On a new discovery about the speed of neutrinos

NOTE: Update added below.

A recent article reports a new discovery about the speed of neutrinos:

 Today, at the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, Japan, the OPERA collaboration announced that according to their latest measurements, neutrinos travel at almost exactly the speed of light. "Although this result isn't as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down," said CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci in a statement.

It turns out that you don't have to know any physics whatsoever in order to understand this discovery, or to understand why it was inevitable. In fact, the explanation is pretty obvious from the article, although neither the author nor any of the physicists involved seem to have noticed it.

The article explains that last September, OPERA announced the discovery that neutrinos actually travel slightly faster than the speed of light (denoted by c)! The OPERA people were well aware that this result would overturn a century of fundamental physics, so they made sure to check very carefully that their result was correct. After being unable to find anything wrong with it, they announce it to the world. And the world was not willing to believe it.

So what happened next? A number of other labs tried to reproduce OPERA's result, and none of them were able to. So OPERA was shut down and their physicists returned to their previous farming occupations.

Just kidding. After OPERA realized no one was buying their schtick, they realized they had to retreat. Exactly what happened next is not completely clear. It appears they first did what the technical support people always tell us to do, namely they checked that their cables were connected well. And they found one that wasn't. So they fixed the cable, and the speed of neutrinos decreased, but not below c. So they looked further and found a faulty clock. Replacing the clock caused the speed of neutrinos to fall just slightly below c, which is where they wanted it to be.

So what did they do next? They next replaced every other piece of their equipment, one piece at a time, to see how sensitive the results were to the vagaries of their equipment. Just kidding again. Next, they did absolutely nothing except to announce their new result. Which just happened to be the result they expected. And was exactly the result I would expect to be achieved by people who keep jiggling their equipment until their output is on the right side of c, and then stop jiggling. Now I suppose one can say that the fact that their original result was close to c is strong evidence that the correct value is also close to c. But surely the subsequent jiggling gives us no further confidence that this is the case, and there is no good reason to take their new error bars seriously.

There is disagreement within OPERA about how much jiggling there should have been before they announced the earlier, unbelievable result. But everyone seems to agree that if a result is believable and even desirable, then it should be believed, and that no (further) jiggling is necessary.

For more fun with OPERAtic neutrinos, consider the following passage:

Before OPERA, all the evidence for neutrino oscillations came from disappearances: detectors would end up with less of a certain type of neutrino than they started with, suggesting some had morphed into other flavours. Then in 2010, OPERA found the first tau neutrino in a beam of billions of muon neutrinos streaming to the Gran Sasso detectors from CERN. The discovery was a big deal at the time, but the team said they needed more tau neutrinos to make it statistically significant. Now, a second tau neutrino has shown up in the detectors, they report.

In unrelated news, I recently conducted an exclusive interview with Joe, a janitor who works for OPERA. Joe told me that he remembers very well the day when the second tau neutrino was discovered.  "I remember that day" he explained, "because that was the day I badly sprained my ankle tripping over a cable."  "I should have been more careful" he added. "That was the second time that happened to me."


update: September 4, 2012
Innumerable people have written to ask me what I think about the discovery of the Higgs boson (or at least a particle very similar to the Higgs boson) by CERN.  According to Joe Incandela (probably not the Joe quoted above who used to work at OPERA), in order to discover this particle CERN had to observe a number of collisions comparable to the number of grains of sand that can fit in an Olympic size swimming pool.  In all those collisions, the elusive particle only showed up a few dozen times.

But it appeared nearly exactly the number of times and in exactly the way that the theory predicted.

Not clear.  But if so, this is a triumph. And if not,  it's even better because it's a "gateway" to Something New. Why should we believe all this? Because Scientists did the Math, and determined that the observations could not be due to  anything except this "God particle" (or something similar). Sort of like when Creationists do the Math and conclude that a new species could not have arisen except by some sort of ... God particle. Of course, scientists correctly point out that the math done by the Creationists fails to take into account certain alternative natural mechanisms. So exactly what mechanisms did the CERN Scientists take into account in order to rule out explanations alternative to their desired one? At last count I calculated that the Large Hadron Collider consists of a gazillion separate parts, each of which can malfunction in interesting ways.  Did anybody do the math here?  As of last September, we know the answer is "NO". (See footnote.)

But not to worry. This is a result everybody wanted, so what's not to like?

(Footnote: Perhaps malfunctioning equipment can cause an error in a measurement, but not in the detection of a particle. I doubt this, since I think everything is measurement. I haven't read the technical literature. But the best we can say about these scientists is that they are treating us like idiots. The worst we can say is ...)

A new paper purporting to present a scientific analysis of ad hominem attacks in the "Climategate" emails has caught the attention of global warming skeptics. The paper's "analysis" has little value--the idea of scientifically analyzing ad hominem attacks is a bit dubious from the start, and this paper does nothing to vindicate the concept. Its primary attraction to the skeptics lies in its attitude towards the climate change question: it bends over backwards to be neutral, while tut-tutting the poor behavior of the climategate emailers--sort of Judith Curry-style. In this respect, it highlights the primary weakness of the climate change skeptics' case.

The problem with this detached, neutral, scientific conduct-focused approach is that the scientific questions can't be so cleanly separated from the conduct questions. It's nice to think that even when one side in a scientific debate--whether the establishment or the dissenters--is the scientific equivalent of flat-earthers or creationists, the other side can and should stick to careful technical arguments, and will eventually win the day. But people (and institutions) are human, "eventually" is a long time, and a lot of damage can be done when flawed ideas are advanced by unscrupulous means, and resisted only by the most fastidiously scrupulous ones. In this respect, the "alarmists" actually have the better of the argument.

"Fakegate" has provided an excellent illustration of this point. Most of the discussion on both sides has carefully avoided the question of the authenticity of the disputed "strategy memo"--one side emphasizing instead Glieck's dishonest methods in obtaining insider information from the Heartland Institute, and the other side, the contents of the acknowledged-authentic Heartland documents--for the understandable reason that the authenticity of the "strategy memo" cannot be proven one way or another, and probably never will be. Yet the final judgment on Glieck's actions depends crucially on that question: if the memo is indeed authentic, then Glieck's deception to expose an organization intent on undermining science education (among other sins outlined in the memo) is at least understandable. And conversely, if the memo is fake, then Glieck isn't simply an investigator with somewhat controversial methods--he's at the very least a reckless purveyor of slanders, and at worst an outright forger.

Likewise, if opponents of the "consensus view" on AGW really are the equivalent of flat-earthers or creationists, trying to replace legitimate scientific consensus in the service of a patently unscientific agenda, then scheming to keep them out of peer-reviewed journals and science classrooms is a perfectly reasonable, even noble endeavor, arguably necessary to defend the standards of scientific research and education from attack. It's only if the climate skeptics have a legitimate scientific case that the shenanigans of Jones, Mann et al. start to look disturbing.

