It has always infuriated me that the newspaper like the LAT, which are staffed with copy editors who know these rules, insist on capitalizing Libertarian--the better to marginalize a broad political philosophy by treating it as a party or sect. Being a libertarian is like being a republican or a democrat.

Follow the link above, or just go to Volokh Conspiracy, to read the thoughtful discussion Randy has sparked on libertarianism and foreign policy. I wholeheartedly agree that you cannot derive much about foreign policy from libertarian first principles. As John Locke observed, kings live in the state of nature. (I'm much more of a consequentialist, empiricist classical liberal than Randy. But he demonstrates that even what I call deductive libertarianism can't tell you much about how a libertarian state should behave toward other states.)

But more importantly, when I heard Kerry utter the following words, I became genuinely depressed and more than a little angry:

I defended this country as a young man and I will defend it as President. Let there be no mistake: I will never hesitate to use force when it is required. Any attack will be met with a swift and certain response. I will never give any nation or international institution a veto over our national security. And I will build a stronger American military.

Any attack? That's it? No preemptive action? Where would Kerry have stood on American intervention in Europe during World War II? The Nazis had not attacked us. Maybe I don't want to know...

But I'll tell you anyway: On foreign policy, attitudes toward preemption represent the central difference between Kerry Democrats and Bush Republicans. To the the Democrats, preemption is a lawless doctrine tantamount to going to war "because we want to." To the Republicans, it's an essential form of defense in the age of al Qaeda.

Kerry, I'm sure, would note that after Pearl Harbor, the Nazis declared war on us--a German attack wasn't required to justify war. They asked for it.

Andrew Sullivan thinks this line is about a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. That's what I thought at first, but I then decided, partly from the crowd's reaction, that it was about the Florida recount. For all I know, it's actually about suggesting that a Bush-appointed Supreme Court would have ruled differently in Brown v. Board of Education or bragging that you voted for a balanced budget amendment (OK, probably not that). It all depends on what "misuse" means. If you're for it, it's not misuse.

First, and most importantly, this portion of Obama's speech was symmetrical with respect to partisan, cultural, and religious divides. It's "pundits" who seek to describe us as divided. But in fact, we're all red and we're all blue. Supporting the war, worshipping God, and playing Little League are symmetrical with not liking the Patriot Act, opposing the war, and having gay friends. That's very different from the "Those nasty conservatives are divisive, unlike us nice inclusive liberals" theme that's kept popping up.

Relatedly, there's something offensive in the "Take America back"/ "Let America be America again" stuff. It's something I fully expect to keep hearing; it's something I remember loathing about the first Clinton inauguration. It's the necessary implication that Republicans, and Republican government, aren't really American, that Democratic rule is not only preferable (of course Democrats think that) but the natural order of things, an order that must be restored (notice the restoration theme in both "take back" and "be America again"). Obama didn't imply any of that, either.

Finally, unlike Edwards, Obama's not imagining one America as some future state of affairs to be accomplished with a Democratic victory. It's a present state of affairs-- we are, already, genuinely united.

Come to think of it, the Republicans' cultural insanity in the mid-'90s had a "Take America back" quality to it. But America was feeling pretty happy and didn't want to go back.

Unlike the challengers, who can speak in generalities, the incumbent needs to lay out specific vision that gives the public a picture of the future, and his future policies, that goes beyond "more of the same." That's especially true at the moment. If people want vague promises that things will be better, they'll go with Kerry.

One plus, or at least the absence of a minus, for Bush is that the Republican base has mostly recovered from the insane cultural pessimism that seized it in the mid-90s (pricelessly portrayed in Rich Karlgaard's Reason report from Dark Ages Weekend). Now it's the hard-core Democrats who think the country is going to hell--but at least they blame the administration, not the general public.

Neither does Steve Hayward. Neither do I.

We think the role of government is to give people the tools and conditions to make the most of their lives. Republicans believe in an America run by the right people, their people, in a world in which we act unilaterally when we can, and cooperate when we have to.

That's an interesting anti-elitist message, one that directly contradicts the Republicans' view of themselves and their opponents. Both parties, in other words, think the other guys "believe in an America run by the right people." Technocracy is certainly dead as a governing ideal, though not as a practice.

Clinton's statement can be read many different ways, depending on your point of view. "The role of government is to give people the tools and conditions to make the most of their lives" can describe anything from a classical liberalism that emphasizes the importance of underlying institutions--if I didn't know the source, I might endorse it myself--to a Swedish-style welfare state.

