I went to see Avatar prepared to see a hackneyed eco-hippie-themed noble-savage-vs.-evil-technology plotline, richly decorated with spectacular visual effects. And the film fully met my expectations on both counts, although the latter were a bit too derivative (of past jungle/rainforest films, from Tarzan to Emerald Forest; of sci-fi flicks such as Star Wars, Aliens and The Matrix; and of man-battles-dinosaur classics from The Land That Time Forgot to Jurassic Park) to lift the film above the level of "mildly entertaining".

What I was not at all prepared for, though, was Avatar's take on relations between the sexes. Not since the laughable Antonia's line--which, despite its wide acclaim, appears to have been made primarily by and for lesbians--have I seen a film so strongly premised on the assumption that women are superior and dominant, and men inferior and subordinate.

The Omaticaya, Avatar's idealized indigenous hunter-gatherers, are, of course, highly matriarchal: their deity is an earth-goddess, their most powerful figure is a shamanistic high priestess, and their women are fierce hunters at least on par with their males. The only Omaticaya men portrayed in the film are the tribe's chieftain, who appears outranked by his high-priestess wife, and the chieftain's heir apparent, a rather sullen young man whom the film's hero quickly supplants. (Remarkably, Omaticaya children are nowhere to be seen in the film--perhaps because depicting women in a childrearing role might cast doubt on their seeming complete dominance over men.)

The earthlings aren't much different--the film's human males are, for the most part, followers, dupes or fools. The corporate executive overseeing the entire mining operation, for instance, is portrayed as a vapid, golf-playing buffoon. The soldiers--with the exception of a single female pilot--are simply disposable grunts following orders. The male scientists are meek minions of the hard-driving female project leader. Even the film's hero is essentially a lost, confused soul unsure whether to be a pawn of the military, a servant of science or a follower of the Omaticaya cult.

(The single exception, of course, is the film's arch-villain, who, despite being portrayed as a brutal, racist psychopath, nevertheless shows enough leadership, drive and independence of mind--enough manliness, in short--to make him by far the most genuinely interesting male character in the whole movie. Like Mad Men's Don Draper--a cold-eyed, philandering snake who has become something of a sex symbol in the eyes of the show's female fans--Avatar's Colonel Miles Quaritch benefits greatly from being, despite his flaws, a welcome island of cojones in a sea of feckless beta males.)

Now, it might seem surprising that a film clearly intended for a young male audience would so glorify women running roughshod over hapless men. And it's certainly not typical of the sci-fi/fantasy film genre: consider, for example, that the most successful recent film series of this type have all featured wise, powerful father figures--viz., Yoda, Gandalf, Morpheus, Dumbledore. Yet in this film, there are only mother figures to admire.

We shouldn't forget, however, that nerdy males--presumably the film's core demographic--are widely understood to live in awe and fear of women. And it may be that Avatar's filmmaker, James Cameron, has in fact struck a chord with his gynocratic vision. After all, if there's anyone who would be expected to understand what appeals to a target audience of adolescent filmgoers, surely it would be the maker of Titanic...

2009 may not have been one of history's most outstanding years, but it was a pretty good year for this blog's annual predictions, as you'll see in this year's review and preview. First, the roundup of last year's list:

Barack Obama's first year in office will go as badly as his mentor's, as the sluggish economy and unresolved conflicts between the moderates and progressives within his own party undermines his popularity, making his cool, detached persona seem weak and indecisive. Republicans will be somewhat rejuvenated by being able to take responsibility-free potshots from the sidelines, although no particularly prominent GOP leader will emerge. More Keynsian "stimulus" spending packages and bailouts will be enacted into law, but other government initiatives popular among Democrats, such as health care reform, will fall victim to the party's internal rifts, with some Republican help.

Health care isn't quite dead, although it's far from a done deal. Otherwise, I'd say this prediction is pretty much spot-on.

Some time during the year, a reputable source--perhaps an intelligence agency or a defense think tank--will declare that Iran most likely has already produced at least one nuclear weapon, and soon will produce more. Little attention will be paid. Likewise, Iraq will all but disappear from the news, as will Afghanistan and Pakistan, despite continuing unrest there. Domestic issues--particularly economic ones--will dominate public attention, and foreign news will focus on trade and economic matters, such as the fate of China's export industries and the Euro's troubles.

This was my only prediction to miss the mark badly. While evidence of Iran's progress to the brink of nuclear weapons production has piled up relentlessly, I don't know of any authoritative claims that Iran has actually succeeded in building a nuclear weapon. And I failed to anticipate the unrest following the June elections in Iran, as well as the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan, which kept those two countries, as well as Pakistan (though not Iraq) still firmly entrenched on the front news pages.

Stephen Harper will continue to hobble along with his minority government in Canada. Bibi Netanyahu will become prime minister of Israel, but in a coalition with Kadima and other parties of the center and right.

I underestimated Tzipi Livni's remarkable combination of personal ego and political incompetence, which caused her to gravely sabotage her own career by refusing to join Netanyahu's coalition. Otherwise, another pretty good prediction.

Hamas and Hezbollah will lay low following Netanyahu's election, quietly building up their military strength as they did during most of 2008. They will take advantage of the inconclusive outcome of the current Gaza operation, which will have included a limited ground invasion that damaged Hamas but failed to dislodge its de facto government, and will have ended with a ceasefire agreement that effectively restores the status quo ante. Netanyahu will thus lack a pretext--or support from an exhausted, cynical Israeli public--for a more decisive engagement, even as the long-term threat on both fronts quietly builds.

As flawless a prediction as I've ever made, I'd say.

The US economy will remain in recession for most if not all of 2009. However, Japanese-style deflation will not set in, and the CPI will be positive by the end of the year. Oil prices will rebound, but only modestly. The stock market will bounce around its recent low levels and end little changed from the beginning of the year. Likewise, housing prices will stabilize. Interest rates will fall on risky assets and rise on risk-free ones, as depression-panic subsides. Unemployment will continue to rise.

Missed the stock market rebound, but again, otherwise pretty much on target.

Environmentalism will "jump the shark" this year, as the cost of being green in a lousy economy turns off enough otherwise sympathetic folks to make the movement's excesses a target of mainstream ridicule.

Another spectacularly prescient call. Some will blame this or this, but we know the real story...


And now for this year's prognostications...

• The US economy will grow only modestly in 2010, and unemployment will remain high. Consequently, the stock market will end the year down slightly. The Fed will continue its highly expansionary (short-term) interest rate policy, but the combination of easy money and profligate government spending will spur fear of possible inflation risks down the road, forcing up longer-term rates and thus impeding economic growth. On the other hand, the US dollar will recover somewhat, and gold and other commodities will fall in tandem, as Europe and Japan continue to suffer from an even worse case of America's economic malaise. This will help dampen short-term inflation. Real Estate will, after a brief pause, continue its decline.


• The Iranian regime will not fall in 2010. In fact, it will begin a massive crackdown not only on oppostion leaders and groups, but also (as previously predicted) on insufficiently hardline elements among the government and clerical elite itself. As the repression gradually succeeds in quelling mass protests, Western attention to internal events there will subside.


• In Iran's vicinity, conditions will continue to deteriorate slowly (with the Iranian regime's help, of course). The already-unpopular war in Afghanistan will grind on without anything like the dramatic progress achieved in Iraq in 2008. Pakistan will continue to totter on the edge of collapse, without actually collapsing. And sectarian violence in Iraq will increase, although again not enough to jeopardize the government. Elections there will proceed more or less normally, with the usual chaotic, not-entirely-conclusive results.


• The Israeli government will fairly soon make a deal with Hamas to free hundreds of Hamas terrorists in exchange for the return of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. The deal will powerfully energize terrorist groups in the West Bank, who will respond with a surge of terrorist violence and disturbingly effective subversion of the new American-trained Palestinian Authority security forces. However, Israel will step in firmly to fill the gap left by the suddenly floundering locals, and will harshly suppress the violence. This show of resolve by the Israeli government will dampen the usual global hysterics--American and European official condemnations being predicated largely on Israel's past meekness in the face of international bombast--and American and European relations with Israel will actually strengthen in the aftermath.


• The Obama administration will hobble through 2010 weakened and flailing. Health care legislation, if it passes at all, will be watered down still further from the already-perfunctory Senate version, after the bill's big losers (Medicare beneficiaries, "Cadillac plan" customers, and most doctors) band together and start exerting serious political pressure. The administration will turn its attention to the economy, but sluggish growth and stubbornly high unemployment will nevertheless persist throughout the year (see above). The president's foreign policy will appear similarly feckless, with the already-unpopular Afghan campaign dragging on inconclusively, the "engage America's enemies" strategy garnering nothing but contempt from the likes of Iran, and the Middle East conflict (unsurprisingly) continuing to resist resolution despite the administration's best efforts. The administration will also make major personnel changes to his inner circle at some point during the year, replacing one or more key advisors with establishment figures intended to add gravitas and centrist appeal. Needless to say, the shuffle will accomplish little.