And this is where the real failure of the broader scientific community becomes clear. Academic research has become so specialized and compartmentalized--for political reasons as much as for scientific ones--that entire scientific fields of highly dubious merit have sprung up, keeping large numbers of "scientists" busy doing research that is at best useless and at worst downright bogus, with nary a complaint from the collective scientific establishment. In this environment, it's simply expected that the scientific community will rush to the defense of any fairly small collection of scientists that comes under attack from without, regardless of the credibility of their conclusions and despite a complete lack of external scrutiny.

It should be obvious to any scientifically literate person that the claims of the AGW establishment are nowhere near iron-clad enough for all of their critics to be dismissed out of hand as cranks, lunatics and political hacks. Yet not only do I hear embarrassingly few scientists from outside the immediate field address this point, but nobody thinks it odd that these outside scientists should simply defer en masse to their specialist colleagues, no questions asked. If I didn't know better, I'd think the scientific research community as a whole cared more about solidarity in the protection of its status as collectively coddled, well-funded "experts" than about the quality of its scientific research.

Does this validate (a bit late) my last prediction for 2011?

It's time for ICBW's annual predictions post...First, a review of last year's predictions:

The US economy will continue to recover in 2011, and unemployment will drop, although not sharply. Inflation will remain tame, and short-term interest rates will therefore be kept very low, although long-term interest rates will rise substantially. Real estate will decline slightly again. The dollar will strengthen, oil and other commodity prices will be stable, and gold will drop.

Not a great prediction--in a nutshell, I expected a stronger recovery in the US economy, the absence of which weakened the US dollar, causing oil, gold and commodities to remain strong.

At least one US state or large municipality, and at least one European country, will experience a Greek/Irish-style debt crisis, which it will manage to muddle through, Greek/Irish-style, with a combination of austerity measures and external bailout funds.

Birmingham AL and Harrisburg PA both declared bankruptcy this year, and numerous states and municipalities have experienced major budget crunches. Several European countries (Italy, Portugal and Spain) joined Ireland and Greece to form the notorious "PIIGS" group.

The Afghan "surge" campaign will show signs of progress, but strong domestic opposition to it in the US will force an overall de-escalation of operations and/or a shortened time limit on deployment. The gradual American withdrawal from Iraq will continue, and internal instability there will again increase, although only modestly.

Pretty much on-target, although the American withdrawal from Iraq became markedly less gradual at the end of the year, and some say the resultant increase in instability has become correspondingly less modest.

Middle East peace negotiations will remain frozen. The Palestinian Authority will enact some kind of official declaration of independence or sovereignty, which will be nominally recognized by a bunch of countries around the world, but otherwise change nothing. Similarly, the UN tribunal will indict some Hezbollah officials for the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The move will be ignored in Lebanon, where Hezbollah's iron grip will continue unaffected. Both Hamas and Hezbollah will exercise relative restraint towards Israel, however, due to strengthened Israeli deterrence and Iranian government's preoccupation with consolidating its hold on power and shoring up its imploding internal economy.

Pretty much dead-on.

The Obama administration and Congressional Republicans will alternate between conciliation and confrontation over the year, co-operating on certain popular measures--possibly including deficit reduction and tax reform--while feuding bitterly over partisan ones, such as health care and the environment. GOP-run House hearings and proposed (but doomed) legislation will compete with symbolic executive and regulatory actions for partisan advantage through theatrics. Obama's approval ratings will improve to the low-50-percent range. On the Republican side, the 2012 presidential nomination race will by the end of the year produce neither a clear frontrunner nor a credible threat to Obama's re-election.

Perhaps they should have taken my advice--a year of continuous confrontation and hostility has badly tarnished the approval ratings of both the Republican Congress and the Obama administration. As a result, Mitt Romney is looking more and more like both a clear frontrunner and a credible threat to Obama's re-election.

Phenomena such as the Voca People and Mike Thompkins will lead a surge of popular interest in a cappella music.

Well, maybe next year...

And now for this year's fearless (or fear-mongering, or fearfully misguided, or merely frightful) predictions...

The Euro's never-ending soap opera will badly constrain European growth, and developing-world growth will also slow. As a result the US economy, though stronger than elsewhere, will grow only modestly in 2012. The stock market will decline as profits get squeezed, and interest rates and inflation will remain low. Real Estate will bottom out but remain flat, and oil prices will (finally!) drop modestly, as new supplies start to come online. The US dollar will continue the recovery it began in mid-2011, as other economies continue to show greater weakness.

At least one European country will begin concrete initial moves towards exiting the EMU (AKA the Euro). Rather than causing the predicted crisis, this move will eventually come to be recognized as the only realistic solution to Europe's financial crisis, and the question of which countries will require a bailout or default will shift to that of which countries will require a Euro exit.

The "Arab spring" turmoil in the Middle East will turn out to be more of a large-scale collapse than an awakening. Following the departure of American troops, Iraq will dissolve into the civil-war-like conditions of 2006, with the Iranian-backed Shi'ite government battling Saudi-supported Sunni rebels, and the Kurds increasingly clamoring for independence. Syria's Bashar Assad will remain in power, but will be forced into a protracted low-level conflict with a Turkish-supported insurgency, as Western sanctions bring the country's economy to its knees. Egypt will face food riots as its economy also collapses and foreign aid fails to prop up the government's finances enough to keep up the necessary rate of subsidized food imports. The new Islamist governments of Libya and Tunisia will attempt to impose strict Shari'a laws, but will find themselves unable even to maintain basic order in the face of domestic political infighting, corruption and tribalism. The PA will find itself under increasing pressure from a resurgent Hamas, and the two will spend most of the year alternating between making nice and fighting bitterly. Iran's nuclear program and apparatus of internal repression will continue to operate unimpeded--new sanctions will be imposed, which will be about as effective as the ones against Saddam Hussein were--but it will be too preoccupied with propping up its proxies in Syria and Iraq to cause much trouble elsewhere.

Amidst all this chaos, Israel will be a haven of stability, with ample time and resources to devote to its endless internal political squabbles.

At least one of the following autocrats will fall from power this year, due to death or ill health: Hugo Chavez, Ali Khamenei, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Robert Mugabe, Raul Castro.

Mitt Romney will very narrowly defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election. The Republicans will also win the Senate--but just barely. They will maintain control of the House of Representatives, but with a net loss of seats. Turnout will be low compared to recent presidential elections.

The issue of concussions will become the NFL's equivalent of MLB's steroid scandal.

There they are--read 'em and weep (or laugh derisively)...

The socioeconomic context of the "Occupy Wall Street" protests and its imitators has been most astutely analyzed by Volokh Conspirator Kenneth Anderson and blogger Megan McArdle. Riffing on columns by Anne Applebaum on the bifurcation of the American middle class and Ross Douthat on privilege protection by liberal interest groups, Anderson and McArdle identify the OWS movement as a cry of despair from the newly downwardly-mobile lower tier of the upper-middle class.

