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An Astronomer Followed a Whim -- and Discovered a New Moon for Neptune
How to Fearmonger About the Fed (In 2 Easy Steps)
The Crash Reel: A Sports Movie About the Dangers of Sports
Night Witches: The Female Fighter Pilots of World War II
Thom Yorke's Spotify Protest: Annoying, Not That Effective, and Still Important
Should Schools Be Responsible for Childhood Obesity Prevention?
Is Harry Reid Bluffing About the Filibuster?
Meet New York's Orthodox Jewish Boxer
Why Latin America Is Becoming Less Democratic
A Journey Into Our Food System's Refrigerated-Warehouse Archipelago
By-Hand Baseball Scorekeeping: A 'Dying Art' That May Never Actually Die
Why Kansan Parsnips Might Soon Be Coming to Dutch Supermarkets
The Impending Senate Vote on Confirming Nominees
China's 'Bacon Buy': National Security Risk, or Just Business as Usual?
Catching Fish Using Birds: Stunning Images of a Dying Art in China
Next Time, Try Not to Compare Huma Abedin to the Taj Mahal
New from The Atlantic Books: The Mark Twain Collection
On Getting Drunk in Antarctica
Republicans Are Starting to Feel Good About Retaking the Senate in 2014
A Modest Proposal: Don't Worry About Government Surveillance at All, Ever
I Know What You Did Last Errand
China's Bernie Madoff Was Executed for Fraud—and Nobody Told His Family
Late-Night Comedy Roundup: Congress Does Its Own Body Issue
Who's Afraid of Young Black Men?
Get the Abs You Crave, in an Amount of Time

An Astronomer Followed a Whim -- and Discovered a New Moon for Neptune

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 03:45 PM PDT

It started when Mark Showalter followed a whim. On July 1, the SETI Institute astronomer was studying -- as one does, when one is a SETI Institute astronomer -- archival pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. The images were of Neptune, and Showalter was analyzing the faint arcs, or segments of rings, that surround the ice giant. Here was the whim: Showalter had a thought that he should look beyond the ring segments ... and, when he did so, he discovered a tiny, white dot about 65,400 miles from the planet. The dot he spotted was located between the orbits of the Neptunian moons Larissa and Proteus. And Showalter noticed that the dot appeared repeatedly in more than 150 archival photographs of Neptune taken by Hubble between 2004 and 2009.

Here, now, is why whims can be worth following: the dot, it turns out, is another moon for Neptune -- the planet's fourteenth that we've discovered. It's named, for the moment, S/2004 N 1. And the little thing is tiny: Showalter estimates it to be, at the most, 12 miles across, making it the smallest moon we know of in the Neptunian system. It is in fact so small, and so dim, that it's about 100 million times fainter than the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye -- a body so miniscule that it escaped even the eagle eyes of NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew past Neptune in 1989, surveying the planet's system of moons and rings.

The body did not, however, escape the gaze of Mark Showalter -- who also helped to discover Pan, a moon of Saturn; Mab and Cupid, two moons of Uranus; and Styx and Kerberos, two moons of Pluto. The images he used for this latest discovery have been in the public domain for years, Showalter points out, so "anyone," he says, "could have discovered this."

But nobody had discovered it -- until the astronomer, armed with curiosity and enough education to trust it, let his eyes travel toward a tiny, white dot.

Which is a nice lesson for the rest of us. Showalter's discovery is an eloquent testament to the power of human intuition. And it's also a nice reminder of the newness, and freshness, of our explorations into space. As we fix our gaze on distant solar systems -- and on the life that may, or may not, exist within them -- it's worth remembering how much we still have left to discover about our own little corner of the universe.

How to Fearmonger About the Fed (In 2 Easy Steps)

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 03:12 PM PDT

Reuters

These are dark days for inflation hawks. For four years, they have warned that the Fed's bond-buying risks a return of 1970s-style stagflation. And for four years they have been wrong. Not just wrong; historically wrong. Indeed, core PCE inflation, the Fed's preferred measure, just hit an all-time low going back 50 years. That's a lot of years.

It's derp. Now, as Noah Smith defines it, derp means being loudly un-empirical. In other words, refusing to change your mind even after reality disproves what you believe over and over and over again. But the inflation derpers are smarter than the average derper. They realize they can't keep crying inflation when there is none, and have anyone (even the Wall Street Journal editorial page) pay attention. So now they cry financial instability and uncertainty instead. But that doesn't mean they've changed their minds: they still want the Fed to tighten, and tighten now. It's just higher-level derp.

But there's a science to this higher-level derp. Rules to follow. What are they? Well, just look at Stanford professor John Taylor's latest Wall Street Journal op-ed, which might be the ur-text of fact-free Fed fearmongering. Taylor (of the eponymous monetary policy rule) has spent the past few years fulminating against the Fed's bond-buying, because ... inflation? That's certainly part of it for someone who always carries a Zimbabwean hundred-trillion dollar bill around with him like Taylor does. But the other part of it is his idea that uncertainty over whether the Fed will end quantitative easing too fast is hurting the economy more than quantitative easing is helping. Now, this critique isn't much of one, and isn't specific to bond-buying. You can say the same about any interest rate cut. Maybe the Fed will wait too long to raise rates, and inflation will spike. Or maybe the Fed will raise rates too quickly, and send the economy back into recession. Neither of those are reasons not to cut rates (or buy bonds) in the first place. Of course, Taylor thinks it's different this time, because the Fed will have to shrink its balance sheet rather than just raising rates. But the Fed doesn't have to shrink its balance sheet; it can just raise the rate it pays on reserves.

Don't be worried if this all seems confusing. It is. It's all about inflation, or maybe not. Or bubbles. Or uncertainty. It's hard to follow the argument -- but not the conclusion. That's always tighter money. But there is some good news: anybody can inflation derp like a pro if they follow these two simple steps.

1. Don't use any evidence. Well, how could you? Inflation is at all-time lows. There are no signs of the kind of credit froth that could make the financial system unstable. Nor are there any quantifiable signs of uncertainty holding back growth. Instead, you should just say that lots of famous economists agree with you -- and they don't need evidence either! If all of you believe it without good reason, erm, it must be true?

Now, there are two notable exceptions to the no-evidence rule. First, you can cite fake evidence, like when Niall Ferguson cited tinfoil-hat-wearing Shadow Stats as "proof" that inflation was really double-digits. And second, you can get things wrong in a way you think helps your argument. Taylor, for example, tries to make Fed apologists look silly by saying they now blame the weak recovery on state and local spending cuts. Now, that was one of the things Fed officials talked about a few years ago, but not now. In fact, Bernanke just said that less state and local austerity is one of the reasons the recovery might pick up soon. It's federal austerity that's holding the economy back now -- and a lot of it. Indeed, the deficit is now falling faster as a percent of GDP than it has in any year since 1969. Maybe Taylor doesn't address this, because it would be impossible to dismiss? In any case, it's the kind of mistake inflation derpers shouldn't worry about: people who know enough to spot it weren't persuadable anyways.

2. Mention the 1970s. This is crucial. Now, the rest is a lot of hand-waving and arguing from authority, but this is where inflation derpers are on much more solid ground. The 1970s did happen. This is not in dispute. And loose money fueled high inflation then. This is not in dispute either. Of course, our problems today are the opposite of our problems then, but ignore this. Say something about how we need "long-term thinking" and can't avoid the kind of "painful choices" that -- bonus points! -- Paul Volcker made. This will make people in Washington think you are wise.

***

And that's it! If you can master these two things, you too can argue for inappropriately tight monetary policy that could choke off the recovery. A lifetime of never having to change your mind awaits.

The Crash Reel: A Sports Movie About the Dangers of Sports

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 02:10 PM PDT

Night Witches: The Female Fighter Pilots of World War II

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 01:41 PM PDT

It was the spring of 1943, at the height of World War II. Two pilots, members of the Soviet Air Force, were flying their planes -- Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes, built mainly of plywood and canvas -- over a Soviet railway junction. Their passage was on its way to being a routine patrol ... until the pilots found themselves confronted by a collection of German bombers. Forty-two of them.

The pilots did what anyone piloting a plane made of plywood would do when confronted with enemy craft and enemy fire: they ducked. They sent their planes into dives, returning fire directly into the center of the German formation. The tiny planes' flimsiness was in some ways an asset: their maximum speed that was lower than the stall speed of the Nazi planes, meaning that the pilots could maneuver their craft with much more agility than their attackers could. The outnumbered Soviets downed two Nazi craft before one of their own planes lost its wing to enemy fire. The pilot bailed out, landing, finally, in a field.

The people on the ground, who had witnessed the skirmish, rushed over to help the stranded pilot. They offered alcohol. But the offer was refused. As the pilot would later recall, "Nobody could understand why the brave lad who had taken on a Nazi squadron wouldn't drink vodka."

The brave lad had refused the vodka, it turned out, because the brave lad was not a lad at all. It was Tamara Pamyatnykh, one of the members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment of the Soviet Air Forces. The 588th was the most highly decorated female unit in that force, flying 30,000 missions over the course of four years -- and dropping, in total, 23,000 tons of bombs on invading German armies. Its members, who ranged in age from 17 to 26, flew primarily at night, making do with planes that were -- per their plywood-and-canvas construction -- generally reserved for training and crop-dusting. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they neared their targets and then gliding their way to their bomb release points. As a result, their planes made little more than soft "whooshing" noises as they flew by.

Those noises reminded the Germans, apparently, of the sound of a witch's broomstick. So the Nazis began calling the female fighter pilots Nachthexen: "night witches." They were loathed. And they were feared. Any German pilot who downed a "witch" was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.

The Night Witches were largely unique among the female combatants -- and even the female flyers -- of World War II. Other countries, the U.S. among them, may have allowed women to fly as members of their early air forces; those women, however, served largely in support and transport roles. The Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women to fly combat missions -- to be able, essentially, to return fire when it was delivered. These ladies flew planes; they also dropped bombs.

Last week, one of the most famous of the Night Witches -- Nadezhda Popova, a commander of the squad who flew, in total, 852 of its missions -- passed away. She was 91. And the obituaries that resulted, celebrations of a life and a legacy largely unknown to many of us here in the U.S., serve as a reminder of the great things the female flyers accomplished. Things made even remarkable considering the limited technology the woman had at their disposal. The Witches (they took the German epithet as a badge of honor) flew only in the dark. Because of the weight of the bombs they carried and the low altitudes at which they flew, they carried no parachutes. They had no radar to navigate their paths through the night skies -- only maps and compasses. If hit by tracer bullets, their planes would ignite like the paper planes they resembled. Which was not a small concern: "Almost every time," Popova once recalled, "we had to sail through a wall of enemy fire."

Their missions were dangerous; they were also, as a secondary challenge, unpleasant. Each night, in general, 40 planes -- each crewed by two women, a pilot and a navigator -- would fly eight or more more missions. Popova herself once flew 18 in a single night. (The multiple nightly sorties were necessary because the modified crop-dusters were capable of carrying only two bombs at a time.) The women's uniforms were hand-me-downs from male pilots. And their planes had open cockpits, leaving the women's faces to freeze in the chilly night air. "When the wind was strong it would toss the plane," Popova noted. "In winter, when you'd look out to see your target better, you got frostbite, our feet froze in our boots, but we carried on flying."

Once, after a successful flight -- which is to say, a flight she survived -- Popova counted 42 bullet holes studding her little plane. There were also holes in her map. And in her helmet. "Katya, my dear," the pilot told her navigator, "we will live long."

Despite all this bravado, however, the female fighter pilots initially struggled to earn the respect of their brothers in arms. The Night Bomber Regiment was one of three female fighter pilot units created by Stalin at the urging of Marina Raskova -- an aviation celebrity who was, essentially, "the Soviet Amelia Earhart." Raskova trained her recruits as pilots and navigators, and also as members of maintenance and ground crews. She also prepared them for an environment that preferred to treat women as bombshells rather than bombers. One general, male, initially complained about being sent a "a bunch of girlies" instead of soldiers. But the women and their flimsy little crop-dusters and their ill-fitting uniforms and their 23,000 tons of ammunition soon proved him wrong. And they did all that while decorating their planes with flowers and using their navigation pencils as lipcolor.

Thom Yorke's Spotify Protest: Annoying, Not That Effective, and Still Important

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 01:40 PM PDT

AP Photo/Joel Ryan

By now, musicians should know that Spotify probably won't make them rich. A year ago, for example, cellist Zoë Keating revealed that users of the service had streamed her songs 70,000 times... which translated into a $281.87 payout.