• Exploiting the economy's weakness and the administration's poor approval ratings, the Republicans will launch a grand policy platform akin to the "Contract with America" that led to huge GOP electoral gains in 1994. Like the previous one, the new program will consist of broad, vague, impractical proposals that poll well but stand no chance of being implemented. Armed with this putative platform and buoyed by populist conservative outrage and disappointment-bred apathy among the liberal base, the Republicans will make large gains in both houses of Congress. They will, however, fail to take control of either one.


• There will be a cultural backlash against recession-driven frugal-mindedness, and stories about straitened times for the once-profligate will give way to 30s-style otherworldly depictions of ostentatious wealth and glamor.

How obviously wrong are Roman Polanski's defenders? Heck, even Nina Burleigh, of all people, recognizes that "[w]hat matters is that the rape of a 13-year old girl, in a nation of laws".

She does concede, however, that "Great Men - and other men - sometimes do find pliant, young flesh irresistible. Geniuses are usually forgiven for it." Well, she would know, wouldn't she?

The latest proof of the extent to which an aristocratic, ruling-class mindset has permeated the political left and its cultural allies is Ellen Ruppel Shell's new bestseller, "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture", which might as well be subtitled, "Let Them Eat Cake". It should no longer surprise anyone that a magazine writer with impeccable liberal credentials would casually accuse ordinary price-conscious shoppers of political ignorance, social irresponsibility and cultural philistinism, although I admit I would never have expected her to denounce, of all things, IKEA, the savior of many an impecunious urban snob--the Trader Joe's of furniture, if you will. (Perhaps the secret of IKEA has finally gotten out to the masses, ruining its cachet.)

What does surprise me, though, is the timing of this broadside against middle-class frugality. Sure, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation could ooze contempt for the unwashed peasantry and their appalling affinity for inexpensive, convenient, tasty food--in 2001, when even those who'd dropped a bundle in the tech crash had little reason to feel particularly vulnerable. But in these difficult economic times, is there really still such a large cohort of readers so insulated from financial concerns that they feel no discomfort while sharing Shell's snooty disdain for ordinary folks and their crude habit of saving money by shopping for the best deal?

Let's say you're the "supreme leader" of a large Asian country ruled by a party with a radical ideology based on a belief system that predicts that the entire world will one day submit to its precepts. Your charismatic predecessor led the overthrow of the nation's ruling monarchy and anointed you as his successor, but the regime you inherited retained some inconvenient vestiges of liberalism and some annoyingly unsubservient members of the ruling party--not to mention plenty of popular discontent. Now, with the help of the loyal thugs of your government's repressive apparatus, you've finally eliminated those remnants of liberalism and isolated and demoted your main rivals. What do you do next?

Well, if history is any guide, you launch a massive purge of your own party and all institutions with the potential to foster leaders or ideas that might challenge your absolute rule. This will certainly cement your hold on power for a while (as well as boost your personality cult), but it'll make your subjects' lives pretty miserable in the process. So if anyone out there happens to be living in a country that fits this description, now might be a good time to get out...

Should doctors be using computers?, Part 2
I discussed here the complaint by the New York Times about the administration's "headlong rush" towards the computerization of medical records. That was the Bush administration of course, and we all still have the whiplash to show for it. By contrast, Obama recently held a health-care summit at which "the flagship proposal ... was the national adoption of electronic medical records". This time it is the Wall Street Journal that is concerned. Apparently there is no reason to believe that computers should be used for medical records, any more than they were in the writing of that article. And of course, once mistaken medical decisions are committed to computer, they will tend to propagate. Perhaps we'd be better off if doctors wrote nothing down. (I do agree with the article, however, that this proposal will not yield great savings.) Interestingly, the New York Times is not (or at least was not) completely on board. It appears that some democrats want to make sure that the privacy issues are completely settled first. Right.

A friend of mine also feels that privacy issues must be perfected before we go ahead: "Just think about how bad a person with AIDS would feel if his medical information became public." This is true, of course, but I pointed out that there is another group of people for whom it is absolutely crucial that medical records be computerized: people with AIDS. It all comes down to the fact that there are two types of people in the world: those who think that people with AIDS primarily have a privacy problem, and those who think that people with AIDS primarily have a medical problem.

It should be clear that any system that makes it easier for good guys to access (medical) data will also make it at least somewhat easier for bad guys to access it as well. That is, we will lose at least some privacy when we computerize medical records. Also, in the initial version of the system, there will be horrible bugs; with time these will be decreased, but the system will never be perfect in any sense. I think it's worth it. If you don't, then you should explain just what degree of disorganization and inaccessibility you desire for medical records.

An interesting question is: why has this computerization not happened already? Surely the privacy-mongers are partly to blame, but there are many other reasons as well. Two culprits are the medical profession, and facts of life about how standards come about. I hope to write more about this in the future.

According to virtually every press account, the recent credit card law means trouble for customers who pay their balances in full every month. Deprived of extra profits from interest rate increases on heavy debtors, the logic goes, credit card companies will have to recoup the extra revenue from non-balance-carriers. Some commentators even go so far as to argue that monthly interest payers are "subsidizing" everyone else, and that the decline in revenue from the former will have to be made up by making the latter pay their "fair share".

Arguments of this type pop up every time something negative happens to the credit card industry. Yet here we are, with annual fees hovering around zero--often with "cash back" rebates of one percent or more--for customers who pay off their balances. If credit card companies could get away with charging balance-free customers annual fees, then why don't they already?

In fact, the supposed free ride enjoyed by non-borrowers is a product of two factors:

• Whatever they may say, credit card companies make good money off non-borrowing customers. The transaction fee charged merchants for credit card purchases more than covers the costs and risks of serving those customers, given that their current balance and default risk is so consistently low.


• Customers careful and stingy enough to pay off their balances every month are also typically willing to shop around for the best credit card deal, forcing credit companies to compete for their still-profitable business.

Neither of these factors is at all affected by the latest legislation. It's therefore a good bet that any future attempts on the part of the credit card companies to squeeze more money from low-risk customers will be feeble, short-lived and unsuccessful.

The Madoff affair--in which prestigious Jewish financier Bernard Madoff bilked investors, many of them observant fellow Jews and Jewish foundations, out of billions of dollars via an elaborate, long-lived Ponzi scheme--is a fascinating lesson in the nature and evolution of social trust. Even before Edward Banfield made it a topic of social scientific research, the idea that the degree to which a society's members can trust each other affects their economic, social and political well-being was a matter of common sense. Recent popularizers such as Francis Fukuyama and John Kay have focused on the role of culturally nurtured social trust in economic prosperity, with Amy Chua (about whom I've written previously) concentrating on the economic success of certain minority populations.

One such population, of course, is the Jewish people, and the Madoff scandal illustrates the extent to which Jewish success is a result of what Fukuyama would call a "high-trust" culture, where norms and traditions cause members to expect and rely on high standards of behavior from each other. There is a downside to these expectations, though: Madoff was able to bilk so many people out of so much money precisely because they considered it implausible that someone so deeply embedded in, and respected by, the Jewish community could be such a crook.

This sort of "affinity fraud" is a familiar weakness of trust based on cultural norms. Trust is inherently brittle: the more weight it carries--that is, the greater the reliance that is placed in it--the greater the temptation for a Madoff type to come along and betray it for his own gain. Back in the days of family-owned banks and letters of introduction, for example, Madoff might have been able to wipe out the life savings of a few relatives and gullible acquaintances. But in an age of highly portable capital and global commerce, inhabited by much larger, richer networks of trust, Madoff was able to tap into, and ultimately destroy, an amount of wealth equivalent to the annual GDP of a small country.

And here's where Madoff's other cultural affiliation comes into play. America is exceptional in many ways, but one of them is that among high-trust cultures, it's the least rooted in cultural norms, traditions and expectations. As the world's most culturally diverse, individualistic and libertarian nation, it simply cannot, and collectively has no desire to, cultivate in its inhabitants the kind of rigid adherence to reliable behavioral norms that's inculcated in, say, every Japanese. Instead, America has built a remarkable infrastructure of trust out of a combination of private institutions and governmental regulations that effectively substitute for cultural norms as a way of mediating trust between parties that wouldn't otherwise trust each other.