Applebaum's observations on the divided middle class are nothing new--I noted the phenomenon some twenty years ago, and it was one of my early blog topics. During the 1960s, America's white-collar middle class, having grown explosively and prospered spectacularly during the entire postwar boom, began to assert itself as a separate class, with economic, social and cultural interests that diverged sharply from those of the blue-collar lower-middle class. Much of the political and cultural turmoil of that decade and subsequent ones--the takeover of the Democratic Party by the (upper-middle class) New Left, with its emphasis on (white-collar-run) services for the poor, rather than the (blue-collar-run) union movement; the sexual and feminist revolutions, driven primarily by the more libertine mores of the upper-middle class; and of course the rise of the coalition uniting the blue-collar lower-middle class with the wealthy to form the modern conservative movement, as embodied by the Republican Party--can be traced to this historic schism within the American middle class.

The schism has also evolved over the decades since the 1960s. Most notably, the boom of the 1990s sharply reduced the political significance of serving the poor, as large numbers of them became gainfully employed, effectively joining the lower-middle class. At the same time, the wealth accumulated by the upper-middle class during that boom caused their interests to shift closer to those of the wealthy. By the crash of the late 2000s, in fact, the left-right partisan divide had come to resemble a straightforward split between the white-collar upper-middle class and their wealthy allies, on the one hand, and the blue-collar lower-middle class on the other.

The effects of that crash are the subject of Anderson's and McArdle's observations. As they point out, the upper-middle class is itself now splitting, with its more tenuously affiliated members--"the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control", as Anderson puts it--rapidly losing socioeconomic ground. (To that list of losers can also be added the legal profession, which now finds itself in the midst of a terrible glut, and journalism, which is being demolished by the Internet revolution.) Hard times, government budget cuts, and student loan debts imposed by skyrocketing college tuition rates, have conspired to markedly dim the once-bright futures of college graduates with ordinary liberal arts degrees and no other marketable skills--that is, a large portion of the less fortunate scions of the upper-middle class.

The "Occupy Wall Street" movement--and the protests in Israel which preceded it, I might add--appear to be this cohort's cri de coeur, as they demand what everyone would have assumed to be their natural birthright a decade ago: a comfortable, satisfying white-collar job, with all its accompanying economic security and social status. Although their official demands are incoherent--a hodgepodge of vaguely radical leftist and populist proposals to be funded by taxes extracted from "corporations" and "the rich"--their overall theme is society's obligation to pour billions of dollars into addressing the concerns of (and, implicitly, valuing--and appropriately remunerating--the contributions of) young, privileged-but-unambitious left-wing liberal arts graduates. Student loan forgiveness, money for environmentalist projects, anti-corporate regulatory regimes (presumably staffed by activist investigators)--these are hardly the stuff of revolution, but they certainly resonate among the protestors' demographic.

What, then, of the ostensible focus of the protests--wealth and income inequality, as symbolized by the supposed depradations of the "1 percent" at the top? Ironically, the protests themselves are proof that the problem is resolving itself as we speak. As Applebaum notes, "[d]espite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans...the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating." In other words, it's not the richest 1 percent, but rather the bifurcation of the American middle class itself, that has generated the most class friction and resentment in American society. And by slipping down and out of that coveted upper tier into a kind of hopeless socioeconomic limbo, the OWS protesters and their supporters are doing more to bridge the gap between the middle class' estranged upper and lower halves than any of their radical proposals could ever hope to accomplish. Eventually, once the howls of entitled indignance have trailed off, we may well see a resurgence of "middle-middle-class" solidarity, uniting middle-income white-collar and blue-collar workers to protect their common interests.

Numerous American journalists seem to be having great difficulty believing the US government's claim that the Iranian government attempted to get Mexican drug cartel members to assassinate the Israeli and Saudi ambassadors in Washington DC. Their argument? That the Iranians would never be so stupid and sloppy as to risk being exposed this way as direct, flagrant perpetrators of a terrorist attack on US soil.

Let's put aside for a moment the bizarre notion that the same regime whose first major international action was seizing the US embassy in Teheran and holding its American occupants hostage for more than a year, and which has spent the last thirty-plus years since then engaging in a steady and completely overt campaign of international terrorism aimed in no small part against the US and Americans, would suddenly get all squeamish about provoking American anger by attacking a couple of foreign ambassadors in Washington DC. Let us instead take it on faith that the Iranian regime would have truly feared being exposed as the initiators of this plot.

Now let's consider the baffled journalists' scintillating logic: it was totally unlike the Iranians, they say, to operate this way--so much so, in fact, that even US investigators doubted Iranian involvement until rock-solid proof more or less fell into their laps. In other words, had the Iranians not been so horribly unlucky as to have chosen a Mexican contact who happened also to have been a paid DEA informant willing to cooperate actively with an FBI anti-terrorist investigation, there would have been every reason to doubt after the fact that the Iranians were in any way involved. Indeed, even today, when the US government claims to have smoking-gun evidence, many journalists have trouble believing it.

Take away that evidence--that is, assume that the plot actually succeeded, with at best a few circumstantial hints of Iranian involvement--and throw in a well-timed fake-but-vaguely-plausible-sounding after-the-fact claim of responsibility from some imaginary new offshoot of al Qaeda, and these doubting journalists would presumably have lots and lots of company among those initially skeptical US government investigators.

Now, remind me again why the Iranians ought to have considered this operation to entail such a hugely reckless risk of exposure?

Amidst all the commentary about the recent rioting in Britain, one simple fact has been consistently ignored: for all their scale, the rioters represent a tiny minority of British "young people", or even "lower-class British young people". (Most of the rest, no doubt, are cowering at home with everyone else.) Those who interpret the unrest as proof of the foolish callousness of the government's austerity measures, or of the moral corruption of the welfare state, or of the decline of British culture, are therefore carelessly extrapolating from a few hoodlums to an entire generation of Britons.

Max Boot is more on target: whatever the "root causes" of the rioters' violent impulses--of which the most significant is no doubt the inevitable, inherent predilection of a certain fraction of humanity for mayhem--the direct cause of the riots has been simple opportunity, provided by negligent policing. We can say this with considerable confidence because the pattern unfolding in Britain--years of gradually increasing laxity in law enforcement, culminating in rampant lawlessness--is a near-perfect replica of the history of America during the latter half of the twentieth century.

From the mid-1960s through the early 1990s, riots in large American cities were frequent and devastating, and crime was rampant. Not only had huge swaths of every large city been turned into de facto "no go" zones, where criminals ruled and the police were effectively absent (allowing riots such as the LA riot of 1992 to spin out of control unimpeded), but even outside those areas, crime--including violent crime--was simply considered a normal element of city life. (I recall one New Yorker recounting to me his tale of being mugged in the middle of a Macy's department store.)

And then, following a massive crackdown on criminality--literally millions incarcerated, a flood of newly stringent laws, law enforcement rules and sentencing guidelines, and a revolution in sophisticated policing techniques--crime rates and criminal unrest finally peaked in the early 1990s, beginning a spectacular decline that has continued to this day. Most young urban Americans these days (outside a few still-dismal spots such as Detroit and Washington, DC) see the chaos in places like London and Paris and simply shake their heads, unaware that until a couple of decades ago, the head-shaking was all going in the other direction.