But on Sunday, the loudest, most prominent critique of the service yet unfolded on Twitter. There, Radiohead's singer Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich said they'd pulled down songs from their non-Radiohead projects--Atoms for Peace, Ultraista, and Yorke's solo album The Eraser--to protest Spotify's system.

"The reason is that new artists get paid fuck all with this model," Godrich tweeted. "It's an equation that just doesn't work."

Glance at the feeds for the two musicians, and you'll sense a defensive tone--a sign that their move was not unanimously hailed as brave. Fans griped about losing access to songs they wanted to hear; critics in the industry characterized the decision as self-righteous, hypocritical, and unlikely to change anything. The hypocrisy accusation stems from the fact that in 2007 Radiohead shocked the music business with a pay-what-you-want sale for their album In Rainbows. At the time, some praised the band for putting forth a revolutionary model to be imitated, while others saw a publicity stunt that could only be attempted by an act as rich and famous as Radiohead. Either way, In Rainbows' "collection plate" approach helped cement the notion that the music industry should embrace listeners' growing addiction to getting music for free or very, very cheap.

"for me In Rainbows was a statement of trust," Yorke tweeted Sunday. "people still value new music ..that's all we'd like from Spotify. don't make us the target." In reply to a follower who had complained, "your small meaningless rebellion is only hurting your fans ... a drop in the bucket really," he replied "No we're standing up for our fellow musicians."

There's probably some truth to the "drop in the bucket" line. Spotify may be a game-changing startup, but as Yorke and Godrich pointed out on Twitter, it's now tied up with major, multinational recording companies. People have made big bets on it and services like it being integral to the future of music, and those people aren't likely to abandon it now. Yorke and Godrich's resources and clout allow them to call out streaming apps, but most newbie artists who are just signing their first record contracts will still be compelled to accept the "fuck all" deal Godrich mentioned.

Yorke and Godrich's rejection of Spotify matters, though, for the simple reason that it screws with the service's appeal. I'm a big Spotify user, and I pay $9.99 a month for a premium subscription. (People can listen for free on their home computers as long as they're willing to sit through ads). I like feeling as though all of recorded music is at my beckon, anytime and anywhere. Of course, all of recorded music isn't actually at my beckon, and there are annoying gaps in Spotify's catalog--like, uh, The Beatles. But weirdly, almost insidiously, you adapt. The awesome electronic artist Four Tet tweeted yesterday that he's withheld his label's music from the service for a long time. Which reminded me--I haven't listened to Four Tet in a while... and that's probably because most of his stuff isn't on Spotify.

Yorke and co. haven't yet offered a solution. But they've still offered something valuable: a reminder that a lot of musicians are unhappy with the status quo, and that some musicians have the power to make fans unhappy with it too.

Atoms for Peace is nobody's favorite band; it's more a curious side project from the leader of a lot of peoples' favorite band (plus Flea). By opting out, Yorke and Godrich won't shatter the illusion of comprehensiveness that Spotify thrives on. But they'll dent it. I'd been meaning to add the hypnotic title track off Atoms for Peace's otherwise so-so new album Amok to my playlist of 2013's best songs. Now I can't--unless I legally or illegally download the album on my own, which is something I've fallen out of the habit of doing. (That sounds super lazy, and it is, but it's also the dynamic that rules much of music-listening these days.) Spotify therefore feels a little less satisfying, complete, worthwhile to me.

The bigger effect of Yorke and Godrich's move may just be to raise awareness. To anyone who follows the music industry, it seems like common knowledge that artists make only fractions of fractions of a cent every time one of their songs gets streamed. But when Radiohead fan site Ateaseweb posted on Facebook about Atoms for Peace ditching Spotify, readers wanted to learn more. "Can someone out there explain the nuts and bolts of this," one fan wrote. "I would like just a little more info on how Spotify is damaging new artists and how this is any worse than illegal downloads." Another fan soon came along with the requested nuts and bolts, and another with a link to Pitchfork's essential explainer article.

Spotify has already responded to Yorke and Godrich by pointing out it'll have paid out $1 billion to rights holders by the end of the year. But the top-line number arguably matters a lot less to the future of music than the amount that each individual artist takes home. And it's still not clear whether an equation yet exists that will make that amount "fair." As Derek Thompson noted in response to musician David Lowery's high-profile complaints about streaming--this time related to Pandora--even if the online radio site "quadrupled the royalty rates paid to Lowery, it'd barely pay for three days rent."

Yorke and co. haven't yet offered a solution to this state of affairs. But they've nevertheless offered something valuable: a reminder that a lot of musicians are unhappy with the status quo, and that some musicians have the power to make fans unhappy with it too.

Should Schools Be Responsible for Childhood Obesity Prevention?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 01:23 PM PDT

school salad bar.jpg — Mike Blake/Reuters

With the nation's childhood obesity rate triple what it was 30 years ago for adolescents, expectations that schools will do more to help keep students healthy continue to rise. But even as the U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to ban campus junk food sales, First Lady Michelle Obama touts the benefits of exercise and cafeteria turkey tacos, and school districts struggle to meet the more rigorous new federal nutrition standards, a larger question looms: How much can educators really do to influence a student's wellness?

Author Roxana Elden, who teaches high school English in Miami, Fla., said that while she supports the feds' campus junk food ban - which will take effect in the fall of 2014 --there isn't much schools can do to control the contents of the lunchboxes kids bring from home.

When she taught fourth grade in Houston a few years ago, Flamin' Hot Cheetos were particularly popular among her students so Elden decided to use them as part of a lesson on how to read nutritional labels. (It's worth noting some school districts already prohibit kids from bringing the snack food to campus.) Her lecture didn't exactly go as planned.

"I tried to emphasize how bad this particular food was for your health," Elden told me. "After the lesson the kids asked if they could eat the bag of Hot Cheetos. It turns out that as I was giving my passionate speech, they were gazing longingly at the bag and mostly thinking, 'Mmmm, Hot Cheetos.'"

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While it might indeed be tough to get kids to choose carrots over Cheetos, there's a case to be made that the public sees schools as sharing that responsibility with parents. In April, Kaiser Permanente conducted a nationwide survey and found that 90 percent of respondents believed schools should "play a role in reducing obesity in their community" and 64 percent supported it being "a major role." Respondents in the same survey also showed strong support for the stricter new guidelines for federally funded school meals and for limiting students' access to junk food on campus.

The American Medical Association has recommended that children in grades one-12 be taught about the dangers of obesity and supported using revenue from proposed taxes on sugary sodas to help schools pay for such educational programs. The AMA suggested its own members volunteer to help schools implement the program. But even with that kind of goodwill effort, schools would likely struggle in the short term to find time in an already crowded academic calendar for yet another instructional mandate. On the upside, many school districts have already initiated aggressive campaigns to address student health, and many have added extracurricular programs aimed at encouraging entire families to be more active and make smarter food choices.

But let's talk about the long term. Educators know - and the research supports - that healthy kids are better learners. Recent reports have found that obese students scored lower on standardized tests, and they're less likely to go to college than their peers who are at a healthy weight (Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report had a clever take on one of those new international reports, wondering if education should market itself as the next weight loss fad). What's not clear is the relationship between students' weight and their academic performance. Self-esteem has been found to be a factor in a student's academic performance, according to some studies, and being overweight is therefore an influence.

Students also can't learn when they're not in school, and overweight kids have been found to be more likely to miss class due to health issues. In fact, A 2007 study found the rate of absenteeism was 20 percent higher among overweight children. Think the problems end when the students graduate and are no longer the school's responsibility? Think again: Obesity-related expenses cost states billions of dollars annually in increased subsidized health-care costs and lost productivity.

For all of the criticism about Nevada's public schools, the Clark County School District - the nation's fifth-largest - has been ahead of the curve in several areas. One of them was eliminating junk food sales on campuses back in 2004. I should mention that the ban produced a not-so-surprising early side effect: Convenience stores situated close to the high schools reported a jump in sales in the morning and mid-afternoon hours when students were walking to and from campus. In other words, some kids only changed the source of their junk food consumption rather than their eating habits.

As the Las Vegas Sun's education reporter, I did some quality control spot checks at various campuses after the junk food ban was passed. I found that bottled water and graham crackers had indeed replaced the sports drinks and chocolate bars -- with one notable exception: the machines in the faculty lounges were fully stocked with the familiar array of candy, chips and sugary sodas. That the ban didn't extend to the adults on campus illustrates the larger challenge facing schools, families, and communities as a whole. Improving students' nutritional sensibilities is not just about regulating what they are allowed to consume when they're in a relatively limited environment. It's about setting them on a healthier path to adulthood when their choices are no one's responsibility but their own.

This post also appears at The Educated Reporter, an Atlantic partner site.

Is Harry Reid Bluffing About the Filibuster?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 01:03 PM PDT

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Associated Press

The Senate may be heading for a showdown on the filibuster. Majority Leader Harry Reid has spent the last week aggressively making the case for the "nuclear option" -- a majority vote to change the Senate rules on executive-branch nominations. On the Senate floor, on Meet the Press on Sunday, and in a speech Monday morning at the Center for American Progress, he has promised to enact such a rules change with a Tuesday morning vote if a set of seven contentious nominations is not approved. "I love the Senate," he said Monday, "but right now, the Senate is broken, and it needs to be fixed."

Is Reid really going to do it? Or is he bluffing?

That's the question on the minds of Senate watchers who have seen this movie before. Most notably, back in January, rules-reform advocates thought they finally had Reid's backing to rein in the filibuster. But instead, Reid seems to have used their proposals as a foil to secure a far more limited procedural deal in an agreement worked out behind the scenes with the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell.

This time, Reid insists he is serious, and his vote threat is not a negotiating tactic. Gridlock and "not getting things done" are the reasons Congress is so abysmally unpopular, he said Monday. The filibuster's use has exploded to an unprecedented degree: Lyndon Johnson, he noted, had to overcome a single filibuster in his six years as majority leader; Reid, in the same amount of time, has faced more than 400. The Constitution, he noted, does not call for supermajority votes for presidential nominations. Like a baseball manager, he said, a president of either party "should have the ability to pick their team."

Reid is not much of an impassioned speaker, so this is about as passionate as he gets. The public speeches and media appearances are also a remarkably frontal and public crusade for a leader who normally prefers to get things done by quieter means. His confrontations with McConnell, heretofore clothed in a sort of phony, gritted-teethed Washington "comity," have become openly hostile: On the Senate floor last week, McConnell said Reid would "be remembered as the worst leader here ever."

Reid and McConnell's dueling floor speeches became so heated that another senator, Roger Wicker of Mississippi, finally stepped in to ask them to knock it off. Like a kid beseeching his parents to stop embarrassing him by fighting in public, Wicker suggested that the conversation continue behind closed doors. As a result, all 100 senators are scheduled to convene -- off the record and without staff present -- in a rare bipartisan session Monday evening.

The unusual meeting offers the possibility of a deus ex machina solution to the current standoff. But Reid insists that he is past seeking a negotiated solution and that unless all seven of the proffered nominations get a vote, he will proceed with the rules change. The nominations include Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and two nominees to the National Labor Relations Board; Republicans are blocking them, Reid averred, not because their qualifications are lacking but out of a desire to stop their agencies from functioning.

Jim Manley, a former top Reid staffer who knows the inscrutable majority leader well, told me he believes Reid is serious. "I believe he's had it up to here with the Republicans, he and his caucus realize something has to change, and he's prepared to move forward [on Tuesday," Manley said.

In his speech Monday, Reid posited that the rule change he's proposing is no big deal. "In the last 36 years, we've changed the rules with a simple majority 18 times," he said, But Republicans are not likely to see it that way. They warn that if Reid does this, it will lead to more gridlock, not less; one top GOP lobbyist predicted that the reaction will be one of "massive resistance" that will completely shut down the Senate. A Republican leadership aide agreed with this assessment.

But Reid insists the time has come for action. When an audience member at his Monday speech asked him if there was room for future negotiations, he replied, "Talks on what? Talks on what? Talks on what?" He paused for emphasis. "If they have a proposal, bring it to me. But otherwise, we're going to have a vote in the morning."