Consider, for example, that quintessential American institution, the credit card. With it, an American can walk into an office thousands of miles from home and buy or rent very valuable goods--a luxury car, for instance--from a total stranger, without so much as a downpayment. Yet the card represents no personal acquaintance to speak of, either between the cardholder and the issuer, the issuer and the merchant's acquirer, or the merchant's acquirer and the merchant. The bonds that restrain their behavior are rather a combination of laws, commercial practices and incentives that successfully convince the participants--most of the time--that obeying the rules of the credit card game is in their interest.

Obviously, this type of behavioral restraint is less effective than the social norms of other high-trust societies, as America's stratospheric rates of crime, bankruptcy, lawsuits and other forms of conflict demonstrate. But its flexibility and libertarian commercialism seem to make it more efficient--in the dynamic modern world, at least--than trust based on tradition and social norms. In much of the world, in fact, financial structures have gradually been pulled towards American styles of operation, rather than vice versa.

On the other hand, the brittleness of trust doesn't go away just because it's mediated by commercial institutions rather than social norms. What affinity fraud has been to high-trust societies, financial bubbles have been to American-style economic trust systems. And the longer and more large-scale the mutual trust gets, the more catastrophic the shattering.

The recent (and ongoing) financial crisis , for example, apparently culminated in a massive run on money market funds. Money market funds are, of course, largely unregulated, uninsured funds that store trillions in ordinary depositors' money--money that could instead have been stored in government-guaranteed deposit accounts at banks. (Those government guarantees, let us remember, were put into place after similar runs on banks during the early 1930s.) Apparently, millions of depositors trusted the funds enough to prefer their higher returns to the comfortable security of government-guaranteed bank deposits--and would have collectively lost trillions of dollars as a result, had the government not intervened to protect them. Lulled into a collective overextension of trust, these investors came close to having their trust instantaneously and utterly destroyed--with all the inevitable economic consequences such a drastic drop in social trust can be expected to bring.

I've explained previously how expectations of continued economic prosperity can undermine that same prosperity. The effect of trust is similar: a continued boom inflates social trust, increasing the opportunities for exploiting it, until it suddenly shatters, leaving society much the worse off economically. As we observe the twin wrecks of a housing system built on trust in homebuyers' reliability, and a retirement savings system built on trust in the stock market's reliability, we would do well to remember that trust is as subject to bubble dynamics as any other valuable commodity.

A group of seventy-odd British residents "of Jewish origin" have written a letter to the Guardian comparing Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto, and urging British sanctions against Israel. No doubt they are highly atypical of their self-declared demographic, but then, out of a population of some 280,000, one could no doubt find seventy to endorse just about any point of view, including the view that Israel is treating Gaza too harshly, and should be punished for it.

But I find it fascinating that they felt compelled to identify their "Jewish origin" in their letter. Why should their ethnic roots matter? Would a group of seventy or so Americans of British origin ever get together to express their opposition to British policy? Do critics of the Chinese government who happen to be of Chinese descent (as opposed to, say, Chinese birth or citizenship) like to call attention to that fact?

Indeed, it's a good bet that the Guardian letter's signatories are predominantly secular leftists who disdain Judaism as a relic of arcane superstitions, consider Jewish peoplehood a reactionary chauvinism impeding international solidarity, and condemn Israel as a colonialist imperialist outpost. In other words, in any other circumstances, they'd take great pains to minimize the significance of their Jewish heritage. Why, then, would they mention it so prominently here?

The answer, I believe, has to do with one of the more minor, less well-known costs of the Holocaust: while powerfully discrediting (to say the least) anti-Semitism, it has also implicitly raised the bar, so to speak, for anti-Semites. Whereas previous Jew-hatred was founded on libels about Jewish religion, culture, moral character or group behavior, the Nazis went a step further, concocting elaborate theories of Jewish genetic inferiority. As a result, many classic anti-Semitic slurs--such as, say, conspiracy theories positing various Jewish plots to achieve world domination--have actually come to seem somewhat milder by comparison, to the point where their modern promulgators often straight-facedly claim that they're not really anti-Semitic at all, since they make no genetic claims about Jews. (One obnoxious commenter here at ICBW, for example, tried this tack, apparently in all sincerity.)

It is in this context that the Guardian letter writers' assertion of Jewish origin makes sense. If extreme hostility towards Israel is widely associated with anti-Semitism, and anti-Semitism is is widely associated with a belief in Jewish genetic inferiority, then rabid critics of Israel might be expected to attempt to insulate themselves against charges of anti-Semitism by identifying their own Jewish genetic heritage. In effect, they're saying, "Hitler would consider us Jewish--so when we say we think Israel is behaving like Hitler, you can believe us."

Perhaps they should stop letting Hitler set the standard for so many of their moral distinctions.

Well, it's that time of year again. Here's my annual assessment of the previous year's predictions, and a futile attempt to do better this year:

• Hillary Clinton will be elected president in November, by a solid margin, in an election with relatively light turnout by recent standards. The Democrats will retain control of both houses of Congress.

Well, she would have, if her staff had been competent enough to pay attention to those caucus states...

• The US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq will suffer significant setbacks in Iraq this year, but the political reconciliation process there will in fact make progress. Iran's nuclear program will last another year without either a military strike or a successful nuclear test.

The very first part was off, but the rest was on target.

• The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan will grind on without resolution, aided by safe havens in Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf will continue to rule, in one guise or another, replicating his neighbor's stalemate with its Islamists.

Again, on target with the exception of one key detail (Musharraf's fate).

• Ehud Olmert will survive another year in office. The Winograd report will criticize him harshly for being too recklessly aggressive during the Lebanon war, thus providing him with cover against his more hawkish main rivals. He will also authorize at least one fairly large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, which will achieve little but will further shield him against charges of dovish, indecisive softness. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's position as the largest single power in Lebanon will be consolidated and officially enshrined in the country's political power structure.

It was touch and go there for much of the year, and he's of course on his way out, but darned if he isn't hanging on to the bitter end, and charging into Gaza--almost as if to validate my prediction with his last ounce of strength...

• The US economy will narrowly avoid recession this year, but will experience very sluggish growth. Inflation will stubbornly refuse to fall, preventing the Fed from easing enough to really boost the economy. The stock market will have a down year, and oil prices will fall modestly. The housing market will not recover, but the US dollar will, somewhat, from its recent plunge.

Rather too optimistic about the economy, but I figure I'm in pretty good company on that one, and possibly more on target than most prognosticators. Also, correct on the direction (if not always the magnitude) of the movements of the stock market, oil, housing and the dollar.

• "Product placement"--advertising embedded into content such as music, films and television shows--will become more widespread and conspicuous, to the point where it becomes a subject of pop-culture irony.

Not this year (that I noticed), but then, I'm always ahead of the curve on these things...

And now for this year's reckless forecasts:

• Barack Obama's first year in office will go as badly as his mentor's, as the sluggish economy and unresolved conflicts between the moderates and progressives within his own party undermines his popularity, making his cool, detached persona seem weak and indecisive. Republicans will be somewhat rejuvenated by being able to take responsibility-free potshots from the sidelines, although no particularly prominent GOP leader will emerge. More Keynsian "stimulus" spending packages and bailouts will be enacted into law, but other government initiatives popular among Democrats, such as health care reform, will fall victim to the party's internal rifts, with some Republican help.


• Some time during the year, a reputable source--perhaps an intelligence agency or a defense think tank--will declare that Iran most likely has already produced at least one nuclear weapon, and soon will produce more. Little attention will be paid. Likewise, Iraq will all but disappear from the news, as will Afghanistan and Pakistan, despite continuing unrest there. Domestic issues--particularly economic ones--will dominate public attention, and foreign news will focus on trade and economic matters, such as the fate of China's export industries and the Euro's troubles.


• Stephen Harper will continue to hobble along with his minority government in Canada. Bibi Netanyahu will become prime minister of Israel, but in a coalition with Kadima and other parties of the center and right.


• Hamas and Hezbollah will lay low following Netanyahu's election, quietly building up their military strength as they did during most of 2008. They will take advantage of the inconclusive outcome of the current Gaza operation, which will have included a limited ground invasion that damaged Hamas but failed to dislodge its de facto government, and will have ended with a ceasefire agreement that effectively restores the status quo ante. Netanyahu will thus lack a pretext--or support from an exhausted, cynical Israeli public--for a more decisive engagement, even as the long-term threat on both fronts quietly builds.


• The US economy will remain in recession for most if not all of 2009. However, Japanese-style deflation will not set in, and the CPI will be positive by the end of the year. Oil prices will rebound, but only modestly. The stock market will bounce around its recent low levels and end little changed from the beginning of the year. Likewise, housing prices will stabilize. Interest rates will fall on risky assets and rise on risk-free ones, as depression-panic subsides. Unemployment will continue to rise.