Note that the supposed "root causes" of crime--either an "underclass" culture of poverty, broken families, and low education and employment levels, or cuts in government social assistance and insufficient availability of social services, depending on whom you ask--have persisted at roughly the same (or worse) levels right through the period of steeply dropping crime rates. Law enforcement, on the other hand, has changed dramatically, and it's hard not to give it significant credit for the decline (though some have tried mightily--it seems that lawlessness, like terrorism, is fertile ground for political posturing). I predict that if the British simply try a dose of the American remedy--as it has been suggested they might do--they will experience the same "miraculous" cure.

The amount of attention being paid to the current negotiations in Washington DC over the debt ceiling simply baffles me. Granted, if the US government really defaults on its obligations, then the consequences could well be quite severe. But there's no significant chance of that happening--the political risks for all the participants are simply too great. And once that danger is discounted, the negotiations are reduced to nothing more than a large-scale, high-stakes form of bazaar haggling.

Even more ridiculous, though, is the meticulous attention paid to the ten-year projections that accompany each side's proposals. (The projected budget changes--whether cuts or tax increases--attributed to the various plans are always expressed as cumulative over ten years.) For one thing, these numbers depend heavily on economic forecasts that are inevitably off the mark, as often as not by wide margins. For another, the tax rates and expenditures they represent are constantly being tinkered with over time, and could change radically with the next big overhaul of the tax code, one or another major entitlement, or various discretionary programs. Just off the top of my head, for example, I can think of major tax rate changes enacted under every US president since Reagan, and major entitlement program changes under those same presidents, with the possible exception of George H.W. Bush. Thus the likelihood that any of the figures being bandied about will even come close to predicting actual government spending or revenue in any category is simply a fantasy.

Why, then, are these numbers seemingly taken so seriously? My best guess is that they're symbolic of the participating politicians' commitments to their coalitions and constituencies. Republicans are taking a hard stand against tax increases and in favor of budget cuts as a way of demonstrating that they won't betray their supporters--largely white, middle-class blue-collar and small-business voters. Conversely, Democrats, by their adamance in favor of larger tax increases and smaller budget cuts, are demonstrating backbone to their supporters: white-collar professionals, government employees and ethnic/racial minorities.

This show of backbone is particularly important because times are hard, and fear is a much stronger motivator than greed. To a typical voter, a politician who's happy to meet an opponent halfway appears more likely to trade away that particular voter's politically-obtained benefits or advantages, than a politician who will go to the mat on a completely arbitrary debate over a few hundred billion fantasy dollars in a meaningless projection. So each faction blusters and threatens, for fear that its supporters will abandon it as weak and fickle if it dares appear too ready to compromise.

The haphazard American response to the various upheavals in the Middle East, and in particular the current civil war unfolding in Libya, has provoked a great deal of speculation about the underlying strategy and reasoning guiding the Obama administration's foreign policy. This is a bit odd, since the underpinnings of its foreign policy have been crystal clear since at least the unfolding of the Honduran crisis in June of 2009, within the first six months of Obama's presidency.

During that crisis, the administration acted promptly and vigorously

• In defense of a rabidly anti-American Honduran president, against the more pro-American branches of the Honduran government;


• In support of generally anti-American multilateral organizations, such as the OAS; and


• In favor of an unpopular would-be authoritarian, battling against democracy, rule of law and popular opinion in his own country.

Since then, the administration's major initiatives have included

• A marked cooling in relations with democratic allies such as Israel, Britain and Colombia;


• Eager (and largely failed) attempts at "engagement" with virulently anti-American, anti-democratic regimes in Russia, China, Syria and Iran; and


• Enthusiastic embrace of anti-American multilateral institutions such as the UN and OIC.

The pattern is unmistakable--the only remaining question is whether the anti-American or anti-democratic impulse is more dominant. (Given the general hostility of multilateral organizations to American power, the multilateralist impulse is simply an aspect of the anti-American one.) And the popular uprisings in the Middle East have provided ample clarification: the most pro-American dictator in the region, Hosni Mubarak, was quickly abandoned in favor of a possibly more democratic but definitely more anti-American mob of protesters.

Since the start of the Cold War, the dominant foreign policy issue dividing politicians around the world has been the desirability of American power and influence. And in Western Europe and America, the broad coalitions of the "left" have lined up against it, while the opposing coalitions of the "right" lined up in favor of it. During the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, the leftist position was that America was supporting brutal right-wing dictators in the name of battling Communism, while conservatives made fine distinctions between "authoritarian" (i.e., pro-US) and "totalitarian" (i.e., pro-Soviet) dictatorships. Today, of course, their positions on democracy are essentially reversed, with "neoconservatives" taking an idealistic line in favor of democracy promotion, while left-wing "realists" defend pragmatic multilateral engagement with powerful tyrants.

This swap of positions demonstrates that in neither case is democracy the true motivating issue. Rather, it is the issue of American power that drives the debate on both sides, as the political contortions over Libya--the liberal obsession with avoiding the appearance of American leadership, the conservative fixation over saving America's reputation--once again demonstrate.

The recent resignation of the director of the London School of Economics over his university's lucrative and academically suspect relationship with Muammar Khaddafi's son has highlighted the general shamelessness of academics in courting wealthy foreign despots. (Daniel Drezner has a nice roundup of reports.) Middle Eastern studies gadfly Martin Kramer has been having loads of fun citing examples and implying that the academics in question--and by implication, academics in general--are essentially for sale to the highest bidder, happy to whitewash murderous tyrants if the pay is good.

In fact, the situation is far worse. Consider, for instance, the famous case of Lee Bass' $20 million-dollar grant to Yale University to expand its "Western Civilization" curriculum. Bass' grant was ultimately turned down, because he wanted to ensure that it was spent at least somewhat in the spirit in which it was offered. Similarly, Princeton sacrificed $50 million out of the Robertson's $900 million grant, plus another $40 million in legal fees, rather than accept the foundation's seemingly innocuous condition that the funds be used to prepare students for government service. Apparently, some principles are more important than mere money.

What, then, distinguishes merely questionable gifts from the unacceptably filthy ones? The easy answer, of course, is, "ideology". One could, for example, draw a parallel with universities' long history of selectively capitulating to threats of violence (only) from quarters representing the academic left's political fashions of the moment, from the appeasement of the student radicals of the 1960s to the most recent case of the Yale University Press' removal of the famous Mohammed cartoons from a scholarly book on the controversy. And no doubt a radical anti-American regime such as Khaddafi's can attract its share of ideological sympathy on American and European university campuses. But Saudi and Emirati potentates--hardly the campus revolutionary's idols--have also received more than their share of academic sycophancy. There appears to be more at work here than just ideology.

