to support the government by threatening to overthrow it during a secret meeting at Dolmabahçe Palace. Now, follow this if you can: In 2007, the military made what many thought was a veiled threat to stage a coup, via its website. Erdoğan called the military's bluff and held snap elections, which the AKP won handily. Kılıçdaroğlu's claiming that the whole thing was a phony--the chief of staff was actually propping Erdoğan up. Get it? I thought not.

Meanwhile, in the fetid backwater towns of İnegöl and Dörtyol (no need to put them at the top of your "must-see before I die" list), enraged Turkish nationalists went on a rampage, destroying shops and buildings, clashing with security forces, burning official vehicles, and attacking police stations in the hope of lynching themselves a few Kurds. Who's stirring up this unrest? Depends who you ask. Everyone has a theory! The AKP's backers say it's the hydra-headed Deep State, of course, which they believe is trying to provoke a civil war so best to get rid of the AKP,