• Environmentalism will "jump the shark" this year, as the cost of being green in a lousy economy turns off enough otherwise sympathetic folks to make the movement's excesses a target of mainstream ridicule.

As always, past performance is no guarantee of future results, although it's pretty good evidence that this blog's name is no idle boast...

I've already noted that the extraordinarily successful are a poor choice of model for those who would understand how to achieve more mundane varieties of success in life. Now, along comes Malcolm Gladwell to devote an entire book to this poor choice, studying a few off-the-charts-successful cases such as Mozart and Bill Gates in order to try to understand how people in general manage to succeed. And his conclusion, apparently, is that the most successful people may well have all been extraordinarily talented, but they have also all been extraordinarily lucky. Gladwell draws the standard luck egalitarian conclusions from this supposed insight.

Much discussion has ensued in the blogosphere, all of it completely missing the point. Of course the most extremely successful people have all been extremely lucky--just as they've all been extremely talented, and extremely hardworking. That's precisely why they've succeeded far beyond the ranks of competitors who only excelled in two or fewer of these three respects.

The far more interesting question is what proportions of luck, talent and work typically contribute to the kind of moderate success that sensible, realistic people aspire to achieve. In those cases, I strongly suspect, talent and dedication weigh far more heavily than luck. Then again, that's probably not the kind of study that would help make Malcolm Gladwell the spectacularly successful writer that he's become.

Yossi Klein Halevi and Matthew Wagner have both written lately about the remarkable relationship between Chabad/Lubavitch and secular Israelis. Unlike other ultra-Orthodox sects, which all coldly reject both the state of Israel and secular Israelis as betrayers of Jewish law and observance, Chabad considers itself a kind of internal missionary organization, winning over secular Jews to piety through good works and generosity.

Unfortunately, Chabad's missionary service is rooted in essentially the same messianism as Christian missionaries': they believe that winning Jews back to observance hastens the coming of the Messiah. Ultimately, that motive can't sustain a generic service ethic, because it inevitably draws the missionaries towards more susceptible recruitment targets, such as the poor and the distressed. (Christian missionaries, for example, certainly follow this pattern.)

It's possible, though, that Chabad (or perhaps an offshoot, or a rival sect) could gradually evolve its beliefs in a way capable of sustaining its passion for serving fellow Jews in general. All it would require is a subtle shift away from believing in the need to convert all Jews to its brand of piety, and towards believing in its members' need to maintain its own brand of piety--including its practice of helping all Jews--as an end in itself.

I believe that such a shift would be of enormous benefit to the Jewish people. For the truth is that the fanatically observant, the fanatically secular, and the broad spectrum in between are all parts of a far stronger whole than any single one of those groups would be on its own. Other religions have discovered this, and typically maintain a pious class--priests, monks, monastics, and so on--that is respected for its dedication and service to its correligionists, but understood to coexist with a more worldly majority, rather than rejecting it.

Already, ultra-Orthodox Jews in general act as a kind of priestly class among Jews, devoting themselves entirely to study and piety at the cost of living on charity, and typically in poverty. They also perform a number of purely religious services to the community, such as recovering bodies for ritual burial (most famously after terrorist attacks). Unfortunately, rather than consider themselves a kind of spiritual elite serving a larger Jewish nation, they tend to view other Jews as apostates doomed to drift away from Judaism towards paganism of one kind or another. And of course, they denounce the state of Israel as a secular travesty.

That's strange, because the Jewish religion itself provides an admirable model for a "spiritual elite", rejecting both militant proselytizing and cultish insularity in favor of the role of duty-bound "light unto the nations". If only the ultra-Orthodox were to embrace that role themselves, they could become as valuable a resource for the Jewish people as the Jewish people have proven, time and again, to be for the entire world.

Say you've just been elected President of the United States after campaigning on the themes of "hope" and "change". Your opponent, an aged former military pilot, had campaigned as an experienced statesman whose decisiveness contributed to a major military achievement in Iraq. But a sharp economic downturn shortly before the election made his foreign policy expertise seem somewhat irrelevant, and his Vice-Presidential choice became a national laughingstock. Meanwhile, your moderate, optimistic proposals to cut taxes for the middle class while making the rich pay their fair share, improve health care coverage, and create national service programs for young people, were attractive enough to voters to allay their doubts about your alleged radical past. (Fawning press coverage didn't hurt, either.) Now you have a solid electoral victory under your belt, as well as clear Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. What do you do next?

Well, the future is always difficult to predict, of course. But experience suggests a few do's and don'ts:

• DON'T expect the free ride from the media to continue. Given their irrationally stratospheric expectations, attack-dog mentality (possibly exacerbated by guilt over their previous obsequiousness) and lack of a suitable alternative powerful figure to tear down, your every scandal, misfortune or embarrassing incident, no matter how big or small, will be jumped on.
• DON'T pander to your base with appointments and executive orders that alienate moderates and inflame conservatives. You'll only end up backing down under pressure to save your administration's tattered reputation.
• DON'T attempt to create any grand, elaborate new social programs of breathtaking scope and complexity. You may think you have a mandate to do such things, but you don't.
• DO go ahead and raise taxes at the high end of the income scale. If the economy hasn't recovered in a couple of years, your presidency is doomed anyway, and if it has, then the resulting improved fiscal condition of the government will more than compensate for the slight drag on spending, laying the foundation for a robust economic recovery.
• DON'T get lured into expanding ill-defined foreign military missions. Your crisis manager and commander-in-chief cred is shaky enough already.
• DO support free trade. Again, good economic fundamentals will come in handy once the current economic storm passes--and if it doesn't, then having pandered to unions years before won't do you much good.
• DON'T expect your first midterm election to be a happy one.

If any of you readers happen to be in this situation, I hope this list has been helpful...

In the aftermath of the Republican electoral wipeout, conservative intellectuals will no doubt continue to busily plug their thoughtful treatises on how to resuscitate the conservative movement. That's understandable--after all, if your stock in trade is formulating and marketing partisan ideas, then it's natural to believe that the cure for what ails your party is more and better ideas.

Unfortunately for these thought-peddlers, that's simply not the way politics works. Newt Gingrich, for example, will no doubt insist that it was the collection of policy ideas known as the "Contract for America" that led to his greatest political victory, the Republican congressional sweep of 1994. Anybody remember what was in the "Contract for America"? Which parts were actually enacted into law and which never made it? Which ones actually had their intended effect?

In fact, the 1994 Republican victory had nothing to do with the particular policy details of that year's Republican platform. Rather, after four decades in power, the Democrats' flaws and political missteps--corruption, arrogance, captivity to "special interests", and so on--were immediately conspicuous, whereas the party out of power had been away long enough for their roughly comparable flaws to be forgotten.

Needless to say, after twelve years of Congressional dominance and eight years in the presidency, the roles are at least somewhat reversed. Barack Obama and the Democrats aren't now ascending to power with an exciting agenda of new, innovative and popular ideas that the Republicans were somehow too hidebound or ideologically blindered to embrace. Rather, they have been elected to avoid repeating, and where possible to reverse, the political and policy blunders committed by their predecessors--and that is agenda enough for any party.

Of course, once they begin governing, they will accumulate their own set of missteps and unpopular actions. And astute Republicans will notice them, and add their reversal to the list of goals of the new Republican agenda. That--not the combined chin-tugging of a bunch of conservative policy wonks--is what will eventually rejuvenate the conservative movement.

Crooked Timberite and global warming zealot John Quiggin inadvertently asks a very important question: "I don’t see how AGW [anthropogenic global warming] differs [from] other examples like mainstream medicine v homeopathy and AIDS reappraisal, evolution vs creation." In other words, what is the difference between bucking the scientific consensus regarding global warming and, say, doubting that HIV causes AIDS?

The answer is quite simple, really, and has to do with the concept of parsimony in scientific theories. Pace Quiggin, what makes the HIV theory of AIDS compelling is not the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community--which is routinely wrong about all sorts of things, after all--but rather the difficulty of coming up with an alternative theory that explains the documented spectacular correlation between HIV infection and AIDS symptoms, as well as all the other evidence amassed in favor of the HIV theory. Similarly, the problem with homeopathy is not that mainstream medical opinion discounts it, but rather that accepting it requires reconciling its effectiveness with the entire body of physical, chemical and biological evidence which argues for its uselessness. (Creationism actually has the reverse problem: it's so parsimonious that it would easily "explain" anything--that is, absolutely any set of phenomena that might be observed--and therefore explains nothing.)