I believe Paul Rahe has identified that key extra element: prestige. It is the currency of the modern academic--indeed, of the professional scholar in every age--and he or she therefore evaluates every seductive offer or menacing threat in light of its dividends in that currency. Certainly the Khaddafis' reputations profited from their hob-nobbing with world-renowned scholars, and fromhaving the latter write glowing op-eds about them. But for the scholars, too, public engagement as an "advisor" to a national ruling family--even one as odious as Libya's--was a badge of global importance, and clearly more than one mere egghead was excited to wear it (at least until said family's status as national rulers suddenly started looking a little shaky).

Contrast this delicate quid pro quo with the Bass and Robertson cases, in which some wealthy industrialists attempted to pay a couple of leading academic institutions to do their bidding. No reciprocal status marker was offered--just cash, in return for the humiliation of being explicitly told what to teach. It's hardly surprising that the institutions in question found that deal rather unappealing.

There's a possible lesson there for philanthropists seeking to influence the direction of academia: mere bribery is unlikely to succeed. Subtler appeals to academic vanity--prizes, say, or appointments to positions of (real or apparent) influence--are likely to work much better.

This past weekend's New York Times story on the Stuxnet computer worm contained a wonderful, fiendishly clever little detail:

The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the
nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators,
like a pre-recorded security tape in a bank heist, so that it would appear that
everything was operating normally while the centrifuges were actually tearing
themselves apart.

Now, I don't happen to believe for a minute that the program did any such thing. First of all, it'd be very difficult to do so--you'd have to alter all the changing details of operation, such as timestamps and run durations, while keeping all the consistent details the same. Anyone who understood the data generated by the monitoring systems that well would almost certainly be able to have the software simply create bogus-but-plausible readings out of whole cloth, rather than record and replay samples of previous problem-free runs. (And how would the software know those previous runs were actually problem-free, anyway? A log that contained data showing the same rare anomaly over and over would look mighty suspicious...)

On the other hand, suppose you're an intelligence official working on the Stuxnet project. You know that the worm has succeeded in disabling some fraction--but not all, and probably not even most--of the Iranian regime's nuclear fuel-generating centrifuges, and is now being thoroughly purged from all its facilities. How do you maximize the cost and difficulty of the Iranians' task, given that your whole cyber-sabotage operation has pretty much played itself out?

Why, you drop a little hint to the New York Times, to the effect that all the Iranian systems that appear to have been untouched by Stuxnet may simply have been faking it, presenting perfectly fine data while actually being infected and destroying themselves. That way, the Iranians--if they're naive enough to believe the New York Times--will have to minutely examine every single machine in their facility, to check for physical signs of damage, rather than simply scrubbing the facilities that appear to have gone awry. Fiendishly clever, indeed!

2010 wasn't quite as good as 2009 for this blog's annual end-of-year predictions, but it wasn't too bad, either. Here's a wrap-up of the results, followed by a new batch of prognostications, sure to demonstrate the principle of "regression to the mean"...

• 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.

Right on the big picture, but off on most of the details. The economy was indeed nearly stagnant through 2010--so much so, in fact, that fears of a double-dip kept even long-term interest rates low, impeded the dollar's recovery, and sustained the gold bubble. The low long-term bond yield also sparked a stock market rally in the fall that carried the indices back above their January levels. (On the other hand, I called the real estate market pretty accurately.)

• 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.

Pretty much on target, although the ayatollahs in particular appear to have generally been cowed rather than targeted. (The arrest of Rafsanjani's grandson, for instance, seems to have kept him in line.) Indeed, if it hadn't been for Stuxnet, the country might have fallen off the news radar almost entirely.

• 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.

Pretty much spot-on, I'd say. I've added supporting links above from 2010 news reports.

• 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.

Okay, this one was way off-base. The Netanyahu government appears to have had considerably more negotiating spine than I anticipated--thereby avoiding the need for military spine...

• 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.

A couple of minor details were off (the Senate version of the health care bill did pass after all, and there was no major staff shuffle at the White House), but overall, I think I captured the spirit of the Obama administration's year quite well.

• 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.

Again, I slipped on a detail--the GOP did, in fact, win control of the House of Representatives. Otherwise, the above paragraph stands up pretty well--including the bit about the "Contract with America" knockoff.

• 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.

Does this count?

And now for this year's predictions:

• The US economy will continue to recover in 2011, and unemployment will drop, although not sharply. Inflation will remain tame, and short-term interest rates will therefore be kept very low, although long-term interest rates will rise substantially. Real estate will decline slightly again. The dollar will strengthen, oil and other commodity prices will be stable, and gold will drop.


• At least one US state or large municipality, and at least one European country, will experience a Greek/Irish-style debt crisis, which it will manage to muddle through, Greek/Irish-style, with a combination of austerity measures and external bailout funds.


• The Afghan "surge" campaign will show signs of progress, but strong domestic opposition to it in the US will force an overall de-escalation of operations and/or a shortened time limit on deployment. The gradual American withdrawal from Iraq will continue, and internal instability there will again increase, although only modestly.


• Middle East peace negotiations will remain frozen. The Palestinian Authority will enact some kind of official declaration of independence or sovereignty, which will be nominally recognized by a bunch of countries around the world, but otherwise change nothing. Similarly, the UN tribunal will indict some Hezbollah officials for the murder of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The move will be ignored in Lebanon, where Hezbollah's iron grip will continue unaffected. Both Hamas and Hezbollah will exercise relative restraint towards Israel, however, due to strengthened Israeli deterrence and Iranian government's preoccupation with consolidating its hold on power and shoring up its imploding internal economy.


• The Obama administration and Congressional Republicans will alternate between conciliation and confrontation over the year, co-operating on certain popular measures--possibly including deficit reduction and tax reform--while feuding bitterly over partisan ones, such as health care and the environment. GOP-run House hearings and proposed (but doomed) legislation will compete with symbolic executive and regulatory actions for partisan advantage through theatrics. Obama's approval ratings will improve to the low-50-percent range. On the Republican side, the 2012 presidential nomination race will by the end of the year produce neither a clear frontrunner nor a credible threat to Obama's re-election.


• Phenomena such as the Voca People and Mike Thompkins will lead a surge of popular interest in a cappella music.

If you disagree--or think you can do better--feel free to add a comment with your own predictions, and I'll review them along with mine next January...

The notoriety of Wikileaks completely baffles me. The huge collection of US State Department cables it recently published is interesting enough in places, but the reality is that Wikileaks' involvement in the cables' publication is entirely incidental. There are literally thousands of sites that happily accept and distribute anonymously uploaded material, any one of which could have been used by the cables' leaker. (The famous climategate emails, for example, were uploaded to a server in Russia, and their location then revealed on multiple blogs, allowing many readers of those blogs to download the entire archive within hours.)

It's shocking, to be sure, that such a large volume of State Department correspondence should be so easy for a single low-level official to copy and leak. But once the materials were in the hands of the leaker, widely disseminating them would have been utter child's play--with or without Wikileaks. The fact that Wikileaks has any place at all, let alone a central one, in the public debate over this story, says far more about the apparently extraordinary self-promotion skills of its founder than about his organization's global (in)significance.

