Long Game

Isn't it strange how Plucky, Democratic Israel goes to such extreme lengths to prevent any media coverage of what they do, any journalistic interference with their propaganda machine, in light of the fact that -- as always -- They Did Absolutely Nothing Wrong?  Is physically blocking the media from covering what happens the act of a government that is in the right?

Historians are finally starting to show that there was a lot more to the “Me Decade” than we might have thought.

It's much easier to navigate the cultural and economic upheavals of the 1970s, however, when you take a planet-sized view. That's the approach chosen by the editors of the aforementioned The Shock of the Global, a grab-bag of lively academic essays that covers everything from the proliferation of global non-government organizations to the worldwide women's rights movement to smallpox eradication.

Shifts in the Kremlin’s view of the country’s economic situation prompted the most recent policy review. Russia is determined to modernize — and not just rhetorically. But this will require Western technology — something the West is wary of.

Levine says young people today are not angry or alienated like previous generations were.

Attitudes will change when government starts to mean more than just the registry of motor vehicles — or as one expert put it, when the young people grow up and get "mugged by reality."

A generation ago, young people vowed never to trust anyone over 30. But as it turns out, those under 30 today are actually more trusting of the government of all age groups, according to a survey by the Pew Research Center.

Take childhood education. If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, there is very little that resembles formal education. Education takes the form of play, and adults provide explicit instructions more or less when asked. And yet this spontaneous education system is not only not exploited by formal education, it is subverted.

The empirical evidence points to substantial group-level benefits for most enduring religions. Benefits include defining the group, coordinating action to achieve shared goals and developing elaborate mechanisms to prevent cheating. The same evolutionary processes that cause individual organisms and social insect colonies to function as adaptive units also cause religious groups to function as adaptive units. Religious believers frequently compare their communities to a single body or a beehive. This is not just a poetic metaphor but turns out to be correct from an evolutionary perspective.

They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Émile Durkheim put it, even though they wrap themselves in the mantle of science and rationality. Someone needs to call them out on that, and that person is me.

The first is what I've heard called "first principles" libertarianism.

The second is utilitarian, or consequentialist libertarianism.

The first is what I've heard called "first principles" libertarianism.

The second is utilitarian, or consequentialist libertarianism.

While the Patriot does not enhance America’s ability to protect itself against long-range ballistic missiles from, for example, Iran, it does give Poland some defense against shorter-ranged ballistic missiles and substantial defense against conventional air attack. Russia is the only country capable of such attacks on Poland

Still, the Russians — with a long history of seeing improbable threats turning into very real ones — tend to take hypothetical limits on their power seriously.

Moscow is not unhappy about the European crisis and wouldn’t want to do anything that might engender greater European solidarity.

France is attempting to distance itself from the eurozone’s profligate spenders and illustrate that it belongs with other northern European governments with responsible fiscal policies

From open-access journals to research-review blogs, from collaboration by wiki to epidemiology by Blackberry, networked knowledge has made more science more accessible more quickly and to more people around the globe than could have been imagined 20 years ago.

Varmus is among a cadre of iconoclasts calling for immediate open access to scientific papers. They’re impatient for colleagues to give up their allegiance to the conventional process that they say keeps new research under wraps for too long. And they’re eager for publishers to break out of business models that require a paid subscription to read the most current publications.

Maddow spent about 20 minutes last night quizzing Paul about his views on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and he and the Republican Party have spent the last 24 hours cleaning up the mess.

He's added to his newsworthiness by claiming his campaign is at the vanguard of the Tea Party movement. That gives him a higher profile still.