Now, I'm no expert on climatological research, but my impression is that the consensus predictions of global warming rely on elaborate computer models that incorporate and combine all sorts of influences on climate, whose likely effect and interaction are estimated using elaborate statistical methods applied to past data. Given the complexity of these models, I would be absolutely astonished if it weren't possible to introduce extra factors, or alter the behavior of existing ones, in a way that radically changes the predicted outcomes without creating any significant inconsistencies with the known inputs. In other words, the exceedingly complex theories embodied in the current models don't offer much parsimony, and hence one can likely embrace alternative models with significantly different outcomes that are very nearly as parsimonious as the widely accepted ones.

Now, perhaps I'm wrong, and the models are constructed so generally as to rule out any such alternatives. If so, though, then I would expect the claims for the models' predictions to be much stronger than I have seen--something along the lines of, "the predictions are scientifically irrefutable", or some such. More likely, they are nothing more than "best current guesses"--valuable, of course, but hardly conclusive. And skeptics of their predictions should certainly not be lumped together with doubters of various more established, more parsimony-generating scientific theories.

The Jerusalem Post's Caroline Glick, in typical sky-is-falling ultra-hawk fashion, has declared that defense minister Ehud Barak's enthusiasm for Israel's recent truce with Hamas has

two possible explanations. Either Barak is risking the lives of Israeli soldiers and civilians to pander to the most radical elements of Israeli society while seeking to win sympathy points from Cairo in a general election campaign, or he is gullible enough to believe that Israel's radical left and the Egyptian regime are moved by facts rather than interests.

There is in fact a third, far more plausible explanation, confirmed by the subsequent deal between Labor and Kadima: Barak knows full well that an Israeli invasion of the Gaza strip is necessary and inevitable, but prefers for personal political reasons to delay it until after PM Ehud Olmert has been ousted. More than anything else, Barak wants to return to the prime ministership, and this ordering of events maximizes his chances of doing so.

Consider the consequences for Barak of an immediate assault on Hamas: if the operation is a success, then Olmert will have repaired, to a large extent, one of the biggest stains on his reputation: his disastrous mismanagement of the Lebanon war in 2006, and its implications for his capacity as PM to command the nation's defenses. His credentials thus restored, he might well succeed in retaining his leadership of Kadima, and thus the prime ministership, until the next election, at which point voters favoring the current government are more likely to vote for his party than for a Labor party that has subordinated itself to his rule.

Of course, the Gaza operation could also go badly, whether as a result of Olmert's meddling, Barak's errors or IDF blunders. In that case, Barak will be at least as badly tarnished by the failure as Olmert. Indeed, the latter has already proven his skill at deflecting blame for military failures onto his subordinates, and Barak would be an ideal target. Either way, then, Barak's chances of succeeding Olmert as prime minister are poor.

Now consider his chances under the two new deals: after a summer of relative calm--probably punctuated by attacks from Gaza that inflame the public even more against the Olmert government--Kadima casts Olmert aside and replaces him with a relative novice, most probably Tzipi Livni. The newcomer will have to ensure the continued support of Kadima's coalition partners, of which Labor is the most important, and Barak can use this leverage to guarantee not only a Gaza invasion soon afterwards, but also plenty of freedom of action for both the IDF's military campaign and his own political campaign. If the military campaign goes well, he should be able to claim the lion's share of the credit--and if it goes badly, he's far better placed to scapegoat Olmert's more junior, less experienced successor than the wily Olmert himself.

Glick is of course quite correct in one respect: Barak appears to be willing to sacrifice the lives and safety of Israeli soldiers and civilians for the sake of politics. however, his political calculations are neither naive nor deluded. They're quite subtle and deep--and if all goes according to plan, I give him tolerably good odds of succeeding.

For some reason local Starbucks outlets are peddling copies of this novel, which is narrated by an unusually deep, insightful dog. (The advertising slogan is, "Narrator. Philosopher. Dog.") Without having read a single word, I can already write a summary review (or perhaps just a review headline): "Jonathan Livingston Beagle".

The subprime mortgage crisis (useful primer here) has provoked the usual partisan reactions, with the left griping about "corporate governance" and "transparency", and the right telling everyone to just "suck it up". I fear that both sides are underestimating the severe and fundamental nature of the problem.

First, some history: in the 1970s, Western economies all seemed to be going haywire simultaneously. Inflation was running rampant, governments were running huge deficits, unemployment was skyrocketing, and the world's major economies were lurching from crisis to crisis. In retrospect (most modern economists will tell you), the problem was that the old Keynsian approach to government intervention in the economy had reached its limits. Further government spending only seemed to exacerbate inflation and deficits, without providing much of a stimulus to the economy. The problem was fixed (again, most modern economists will tell you) by governments shifting to monetarism as the new, better way to guide the economy to prosperity.

What this story doesn't explain, however, is why Keynsianism, which had fueled two and a half decades of postwar prosperity, suddenly stopped working. Some economists will say that it was always too imprecise a tool, and its wielders were bound to lose control eventually. Others will say that it was "abused" by governments eager to keep the good times rolling. Like an antibiotic, the latter would explain, Keynsian pump-priming loses its effectiveness when overused unnecessarily during prosperous times, rendering it incapable of mitigating the inevitable downturn.

But economies aren't bacteria. How do they become immune to economic stimuli? Why wouldn't "overuse" of Keynsian stimulus, whatever its side effects, at least succeed in its basic purpose of warding off recessions?

The answer can be summed up in one word: expectations. Once enough people start assuming that the government's response to any economic slowdown will be more government borrowing and spending, they can place financial bets on that assumption. For example, they can bet that the government will ensure that lots of money remains available in the economy, and that they can therefore raise prices accordingly, or demand higher wages. As these bets pile up, they dampen the effect of the intervention they anticipate, forcing the government into an even more extreme intervention to achieve the same result--further heightening expectations for future interventions. Eventually, expectations match the government's maximum feasible effort, and all interventions fail. Only a completely new, unanticipated form of intervention can hope to work.

Let us return now to the subprime crisis. In 1987, Alan Greenspan massively expanded government credit and cut federal interest rates in response to a stock market crash. He was to do this multiple times over the course of his career--in 1998, and again in 2001--in response to similar economic crises. This maneuver--which came to be known as the "Greenspan put"--was remarkably effective at mitigating the effects of economic shocks. However, it has also been blamed for the stock bubble of the late 1999s and the real estate bubble of the early 2000s.

The connection between these bubbles, the policies that preceded them, and the lethal effect of expectations is nicely illustrated by the investor behavior that led to the subprime crisis. Why did so many sterling financial firms pour money into highly questionable investments based on mortgages of dubious quality? Were they fools or maniacs, caught up in some kind of frenzy? More likely, they were sensible people making a very reasonable bet: that when the bubble burst, the Federal Reserve would come to the rescue with a massive interest rate cut, and most if not all of their bubble profits would be preserved. And indeed, plenty of subprime mortgage investors, Bear Stearns notwithstanding, have ended up netting a hefty profit from this bet.

Unfortunately, the bet only increased the magnitude of the crisis, while dampening the government's capacity to resolve it. The subprime-driven real estate bubble was not only far bigger than previous bubbles, thus requiring a much bigger liquidity infusion than previous ones--it also juiced the economy enough to nudge inflation upward, limiting the government's leeway to cut interest rates without triggering an inflation spiral. As in the 1970s, the reigning paradigm for government management of the economic cycle has become too predictable, and has thus lost its curative power.

I don't know what the next paradigm will be, but it had better be pretty darn complicated. Financial firms have enormous analytical resources at their disposal these days, and are much better at predicting government policies than they used to be. It'll take an even more inscrutable policymaker than the famously Buddha-like Greenspan to keep them from catching on to the government's methods very quickly--and promptly undermining them.

The widely praised recent film Juno, which bills itself as an edgy comedy, would be more accurately described as a disturbing psychodrama. The story is ostensibly straightforward: a sixteen-year-old high school student gets pregnant, and decides to have the baby and give it up for adoption. The film simply tracks her relationship with her parents, the adopting couple, and the baby's father during her pregnancy.

The problem is that taken at face value, the interactions in the film make no sense. The girl is impossibly self-assured, clinically detached and jaded. She treats the adults around her as equals, if not as inferiors, and the adults, likewise, respond to her as they would a poised, assertive adult--which is what she seems to be, in all respects but her actual age. Moreover, these adults scarcely exist apart from her--their lives seem to revolve around her, as if populating her life were their only purpose. This solipsistic unrealism is quite reminiscent of the film Peggy Sue Got Married, in which a middle-aged woman suddenly wakes up (or perhaps falls into a dream) to find herself back in high school, taking advantage of her knowledge and experience to recognize and correct her youthful mistakes in dealing with various people.