I, too, have been thinking about everybody's favorite children-blowing-up movie, and the minds of the people who released it. Of course, the only way to think about it that doesn't make my own head explode is that it was made as a satire of environmentalists, by their opponents. In that context, it makes sense to ask whether or not it is fair, whether or not it is funny, and whether or not it is in good taste. As a film made by environmentalists, it makes no sense whatsoever. Dan's attempt to get inside the minds of the producers is brave indeed. But I don't buy his view that environmentalists view opponents as minor social annoyances, much as we view people who take a cell phone call at dinner.

Environmentalists do not deserve the benefit of the doubt. Consider this post, which contains just some of the very nasty plans that prominent environmentalists have announced for those of us who are not yet assimilated. And there is no shortage of direct violence by environmentalists as well. And environmentalists -- including the relatively sane ones -- know about these instances. For an environmentalist to "joke" about blowing up opponents is a bit like anti-abortionists "joking" about blowing up people who support legalized abortion; or Muslims "joking" about blowing up opponents of the ground zero mosque: it's not something I can get my head around.

In fact, I have no explanation at all for the mind-set of the people who made that movie.

I do, however, wish to point out one thing about the movie that I have not seen other people remark on. One of the many ways in which this movement is fraudulent is that their good cops tell us, "all we're asking for is this little thing"; but when pressed, the bad cops explain that the little thing was just an appetizer, and that the main course will -- and must -- completely overturn the economy of the world. (This point was also made in my out-of-date (even then) post.) And we see this in the movie as well. The teacher says:

The idea is everyone STARTS cutting their carbon emissions by 10% thus, keeping the planet safe for everyone, EVENTUALLY.

Clearly there will be further rounds of cutting, but don't worry about that right now. Just remember to think right, and to wear a raincoat to class.

Michael Kinsley is fond of pointing out the contradiction between anti-abortionists' moral absolutism and their rejection of its natural consequences. If abortion is, as pro-life groups routinely claim, morally indistinguishable from murder, he notes, then violence in defense of murder victims--murder of abortionists, for instance--ought to seem eminently justifiable to the entire movement, rather than just to a tiny fringe. Kinsley concludes, quite plausibly, that anti-abortion activists can't possibly believe their own absolutist rhetoric.

I have a similar reaction to the celebrity video and subsequent apology published by a British environmental group called 10:10. The video presents several vignettes in which people are encouraged to volunteer to reduce their personal greenhouse gas footprints by 10 percent...and those who refuse are shown being blown to pieces in blood-spattering explosions at the press of a big red button.

Opponents have responded with outrage, suggesting that the film exposes the brutally totalitarian mindset of the 10:10 group in particular, and the environmentalist movement in general. The apology reassures readers that the whole thing was intended to be funny, not threatening--the script was, after all, written by Richard Curtis, the screenwriter behind such wildly successful comedies as the Blackadder series and Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Here's where Kinsley's point comes into play. Let us assume, for a moment--and I see no reason to doubt it--that the film was, indeed, meant to be humorous. What does that say about its creators? Certainly not that they're wild-eyed totalitarian fanatics--such people might find the idea of blowing up opponents heartening and praiseworthy, but they wouldn't consider it particularly funny. On the contrary, blowing up dissenters only comes off as humorous if the punishment is understood to be wildly disproportionate to the crime, rather than commensurate with it.

In particular, the premise of social annoyances--queue-jumping, inconsiderate driving, loud and disruptive cellphone use and the like--being punished with over-the-top violence has been a stock comedy theme for years. In the 2000 horror film spoof, "Scary Movie", for example, a disruptive moviegoer is murdered by a masked killer, to the applause of annoyed fellow audience members.

And indeed, the 10:10 film never depicts anyone either justifying or acting on environmentalist principles--the rigidly enforced social norm it depicts requires only vocal embrace of the general idea of "saving the planet", and a cheery promise to do something concrete toward that end at a later date. The gory fate imposed on those who dare dissent isn't argued for or justified--it's simply a Scary Movie-style comic exaggeration of the cold disgust that we all feel towards those whose behavior we find unacceptably rude, crass or tasteless.

The 10:10 movement's critics' rants about bloodthirsty totalitarians are thus badly off the mark. The filmmakers have in fact shown themselves to be nothing more than shallow conformist trend-followers, for whom failure to pay nominal lip service to fashionable environmentalist cant is intolerably rude and inconsiderate, in the same way that talking loudly on a cellphone in a movie theater is intolerably rude and inconsiderate. If they really believed that shirkers who neglect the 10:10 commitment deserve to die, then they could never have portrayed the idea of killing them so lightheartedly.

The story of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who committed suicide after his roommate broadcast live video over the Internet of him engaged in gay sex acts in his dorm room, has certainly confused a lot of commentators. To begin with, it's clearly not, as some have claimed, about "cyberbullying". There is no indication that Clementi was harassed or threatened in any way, and the passive-aggressive tone of the perpetrator's Twitter messages (not to mention their act itself) strongly suggests that they were themselves most likely incapable of even attempting to intimidate Clementi.

Second, it's only peripherally about society's attitudes towards homosexuality. While Clementi's roommate, Dharun Ravi, appears to have been unhappy about Clementi's use of their shared dorm room for gay sex (among other points of friction between them), he is not known either to have directly disparaged homosexuality, or to have been motivated by Clementi's orientation. Indeed, Ravi's action appears to have been completely opportunistic--he simply activated the Webcam on his own computer, sitting in his own dorm room, from a friend's dorm room. There's no reason to believe he would have behaved differently had his disliked roommate's companion been female. (It's likely, though, that had either participant in such a heterosexual tryst committed suicide on hearing of having starred in a live Internet video, the public reaction would have been far more muted and less passionately sympathetic.)

No, the real moral of this story is one I have touched on before: the failure of modern etiquette to evolve quickly enough to keep up with modern communications technology. Ravi and his friend appear to have thought little about the propriety, let alone the consequences, of their video streaming project before embarking on it. Perhaps they were simply not tuned in to current social conventions regarding such acts--but far more likely, such social conventions simply don't exist yet.

In Robert Altman's 1970 film M*A*S*H*, the story's "heroes" engage in an audio, heterosexual version of Ravi's stunt, publicly humiliating two "villains". (There was no Internet at the time, of course, but the army camp's public address system served as a substitute.) Now, I've long condemned this film's celebration of its heroes' shocking cruelty, but to the best of my knowledge, no other commentator has characterized the stunt of broadcasting audio of a sexual tryst between two unsympathetic characters as anything other than hilarious. On the other hand, the scenario enacted in the film was until recently sufficiently remote from common experience to be easy for audiences to distance themselves from. What makes the Clementi story so unsettling is precisely that what was once a wildly improbable gag, suitable for a ribald, off-the-wall comedy, can now be a casual, unthinking act by a disgruntled college student with no special equipment. And it will probably be quite some time before social conventions catch up to that technological shift.

