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Wednesday, January 07, 2015

Playing Catch-up With Politics

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Jan. 7, 2015
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No. 153
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By Jonathan V. Last
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COLD OPEN
A lot's happened while we were away, so this week is going to be one long, extended Required Reading list with, I hope, enough material to keep you busy for the rest of the week. We'll start out with pieces from the world of politics, and then move on to what I've cleverly delineated as "Not Politics."

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* Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit has an entertaining riff on Jeb Bush's big jump in the 2016 polls. The overall poll numbers are-obviously-meaningless. But Allahpundit wonders if the crosstabs, which ask respondents how they feel about Bush's specific positions, aren't kind of interesting: "Look again at that table of Jeb's heresies. Is it, in fact, bad news for him-or good news? For each question, no less than 58 percent of Republicans say his position will either make no difference to their vote or will make them more likely to vote for him. Since probably 35-40 percent of the GOP electorate won't vote for an anointed RINO like him under any circumstances, that means his heresies aren't hurting him much with the 60 percent of the electorate he's counting on. Good news for him, no?"

* Molly Ball has a long, loooong profile of Erick Erickson in the Atlantic. It's both fair-minded and illuminating. And a welcome bit of mainstream attention for one of my favorite conservative radio hosts. If you take nothing else away from the piece, soak up Erickson's call for conservatives to return to being happy warriors. Erickson shows that you can be political without living a politicized life.

* Just before Christmas, Harvard's Program on Constitutional Government posted video from a discussion about the 2014 midterms that was held after the election. It features Harvey Mansfield, William Galston, and the boss, Bill Kristol. And it's easily the most interesting conversation I've heard about the midterm results. Even two months later, it's well worth your time.

* Also worth your time is another video from Mansfield's Program on Constitutional Government-this one a lecture by my colleague Christopher Caldwell about the Baby Boomers and the endless loop of the 1960s in which we seem to be trapped in America. (If you're into podcasts, you can find both this lecture and the Galston-Kristol discussion in the iTunes podcast portal. That's how I listen to them.)

* We're a little more than two weeks past the despicable murder of two New York City policemen, but the fallout continues. As a policy matter, the killing has made it almost impossible for any real attempt at reform in American law enforcement. As a practical matter, it has created the potential for political calamity in New York as neither the city's mayor, nor the police department's union leadership, has behaved with much prudence.

Mayor de Blasio imprudently criticized the police at a tense moment and in a manner that created the maximum amount of heat while shedding the minimum amount of light. The NYPD responded by accusing him of complicity in the murder, turning their backs on him (both figuratively and literally), and then staging an informal work slowdown.

Some thoughts: (1) One officer explained the work stoppage to the New York Post by saying that they were making arrests "only when then have to." Shouldn't that be the standard for an arrest in the first place? (2) As Tim Carney noted over at the Washington Examiner, while society certainly needs the police, it's not clear where the point of diminishing returns sits with regards to law enforcement. And it will be instructive to see how NYC's crime statistics overlay with the NYPD work stoppage. (3) Ben Domenech points out, correctly I think, that there is something unpleasant- undemocratic, even-in New York's police officers refusing to do their jobs because of a political disagreement with the city's mayor.

Only fifteen percent of America's active-duty military support President Obama. Yet they do not turn their backs on him, or refuse to carry out the commander-in-chief's orders. Bill de Blasio may be foolish, vain, and much else. But for the NYPD to refuse to do its job suggests that they do not understand who truly serves whom. This is just one more data point on the wedge that can (and should) be driven between public- and private-sector unions.

* Finally, Walter Russell Mead has an essay on Obama and the liberal cocoon, trying to determine what caused the current wreckage of liberalism:

[Eric] Alterman argues, the Democrats' turn to social rather than economic issues (gentry liberalism vs. populism) hasn't been helpful. Focusing on "immigration, reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, gun control, etc." at a time when real wages are stagnant or declining for most Americans is a recipe for political failure.

But this analysis, cogent as it is, raises another question: why were liberals so feckless in power? Why did they blow the historic opportunity that the Bush implosion gave them?

What liberals are struggling to come to grips with today is the enormous gap between the dominant ideas and discourse in the liberal worlds of journalism, the foundations, and the academy on the one hand, and the wider realities of American life on the other. Within the magic circle, liberal ideas have never been more firmly entrenched and less contested. Increasingly, liberals live in a world in which certain ideas are becoming ever more axiomatic and unquestioned even if, outside the walls, those same ideas often seem outlandish.