Meet New York's Orthodox Jewish Boxer

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 12:40 PM PDT

"Since there are not a lot of Jewish athletes, I definitely feel pressure," Dmitriy Salita says. "It's irresponsible to say that you don't feel pressure." Salita, a professional boxer with a record of 35-1-1, immigrated to New York from Ukraine in 1991. Upon arrival in America, he was stunned to see entire streets of Jewish communities, and he quickly combined two devotions: Judaism and boxing. Salita says religion and community have given him the drive to succeed both inside and outside the ring. "Boxing is a spiritual experience," Salita says. "I think a boxing gym, more than anywhere else, attracts different persons of different personalities. It really helped me learn American culture."

This short documentary is part of an ongoing series from Moonshot Productions called New Yorkers. The producers discuss the project in an interview with the Atlantic Video channel here. Don't miss their profiles of a Shaolin warrior monk and an obsessive graffiti artist named Guess.

Why Latin America Is Becoming Less Democratic

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 12:04 PM PDT

Opponents of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez stage a protest over a drawing of a gagged face during a march to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the return of democracy after the 1958 coup in Caracas January 23, 2011. (Jorge Silvas/Reuters)

Around the turn of the millennium, prominent Latin America specialist Scott Mainwaring highlighted the surprising endurance of democracy in that region after the transition wave of the late 1970s and 1980s.During that interval, no democracy had permanently succumbed to a military coup or slid back into authoritarian rule. After decades marked by instability in numerous countries, especially Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador, this newfound democratic resilience came as a welcome surprise.

But at about the time Mainwaring was writing, onetime coupmaker Hugo Chávez was winning election to the Venezuelan presidency and beginning to move his country away from democratic rule. Venezuela had survived the rash of military coups that swept the region in the 1960s and 1970s to become a byword for democratic stability in Latin America. Economic deterioration, political ossification, and rampant corruption had brought sustained decay, however, and paved the way for this radical populist, former army officer, and would-be golpista (he had led a violent putsch that failed in February 1992) to decisively win the free and fair December 1998 balloting. Using plebiscitarian strategies to transform the country's liberal institutional framework, concentrate power, and entrench himself, Chávez set about strangling democracy and putting competitive authoritarianism in its place. He remained as president till he died of cancer on 5 March 2013.

The Chávez phenomenon has had strong demonstration and contagion effects beyond Venezuela. Eager to overcome instability and cement their own supremacy, Presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia (2006-) and Rafael Correa of Ecuador (2007-) have emulated Chávez's script. As did their political ally and financial benefactor, they have used constituent assemblies to augment executive powers, allow for presidential reelection, and weaken institutional checks and balances. From that position of strength, they have made discretionary use of the law for political purposes. With this discriminatory legalism, they have attacked, undermined, and intimidated the opposition in their respective countries, moving toward competititve authoritarianism as well.

With its electoral façade and progressive rhetoric about helping the excluded, the soft authoritarianism that is taking hold in parts of Latin America has an attractive face.

Similarly, strong informal pressures and disrespect for constitutional principles have enabled Daniel Ortega (2007-) to establish his hegemony in Nicaragua. President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras (2006-2009) also sought to follow in the footsteps of Chávez, Morales, and Correa by convoking a constituent assembly and preparing his own perpetuation in power; yet coordinated opposition from Congress, the courts, and the military aborted this effort through a controversial June 2009 coup. Even President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina (2007-), whose fervent supporters take inspiration from Chávez, is eyeing constitutional changes and renewed reelection (she is now in her second term). Given Argentina's weak and disunited opposition, this push for entrenchment, combined with continuing attacks on the press and the president's personalistic command over the state, has created alarm in civil society about looming threats to the country's hard-won democracy.

That Venezuela had already fallen under nondemocratic rule was confirmed in October 2012 by Chávez's unfair reelection, achieved with the help of intimidation tactics, tight restrictions on the opposition, and the massive misuse of the state apparatus. Since the third wave reached Latin America in 1978, the region had seen only occasional threats and temporary interruptions of democracy in individual nations. The recent suffocation of political pluralism in a whole group of countries is without precedent. For the first time in decades, democracy in Latin America is facing a sustained, coordinated threat. The regional trend toward democracy, which had prevailed since the late 1970s, has suffered a partial reversal. Unexpectedly, democracy is now on the defensive in parts of the region.

With its electoral façade and progressive rhetoric about helping the excluded, the soft authoritarianism that is taking hold in parts of Latin America has an attractive face. It exerts an appeal on regional and global public opinion to which academics are not immune. The military dictators of the 1960s and 1970s were ogres with no legitimacy who depicted themselves as stopgaps--house cleaners putting politics in order so democracy could return. By contrast, Chávez and friends have claimed to institute a new participatory--and hence qualitatively better--form of democracy and to promote social equity and national independence. Rather than a short-lived detour, they seek to carve out a distinct development path purportedly leading to what Chávez called "socialism for the twenty-first century." Their competitive authoritarianism appears not as a limited interruption but a permanent alternative to pluralist, representative democracy. This appeal is unusual among contemporary nondemocracies; it contrasts with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin's more bluntly unsavory brand of autocracy, for instance. These "progressive" claims aggravate the risks emanating from the recent turn to authoritarian rule.

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The current authoritarian trend in Latin America is not regionwide: Major countries such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and now Colombia seem safely consolidated as democracies; Costa Rica and Uruguay boast especially high democratic performance. But the unexpected ease with which a coordinated nucleus of competitive authoritarianism has emerged must give pause. To see even Argentina, with its tragic history, being lured by the siren song of personalistic plebiscitarianism is worrisome indeed.

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As Steven Levitsky and James Loxton and Raúl Madrid have emphasized, Chávez and his friends used populism to entrench their predominance and install competitive authoritarian regimes.⁴Populism, understood as a strategy for winning and exerting state power,⁵inherently stands in tension with democracy and the value that it places upon pluralism, open debate, and fair competition. Populism revolves around personalistic leadership that feeds on quasi-direct links to a loosely organized mass of heterogenous followers. Bypassing or subjugating intermediate institutions such as firmly organized parties, the leader-- often a charismatic figure--establishes face-to-face contact with large numbers of citizens. In earlier decades, mass rallies were crucial; nowadays, television allows populists to reach their followers "in person." Chávez hosted a regular Sunday talk show. The leader in turn ascertains "the people's will" through frequent popular votes and opinion polls. To show vigorous leadership, seem indispensable, and boost followers' loyalty, populist politicians are fond of constantly attacking enemies, at least rhetorically. In this way, the leader blames others for the problems that have allowed the leader to take power and act as the savior of the fatherland. The leader is the star of a drama in which "the people" struggle heroically under the leader's direction against selfish, corrupt enemies at home and abroad.

As a political strategy, populism can have variegated and shifting ideological orientations and pursue diverse economic and social policies. Contemporary Latin America has seen populist presidents from the right, such as Argentina's Carlos Saúl Menem (1989-99) and Peru's Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000), and populists of the left such as Chávez, Morales, and Correa. Many populist leaders have embraced economic nationalism and state interventionism, yet others have imposed freemarket reforms. In a particular twist, the Peronist Menem dismantled the protectionism-based developmental model that his own party's populist founder, Juan Perón (president from 1946 to 1955, and then again from 1973 to 1974), had installed.

Populism will always stand in tension with democracy.

Populism will always stand in tension with democracy. The logic of personalism drives populist politicians to widen their powers and discretion. Because these leaders sustain their influence via personal appeals rather than intermediary organizations, they see any institutions outside their control as obstacles to be bypassed or overcome. Determined and politically compelled to boost their personal predominance, populist leaders strive to weaken constitutional checks and balances and to subordinate independent agencies to their will. They undermine institutional protections against the abuse of power and seek political hegemony.

Correspondingly, populist leaders treat opponents not as adversaries in a fair and equal competition, but as profound threats. Branding rivals "enemies of the people," they seek all means to defeat and marginalize them. Turning politics into a struggle of "us against them," populists undermine pluralism and bend or trample institutional safeguards. Populist leaders also put strong pressure on independent forces in civil society and strive to control the media, especially television. All these attacks, depicted as a defense of the people against rapacious elites, are also meant to strengthen leader-follower bonds and thus to compensate for the lack of organizational mediation. The absence of institutional discipline in the populist movement prompts the leader to recharge the base's loyalty through heroic activism. In all these ways, the populist notion of politics as an "all or nothing" struggle damages democracy.

Populism, whether of the left or the right, is a threat to democracy. Yet in Latin America today, the graver and more sustained danger is coming from the leftist variant. Chávez set the model. As soon as he was elected president of Venezuela, he set about revamping the country's institutional framework. First, he called a constituent assembly. Then, to dislodge the established political class that he charged with selfishness and corruption, he successfully pushed to close the recently elected bicameral Congress, where his followers held only about a third of the seats. Thanks to a reengineered electoral system, Chávez dominated the constituent assembly that boosted his powers, ended the ban on consecutive terms, and created a new unicameral (and hence easier to control) national legislature. These institutional victories--plus the promise of socioeconomic change--lifted Chávez and his camp to victory in the 2000 elections. Moreover, he took control of the courts and other independent institutions, such as Venezuela's electoral commission, and soon had a stranglehold on all branches of government.

Chávez and his supporters, along with some academics and intellectuals, claimed that Venezuela had become a participatory democracy. Common citizens, so long neglected by traditional politicians, could at last have a direct say in their own governance. There is some truth to these claims when it comes to local decision making and social-program implementation, but they are unconvincing as applied to the crucial arena of national policy making.

There should be no mistaking that Hugo Chávez made every important decision and thoroughly determined his country's political course. No aide could rein him in, and the people lacked the capacity to advance their collective will independently. The absence of firm popular organization and of transparent decision-making procedures precluded effective bottom-up influence. Political initiative emanated from the leader, not the citizens. Chávez never changed any significant plan due to popular resistance. Even when he lost, as in the 2007 constitutional plebiscite, he simply redoubled his efforts and pushed through to his goals. Rather than driving decisions, the populace was the object of Chávez's populist strategies and tactics, as can be seen from the rapid rise and decline of chavista movements such as the Bolivarian Circles. Talk about direct democracy cannot change contemporary Venezuela's status as a prototypical case of personalistic populism. Chávez's handpicked successor Nicolás Maduro, who won an April 2013 special election to the presidency, is perpetuating this top-down style--witness the strikingly opaque machinations that surrounded Maduro's assumption of presidential powers during the later stages of Chávez's illness.

Chávez's success in revamping Venezuelan politics and fortifying his personal dominance turned his strategy of constitutional reform into a script that other populist-leaning left-wing leaders followed. The core of the Chávez method is to use plebiscitarian mass support in order to transform established institutions, dismantle checks and balances, concentrate power in the hands of the president, and promote immediate reelection. Like their Venezuelan role model and generous patron, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras (till he was stopped) called for constituent assemblies with the aim of boosting the presidency's powers and paving the way toward indefinite reelection to that office. Bolivia and Ecuador's respective histories of acute instability--including interrupted presidencies--and consequent hopes for "a fresh start" guaranteed strong popular support for the new chief executives. With this majoritarian backing, personalistic leaders undermined liberal, pluralist institutions.

In Bolivia, the Morales government shut the opposition out of decisive stages of the constitution-drafting process. The charismatic leader then won his foes' agreement to a referendum on the tailor-made charter by promising not to run in 2014. But he soon went back on this vow; a typical populist, he is determined to cling to power. In Ecuador, Rafael Correa got his constituent-assembly election by engineering the irregular removal of more than half the members of Congress. By invoking popular sovereignty, this populist leader managed to defeat his adversaries and rewrite the rules via a new charter that greatly increased presidential powers.

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Once these populists of the left established predominance, they used their unfettered control over all branches of government to limit debate, strike at opponents, and drastically tilt the electoral playing field. These maneuvers dismantled democratic accountability and eliminated safeguards against arbitrariness. Hegemonic presidents called frequent referenda to garner plebiscitarian acclaim, but always with arrangements in place to ensure that these ballot-box exercises never gave the opposition a fair chance to win. When adversaries did manage to claim a victory, as happened occasionally from 2007 to 2010 in Venezuela, Chávez employed all kinds of shenanigans to render it meaningless. In late 2010, for instance, he crippled a newly elected parliament with significant opposition representation by having the outgoing assembly, where his supporters had exclusive control, delegate extensive legislative powers to him.

In these ways, left-wing populists have slowly but surely smothered democracy and entrenched competitive authoritarian rule in several Latin American states. Their brand of soft authoritarianism violates basic principles of democracy by placing controls on the media and the opposition while the government electioneers using state resources. Even when presidents command high popularity, as left-wing populists often have, contests held under such profoundly unfair conditions cannot qualify as democratic. Where the parameters of political choice are so badly distorted, majority support cannot compensate for serious infringements of pluralism and competitiveness.