Two comparisons brought to mind by recent events in the world of pop culture:

• The evolution of pop music lyrics over the last forty-three years: from here to here (foul language warning), over essentially the same melody.
• In film: from terrorist to would-be pop star; in real life: from would-be pop star to terrorist.

The standard social conservative argument against gay marriage is that it undermines and trivializes traditional forms of marriage and the family, by incorporating into them relationships that lack the same level of solemn responsibility and commitment. Two prominent moderate conservatives, Ross Douthat and David Frum, have finally managed to identify the main problem with this argument: it gets the flow of causation backwards. It's not that acceptance of gay marriage undermines traditional marriage, but rather that gay marriage couldn't possibly have reached today's levels of popular approval, were it not for the fact that the ideal of marriage as a socially enforced rock-solid commitment to fidelity and family is already, for all intents and purposes, moribund in the Western world. In an era when ordinary heterosexuals routinely enter into--and drift out of--"relationships" of greater or lesser length that can include sex, cohabitation or even reproduction, more or less irrespective of whether or not they choose to add a marriage ceremony into the mix, it's hard to see why anyone would bother to take a stand on the minor detail of whether the redundant formalism that is modern marriage might also be stretched to include yet another category of indeterminately casual or serious liaison.

In another respect, though, both Frum and Douthat hew to the standard conservative line about traditional marriage, by fretting about the effects on society of its collapse. In their characterization, disdain for the traditional family is a kind of pernicious cultural fashion, rather like uneconomical recycling programs or ugly, annoying "transgressive" art, that affluent Westerners have affected as a form of social snobbery, and that has by now percolated down to--and wrought havoc upon--the masses. The middle and lower classes, according to their theory, have embraced the elite's lack of sexual and domestic discipline, thereby ruining their prospects for social and economic stability, let alone advancement.

To be frank, I once subscribed to this view myself. But the stubborn failure of traditional marriage to revive itself, despite all the supposed incentives it offers, has led me to rethink this analysis. And I've arrived at a very different conclusion: the feminist and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, far from being mere elite cultural fads, were in fact fundamental, historic breaks with the past, of which the collapse of the traditional family is just one facet.

Although it is rarely stated explicitly, the traditional family rests on a basic assumption: that in the vast majority of cases, a woman needs (or at least benefits greatly from having) a man to provide for her. And for most of human history, that was simply true, because much of the business of survival involved physically strenuous activities--first hunting, later agriculture, and even, fairly recently, heavy industry--to which men were significantly more suited, and which were incompatible with maternal care of infants.

By the late twentieth century, however, technology and its attendant prosperity together allowed women to be more or less fully competitive with men at the majority of reasonably well-paying occupations. Meanwhile, medical advances have vastly reduced the amount of time a woman has to spend caring for infants in order to be confident of raising a small number of them to adulthood. Thus, for the first time in history, a critical mass of women have truly come to need men, as the old feminist saying goes, "like a fish needs a bicycle".

And it is this newfound independence that has brought about the destruction of the traditional family, not vice versa. While the conventional wisdom characterizes men as reveling in their sexual freedom while women still pine for a stable marriage and family, it is in fact women who have shifted their position on marriage most dramatically. Well over half of divorces, for example, are instigated by women, and the surge in extramarital sexual partnerships, from casual relationships to long-term unmarried cohabitations, would be impossible without women's consent to them--something that would have been simply unheard-of fifty years ago, when most women's economic stability was dependent on marital stability. Today's women, freed by the prospect of financial independence, can now structure their personal relationships the way men have long preferred to: based on emotional preference, rather than material need. And as it turns out--for many of them, though certainly not all of them--emotional preference is less conducive to stable, lifelong marital commitment than material need used to be.

Now, it's quite possible that social conservatives are correct in warning that this shift has had, and will continue to have, deleterious effects on society. In particular, there's the whole matter of childrearing: now that women are no longer bound by economic need to the role of wife and mother, they are having, on average, far fewer children, and caring for them less. The effects of this new family profile on society are only beginning to make their impact, and we don't know for sure that they will be even tolerably benign in the longer term.

But neither are we likely to be able to put the genie back into the bottle. If I'm correct that today's radically altered options and incentives for women are a result of prosperity and technology--two things we probably can't give up even in the unlikely event that we wanted to--then it's surely far more productive to consider how society can best adapt to the new reality of domestic instability, than to pine for a not-so-happy past era in which economic and technological backwardness made it less of a problem.

A maybe-not-so-old joke tells of a party of explorers of several different nationalities captured by cannibals in some remote jungle. The cannibal chief offers each a last wish before being eaten, and each responds in a noble-but-feckless manner befitting his nationality. The last captive, an Israeli, asks, oddly enough, for the chief to punch him in the stomach. The chief, nonplussed, complies, whereupon the Israeli doubles over, pulls a pistol from under his pant leg, shoots the chief, and in the ensuing confusion, leads the party to safety in the surrounding jungle. "Why didn't you shoot him sooner?", asks one. "What?", he replies, "and be branded an evil Zionist aggressor?"

I'm reminded of this joke when reading about the recent "Gaza flotilla incident", in which Israeli naval forces boarded a boat attempting to run Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, only to be set upon by dozens of "peace activists" wielding knives, iron bars and other weapons. The consensus so far among pro-Israel commentators (of the reaction from the usual anti-Israel suspects, the less said the better) seems to be that (1) this episode was a public relations fiasco, and (2) the Israeli Navy was derelict in not using overwhelming force to subdue the thugs aboard the boat without offering any opportunity for effective resistance.

This consensus strikes me as utterly wrongheaded. Given the level of preparation and dedication displayed by the "activists" aboard the Mavi Marmara, casualties were simply inevitable. If the figures being bandied about (10-15 killed, dozens injured) are accurate, then the fighting must have continued despite casualties having been taken. And if the knife-and-bat-wielders were willing to take casualties and go on fighting, then the Israelis would simply have had no choice but to inflict them in the course of taking control of the ship, no matter how overpowering their numbers. The spectacle of Hamas and its allies waving the bloody shirts of killed or injured "peace activists" was thus a foregone conclusion, once the Israelis had made the decision not to allow the ship to run the blockade.

On the other hand, if overwhelming force had been used to suppress the resistance, several Israeli commandos would have avoided injury--but there also would have been no footage of "peace activists" stabbing and beating Israeli soldiers. If the main point of the exercise was to win the propaganda war, then the Israeli Navy's (probably inadvertent) decision to let a few of its commandos get badly roughed up was quite possibly the best option available. Like the Israeli in the joke, they're harder to brand as Zionist aggressors now that they've taken a figurative fist to the stomach.

The most important test, though, is yet to come: the disposition of the boats. Having been used in a violent attack on Israeli military personnel, they should be treated as captured enemy materiel, and confiscated. This would be by far the most effective measure the Israeli government could take against the would-be blockade-busters. Fanatical "activists", after all, are a dime a dozen. But large boats are really expensive, and even Hamas' backers can't afford to keep supplying them--and losing them--indefinitely.