We'll move on to the Not Politics section down below.


LOOKING BACK
"'We know there were numerous warnings of the events to come on September 11,' McKinney said that day. 'What did this administration know and when did it know it, about the events of September 11? Who else knew, and why did they not warn the innocent people of New York who were needlessly murdered? What do they have to hide?' McKinney thought she knew the answer. 'What is undeniable,' she explained, 'is that corporations close to the administration have directly benefited from the increased defense spending arising from the aftermath of September 11th.'

"It was all downhill from there. On April 12, 2002, a synopsis of the interview appeared in the Washington Post. Democrats began distancing themselves from McKinney. She released a statement admitting she was 'not aware of any evidence' proving 'President Bush or members of his administration have personally profited from the attacks of 9/11,' but 'a complete investigation might reveal that to be the case.' Then again, it might not. For that matter, McKinney might have had no idea what she was talking about."

-Matthew Continetti, "Cynthia McKinney (D-Conspiracy)" from our January 3 / January 10, 2005, issue.

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THE READING LIST
Lena Dunham's "Republican" "rapist" was neither of those things.
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Tracking the rise of single motherhood in America.
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The Internet ruins everything: Part 7,952.
INSTANT CLASSIC
"The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion-1 followed by 27 zeros-planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion-1 followed by 24 zeros-planets capable of supporting life.

"With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis-0 followed by nothing.

"What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

"Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: 'In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.'

"As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn't be here.

"Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life-every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth's surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing. . . .

"Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term 'big bang,' said that his atheism was 'greatly shaken' at these developments."

-Eric Metaxas on atheism and Life Out There, December 25, 2014.
THE LAST WORD
There was a metric ton of great reading over the Christmas break, starting with this depressing piece explaining why airlines are-intentionally-trying to make travel less pleasant for the average customer. Answer: So that they can sell pathways out of the discomfort. It's important to note that this isn't a case of an industry facing inefficiencies and charging people for upgrades. No, in this case the carriers are intentionally creating inefficiencies in order to then charge people for upgrades. Perhaps our two cheers for the free market ought to be downgraded to one-and-a-half.

* On the other hand, the stories of honest-to-goodness free-market innovators are often as inspiring as they are interesting. The Washington Post has a substantial interview with Ron Shaich, the man who built both the Au Bon Pain and Panera empires, and more or less invented the casual dining category. Here he is explaining his eureka moment for Au Bon Pain:

In 1984, these were still traditional French bakeries, and people would come in and ask for a baguette. But they started asking for it sliced not like a loaf of bread, but from top to bottom, long ways. I would hand it to them, and I would see them pull out meats from the local delicatessen, and they would put in on the bread.

I mean, you don't have to have a Harvard MBA to figure out that there's a huge opportunity there. So we changed the concept. Our thinking was no longer to have the bread and croissant be the product. Instead, we would use them as the platform on which to sell soup, salads and sandwiches-creating the French bakery cafe concept. It became very hot very quickly, and suddenly every mall wanted one.

In 1993, Shaich bought a small business called the Saint Louis Bread Company, which had 19 stores in St. Louis. He would eventually create Panera out of this seedling:

We left it alone for a couple of years. We studied the market, and what we learned was that there were these increasingly large niches of consumers who wanted to feel special in the world in which they lived. You have to understand that by 1990, consumer brands had been completely consolidated, and the mantra in corporate America was dominate your industry, be No. 1, 2 or 3, and then get the hell out. What that led to was a few companies with large market shares competing on advertising dollars and shelf space.

The reaction was the development of what we call these specialty categories. In beer, it was craft breweries. In coffee, it was the specialty coffees. And we thought that the same thing was going to happen in the food service industry, and it became what we now know as fast casual dining. It was for people who wanted to feel better about their food and who were willing to pay a little bit more for something that was worth a lot more.

So that was my vision, and we spent the next couple years building it. We renamed the stores Panera, and we redefined it around specialty food. We took the lunch business and we added specialty soups and salads, and then we went after the breakfast business.

Shaich is one of those businessman who gives you faith in the free-market system.

* For those of you with nerdist tendencies, this video arguing that the browncoats in Firefly were the actual villains makes a cogent, coherent case on behalf of the Alliance. But then, I would say that.

* And finally, there's this wonderful piece by Eric Metaxas in the Wall Street Journal about how astrophysics has slowly been making atheism more difficult to maintain. There's a long quote from it in the Instant Classic above. If you missed it the first time, be sure to read it now.

Best,
Jonathan V. Last

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