In the latter film, though, the title character eventually reconciles herself to the life she embarked on as a naive youth. Juno, however, hints at a much darker reality: the girl's jaded detachment, as well as several plot elements I'll refrain from revealing, suggest a sexually traumatized twentysomething fantasizing about re-experiencing her vulnerable teen years with the protection afforded by her adult knowledge. And indeed, the film's screenwriter, who goes by the pen-name Diablo Cody, turns out to be (as I suspected while watching the film) a twentysomething woman with what one might describe as sexual "issues"--her major previous work was a diary recounting the aftermath of her decision, on a whim, to give up her secretarial job and become a stripper and peep-show performer.

Granted, I don't know exactly what demons drove Ms. Cody to choose to spend years as a sex-industry worker. But I'd guess that for most audiences, a dramatized depiction of her battle with those demons won't be quite as bracingly comic as Juno's trailer implicitly promises.

A quick you-read-it-here-first observation about the "Super Tuesday" results: Hillary Clinton's primary victories are concentrated largely in "blue" states (those that tend to vote Democratic), while Obama's are concentrated largely in "red" states (those that tend to vote Republican).

Off-the-top-of-my-head explanation: As the establishment candidate, Clinton wins over Democrats in states where being a Democrat means identifying with the establishment. As the insurgent outsider, Obama wins over Democrats in states where being a Democrat means thinking of oneself as a rebel outsider.

Quick prediction: Within a couple of days, this observation will be widely noticed, often talked about, and probed for deep meaning. But you read it here first!

But did they find Jake Gyllenhaal's shirt in his closet?

Time for ICBW's annual predictions...First, a review of last year's...

• Any "surge" by US troops in Iraq, if it occurs at all, will be perfunctory and ineffectual. Likewise, any diplomatic initiative aimed at Iran or Syria will be half-hearted and come to nothing. Instead, Bush will rely on congressional pressure to force his hand, allowing him to reduce the American troop presence in Iraq while protesting that the mission would have succeeded if not for the meddling of lily-livered Democrats. More generally, the administration's popularity will improve now that it has a Democratic congress as its foil, although Iraq, and foreign policy generally, will not be the main arena of confrontation (see below).

My clunker of the year--it would have been hard to have been more wrong on every count, I guess. Who knew that the US military, having bungled Iraq for several years, could suddenly conceive and implement an effective counterinsurgency strategy there?

• The conflict between Hezbollah and Israel will not flare up again this year, as Hezbollah will be preoccupied with consolidating and increasing its power in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Israel will be preoccupied with the continuing chaos in Gaza, which will spill over into the West Bank as well. The low-level civil war between Fatah and Hamas will continue, with numerous outside interests lining up on one side or the other. Rocket launchings and other attacks from Gaza into Israel will continue, and Israel's response will be sporadically violent, and sufficient to reduce but not eliminate them.

This one was just about spot-on, although arguably pretty easy to nail. The only possible criticisms are that the West Bank is still relatively calm, and that I didn't actually predict Hamas' takeover of Gaza. Both are, I think, minor quibbles.

• Attention in the US will turn away from foreign policy and towards the economy, as (1) the economy slows and (2) economic policy becomes the focus of the Democratic congressional agenda--and of conflicts between Congress and the administration. Trade, taxes, fiscal policy, entitlements and regulation of business will be key flashpoints, against a backdrop of slower growth, a weakening dollar, a continuing real estate slump, and a retrenching stock market. Oil prices will drop slightly, though, and interest rates will decline slightly--although not enough to juice the economy, owing to lingering inflation worries.

Pretty good, I think, although Congressional Democrats haven't exactly grabbed the economic non-bull by the horns. Also, the stock markets are actually up modestly on the year, thanks to big gains early on, and of course oil prices have skyrocketed instead of falling. It's easy to forget, though, just how little attention the economy was receiving a year ago, and how optimistic most forecasts were back then.

• In addition to the usual suspects all making it through the year (barring accident or illness), Ehud Olmert will surprise many by remaining in power as prime minister of Israel. (Navigating Israel's byzantine political ecosystem is the one thing he's serious about and competent at.)

My big winner for the year--few prognosticators would have given a plug nickel for Olmert's survival chances back when I called this one.

• Neither of the two current frontrunners for the Democratic party presidential nomination (Clinton and Obama) will be considered a frontrunner by the end of the year. On the other hand, at least one of the two current frontrunners for the Republican nomination (Giuliani and McCain) will be considered a frontrunner at the end of the year.

Badly off-base both in substance (with respect to the Democrats) and in spirit (with respect to the overall tone of both primary races). This cycle, the parties appear to have adopted each other's traditional roles, with the Democrats rather stodgily anointing a consensus heir-apparent and the Republicans flailing around looking for a candidate with sufficient national stature.

• (This one contributed by someone I know) A scandal will tarnish the sterling, upscale image of Whole Foods.

As promised...

Now for this year's predictions...

• Hillary Clinton will be elected president in November, by a solid margin, in an election with relatively light turnout by recent standards. The Democrats will retain control of both houses of Congress.


• The US counterinsurgency effort in Iraq will suffer significant setbacks in Iraq this year, but the political reconciliation process there will in fact make progress. Iran's nuclear program will last another year without either a military strike or a successful nuclear test. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan will grind on without resolution, aided by safe havens in Pakistan, where Pervez Musharraf will continue to rule, in one guise or another, replicating his neighbor's stalemate with its Islamists.


• Ehud Olmert will survive another year in office. The Winograd report will criticize him harshly for being too recklessly aggressive during the Lebanon war, thus providing him with cover against his more hawkish main rivals. He will also authorize at least one fairly large-scale incursion into the Gaza Strip, which will achieve little but will further shield him against charges of dovish, indecisive softness. Meanwhile, Hezbollah's position as the largest single power in Lebanon will be consolidated and officially enshrined in the country's political power structure.


• The US economy will narrowly avoid recession this year, but will experience very sluggish growth. Inflation will stubbornly refuse to fall, preventing the Fed from easing enough to really boost the economy. The stock market will have a down year, and oil prices will fall modestly. The housing market will not recover, but the US dollar will, somewhat, from its recent plunge.


• "Product placement"--advertising embedded into content such as music, films and television shows--will become more widespread and conspicuous, to the point where it becomes a subject of pop-culture irony.

As always, my predictions are not for everyone. Consult your doctor if you experience sensations of plausibility while reading them.

Congratulate yourselves, readers--according to this site, you must all be geniuses (or, rather, genii). And I now have the perfect excuse for there being so few of you.

Of course, I could put in a lot of extra time (if I had any) and effort into making my blog more readable. But given that most of my postings contain roughly a book chapter's worth of ideas, it's not clear that that strategy would actually gain me readers. And in the end, I suppose I'd rather be brilliantly right than widely-read.

Then again, since you're all such scintillating intellects yourselves, perhaps I can benefit from your collective wisdom. Here's the challenge: take one of my postings (I'm assuming that mine, not LTEC's, are the problem), and explain how it could be rewritten so as to be much more accessible, without altering its content. The winner (in the unlikely event that there are multiple entries) will be posted as a kind of blog "'after' picture".

The other day, I found myself driving behind a large white pickup truck bearing two bumper stickers. One bore the slogan, "Powered by Biodiesel--No Wars Necessary", and the other advertised a local "progressive talk" AM radio station.

My immediate thought was, "there goes a real greenneck..."

I've written at length many times before about how many supposed foreign affairs "experts" exhibit complete historical ignorance and astonishingly poor understanding of basic international relations. Dan Senor's analysis of the Iranian threat in the Wall Street Journal is a case in point.

"Iran is not the Soviet Union," he writes, "and the post-9/11 struggle is not the Cold War. The deterrence camp is willing to stand by as Iran develops nuclear weapons, presumably on the model that Iran will eventually collapse as the Soviet Union did. But the Argentinean case [Iran's terrorist bombings of Jewish and Israeli targets in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994] demonstrates what Tehran was willing and able to do when it had no nuclear umbrella."

Senor seems to be under the impression that the Soviet Union never sponsored terrorism against its Western adversaries, the way Iran has. In fact, the Soviets provided ample support, in the form of arms, training and sanctuary, to various international terrorist groups during the 1970s and 1980s. It was also, lest we forget, willing to supply nuclear weapons (under its own control, we assume) to its ally Cuba. In its ruthless ambition for world domination, Communist ideology was second to none--including Islamism.