Peter Beinart's cri de coeur in the New York Review of Books about how non-liberal American Jews aren't liberal enough, or something, will be familiar to readers of his small coterie of fellow anguished liberal Zionists, such as Jeffrey Goldberg and Leon Wieseltier. But in practice, it's not substantially different from the critiques of more straightforwardly Israel-bashing liberal Jews such as Joe Klein, Ezra Klein or Matthew Yglesias. The critique, which Beinart follows quite precisely, goes roughly as follows: in the old days--say, before the rise of the Likud party--liberal, secular Israel used to be a comfortable object of affection for liberal, secular American Jews. But today, Israel is less liberal and less secular, and thus increasingly alienates liberal American Jews, who respond with hostility towards Israeli policies and actions. Non-liberal, non-secular American Jews, on the other hand, continue to support and defend non-liberal, non-secular Israel, and this is a moral failing of the first order, given Israel's shocking deviations from secular liberalism.

Now, as a purely objective matter, this argument suffers from multiple serious historical distortions. Beinart's bizarre suggestion that "[f]or several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door" is simply not accurate--during the Oslo years, American Jewish liberals had no problem supporting the Rabin, Peres and Barak governments.

Nor is there any historical basis for Beinart's claim that "comfortable Zionism has [recently] become a moral abdication". The liberal, secular Labor governments of the pre-Likud era, while certainly more liberal and secular, were objectively no less guilty of any of the "crimes" of which the current Israeli state typically stands accused. The annexation of Jerusalem, the establishment of Jewish communities in the West Bank and Gaza strip, pre-emptive invasions of neighboring territory, the assassination of terrorists--all these predated the first Likud government. And the consequences of these actions for Arab civilians were no less severe back when the lead perpetrators were Laborites.

Of course, back then, that was the whole point. It wasn't, after all, Israel's granola-munching pacifism that thrilled American Jews in 1967, when it turned apparent imminent doom into lightning conquest, or in 1976, when it launched a daring hostage-freeing raid hundreds of miles away in Entebbe. In those days, an unapologetically aggressive Israel was a source of pride, not shame, for American Jews.

But if Israel hasn't changed as much as its critics claim, American Jews have changed a great deal more. It was only during the 1960s that the discriminatory barriers that had previously kept Jews out of the highest levels of the American establishment began to crumble. To an American Jew in 1967, a beleaguered Israel turned conquerer was a fitting symbol for an insecure minority finally winning a chance to conquer the highest rungs of American society. Zionism was thus the rallying cry of the assimilationist, proclaiming that secular, liberal Jews, by shedding their pious, persecuted shtetl identities, could be proud, equal citizens of America, just as secular, liberal Israel, by shedding its diaspora vulnerability, could be a proud equal member of the society of nations.

Today, however, the children of those assimilated liberal Jews have completely arrived. No longer haunted by the sense of apartness that dogged their parents and grandparents, Jews like Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias see themselves as liberal, secular Americans tout court. For them, Zionism--even without the Likudnik/Haredi angle--is an unwelcome reminder of the old sense of otherness that they would rather avoid feeling, now that they have the option.

It is this swing against Zionism among assimilated American Jews that is creating so much conflict in more seriously Jewish liberals such as Beinart, who aren't seeking assimilation into American society as a whole, but rather into the liberal intelligentsia--including its nominally Jewish contingent. Mere anti-Israel animus on the left can't be the explanation--it's nothing new, after all, and pro-Zionist liberal Jews have long resisted its pull and vigorously countered its arguments (including a lonely few, such as Goldberg, Wieseltier and Jonathan Chait, who continue to do so to this very day). In fact, the liberal arguments in defense of Zionism are stronger than ever these days, now that even the Likud accepts a Palestinian state in principle, while Israel's Arab and Palestinian opponents have swung towards a rejectionism that's not only as brutally violent as ever, but also increasingly theocratic, quasi-fascist and nakedly anti-Semitic.

On substantial grounds alone, then, the liberal Zionist's defense against leftist anti-Zionist agitation ought to be far stronger and more confident today than, say, twenty years ago. (In the very issue of the New York Review of Books containing Beinart's essay, an advertisement by a long list of American leftists accuses the Obama administration of war crimes in the Middle East--specifically, the targeting of Al Qaeda civilians for airstrikes by unmanned drones. Yet somehow, mainstream liberals seem to have managed not to collapse in anguish over the alleged incipient fascism of the Obama administration.)

But as I've pointed out before, international political campaigns like the current one against Israel (or the one against South Africa before it, for that matter) aren't motivated by substance, but rather by their symbolic value in the context of other (usually more local) political battles. And now that such a large fraction of assimilated, secular, liberal American Jews have abandoned Zionism altogether--while non-secular, non-liberal American Jews continue to embrace it--it's much more difficult for a self-identified liberal American Jew like Beinart to break ranks with his chosen side in this domestic sectarian conflict.

Third in a series: Here's the last modern pop song you'll ever need to listen to (caution: dirty words again)...

As a followup to my previous service to readers, here's the trailer for the last Hollywood film you'll ever need to see.

More Advice For Men
I discussed here what we learned from the films "Groundhog Day" and "Superman" about how a typical man should go about winning the heart of the woman he desires. But what if, in addition, he wants to regain the respect of his nine year old son?

(Spoilers ahead!)

Fortunately, Hollywood has some answers for us here as well. One helpful film is "Night At The Museum". Ben Stiller is rejected by both his son and the woman he loves, until he hits upon the obvious solution: become the night watchman at a magical museum where everything comes alive at night! Of course, that's not nearly enough. He has to gain the trust of most of the museum's inhabitants -- including monkeys, dinosaurs, cowboys, ancient Romans, Teddy Roosevelt and Attila the Hun -- and organize them all to defeat the bad guys. Then he introduces the woman he loves to her role model Sacajawea and voila, he gets all the love and sex and respect he deserves. Piece of cake.

The reason I'm writing a(n infrequent) blog post about this is because I just finished watching "2012". John Cusack has the same problem that Ben Stiller had: how to gain the love of a woman (his ex-wife) and the respect of his son (who won't even call him "dad"). It turns out that John's solution is a bit more difficult than Ben's. John must save his family from, quite literally, the end of the world. He must drive the car while dodging huge projectiles emitted from sudden volcanoes, while at the same time avoiding massive rifts that are opening up in the Earth, and driving around and through falling skyscrapers. For a start. He must then get everyone on board a number of airplanes (strangely, he doesn't have to pilot the airplanes himself) and make their way to a secret location in China, stowaway aboard an "Ark", dive underwater to fix the Ark's hydraulic system, and then surface for a well deserved hug from woman and son.

I suppose one can say that these movies are really about special effects, and the motivations of the characters are irrelevant. But both of the directors felt they had to give some motivation to the main character other than survival, and they both chose the same motivation. They felt that the audience would naturally and unthinkingly accept the premise that for a man, winning the love of a woman and the respect of a son is a Herculean task of Earth-shattering difficulty.

As a service to readers, here's the last television news report you'll ever need to watch. (Note: contains a naughty word.)

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.