While justifying their undemocratic moves with progressive claims, left populists have eagerly availed themselves of timeworn tactics of Latin American politics. Presidents in the region have long been known for efforts to distort electoral competition and unfairly perpetuate themselves in power. In particular, they have applied discriminatory legalism and its maxim "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law!" As populist chief executives have commandeered all major institutions including the courts, they have used formally legal authority in discretionary ways to promote their cronies and allies while punishing or intimidating critics and opponents in politics and society. With the government controlling all avenues of appeal and avoiding blatant violations of formal rules, those targeted find few chances for domestic recourse or the gathering of international support.

Here again, Chávez proved himself a trendsetter: He showed how skillfully an elected incumbent can employ discriminatory legalism to stifle debate and push critics and opponents to the wall. With comprehensive control over Venezuela's political institutions, Chávez closed a number of independent television stations and threatened the remaining ones; used trumped-up charges to jail or drive into exile recalcitrant judges and opposition leaders; and exploited oil rents and the state apparatus for campaigning. In these ways, he sapped the opposition's chances of success and ensured himself frequent victories at the polls. If his adversaries did win against all odds, he used various ploys to limit the effects. After the opposition managed to win the mayoralty of Caracas in 2008, for instance, Chávez folded much of the city into a new Capital District under a handpicked commissioner who was given most of the power and funding that had previously been under the mayor's control. With such unfair tactics, this populist leader undermined democracy and skewed political competition.

Seeing how discriminatory legalism has served to entrench competitive authoritarian rule in Venezuela, the leftist presidents of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua have followed suit and imitated Chávez. In Latin America today, the strangling of pluralism and competitiveness is not confined to a single case. Instead, formally legal means to control the media, attack the opposition, and massively use the state for electioneering are catching on in a whole set of countries as handy expedients for incumbents intent upon securing a lock on power.

In Bolivia, Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism have used trumped-up charges of administrative irregularities, corruption, terrorism, and genocide against numerous opposition politicians, imprisoning some, driving many others out of the country, and intimidating the rest. The competitiveness that is essential to democracy cannot survive in such a hostile setting. Ecuador's Rafael Correa has applied similar tactics, for example against the politician who challenged him in the 2006 election. Correa also seized on a 2010 police rebellion--painted by him as a coup attempt--as a pretext for cracking down on independent social and political forces. And he has intimidated the media by suing for exorbitant damages and stiff prison sentences over an opinion piece. Daniel Ortega has decreed many paralegal measures in Nicaragua's weakly institutionalized polity and has put persistent pressure on independent NGOs. After extracting concessions from an opposition leader who had been convicted of corruption charges, Ortega packed the courts and then had his appointees on the bench exempt him from the constitution's ban on immediate reelection. Furthermore, Ortega's supporters relied on manipulation and fraud in the 2008 municipal elections. In Nicaragua, discriminatory legalism has shaded into systematic illegalism.

Even in Argentina, where democracy has so far survived populist pressures, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (often known as CFK) has started to follow a Chávez-like script. Businesspeople who publicly criticize her have found themselves targets of special tax audits. Media outlets that draw her ire--the newspaper Clarín is a particular thorn in her side--have faced everything from antitrust investigations to mob violence. Even as it has been bullying critics, the ruling group around Kirchner has been floating the idea of calling a constituent assembly to pave the way for a third CFK term. Argentine civil society, however, has pushed back harder against this scheme than civil society in a "Bolivarian" country would likely be able to do. Mass protests in late 2012 noisily opposed the extension of CFK's rule, suggesting that Argentina will not easily be led down the Chávez path.

***

The populist wing of Latin America's contemporary left poses a significantly stronger challenge to democracy than did the wave of right-wing populist presidents who rose to prominence in the 1990s (or in Colombia's case, the 2000s). Carlos Menem and Alberto Fujimori, along with Brazil's Fernando Collor de Mello (1990-92) and Colombia's Alvaro Uribe (2002-10), also employed populist strategies, but on behalf of neoliberal economic policies and, in Peru and Colombia, the need to defeat violent leftist guerrillas. Despite differing from the current crop of left-wing populists on ideology and policy, these rightist presidents nonetheless favored a similar personalistic leadership style and mobilized amorphous, heterogeneous mass followings in a quasi-direct fashion. Each president cast himself as the people's champion in a struggle against malign forces such as established politicians and left-wing insurgents. In these ways, neoliberal populists garnered wide popular support that they sought to sustain with plebiscitarian tactics.

In typical populist fashion, these neoliberal politicians sought to boost presidential powers, weaken checks and balances, and extend their control over the government while preparing their own reelections. Menem, for instance, bent constitutional rules by issuing an unprecedented number of "emergency" decrees and packed Argentina's Supreme Court in order to protect his arrogations of power. Collor steamrolled Brazil's Congress, forcing legislators to accept drastic macroeconomic-stabilization measures by using his decree powers to confront the lawmakers with a fait accompli. Menem and Uribe pushed constitutional changes designed to help them get reelected. Most blatantly, Fujimori closed Congress and took control of the courts with his 1992 autogolpe (self-coup). Faced with strong international protests, he sought to tack away from naked authoritarianism by calling a constituent assembly that augmented presidential prerogatives and allowed for his reelection. The new charter also weakened the legislative branch by replacing Peru's bicameral Congress with a unicameral assembly. In these ways, right-wing populists damaged Latin American democracy, destroying it altogether for a time in Peru.

But this deterioration was limited in severity in Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, and in duration in Peru. Collor did not keep his promise to "kill inflation" and was defeated by Brazil's political class, which forced him to resign amid a corruption scandal. Menem and Uribe did achieve policy success and parlayed the resulting popularity into convincing reelection victories. But the desire of each to win a third consecutive term ran afoul of intraparty opposition in Argentina and a powerful independent Constitutional Court in Colombia. When Menem and Uribe stepped down, democracy in Argentina and Colombia recovered. Even Fujimori, who in 2000 managed to win a second reelection, fell soon thereafter as his ever more extreme personalism collapsed under its self-destructive logic. Once the president had pulverized the party system and subjugated the Peruvian state, his rule was thoroughly extra-institutional, resting on shady personal connections sustained by widespread corruption. When evidence of this crass bribery surfaced, Fujimori's hold on power vanished. The political demise of Fujimori--who is now serving jail time for corruption and human-rights abuses--brought back full democracy, with ample public debate and free and fair elections. Thus, right-wing populism did not ruin democracy in Argentina, Brazil, or Colombia, and in Peru democracy's destruction and temporary replacement were followed by a quick resurrection.

By contrast, left-wing populism has a more negative balance sheet. Chávez dominated Venezuelan politics for fourteen years, stopped only by his death. His underlings have good chances of retaining control, aided by the emotional impact of Chávez's "martyrdom." Morales, Correa, and Ortega have also cemented their respective hegemonies and prepared their own continuations in power. Bolivia's president, as mentioned, has gone back on his promise not to run again in 2014. With Correa's February 2013 reelection to a third term now behind him, he is poised to tighten his own political stranglehold. Given these leaders' unfettered control over state resources and their willingness to employ discriminatory legalism, opposition forces face steep uphill battles in a context of heavily rigged electoral competition. Incumbent governments have jailed opposition politicians or driven them out of the country in Bolivia, and have attacked and intimidated civil society in Ecuador and Nicaragua. These tightening constraints on political pluralism give the nondemocratic leaders of left-wing populism ever firmer foundations for their rule.

***

Why has left-wing populism been doing more damage to democracy in Latin America than right-wing populism did? This asymmetry reflects differences not in intention, but in capacity. Today's populists of the left command greater political strength and have more policy tools. They can push further down the road toward concentrated power than could their neoliberal cousins of a few years ago.

First, right-wing populism has a temporary (usually crisis-driven) support base, while leftist populism has more lasting roots, particularly in the "informal" sectors that figure so largely in the economies of many Latin American countries. Second, by reducing the power of the state over markets and private economic actors, neoliberalism diminishes the power of right-wing leaders. The growing state interventionism favored by left-wing populists, by contrast, gives them additional means of influence. Third, neoliberalism exposes right-wing populists to international pressures for democracy; economic nationalism, by contrast, insulates leftist presidents from such exhortations. Finally, right-wing populists acted separately, while today's left-wing leaders form a coordinated group. This cohesion further disarms international pressures to maintain democracy. For all these reasons, Bolivarian leaders have managed to strangle democracy much more effectively than neoliberal populists ever could.

The populists of the right always stood on shakier political ground than that of Chávez and his friends. Neoliberal populists won office by vowing to solve crises. Success made these leaders dispensable. By contrast, left-wing populists invoke structural problems--poverty, inequality, marginalization--that allow only for slow progress and resist definitive resolution. Stubborn problems thus justify one reelection of "the leader" after another. Moreover, these presidents have relied not only on performance-based legitimacy, but also on durable identity-based appeals that cast them as champions of, for example, informal workers, barrio residents, or indigenous people.

The right-wing populist presidents Menem, Fujimori, and Collor rose to power amid bouts of hyperinflation. These economic catastrophes discredited the existing parties in Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, respectively, opening space in each country for an outsider who pledged to stop the pain. But the political weakness that followed Collor's failure to end inflation contributed to his downfall on corruption charges. Menem and Fujimori eventually brought skyrocketing prices under control and received massive popular support in return. But the backing did not endure: Once these presidents had restored economic stability, voters switched to worrying about poverty and unemployment--problems that executives committed to neoliberal austerity, budget discipline, and privatization found much harder to solve. Within Menem's own Peronist party, for instance, a rival running to Menem's left cut him off from his hopes for a third term.

Fujimori and Uribe also won popular support with their success in fighting guerrillas. An improving security situation boosted each president's popularity for a while. But as the danger receded, especially in Peru, citizens' priorities shifted, exposing the two chief executives to a paradox of success. Their very accomplishments hamstrung their efforts to perpetuate themselves in office. Fujimori fell in 2000, the victim of his achievements as well as his considerable excesses, and Uribe failed to parlay his 2008 victories over leftist insurgents into another reelection in 2010.

Left-wing populists, by contrast, base their appeal on structural problems. They highlight Latin America's longstanding social deficits, especially widespread poverty and inequality. While the established political class looks self-serving and beholden to privileged elites, left-wing populists project concern for common citizens and start generous social programs that--despite frequent administrative problems stemming from politicization--significantly increase benefits, alleviate destitution, and bring symbolic recognition as well. This deliberate identification with ordinary people and their plight is reinforced by the leaders' affiliations with the popular sectors from which they spring (or with which they identify themselves). Left-populist identity politics is especially important in Bolivia, where the supporters of Morales like to boast that he is the first indigenous president that this majority-indigenous country has ever had. Similarly, Chávez dwelt often on his humble upbringing and spoke in a popular (and vulgar) idiom not previously associated with presidents of Venezuela.

Left-wing populists claim to be the first chief executives to embrace a preferential option for the poor. Their social programs embody this commitment, but cannot quickly overcome longstanding structural deficits. This slow progress with no end in sight yields more durable political payoffs than neoliberal populists' success in solving dramatic crises. Left-wing populists prove their social orientation and performance, and then point to the difficulty of the task in order to explain why they must stay in office. Thus, activist social policies further cement identity-based loyalties. These bonds give left-wing populism more reliable political sustenance than neoliberal leaders can command and allow left-wing populists to do graver damage to democracy.

The neoliberal economics to which recent right-wing populists were devoted, far from fortifying their political hegemony, ended up diminishing their control over economic matters and hence weakening them politically. Certainly, in the short run market-based reforms can augment presidential influence. Privatization programs, in which the government decides who may buy public enterprises, offer obvious opportunities for extracting favors. But once firms pass into private hands, the government loses control. Thus neoliberalism's end product is reduced presidential clout.

Neoliberal orthodoxy limits leaders in other ways. Budget discipline restrains patronage spending. Personnel cuts shrink the leeway for hiring cronies. Reliance on market forces precludes large-scale employment programs. Moreover, business and international financial institutions insist on firm, transparent legal parameters and thus reduce leaders' autonomy and discretion. In sum, neoliberalism constrains populist chief executives and hinders their continued reelections.