The lessons of the Cold War, properly understood, actually apply very well to the Iranian situation. The Cold War demonstrated that nuclear deterrence works--in the absence of proliferation. The Cuban missile crisis and centralization-obsessed Soviet dogma ensured that Soviet-made nuclear weapons would not be used except on the orders of the Soviet Politburo--and the American nuclear deterrent ensured that the Soviet Politburo could never afford such a risk. The Iranian government is almost certain to be similarly deterred from launching a direct nuclear attack, should it acquire the means to do so. Whether it will be as careful as the Soviet Union about husbanding its nuclear capacity is a more difficult and worrisome question.

But as the Cold War also taught us, nuclear and non-nuclear conflict are eminently separable. Nuclear deterrents, whether American, Soviet, Israeli or Iranian, are effective primarily against existential threats, of the kind that nobody is likely to mount against Iran in any event. But they do not prevent an adversary such as the Soviet Union or Iran from engaging in all manner of attritive combat, from proxy wars to terrorism, and even direct limited-theater military attack.

What the Cold War taught us about such conflicts is that they can and should be answered in kind. During the late 1970s, when the US was in full retreat, Soviet proxies, including aggressive allied nations, insurgent groups and terrorist organizations, attacked the Western world and its allies virtually unopposed. The Reagan doctrine--that Communist victories can be not only resisted, but actually reversed--changed all that, forcing the Soviets to expend their resources on defense as well as offense (in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and many other places), and thus reversing all the political momentum the Soviets had built up following Vietnam. Whether or not it was the primary reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union, as I've speculated, it was most likely an expediting factor.

The Iranian nuclear program can plausibly be compared with the Cuban missile crisis, in that an American enemy threatens to cross an important nuclear proliferation threshold. But the Cold War didn't end with the Cuban missile crisis, nor will the conflict between the US and Iranian-led radical Islamism end with the final success or failure of Iran's nuclear ambitions. If the Cold War is any guide, the outcome of that conflict will likely depend more on what the US does to confront and counter Islamists' global exercise of power, than on how it manages the nuclear stalemate that will ultimately exist regardless of whether Iran manages to build atomic bombs. America's lethargic response so far to aggressive Iranian operations in Iraq suggests that the current administration has yet to learn this lesson.

Should the US attack Iran? If so, how, where, and on what scale? Obviously, I have no idea, since I'm not privy to the kind of information that would allow someone to assess the likely outcomes of different types of attack with any accuracy. Those with the requisite intelligence data are presumably working through various scenarios as we speak, figuring out the worst-case, best-case and most probable outcomes, and trying to decide if they're worthwhile.

But there's one consideration that I fervently hope they aren't taking into account: the effect of such an attack on Iranian public support for the current government. Mark Kleiman, for example, points indirectly to a report that Iranian president Ahmadinejad is believed to be gearing up for a military confrontation with the US, hoping thereby to reverse the damage he's done to his own popularity by destroying the economy and generally behaving buffoonishly. Kleiman concludes that if such a military confrontation is in Ahmadinejad's interest, then it must clearly also be against American interests.

But that doesn't follow at all. It's true that if Ahmadinejad's successor were likely to be more pro-American, then there might be some justification for avoiding actions that could shore up his support. But under the Iranian system, in which candidates for president must be approved by "Supreme Leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei--the guy who approved Ahmadinejad's candidacy in the first place, lest we forget--the next president is highly unlikely to be significantly less anti-American than Ahmadinejad. He is, however, quite likely to be more competent. Hence, shoring up Ahmadinejad's popularity might well be a positive side effect of US military action against Iran.

Most partisan political debates are at least somewhat dishonest, with both sides concealing somewhat unsavory motives behind grand, idealistic rhetoric. The current immigration debate, however, may be setting new standards for bipartisan hypocrisy.

Supporters of the bill--primarily Democrats--claim to be saving millions of poor, oppressed illegal immigrants by granting them legal status (so-called "amnesty"). Of course, amnesty will do nothing of the sort: if the newly-legalized immigrants take advantage of their new status to escape their ill-paid, backbreaking labor, then employers will simply shun them in favor of fresh illegal arrivals, creating not one, but two underclasses--unemployed legal immigrants and their illegal replacements.

That's supposedly why Republicans want any amnesty tied to vigorous "enforcement"--meaning sealing of the US-Mexican border. The premise, presumably, is that once the amnesty is declared, the millions of new illegal immigrants who will rush to take their place must be stopped at the border. In practice, though, border interdiction can at best slow, not halt, the flow of illegal immigrants. (Think of how effective it is at interdicting drug trafficking, for instance.) Eventually, the supply of illegals will have been fully replenished, and "enforcement" will have come to naught.

There is, mind you, a highly effective way of massively reducing the number of illegal immigrants, with or without amnesty. It's no mystery--it's known as "employer sanctions", and it was supposed to be a part of the 1986 amnesty, but was never seriously implemented. The principle is simple: illegal immigrants come to the US because even the awful under-the-table jobs available to illegals are better than their prospects back home. However, if employers are harshly penalized for employing illegal immigrants, then the illegals will no longer be in demand, and therefore no longer have an incentive to come--or even to stay, if they've already arrived by now.

Employer sanctions would require a fair bit of work, of course--establishing a database of citizens, an effective identification system, and an inspection system to catch scofflaw employers. But given that these things have been built for cars and guns, it shouldn't be impossible to do the same for people. And the system needn't be perfect, because employers--unlike, say, gun owners--tend to be affluent and respected enough to want to avoid the risks associated with breaking the law.

One could raise some legitimate, though minor, concerns about this regime, such as whether the database jeopardizes personal privacy, or whether legal job applicants of the wrong ethnicities would come under undue suspicion of being illegals masquerading as legal. Employer sanctions also face opposition from politicians who see partisan benefit in the perpetuation of the illegal immigration problem: Democrats who see the illegals as potential Democratic-voting future citizens, and Republicans who see their employers as potential Republican-donating business tycoons.

But the real reason why serious employer sanctions aren't part of the current immigration bill--and barely figure in the debate at all--is that the perpetuation of the illegal immigration problem benefits many more Americans than just the aforementioned political operatives. In fact, virtually every American pays lower prices for goods and services provided by a host of industries whose millions of illegal workers would have to be replaced by legal workers--at a much higher cost--if employer sanctions were put into place. Indeed, nobody knows where those legal workers might come from, how much they'd cost, or whether customers would be willing to pay the bill. In other words, the exploitation of millions of Mexican workers with no alternative is a massive and crucial portion of the American consumer economy, one that few Americans want to give up.

Of course even fewer Americans want to admit that they depend on the illegal worker system for their low-priced goods and (especially) services. They'd rather engage in pointless arguments about amnesty and border control instead.

It's a year before the presidential election. The president, a backslapping Texan doggedly pursuing a costly and unpopular war, will not be running again. His party's activist base is rumbling with dissatisfaction at the collection of establishment centrists who are contending to replace him, and itching for a more ideologically pure candidate to enter the fray. The opposing party, meanwhile, is haunted by its own candidate from the presidential election seven years before, a sitting vice-president who lost in a controversial photo finish. He has since rejuvenated his tarnished reputation by reinventing himself completely and winning over his party's angry grassroots. And so we must ask the year's burning political question: is Nixon the one?

No, I don't predict a repeat of 1968, with Al Gore storming to victory, only to resign in disgrace six years later. Nor, however, do I consider the parallels merely superficial. Like the Democrats in '68, the Republican party of 2008 has created enough of a moderate, responsible establishment to alienate its purist ideologues, the latter egged on by a full range of newly-mature, ideologically conservative institutions: think tanks such as AEI, Heritage, Cato, Hudson, Hoover and Manhattan, as well as media outlets such as Fox, and even a large portion of the Supreme Court. The party is thus ripe for the kind of radical takeover that eventually decimated the New Deal Democratic coalition and opened the door for the conservative resurgence of the 1980s.

Meanwhile, today's Democrats are in a position similar to that of the 1968 Republicans: their establishment core is moribund, focused on declining institutions and long-outdated ideology. Its young guard is blessed with (environmentalist) religious fervor and unburdened by the old (race-and-class) political orthodoxies, but has yet to form a coherent coalition based on what it's for, not just what it's angrily against.

History doesn't always repeat itself, of course. The Republicans could avoid a radical takeover, or the Gore and "netroots" Democratic factions could fail to coalesce into a coherent reformist movement. (Or both.) But I would be surprised if the institutional right wing of the conservative movement didn't at least try to flex its muscles over perhaps the next decade or so, seeking to consolidate and even extend the right's recent political gains. And to the extent that it succeeds, it will certainly provide a useful focus for a re-invigorated left, as it evolves from a ragtag coterie of angry outsiders into the next mass political movement.