The other interesting thing about Clinton's speech is what it didn't say. It didn't mention "a woman's right to choose"--a phrase that used to be all but mandatory in Democratic convention speeches. It didn't mention gays. It didn't mention immigrants. On the social issues, where the parties disagree most emotionally (and where the chattering classes, including me, are liberal but swing voters aren't), Clinton said nothing. He aimed his speech at John Kennedy's Democratic party.

John Kerry is smart to put quite a few days between himself and Bill Clinton's star power. Maybe by the time Kerry takes the podium, people will have forgotten the contrast.

I thought of that insight today when I glanced at Maureen Dowd's column and read this sentence, "Maybe it's because George Bush is relaxing at his ranch down there (again) while Osama is planning a big attack up here (again)."

That is the voice of a petulant child, angry that she has a tummy ache while Daddy is at work or Mommy is visiting a friend, or the voice of a grouchy wife angry that she has a migraine while her husband is out coaching the kids' baseball team. You're upset that you're in pain (we've all been there), so you get mad at someone whose presence wouldn't make the pain any better.

No mature student of politics believes the president of the United States goofs off on vacation. It's not the kind of job you escape. George Bush may be completely insane to voluntarily spend July in Texas--as opposed to Bill Clinton's favored coastal retreats--but Osama bin Laden is no more or less a threat than in Bush were in Washington. But if blaming Bush makes people feel better, safer, or at least able to focus their anger on someone they can hurt, they'll blame Bush.

Speaking of the Texas summers, I escaped to L.A. a week ago and will be here for a couple of weeks. I'll be speaking on The Substance of Style at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena on August 5. The talk is free and open to the public.

Update: For serious comments on the Bush administration's latest trade travesty, see the posts at Marginal Revolution.

The real difficulty with Saudi Arabia is that it poses a problem with no solution, at least in the short term: The despotism, brutality and corruption of the Al-Saud has reinforced domestic Islamists, many of whom sympathize with Osama bin Laden and detest the United States; yet democratic elections could well bring these people to power. At the same time, if the Al-Saud crush Al-Qaeda in their midst, this would allow the royal family to ward off real change, generating new forms of violent opposition.

That said, the idea of domestic Saudi reform is laughable. The Saudi royal family will never transform itself into something more enlightened--not, for example, when so much state funding goes to paying lavish salaries to the kingdom's estimated 7,000-8,000 princes and princesses. (In 1995, Jean-Michel Foulquier, a pseudonym for a French diplomat who had worked in the kingdom, wrote a prescient book on Saudi Arabia's woes, where he estimated the monthly allowance at between $15,000-20,000, not including myriad other subsidies.) Nor can a nation of institutions peacefully replace a kingdom that is named for, and mostly run as a private domain, by a single family. For the near future, nothing short of enforced change, internal or external, will alter power relations in Saudi Arabia.

No doubt to the consternation of some of his U.S.-based Reason compadres, Young suggests that the answer may start with "deriving advantages from democratization in Iraq. This may be a long shot given the ambient (and utterly mistaken) perception of failure there. But as Americans consciously turn their attention away from the grand ambitions that accompanied the war in Iraq and embrace a more urgent desire to head for the country's exits, they might want to recall that one of the inherent aims of the Bush administration's campaign was to protect the U.S. against the dangerous vicissitudes of Saudi politics."

Did you know ... several mainstream publications such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal carry online clinical trial information? The Post carries a database run by CenterWatch that lists hundreds of trials across the country as well as information about the clinical trial process, including the risks and benefits involved with participation. The Wall Street Journal posts a list of drugs currently in the development stages for various medical conditions. This database is primarily intended to highlight drug development competition, the potential financial impact and where they are in the Food and Drug Administration approval process. Updates to this database are published every other Tuesday in Online Journal's Health Industry Edition.

The Post's list is here. The WSJ's is here.

Terms like "revolution" tend to be overused and abused by historians. They draw attention. They sell books. But do they have historical content? In economic history especially, melodramatic terms have a bad name, because the field tends to be relatively undramatic. Most of the elements that drive modern economic growth work gradually, slowly, and almost imperceptibly: the dissemination of technological ideas, the accumulation of capital, even the changes in economic institutions were rarely very spectacular. Whenever a genuinely dramatic general-purpose invention occurred, its impact on the productivity of the economy as a whole took many years to be felt. The first Industrial Revolution used to be regarded as the watershed event in the economic history of mankind since the invention of agriculture and has often been mentioned in one breath with the dream-laden contemporaneous French Revolution. It has now been shown to have had only modest effects on economic growth before 1815 and practically none on real wages and living standards before 1840, more than a century after the appearance of the first steam engine. The second Industrial Revolution, similarly, was slow in manifesting its full impact on the economies in question and took much of the twentieth century to work out its effects fully. The paragon of the putative third Industrial Revolution, the computer, has still apparently not wholly lived up to the hopes and expectations regarding productivity and output.