By contrast, left-leaning populists boost state interventionism. They add to the public payroll, increase regulation, and nationalize enterprises. This yields growing patronage resources, so presidents can buy support and press their opponents. As ever more people come to depend on the state, they become possible targets for discriminatory legalism. Citizens have an incentive to toe the line and back the incumbent, however grudgingly, as in the 2012 election that returned a dying Hugo Chávez to the presidency of Venezuela. Businesspeople need to think twice before funding oppositionists lest the government find a pretext to revoke business licenses, deny access to foreign exchange, or impose other sanctions. Once a populist president has established hegemony and defanged accountability mechanisms, extensive state interventionism offers untold new chances to reward friends, punish foes, and tilt the playing field.

In the years since the Cold War's end, international pressures in favor of democracy have come to the fore. Neoliberal economic-policy commitments exposed right-wing populists to these in ways that left-wing populists have seldom if ever experienced. After Fujimori's self-coup, he quickly backed away from open authoritarianism lest economic sanctions foil his market reforms. To preserve his hard-won economic success, Fujimori called elections for a constituent assembly and restored room for political competition. Neoliberalism trumped authoritarianism. Similar external pressures later limited Fujimori's efforts to manipulate the 2000 presidential election; they also hindered Menem's and Uribe's attempts to stay in office.

Left-wing populists, by contrast, can huddle behind economic nationalism. Reduced reliance on global market forces and rising statism build walls against international efforts to promote democracy. Under fire for blatant uses of discriminatory legalism, Chávez pulled out of hemispheric institutions such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. He also kept international election observers out of Venezuela, which helped him to hide how badly he had warped the competitive arena in his own favor. With the continuing boom in oil and natural-gas prices, commodity-rich Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have been able to ignore global market pressures (as has Nicaragua, which receives Venezuelan subsidies).

Yesterday's right-wing populists differed from today's left-wing populists, finally, in being less organized as a group. Neoliberal presidents may have banded together to found the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) but they never did much to support one another diplomatically. For instance, neither Menem nor Collor backed Fujimori after his self-coup, and neither ever came close to trying to shutter Congress. When Chávez put democracy to death by constituent assemblies, he inspired imitators. Fujimori's more direct attack on democracy had no such effect on his neoliberal peers.

Left-wing populists act in coordinated ways. Morales, Correa, and Zelaya (who was stopped early in the process) sought to retrace Chávez's path through constitutional change to political hegemony and discriminatory legalism. Daniel Ortega took advantage of Nicaragua's low level of institutionalization to push his changes through by informal means. They all benefited from Chávez's petrodollars, political advice, diplomatic support, and security protection. This comprehensive backing from Caracas strengthened left-wing populists both at home and abroad. Thus did Chávez help to smother democracy in several countries.

The tendency of left-wing populists to close ranks also serves to protect their assaults on political competition from international rescue efforts. The hemispheric community can force the president of Peru to retreat from open authoritarianism, but has no such leverage on a cohesive group of countries that aid one another and wield something akin to a veto within regional institutions. Among their tacit allies have been more moderate countries, such as Brazil, which see Bolivarian radicalism as a handy foil that raises their bargaining power vis-`a-vis Washington. The diplomatic self-interests of Latin American democracies have thus played a role in hampering international efforts to prevent authoritarian backsliding in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.

In fact, left-wing populists have skillfully used the region's democracy-defense arrangements to abet their own internal assaults on democracy. International mechanisms to protect competitive rule were designed with dramatic threats, such as coups against elected presidents, in mind. When Chávez faced an irresolute attempted coup in 2002, these mechanisms helped him, just as they helped Evo Morales when he had to deal with mass protests in 2008. It is no small matter that chief executives, who naturally display solidarity with their counterparts elsewhere, are typically the ones who must apply these measures.

Discriminatory legalism has so far proved a democracy-strangling tactic that the international community has found hard to rein in. Outsiders to a country must first pierce the veil of formal legality, and then decide when discrimination has become bad enough and broad enough to count as a violation of democracy. Left-wing populists typically move gradually to undermine democracy; where is the threshold that calls for international intervention? The most visible victims are usually legislators, high-court judges, and party politicians--not types that foreign presidents will feel most eager to rescue. As elected populist presidents squeeze and manipulate their opponents, diplomatic backing against the onslaught can prove scarce.

Leftists bore the brunt of the repression, learning to stop calling democracy a 'bourgeois farce' and to embrace human-rights safeguards and checks on state power. Much of Latin America's left has thus come to have strong democratic credentials.

Because they can so easily be made to shield perpetrators more than victims, current democracy-protection protocols in the region are serving to undermine democracy and--however unintentionally--to further tilt the playing field in several countries. Like discriminatory legalism at home, the asymmetrical internationalism that informs regional councils helps to spread and entrench nondemocracy. The new competitive authoritarian regimes of Latin American leftist populism lack the harshness of old-school dictatorships, but they have achieved a degree of "perfection" (to borrow Mario Vargas Llosa's ironic term) that even Mexico's long-ruling PRI in its heyday could not rival.

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Historically, it has been the right that has done the most damage to competitive civilian rule in Latin America, so when a new threat from the left emerged during a time of what appeared to be democratic consolidation, many observers were surprised. For decades, oligarchs had stifled mass participation while soldiers mouthing anticommunist slogans had all too often intervened to crush popular empowerment and democracy. Leftists bore the brunt of the repression, learning to stop calling democracy a "bourgeois farce" and to embrace human-rights safeguards and checks on state power. Much of Latin America's left has thus come to have strong democratic credentials.

Populist politicians, however, lack firm commitment to ideologies and principles and concentrate on the quest for personal power. The urge to boost the leader's clout, the dislike of constitutional limits, and the harsh treatment of rivals make populism an inherent threat to democracy. Populists both right and left have displayed these tendencies, but the latter have done more damage to democracy with their greater staying power and more skillful efforts to hoard power, knock down institutional safeguards, squeeze opponents, and skew competition. Beneath a veneer of formal legality, these populists have blunted and even exploited the hemisphere's methods for guarding against reversals of democracy.

With its claims to make democracy more direct and to be especially mindful of the poor, left-wing populism has crafted an attractive message. It has spread from Venezuela to several other countries and has stimulated interest elsewhere, especially Argentina. The temptations that it spawns make Chávez-style populism a particular threat to democracy.

This threat also seems to have clear limits, however. Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Uruguay, and now Colombia boast stable democracies. Steady institutions, pluralist party systems, and respectable government performance leave less room for populists. The downsides of Bolivarian populism, which include raging inflation, corruption, and violent crime, are well known and act as a deterrent. Left-wing populism and soft authoritarianism are unlikely to infect those countries.

Where leftists have achieved political success in those nations, they differ profoundly from Chávez. With coherent organizations and agendas, the Brazilian Workers' Party, Chile's Concertación, and Uruguay's Broad Front have eschewed personalism and populism. Committed to existing institutions and gradual change, they have preserved and enriched democracy. Thus the authoritarian turn in Latin America today comes not from the left in general, but from a populist left that in certain countries is even more dangerous than its rightist forebear. The scrim of "progressive" rhetoric around this undemocratic style of politics only makes things worse.

Chávez's death may abate this threat a bit, but competitive authoritarianism will likely persist and continue to hold appeal. The original Bolivarian leader is now gone, and Venezuelan subsidies may shrink, weakening especially Ortega in resource-poor Nicaragua. But the lessons of Chávez's remarkable "success" live on and may inspire more imitators, particularly in Argentina. The undemocratic incumbents in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela have entrenched their rule and wield many tools for extending it, aided by the commodities boom. Moreover, neither the domestic opposition nor the international community has found a way to stop discriminatory legalism. For these reasons, the end of the authoritarian trend in Latin America is not in sight.

This post originally appeared in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Democracy.

A Journey Into Our Food System's Refrigerated-Warehouse Archipelago

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:33 AM PDT

Scene from an exhibition (Nicola Twilley).

"The diet of the average American is almost entirely dependent on the existence of a vast, distributed winter--a seamless network of artificially chilled processing plants, distribution centers, shipping containers, and retail display cases that creates the permanent global summertime of our supermarket aisles."

That's Nicola Twilley, one half of Venue and a contributor to this site, talking about her new installation at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, "Perishable: An Exploration of the Refrigerated Landscape of America."

This is an infrastructural truth that it's possible to take as a kind of metaphor or hyperbole because it's almost impossible to believe the scale and complexity of the systems that undergird our lives. But just imagine opening your freezer and being able to see the true narrative of the foods inside. The story isn't solely one of agriculture, of farmers picking the food, and tossing it in the back of the truck. There's so much technology and transportation embedded in those frozen peas, all of which Twilley excavates.

And it's not just the stuff in the freezer! "At least 70 percent of the food we eat each year passes through or is entirely dependent on the cold chain for its journey from farm to fork, including foods that, on the surface, seem unlikely candidates for refrigeration," Twilley writes in introducing her show. "Peanuts, for example, are stored between 34 and 41 degrees Fahrenheit in giant refrigerated warehouses across Georgia (which produces nearly half of the country's peanut harvest)."

Or take potatoes. "An astonishing 80 percent of the nation's potato output is cut, processed, frozen, bagged, and distributed as French fries," she writes. Put another way, "Of the 36 lbs of potatoes eaten by the average American every year, 29 lbs are in the form of frozen French fries." So, hypothetically, a change in the electricity markets, say, could require new ways of freezing potatoes, which could spark the search for new types of plants, and eventually lead to large-scale genetic differences between the potatoes we used to grow and the potatoes of the future. (Or as we would have written it in the 1950s, "THE POTATOES OF THE FUTURE.") We didn't get jetpacks, in part, because we were too busy building and refining the "artificial cryosphere," as Twilley calls it.

These systems, by design and necessity, exist away from the cities, and even when they're within cities, away from where the people are. You don't see them unless you work there, and if you work there, you generally don't get to tell the stories of the landscape in the popular press.

To venture into infrastructural space is not just to leave the Beltway or the New York media world behind, but to come to know entirely different networks. The nodes on the map are different: Oakland and Richmond, not San Francisco; Long Beach and Hueneme, not LA; Newark and Wilmington, not New York.

In these geographies, the physical reasons people have long chosen certain locations retain their purchase: proximity to resources and markets, water access, transportation access, grid access. Take Allentown, Pennsylvania. It features a logistics hub "where U.S. Foods, Americold, Millard Refrigerated Services, Kraft, Ocean Spray, and others all maintain facilities," thanks to its "location at the intersection of I-78, I-476, and several East Coast railway lines. It is also close to major urban markets in the north-east corridor--but not so close that the land is expensive."

My point here is that this is another America. And it's neither the pastoral, wholesome family farm of Iowa political campaigns and Wendell Berry poems nor the dense Creative Class preserves where the nation's bloggers and TV producers live. Almost no one tells the stories of these places.

Except maybe Tom Wolfe. In his book, A Man in Full, one of his characters, Conrad Hensley, works in a refrigerated warehouse in the East Bay, and Wolfe uses Hensley's eyes to describe "the engine room, the heavy plumbing, the industrial hardpan" of the Bay Area.

The Dreisbach refrigerated warehouse on a foggy morning (Alexis Madrigal).

Based on the descriptions he gives of its location and many hours of Google Map scrolling, I'm almost sure Wolfe, who worked on the book for 11 years and is famous for on-the-ground research, once stared at the Dreisbach cold storage facility and turned it into the "Croker Global Foods Warehouse" of his imagination.

If you drive out of San Francisco on I-80 East, up near El Cerrito in Richmond, you'll pass the warehouse on the Bay side of the highway, just up from the marshes. It's my own personal favorite 6 million cubic feet of cold storage in America.

Here's Wolfe:

The Croker Global Foods Warehouse in the San Francisco Bay Area is not in any part of the fabled Bay Area that ever stole the heart of a songwriter. Or, as far as that goes, a travel writer, not even a travel writer desperate for something different to write about. No, the Croker warehouse is on the wrong side of the bay, the east side, not the San Francisco side but the Oakland side, up toward El Cerrito, in Contra Costa County, just off the marshes in the flatlands.
On one of those magical evenings in San Francisco when the fog rolls in from the Pacific Ocean and people emerge from the hotels on Nob Hill and go for brave walks down the staggeringly steep slopes of Powell Street and shiver deliciously in the chilly air and listen to the happy clapper clangor of the cable cars and the mournful foghorns of the freighters heading out to sea, and all at once life is a lovely little operetta from the year 1910--at that moment, likely as not, barely five miles to the east, a brutal sun has been roasting Contra Costa County for thirteen or fourteen hours, and the roof of the Croker warehouse is still swimming in caloric waves, even though the stars are out and the mercury remains swollen up to 90 degrees, down from 104 at 3pm and the employees' parking lot, which is dirt, has been cooked to cinders until it's as parched, pocked, dusty, and godforsaken as the surface of Mars. In short, Croker Global Foods is part of the engine room, the heavy plumbing, the industrial hardpan of this Elysian littoral known as the San Francisco Bay Area.
At about 8:45 on just such an evening a young man named Conrad Hensley drove into the employees' parking lot at Croker behind the wheel of a Hyundai hatchback family wagon. Since he was wearing a full set of long johns beneath his flannel shirt and jeans, he had the air conditioning roaring away on the high setting. He cruised up and down six or seven rows of cars, churning up quite a swirl of dust as he went and finally found a spot over by a Cyclone fence with razor wire on top. Beyond the fence, against a vasty California sky bursting with stars, he could see the silhouettes of a sewage substation, the smokestack of the Bolka Rendering works, the piling of a freeway spur that was under construction, and coming toward him, overhead, low enough to touch, it seemed like, the big belly of an airplane grumbling along the glide path to the Oakland International Airport. Such was the view on this side of the scenic San Francisco Bay."