Michael O'Hare's May Day tribute to several generations of American Communists--including, he makes clear, thousands of loyal Stalinists--is a fascinating study in partisanship. "They were misled by their leadership more than once", he writes, "and there's a lot they didn't understand about how societies and people really work, but they were brave and their hearts were in the right place."

The usual partisan retort to such an encomium is to declare it equivalent to--that is, as unthinkably obscene as--a celebration of, say, American Nazis. But as a committed non-partisan, I find it much more interesting to compare it with an equally unthinkable (for Prof. O'Hare), but rather less obscene, hypothetical: a tribute to supporters of the current American president.

It seems obvious, accustomed as we are to partisanship, that O'Hare would never dream of including contemporary Republicans in such a misty-eyed paean. But in fact he almost certainly has more in common with them, politically speaking, than with at least the most extreme of those he actually chose to celebrate. And this relative affinity goes well beyond the paramount fact that both he (I assume) and today's Bush Republicans prefer democratic politics over, say, a totalitarian revolutionary vanguard's violent seizure of absolute dictatorial power. Indeed, "on the issues", as they say, today's compassionate conservative probably occupies the mushy middle ground between O'Hare and his beloved Marxist predecessors. Let's consider a list:

• The environment: Pure bourgeois frivolity. The industrialization of the Soviet Union--achieved at a horrific environmental cost--was uniformly celebrated by Communists of pretty much every stripe. In those days, conservationism was the preserve (so to speak) of wealthy brahmins with plenty of free time for birdwatching and the like, and little concern for maximizing industrial production.
• Immigration: Surely I don't have to review Communist doctrine regarding control of movement of people across borders. The mere idea of allowing wealthy American capitalists to import millions of foreign laborers to underbid local workers would have given any self-respecting Red apoplexy.
• Welfare: In the Soviet Union, those who refused to work were declared "parasites" and prosecuted.
• Civil liberties: 'Nuff said.
• Iraq: This is the only (slightly) tricky one--certainly, 20th-century leftists were generally in favor of deposing fascist dictators by military force, but on occasion (say, when the Soviet Union had entered into a non-aggression pact with one), the most orthodox among them were inclined to waver. Still, it's safe to say that absent a direct Soviet interest, invading a country to replace a fascist dictatorship in which Communists had no hope of seizing power with a democracy in which they were free to organize would have met with the approval of most Communists.

Given this list of sharp disagreements, what could O'Hare possibly have meant when he declared that those old Stalinists "had their hearts in the right place"? He gives a hint in his comparison of his historical heroes to his current enemies:

As the United States slides further and further toward the kind of outrageously unjust income distribution my parents and grandparents fought against, and every day's news has another injustice by the strong against the weak, what's worth remembering is the generations of people who paid some real dues trying to make a better world.

Is this really the root of O'Hare's identification? Shared preference for a more progressive tax policy? Delusion that a self-professed "revolutionary vanguard" seeking absolute power really only wanted to defend "the weak"? Well, sort of. In practice, these shared symbolic ideals are a kind of coded signal, indicating to others that their holders' hearts, as O'Hare would say, are in the right place--that is, that they're "the right sort of people". In this particular case, "the right sort of people" are relatively educated folks of plebeian origin who think of themselves as clear-thinking, truth-seeing intellectuals, and embrace the values such people could be expected to embrace: erudition, rationality, articulateness, intellectual discipline. In their utopia, what counts are these qualities, not wealth or social class or talent or hard work--traits that could elevate people other than themselves to positions of wealth and power (over them).

Other forms of political partisanship are, at heart, similarly constructed out of tribal fraternities of the like-spirited. The nerdy libertarian pines for a world where impersonal markets govern everything, and physical strength and social skills are powerless against (his own self-attributed) raw talent and brilliance. The working-class heartland conservative imagines a country where "values" and "tradition" (that is to say, his values and tradition, since they are, he believes, the dominant version) shape policy more than wealth, social status or education. The self-identified minority group member dreams of a world where his minority is privileged and superior where possible, and otherwise no less favored than the majority. The ambitious, hard-working ladder-climber envisions a world where hard work and ambition are all it takes to get ahead, and lazy bums, busybodies, do-gooders and pointy-heads (that is, people unlike him) can't interfere. And so on.

As I've pointed out before, ideology has always been, for the most part, a cover for the alliance of constituencies with common interests. That today's middle-class intellectuals would imagine themselves in solidarity with a previous generation of middle-class intellectuals--despite disagreeing with them on virtually every concrete particular of public policy--shouldn't surprise anyone. After all, that's what partisanship is all about.

I remarked some time ago that those who are ardently committed to one side in a political conflict rarely simply change their minds when faced with the moral or empirical unsupportability of their position, but rather tend to become more and more vehement in their partisanship, until they reach a "breaking point" at which they can no longer tolerate their own stance. The classic example, of course, is the process by which many devoted Soviet Communists eventually broke with their ideology--often swallowing numerous hard-to-reconcile outrages (the show trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Hungarian and Czech invasions) before their cumulative effect, or perhaps a final straw, caused them to recognize their error. I suggested at the time that the continued eliminationist radicalism of Palestinian terrorist movements in the face of Israeli concessions during the Oslo peace process was having a similar polarizing effect, causing many to abandon their pro-Palestinian leanings, while others maintained their continued allegiance by redoubling their hatred for Israel.

Since then, as the fanaticism and barbarity at the core of the various Palestinian factions (and their anti-Israel allies such as Hezbollah and its sponsor, Iran) have become even more conspicuous in the West, the Palestinians' Western base of support has been both eroded and radicalized, to the point where it now openly and frankly echoes Palestinian/Hezbollah/Iranian calls for the complete elimination of the state of Israel. Increasingly, though, the latter have incorporated blatant expressions of crude anti-Semitism, in the form of Holocaust denial, invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and ugly ethnic slurs. How, then, will Western eliminationists reconcile themselves with this unsightly aspect of their allies' public image?

Why, the same way as they reconcile themselves to Palestinian terrorism, of course: by excusing it as a natural reaction to "Israeli oppression". I first sighted this tactic recently among the comments to this Crooked Timber posting. Note that not one peep of protest is uttered when one commenter offers, and another echoes, the "Israel made him do it" justification for Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's anti-Semitic tirades.

The readership of Crooked Timber itself appears to have radicalized somewhat in the three-and-a-half years since I noted their unwillingness to condone Palestinian terrorism. (Compare, for example, this more recent discussion, in which the defenders of Palestinian terrorism are much more forthright and aggressive, and its critics much more timid and equivocal, than in the previous case.) It may therefore no longer be representative of current liberal thinking on the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, it does provide a useful window into the current thinking of the remaining rump of diehard leftist enemies of Israel, among whom I predict that the defense of virulent Middle Eastern anti-Semitism as an understandable reaction to Israeli depredations will before long be a routine rationalization.

The wide availability of video editing software has spawned a number of new art forms, one of which is the imaginatively reinvented movie trailer (the "recut"). Three of my favorites are for Jaws, When Harry Met Sally, and Taxi Driver.

A startling new research result is rocking the worlds of sociology and psychology. Apparently, when provided with certain artificial stimuli, under controlled conditions, a group of experimental subjects were found to be capable of reliably inducing in themselves an intense, satisfying sexual experience--one that they described afterwards as among the most powerful of their entire lives. These experiences had no apparent ill effects, and may even have improved the subjects' overall well-being, as later reported by themselves and others. Some researchers are speculating that the results of this experiment may radically alter our view of sex--possibly ending sex as we know it.

Not exactly astounded by the news that people can enjoy getting themselves off? Well, I lied a bit--the experiment, as reported by Mark Kleiman (full paper here), actually deals with the artificial induction of religious experiences, using the hallucinogen psilocybin (the active ingredient in so-called "magic mushrooms"). Either way, though, a breathless, apocalyptic tone is quite unnecessary.

Artificially generating intense feelings outside the context which naturally produces them can certainly be useful at times--imagine being able to feel comfortably satiated without actually having to eat a large meal. But religious feelings, like sexual ones (or appetitive ones, for that matter), perform an important role within their normal context--a role that doesn't disappear just because the same feelings are also available on demand. Most people, for example, still need intimacy, trust and partnership in life, and continue to reinforce those things using intense sexual feelings even in this era of technologically advanced sex toys. Likewise, many people need a moral, metaphysical and communal framework into which they can fit their lives, and from which they can draw inspiration and comfort. They will no doubt continue to seek that inspiration and comfort from religion even when artificial varieties of mystical experience are readily available. Magic mushrooms may be good for an occasional religious thrill, after all, but that doesn't mean the age-old story of boy-meets-God is going to go out of fashion anytime soon.