Few scholars nowadays think of the Industrial Revolution as a series of events that abruptly and significantly raised the rate of sustained economic growth. Most of the effects on income per capita or economic welfare were slow in coming and spread out over long periods. All the same, even though the dynamic relation between technological progress and per capita growth is hard to pin down and measure, it is the central feature of modern economic history. We are uncertain how to identify the technology-driven component of growth, but we can be reasonably sure that the unprecedented (and to a large extent unmeasured) growth in income in the twentieth century would not have taken place without technological changes. It seems therefore more useful to measure "industrial revolutions" against the technological capabilities of a society based on the knowledge it possesses and the institutional rules by which its economy operates. These technological capabilities must include the potential to produce more goods and services, but they could equally affect aspects that are poorly measured by our standard measures of economic performance, such as the ability to prevent disease, to educate the young, to move and process information, and to coordinate production in large units. By those standards, it is hard to deny that the 1990s witnessed an industrial revolution, but we need to assess it in terms of those capabilities, with the macroeconomic consequences following eventually but often much later.

Update: Thanks to David Young, who helped proof TSOS, for correcting my typos. If you're in need of a professional copy editor/proofreader, I recommend him. (Email me for contact info.)

The UK government has been urged to take emergency action to combat animal rights extremists after Walter Lilly, a subsidiary of the Montpellier Group, pulled out of an £18 million (USD $33.3 million) contract to build a new center for animal research at Oxford University. The decision was widely attributed to intimidation by animal rights extremists, although Montpellier would only say that the decision was reached by mutual consent with Oxford University.

Scientists were in little doubt that the decision has brought to a head the long-standing battle between the research community and the antivivisection campaign, with Oxford taking over from the Cambridge area as the focus of activity. The move by Montpellier comes 6 months after Cambridge University decided to abandon plans to build a primate research center.

Researchers consider the Oxford case to be more serious because it involves a large, broad-based animal laboratory where 98% of the work would be on rodents, rather than a specialist primate center, where antivivisectionists are more likely to gain public support. "Unlike Cambridge, where it was just a relatively small laboratory, this is the center for all animal research at Oxford," noted Mark Matfield, director of the pro-animal research Research Defence Society, in a statement.

The Montpellier decision should at last get the government to wake up and enact emergency legislation, according to Ian Gibson, chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. "We want action now, but I've no confidence it will be taken at the moment," Gibson said. "I don't think the government realizes the severity of the situation even now." Gibson wanted action along the lines taken to combat soccer hooliganism. "If you can stop football thugs from going across to Europe, why can't they pick these people up? I can't believe they don't know who they are."

The threat posed by such extremists was not just to animal research, but to the whole UK science base, according to Simon Festing of the Association of Medical Research Charities. "Unless we see urgent action from the government, the prize of the UK staying a world leader in developing new medicines could slip through its fingers," he said in a statement.

For the rest of the link-rich article, go here. I'd like to hear what Andrew Sullivan has to say on this matter.

UPDATE: Brian L. O'Connor has been all over this story, and related issues, at Animal Crackers.

Sure enough, the NYT report contains this sentence: "Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said."

I'm an odd defender of Berger, who used to make me wince at his incompetence when he was national security adviser. He's a good argument against the return of the not-very-deep Democratic foreign policy team--but not because of purloined notes. Partisans (and reporters) make fools of themselves, and their causes, when they turn this sort of story into a Very Big Deal. Argue the issues, folks.

In related news, Lileks writes about how the evolving precision of the Berger story made his column writing hell. See, he's not just a blogger--he has editors!

The way the movie simultaneously remains faithful to and subverts Asimov's technocratic rationalism put me in mind of this essay by Greg Benford, who has done his own reworking of Asimov.

Even early sf presumed that elites should rule and that information should flow downward, enlightening the shadowed many. Sf's Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, was welcomed to speak by the Petrograd Soviet, the Reichstag, Stalin and both Roosevelt presidents. This company never doubted their managerist agendas, and Wells had his own.

Today, such mechanistic self-confidence seems quaintly smug. The genre looks to more vibrant metaphors, while cocking a wary eye at our many looming problems.

Sf writers are less interested in predicting and thus determining the future. They see themselves more as conceptual gardeners, planting for fruitful growth, rather than engineers designing eternal, gray social machines.

Posted by Virginia at 06:26 PM