Inside the warehouse, of course, it is freezing, and Wolfe describes, at length, what working in arctic temperatures does to the bodies of the workers in the warehouse. It's not pretty, as health research has shown.

This is where the trucks go (Alexis Madrigal).

Twilley visited dozens of outposts from the frozen archipelago -- from the Birds Eye frozen food plant in Darien, Wisconsin, a 55,000 square foot facility that processes green beans and carrots, to the Tropicana Bradenton Juice Plant in Florida, which is, at 29 million cubic feet of refrigerated storage, the "largest juice tank farm in America." (That is five times larger than the Dreisbach warehouse in Richmond, and go take a look at that on Google Maps and note its size relative to the semis parked nearby.)

All of these places are links in what is known as the "cold chain." And it's through their functioning that you get to eat fresh produce all winter and frozen french fries year round. So check out Twilley's exhibition in Culver City or online. This is your world: you're the last link in the chain.

The Tropicana Bradenton Juice Plant (Nicola Twilley).

By-Hand Baseball Scorekeeping: A 'Dying Art' That May Never Actually Die

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:32 AM PDT

Wikimedia

The baseball season has reached its midway point, so it's time once again for one of the history-minded sport's traditional rites of passage.

Not the All-Star Game, which celebrates its 80th anniversary Tuesday night (but which has lost much of its former sparkle in the era of interleague play, free agency, and eroded league identity and loyalty—as its plummeting television ratings attest). I mean that it's time for yet another report about the demise of the practice of keeping score at the ballpark.

Devised by pioneering statistician Henry Chadwick in the midst of the Civil War, its death was prominently featured on the first sports page of The New York Times a few days ago. "Who's Keeping Score? Not So Many," Times asked (and answered). After all, the Times's Harvey Araton wrote,

Today's fans go to ballparks that feature upscale restaurants, play areas for children and other attractions besides the game. Digital apps aside, there are also e-mails and social media to check, photos and videos to shoot, phone calls to make.

What chance, after all, does a pencil and paper—talk about obsolete technology—have against such competition? As a scorecard vendor Araton quoted said, "It's a dying thing." And what could be more crushing than the verdict of one completely uninterested 20-something fan: "It's my dad's thing"?

But that obituary was hardly breaking news of scorekeeping's supposed death.

Three years ago, Chris Erskine of the LA Times was ready to "clos[e] the book on baseball hieroglyphics," observing that "fewer and fewer fans keep a scorebook at ballgames." Prior to that, The Wall Street Journal proclaimed that "Keeping score is a dying art." "At tonight's All-Star Game," the Journal's Jonathan Eig wrote, "as at most Major League Baseball games these days, old-fashioned scorekeeping will be scarcely seen"—and that was back in 2001.

Jonathan Eig wrote, in 2001 that, "as at most Major League Baseball games these days, old-fashioned scorekeeping will be scarcely seen." But even Eig was a latecomer to the death watch. "Few fans actually keep score," the Sporting News disclosed—in 1950.

But even Eig was a latecomer to the death watch. "Few fans actually keep score," the Sporting News disclosed—in 1950. "In a recent survey of scorecards discarded by fans following a major league game," the so-called "baseball bible" reported, "only eight out of 100 purchasers knew the rudiments of scoring [and] less than half the fans bothered to even mark their cards with a pencil."

Having somehow survived these consistently gloomy prognoses for six decades and more, scorekeeping has proven harder to kill off than Rasputin. Keeping score is "dying, but not extinct," Araton concluded. When something has been "dying" for so long, that's a sign that there's still some life left in it yet—and I await the future send-offs that it will surely receive. In the meantime, all credit to the Washington Nationals for doing their best to encourage the practice. The Yankees may be charging 10 bucks for a scorecard buried in a glossy program, but the Nationals offer fans free scorecards at their home games.

To be sure, it's an uphill battle. But as I kept score during a recent game in Washington, I was happy to see that I wasn't alone in my section of the stands. There were all of two of us more or less diligently marking our cards—and trying to keep the "WW"s ("wasn't watching," the inevitably necessary notation devised by Yankee Hall of Fame shortstop and long-time broadcaster Phil Rizzuto) to a minimum. Hardly a mass movement, true, but you have to start somewhere.

Why Kansan Parsnips Might Soon Be Coming to Dutch Supermarkets

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:30 AM PDT

T-TIP could significantly change world trade. (Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters)

Despite potentially awkward revelations that the U.S. has bugged parts of Europe, negotiations for a monumental free trade agreement between the new and old worlds are being carried out on schedule last week in DC.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), if agreed upon, will have a significant impact on world trade, as well as the everyday lives of Americans and Europeans alike.

Here's a handy explainer on the key issues related to T-TIP.

What is T-TIP and what does it aim to accomplish?

T-TIP, as its proponents will tell you, is designed to boost economies on both sides of the Atlantic. Estimates made with the support of the European Commission indicate that it would increase world GDP by around $400 billion.

The catch is that, while most free trade agreements are aimed at removing tariffs that discourage trade, this one is different. Tariffs between the U.S. and the E.U are already very low (on the order of 3-4 percent).

This agreement, instead, targets "non-tariff barriers."

What are "non-tariff barriers"?

The euphemism "non-tariff barriers" refers to regulations and standards put in place by democratic governments which "irritate" trade but usually do so out of concern for national, state, or local interests. These interests could include things like having secure financial institutions or preventing children from consuming products that are dangerous.

Basically, as under many other free trade agreements, the lowest standards and regulations will apply in cases of trade between the two sides. If Kansans are allowed to produce and trade genetically modified parsnips, the Dutch will be compelled to stock them in their supermarkets. European banks, which have expressed an interest in weakening American financial regulations, could get their way, as well, depending on the final wording of the agreement.

What does this mean for U.S. states?

One of the more controversial proposals expected to be part of T-TIP is the ability for foreign corporations to sue domestic governments, or vice versa, in what are known as "investor-state tribunals."

Delegates from both the U.S. and EU who are participating in the negotiations report that both sides favor an agreement that includes opening the way for these controversial dispute-resolution methods.

Basically, under a system that would allow for investor-state tribunals, if a European corporation wanted to sell to Oregon, but there were rules established by that state that were antagonistic to the corporation's product, the corporation could take the state to court. The tribunal would be presided over by three international judges. If the corporation won, it could be eligible to receive taxpayer money from the state as compensation for lost profits or even lost expected profits.

Opponents of the deal worry this would lead to a"chilling effect," meaning states would be less likely to pass regulations in the future out of fear that they would lead to a costly lawsuit.

The next round of negotiations will be in Brussels in October.

This post is part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The Impending Senate Vote on Confirming Nominees

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:23 AM PDT

For now I'll skip the full parsing of why it is hysterical to use the term "nuclear option" to describe the rule-change Sen. Harry Reid says he will propose soon. Namely, allowing an Administration to have its nominations approved (or rejected) the way the Constitution specifies, through a majority vote, rather than being subjected to routine veto/delay by filibuster. For a quick refresher and antidote to "nuclear option" thinking, see this, by Jonathan Bernstein. Also an assortment of articles linked from here and here. (And this very good piece by Alec MacGillis in TNR.) Pay-off graf of the Bernstein piece:

[Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell, ever since January 2009, has treated filibusters as routine and universal. That's brand new. There have been filibusters of executive branch nominees before, but only in rare cases. Almost all the time, under all previous presidents, the Senate had a simple majority hurdle, not a 60 vote hurdle, for executive branch appointments. Nominees didn't have to get cloture; they only needed to get a simple majority.

That is the historical distortion that Reid's move is intended to offset. But what else is going on? Here are two reader dispatches to tide us over until we see what happens. The first is from Mike Lofgren, long-time aide (now retired) to Republicans in Congress and author of the celebrated The Party is Over. He writes about the paradox of modern American government simultaneously being too weak and too strong:

Your posts go some way in explaining the current political situation, but by no means do they go the whole way. A more complete explanation has to acknowledge the paradox of the contemporary American state. On the procedural level that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly gridlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s; that is true. The objective of the GOP is, obviously, to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected (and voter suppression laws in the GOP-controlled states are clearly intended to accomplish that result). As a consequence, Obama cannot get anything done; he cannot even get the most innocuous appointees in office.
Yet he can assassinate American citizens without due processes (Holder's sophistry to the contrary, judicial process is due process); can detain prisoners indefinitely without charge; conduct surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant; and engage in unprecedented - at least since the McCarthy era - witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called insider threat program). At home, this it is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal law enforcement agencies and their willing handmaidens at the state and local level. Abroad, Obama can start wars at will and pretty much engage in any other activity whatever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, to include just recently forcing down a plane containing a head of state. And not a peep from congressional Republicans, with the exception of an ineffectual gadfly like Rand Paul. Democrats, with the exception of a few like Ron Wyden, are not troubled, either - even to the extent of permitting obvious perjured congressional testimony by certain executive branch officials.
Clearly there is government, and then there is government. The former is the tip of the iceberg that the public who watches C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part is the Deep State, which operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. The Deep State is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies, key nodes of the judiciary (like FISC, the Eastern District of Virginia, and the Southern District of Manhattan); cleared contractors, Silicon Valley (whose cooperation is critical), and Wall Street.
This combination of procedural impotence on the one hand and unaccountable government by fiat on the other is clearly paradoxical, but any honest observer of the American state must attempt to come to grips with it. I will note in conclusion that in order for the Senate to pass major "social" legislation like immigration reform, it was necessary to grant an additional $38-billion tribute to Deep State elements, i.e., military and homeland security contractors. Clearly the GOP wanted it, but the Democrats didn't object; the $38 billion had been an internal "wish list" of the Deep State node called the Department of Homeland Security.

Next, from Mark Bernstein, head of the Eastgate software company and a former guest blogger here. He describes a different paradox: why one of the two parties supposedly competing for leadership of American governance seems indifferent or actively hostile to the idea of governance.

I happen to be reading Antonia Fraser's new account of the Reform Act, Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832. Not my usual thing, but a TLS reviewer loved the book...

What's striking to me about the fight of Reform -- essentially reapportionment -- is not that the institutions were sounder or the people better, but that the fear of disaster was shared by both the radicals, who could easily envision a military dictatorship, and by the ultraconservatives, who could easily imagine revolution followed by Terror. Both sides were intransigent but even the fire-eaters could see something to fear on each flank. Reform came because a majority feared insurrection more.

The same has often been true in the US, even at times of great polarization. In the Civil Rights struggle, even solid Southerners like Johnson and Ervin knew that there was something worse than integration: they could see it in Watts and Detroit, and the South had feared it since Toussaint Louverture's revolt in Haiti. In the Great Depression, even staunch Republicans could imagine something worse than the New Deal: they could see it in the Bonus Army and they could see it in Moscow. The story of the Great Compromises is entirely driven by knowledge that the terrible swift sword was credible and the Judgment could not forever be postponed.

But is that true today? We have credible threats of right-wing violence: the 2000 white-collar riot in Florida, Josh Marshall's litany of strange right-wing private militias and mercenaries, the whole fever dream of assault-weapon resistance to Big Government or Blue Helmets. But no one really worries anymore about the extreme left -- about revolution. We have no Eugene Debs, no Malcom X, not even a Henry Wallace; when the right needs to conjure up a Radical for rhetorical effect, the best they can manage seems to be Bill Ayers, a primary education activist! A thriller writer can easily imagine a right-wing takeover, and they do: Seven Days in May, The Handmaid's Tale. Nobody can see a plausible left-wing takeover; when Hollywood needs one, it conjures up things like Chinese Fleets or Space Aliens.

This means that the Right feels free to be irresponsible because the worst possible government is the government they already have. Any left-wing president is always going to be looking at a largely right-wing judiciary and a largely right-wing military; they can easily imagine a very bad government and have good reason to take steps to prevent it. But, if the right truly believes this is the worst of all possible governments, they have no need to be reasonable because their unreasoning cannot be punished.

China's 'Bacon Buy': National Security Risk, or Just Business as Usual?

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 11:02 AM PDT

(J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

Bacon has become an issue of national security.

The transition from delicious domestic product to topic of a Congressional hearing last week began in May when China's largest meat producer purchased the United States' biggest pork company, Smithfield Foods (a company most-famous for its former-spokeswoman and racist ham magnate Paula Deen). For a price of almost $5 billion (making it the biggest acquisition of an American company by a Chinese one) Shuanghui International would control approximately one-quarter of the American pork market.

It's a big deal for China, a place that truly loves its pigs. Here is a place that consumes more than half of the world's pork, and even has its own strategic pork reserve to keep prices steady. If the deal goes through -- and there are still obstacles -- the Chinese company would become the proud owner of 460 farms, more than 30 processing plants, and 28 percent of our country's hogs. But some folks in Washington have been wondering aloud: Is that all that they're getting?

"The end game from the Chinese point of view is to ultimately dominate our domestic pork market," Daniel Slane, a commissioner at the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said at the hearing. "They will take our technology and they will integrate it into China."

In Slane's view, this isn't about our pork, it's about the U.S.'s unparalleled production ability. Slane said they will use our technology for "manure handling, for genetics, for meat cutting. The history is, once they digest all of this and they get the their industry up, they'll start to try to export their pork to us."

If this is really just some sort of attempt at agricultural espionage, would that qualify as a threat to the country's wellbeing? That's a question for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a secretive group chaired by the Treasury Secretary. The CFIUS process is notoriously secretive, and we may never know exactly what goes into their decision.

Matthew Slaughter, a former member of CFIUS, says he understands the worry surrounding China's habit of stealing this country's intellectual property. But at least in this case they would be paying for it.

"In this context it is important to see that the Smithfield transaction offers Exhibit A of the ideal solution to this grave problem," he said at the hearing. "An American company being paid by a Chinese company billions of dollars for its ideas in a transparent market based deal."

There's even a question about whether Smithfield is really even in possession of any secrets.

"There's a boogeyman in a lot of this," said Kirk Feller, a former lobbyist for the National Pork Producers Council. "The thought is there some way China could steal something away from the American pork producer and capitalize on it in China and overtake the world. It's the boogeyman behind every tree scenario ... Everything Smithfield has is commercially available. It doesn't make sense to me, everyone has access to these technologies."

And even if China ends up with more than just our hogs, Slaughter doesn't see how this rises to the level of a national security threat.

"Suppose there is special technology about hog raising or slaughtering, that China is able to get its hands on, that doesn't concern national security," he told National Journal. "It's not like there are men and women in uniform that need that kind of pork to be soldiers."

But Usha Haley, a professor and Director of the Robbins Center for Global Business and Strategy at West Virginia University, sees it differently. For her, it could be the start of handing off control of large swaths of our food supply.

"Even if they are extremely benevolent now, their intentions could change," she told National Journal. "We do not want a resource on which we are crucially dependent to be in the hands of somebody else. That's what national security is all about."

Haley also points out that there is cause for concern about the quality of our food supply. China, she notes, has had a poor record of food safety (recent examples include thousands of pigs rotting in China's drinking water supply and rat meat passed off as mutton), and if the company ends up selling back into the United States, our country food-consumers could suffer.

Smithfield CEO Larry Pope maintains that this deal will not affect products in the United States at all. China, he says, with its water shortage and growing appetite for protein, is in need of this country's product. All this will do, he says, is increase the amount of exports from the United States.

"It'll be the same old Smithfield, only better," he told the committee. For him, anyway: He could make $46 million in merger-related payments.

Catching Fish Using Birds: Stunning Images of a Dying Art in China

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 10:26 AM PDT

The brothers Huang Yuechang and Huang Mingde have spent a lifetime fishing with cormorants. (Michael Steverson)

74-year-old Huang Yuechuang sat across from me looking like no entrepreneur I'd ever met before. With his classic white goatee, vintage self-made fishing clothing, and a traditional conical bamboo hat, he looked every part the old fisherman he is. A wiry, spry man with a quick smile, Mr. Huang is a semi-retired cormorant fisherman who works about 25 days each month at the scenic Li River around Xingping Fishing Village in Guangxi Province. There are fewer fish in the Li these days, so the men, raised as fishermen from their teens, have out of necessity become models for the many millions of travelers who visit the area each year.

Huang Yuechuang, aged 74. (Michael Steverson)

In a bold move, Mr. Huang, along with his 82-year-old brother Huang Mingde, recently ended a long affiliation with a Yangshuo-based tour operator and struck out on their own. The reason was purely financial: The younger Huang's wife was diagnosed with diabetes a few years ago, and the family needed to cover the mounting monthly cost of insulin.

The brothers Huang Mingde (left) and Huang Yuechuang (right) at work on the Li River. (Michael Steverson)

Cormorant fishing is a dying art. For thousands of years, fishermen have used trained cormorants to fish the rivers and lakes of China. The process is simple: The fisherman first ties a snare near the base of the bird's throat, which effectively prevents them from swallowing larger fish, although they can still swallow some smaller fish. When a cormorant catches a fish, the fisherman then brings the bird back to the boat and has it spit the fish up onto the bamboo deck.

The brothers wait patiently for the perfect light. (Michael Steverson)

While there aren't many practicing cormorant fisherman left these days, a few, such as Mr. Huang and his brother, can still manage a decent living serving the tourism industry. Mr. Huang first began working with photographers back in the 1970s and never imagined it leading to this. He offers a practical explanation:

Huang Yuechuang in his office. (Michael Steverson)

"Tourists are interested in seeing the traditional way of life here, such as fishing with cormorants and lanterns, and we are happy to keep the old ways alive while supporting ourselves." It was a risk for the men to go it alone, but risk is the definition of entrepreneurship. So far, it has worked out well for the brothers Huang.

Huang Mingde (age 82). (Michael Steverson)

Next Time, Try Not to Compare Huma Abedin to the Taj Mahal

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 10:25 AM PDT

New York magazine has a new Anthony Weiner profile by Mark Jacobson. Some people are already giggling at what appears to be the writer's crush on Huma Abedin, Weiner's wife. Given that Abedin is strikingly lovely in every photo that's been circulated of her, that hardly seems all that noteworthy. But that's not to say there's nothing worth noting about the profile's descriptions of Abedin. Let's take a look at one of the paragraphs Isaac Chotiner at The New Republic highlighted as one of the "silliest/creepiest tidbits":

She approached in a knit white top and navy-blue business skirt, her dark, almost black hair down to her shoulders. She wore bright-red lipstick, which gave her lips a 3-D look, her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race. The harsh, cheap buck lighting in the coffee shop couldn't lay a glove on her. By the time she sat down, the harmony of angels had vanquished the tinny background music from every corporate space on the planet. Of course, you'd seen pictures before. But you'd also seen pictures of the Taj Mahal. It didn't quite come up to actually being there.

Hold it right there. I hate to join the Internet outrage machine, but my problem with this paragraph has nothing to do with whether or not Jacobson is attracted to Abedin. (Who cares, and who isn't?)

My problem is that Jacobson couldn't have written a better paragraph to illustrate what's known as "orientalism" if he had tried. This reads like someone is trying to troll Edward Said.

Let's start with the red flag that should have alerted the editors that a little more work was needed here: comparing Abedin to the Taj Mahal, the icon of Indo-Islamic architecture. (Abedin is a Muslim whose parents were born in India and in Pakistan.)

First, this is crude. As an editorial matter, you probably want to strike out comparisons of Brigitte Bardot to the Eiffel Tower (for example) on your daily cliché watch. Second, though, in terms of racial sensitivity, this is less like comparing Bardot to the Eiffel Tower than comparing Tyra Banks to the Serengeti. As great as it may sound in the mind of a sleep-deprived writer on deadline, it should never, ever make it to print.

This is a tricky point to make delicately, because it's certainly true that there's a lot of manufactured indignation on the web, and I'm not convinced that much good comes from examining every written word in search of the politically incorrect just to have something to talk about. But that isn't a reason to ignore harmful stereotypes -- and what's remarkable about this particular paragraph of stereotyping is that people are not calling it out ... possibly because Internet sensitivity isn't set equally high for all ethnic categories.

Because I was an equal-opportunity skimmer of reading assignments in college, I never had much time for Said, just as I never had much time for Adam Smith. But somewhere along the line, probably while listening to female friends of South Asian extraction talk about feeling exoticized by American men they were trying to date, something sank in.

At the heart of Said's critique of Western treatment of the "Orient" is the observation that even romanticizing something is a way of diminishing it, rendering it two-dimensional. "Orientalism," according to the postcolonialists, is about emphasizing the differences between East and West, exoticizing them, seeing one, for example, as spiritual and the other as material: "By the time she sat down, the harmony of angels had vanquished the tinny background music from every corporate space on the planet." Or seeing one as ancient and the other as modern: "her brown eyes were pools of empathy evolved through a thousand generations of what was good and decent in the history of the human race." In fact, Said was particularly cognizant of the way these trends manifested in Western perceptions of Eastern, Muslim women, in part because he felt the sexualization of the Orient was vital to Western justification for imperialism: the East was a female sex object ready for Western male penetration--the veil was made to be removed. Completely unintentionally, this paragraph, with its joint focus on Abedin's beauty and her otherness, is a classic of the genre.

Don't giggle at Jacobson for admiring Huma Abedin, and don't shame him for resorting to handy cultural references when trying to communicate with his readers, either. As a time-pressed editor myself, I'm reluctant to trash-talk editors every time something slips by. But this was a print profile, not a 20-minute or even two-hour post on the website. Next time, catch this. A paragraph like this has no business in a serious magazine. It certainly has no place in a piece seeking to illuminate a civic choice the voters of New York City will make at the polls this November.

New from The Atlantic Books: The Mark Twain Collection

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:36 AM PDT

Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens (center) with author George Alfred Townsend (left) and David Grey, editor of the Buffalo Courier (right) (Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons)

One winter day in 1869, Mark Twain took the stairs to the second floor of a building near Boston Common and introduced himself to the editors of The Atlantic Monthly, including William Dean Howells. The meeting would change both Twain and the magazine, and begin a friendship between editor and author that would become one of America's most important literary collaborations.

The pieces collected in our new ebook are the fruits of that partnership. Twain wrote for The Atlantic from 1874 to 1880, publishing essays, recollections, short stories, and even the memoir Old Times on the Mississippi, which appeared in seven installments beginning in 1875 and was later released as the book Life on the Mississippi.

Each of Twain's stories for the magazine was encouraged and improved by Howells, who became Twain's most useful public champion and his most trusted editor--a relationship that the Twain biographer Ben Tarnoff explores in his introduction to the collection. "[Howells] didn't simply make Twain a better writer; he also explained Twain's significance to the wider world," Tarnoff writes. "He elevated the author of The Innocents Abroad from a popular entertainer to a transformative literary figure--into the "Lincoln of our literature," as Howells called him."

Writing to Howells in 1874, while the two were editing Old Times on the Mississippi for the magazine, Twain described a burden he felt of being known merely as a humorist. He bemoaned the expectations of an audience that simply wanted him to "stand on his head every fifteen minutes." Writing for The Atlantic, he told his friend, offered him a new relationship with readers and a new way to feel about his work. "It is the only audience that I sit down before in perfect serenity," he wrote.

The Mark Twain Collection is the first ebook in an exciting new series that will spotlight some of the most-celebrated contributors since the magazine's founding in 1857. These exclusive collections will feature the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Muir, among others who've been delighting readers of The Atlantic for generations. For more on the Mark Twain Collection and other ebooks from The Atlantic Books, see this.

On Getting Drunk in Antarctica

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:08 AM PDT

A scientist stands outside the Ice Cube Laboratory at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on August 17, 2012. (National Science Foundation/Sven Lidstrom)

There comes a point every summer where the hot weather starts to feel less like an opportunity for outdoor fun and more like a full-body rash that won't go away. New Yorkers are flocking to an ice bar. Japanese workers ditch their suits for Hawaiian shirts. Here in D.C., the summer is so swamp-like that when you go outside -- even when it's not raining -- people tell you to stay dry.

So naturally, when I learned about Phil Broughton, a health physicist who once worked at the Amundsen Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica, I was drawn as much by the frigid setting as I was by his amazing story.

This time of year, when days in the northern hemisphere are long and sweltering, those near the South Pole reach lows of -100 degrees Fahrenheit or less, and the continent is in the throes of its yearly six months of darkness.

Each winter, the few dozen workers at the South Pole research station spend nine months in total isolation: No airplanes can fly in or out until the base "warms" up to 50 below zero -- otherwise the fuel might freeze and kill the engine.

Employees at the Amundsen-Scott research station at the South Pole pose for a picture with Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg on Dec. 12, 2011. (AP Photo/ Norwegian Prime Minister's Office) (Reuters)

To hold the workers over, the company running the station stocks a store ahead of time with provisions, including plenty of alcohol. (After all, who wouldn't want a healthy gin reserve before embarking on months of endless night with your co-workers?) To round out the standard liquor and beer staples, some of the "winter-overs" bring special treats with them in their 125 pounds of allowable luggage.

"I brought Angostura bitters because I guessed (correctly) that the bottom of the globe would be missing the critical ingredient to make a proper Manhattan," Broughton said.

Broughton's downtime during his Antarctic days mostly consisted of watching DVDs left by previous tenants, talking online with family back home, and reading an assortment of books that had been abandoned by previous crews. There was also a pool table, some rusty musical instruments, and a gym "meant for all sports and thus good for none."

Occasionally, they entertained themselves with daredevil stunts, like running from a 200-degree sauna to touch the South Pole while wearing nothing but shoes. (He did this twice).

The sun rises above the horizon on September 22 for the first time since March 22 at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station on September 24, 2012. (National Science Foundation/Katie Koster)

But there was a major downside to living in what is basically earth's version of outer space: the torpor of nonstop winter set in quickly, and so did depression and alcoholism for some of Broughton's compatriots. And as the resident volunteer bartender, he saw first hand the ugly side of living in the "big dead place."

***

If you want to escape your problems, Antarctica is the furthest you can go, as Broughton has noted. In 2000, he was working in Silicon Valley, and after a particularly bad day at work, he came home, sat down at his computer, and thought:

"What is the furthest I can get away from these assholes?"

He typed "Antarctica" into a job search engine, and by October 2002, he was at the bottom of the earth, working for a National Science Foundation contractor as a science cryogenics technician. ("It was my job to take care of the liquid nitrogen and liquid helium for experiments.") He was deployed for a year -- including one very long winter.

The continent is vast, high desert, and it's one of the driest places on earth. A one-mile walk across the glacial ice required suiting up in the local body-armor, complete with thermal underwear and a special parka. Broughton said that while he struggled with permanently chapped, cracked skin, he eventually acclimated to the cold. At first, negative 30 didn't feel so bad, he said, and on some days even negative 80 could be tolerated, albeit briefly, in a t-shirt.

Broughton is from Florida, and before he landed at the South Pole, he had seen snow a total of five times.

"I've now seen enough snow to last me a lifetime," he said.

South Pole employees remove snow from the top of buildings during the winter darkness on May 9, 2012. Red lights are used outside to minimize light pollution during the winter to lessen the impact on the scientific telescopes. (National Science Foundation/Sven Lidstrom)

***

A bored, trapped, and cold population naturally gave rise to a bar. Club 90 South was a simple, wood-paneled joint with a hole in the wall opening up to the outside, where the bartenders would put the Jagermeister to keep it chilled. Massive pallets of beer, wine, and liquor were flown in with the winter crew, and they prayed it would last until them all nine months. The previous year's team, Broughton said, ran out of wine and beer early.

Someone someday will make a chart of the inverse relationship between "activities available" and "alcohol consumed." Another Antarctic winter-over and author, Nicholas Johnson, once offered the following list when asked what he wished he had brought with him:

Right now I wish that I had a beer brewing kit, another bottle of 16 year old Lagavulin, a greater selection of wine, a pocket-sized classical Greek dictionary, the electric guitar that didn't make it onto the last flight with mail, a blender, the copies of my thesis with reviewers' notes, some cave-aged emmenthaler and a pomegranate.

One day early in his time there, Broughton walked into Club 90 South, sat behind the bar at the only available seat, and became the default South Pole bartender.

Club 90 South, with Broughton doing a "dragon" trick with liquid nitrogen. (Courtesy of Phil Broughton)

The bar operated on an honor system: take some liquor, leave some liquor. The system didn't work perfectly, though -- they were out of all but their worst beer (New Zealand's Export Gold) two months before the end of the winter.

The workers became best friends; then they ran out of things to talk about.

"By the time a year has gone by, you pretty much know everyone's stories," he said. "There is no escape."

Co-workers stationed back home would phone often, but they would forget that the people on the other end of the line were trapped in a frozen wasteland.

"They're talking to you about the ice cream social and saying you need to submit your minutes for the departmental meetings," he said. "I would think, 'How did I end up with corporate culture at the bottom of the earth?'"

Eventually, workers who were predisposed to seasonal affective disorder were hit hard. The darkness and cold caused sleepiness and memory problems, and over time some of the winter-overs became disoriented and lethargic.

"You were supposed to write copious notes to yourself in a notebook," Broughton said. "Life gets rough when you can't remember things. My strangest thing was that I lost complete command of written grammar. And I pretty much don't remember the month of October."

There were occasional tee-totalers and plenty of moderate drinkers, but for some, alcohol became a refuge.

"You see things that leave you uncomfortable. There were a good dozen people who were drinking to kill the days -- that was hard to watch, and it was hard to serve. Though at some level, I'd rather have you drinking in front of me than drinking on your own."

Broughton said he tried to swap in sodas and other drinks for his inebriated colleagues, but non-alcoholic options didn't last long. Coke and Mountain Dew were gone a month into the winter, and their pallet of wine froze one day. There were six months where the only beverage options consisted of beer, hard alcohol, and powdered milk. (And of course, the purest glacial water this side of the Bellingshausen Sea.)

But for Broughton, serving someone in a bar until they passed out was sometimes a better option than letting them drunkenly wander outside by themselves. As he wrote recently about the experience:

The most dire danger in Antarctica is always failure to respect the absolutely lethal environment of Antarctica itself. I was far happier to serve until I could guide him over to a couch to pass out than to see him stagger out into the -85F night.

(National Science Foundation/Deven Stross)

***

Broughton heard that the following year, the station management tried to get the winter-overs to cut back on drinking, but that did not, as one might expect, go over well.

They eventually did successfully cut smoking rates, though, by insisting people smoking near their dorms do so outside.

In spite of everything, Broughton told me that not a day goes by when he doesn't think about Antarctica, and he says that he would go back if he had the chance. And he would still pick the polar winter over the alternative: the continent's five-month summer of nonstop sunlight.

"The summer in Antarctica is a rat race to try to batten down the hatches and fix everything before the winter sets in," he said. "I would be much happier to play caretaker for the long night."

Republicans Are Starting to Feel Good About Retaking the Senate in 2014

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:06 AM PDT

Reuters

For the first time this year, Republican strategists believe they're within striking distance of taking back control of the Senate, thanks to untimely Democratic Senate retirements and red-state Democratic recruits deciding not to run for Congress. The latest blow to Democrats: former Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer's surprising decision Saturday to pass up a campaign.

Republican recognize they need to win only three Senate seats in the most of conservative of states -- Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alaska -- and Mitch McConnell could be majority leader in 2015. (That is, if McConnell can hold onto his own Kentucky seat.) The latest developments underline how punishing the map is for Democrats for 2014, and how little margin for error they have.

Democrats can afford to lose up to five Senate seats and still maintain their majority, but they already risk conceding over half that number before campaigning even gets under way.

Schweitzer was the type of grade-A recruit who could nearly guarantee victory despite Montana's Republican leanings. His near-universal name recognition, blunt outspokenness, and statewide organization made him a heavy favorite, especially when Republicans had yet to field a first-tier challenger. Big Sky Country was beginning to look like a long shot for the GOP.

But somewhere along the way, Schweitzer got cold feet. Montana Democratic officials were expecting Schweitzer to announce his campaign earlier this week, and were caught by surprise when they didn't hear from the former governor. Democrats are claiming -- after the fact -- that they were concerned about vulnerabilities in his background, but Republicans say that the difficult political environment for Democrats in Montana also played a role.

"We did our homework, and there was a lot of rust under Schweitzer's hood -- a LOT of rust," said Brad Dayspring, spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. "Just as important, though, is that Schweitzer looked at the race and realized he couldn't win in light of how unpopular the Democrat agenda of higher taxes, bankrupting spending, and the Obamacare train wreck is in Montana these days."

Indeed, Schweitzer's backing out is illustrative to a mounting recruiting problem for Senate Democrats in conservative states, which make up a disproportionate share of the battleground matchups in 2014. The party has failed to persuade any of its top choices in West Virginia, where Rep. Nick Rahall and lawyer Nick Preservati passed on bids. In South Dakota, the party missed out on former Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin and the son of retiring Sen. Tim Johnson. In Georgia, Rep. John Barrow decided not to run, but the party rallied behind Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn. The party's biggest red-state recruit is Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, whose campaign against McConnell has gotten off to a rocky start.

Possible Democratic candidates for the Montana Senate seat include Stephanie Schriock, president of EMILY's List; Denise Juneau, state superintendent of public instruction; Monica Lindeen, the state's auditor; Brian Morris, a state Supreme Court justice; and state Sen. Kendall Van Dyke.

On the Republican side, all eyes are on freshman Rep. Steve Daines, who comfortably won the state's at-large House seat last year.

"We remain confident that Democrats can hold the Montana seat, and the overall math still favors Democrats next year," said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Executive Director Guy Cecil. "Only three Democratic incumbents have lost reelection in the last decade. Our incumbents are positioned to win, we've already recruited a strong challenger to Mitch McConnell, and Republicans have failed to expand the Senate map into blue and purple states."

That's been the Democratic saving grace this election year -- that Republicans have struggled to recruit top candidates in the traditional battlegrounds against Al Franken in Minnesota, Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire, Mark Udall in Colorado, and for open seats in Iowa and Michigan.

But if Democrats struggle to put Montana in play without Schweitzer, that means the path to a majority will run through Louisiana and Alaska, not the more Obama-friendly confines of the Midwest and Northeast. That's an unnerving proposition for Democrats, given how badly the party has struggled outside their comfort zone lately.

A Modest Proposal: Don't Worry About Government Surveillance at All, Ever

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 09:00 AM PDT

Mark Gstohl/Flickr

It is melancholy to observe how swiftly Americans have been divided by federal surveillance. A new poll finds that a majority view Edward Snowden as a whistleblower, and a plurality of respondents say "government goes too far in restricting civil liberties in the name of anti-terrorism." These worrywarts need to be reminded of all the reasons to trust their government. What reason do any of us have to doubt that President Obama can be fully trusted on this matter?

Numerous Obama Administration officials say that they're acting within the law, that they're careful to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, and that they'd never abuse their power. Would elected officials really break their promises or lie to the public? What precedent is there in U.S. history to suggest that politicians would violate their oath to uphold the Constitution? Would the government really abuse civil liberties to fight terrorism of all things? And what reason has Obama himself given us to think that he'd brazenly break his word? Besides, the NSA, CIA, and FBI wouldn't dare contravene the law while under the supervision of a Constitutional law expert with Obama's reputation for investigating and prosecuting lawbreakers. Seeing how he dealt with Bush-era torturers, would you break the law on his watch?

Some Americans worry that the NSA conducts its surveillance in secret, under the supervision of a secret court with secret rules. But as Hendrik Hertzberg writes, "I still don't know of a single instance where the N.S.A. data program has encroached on or repressed any particular person's or group's freedom of expression or association in a tangible way. Nor have I come across a clear explanation of exactly how the program could be put to such a purpose." Yeah. How would you even abuse a vast database detailing the private communications of Americans?

Sure, the program has been conducted in secret for years, but does anyone really think we wouldn't know immediately if there were problems? The president staked his word on running the most transparent government in history! He has specifically promised to protect whistleblowers -- who would surely emerge to document NSA abuses, confident that they'd be shielded from prosecution, or at least that they'd be able to get asylum somewhere without being vilified in the media. It's true that the Church Committee documented abuses totally unknown to the public for decades after they happened. But although we call the generation that committed those abuses the "Greatest," there's good reason to believe today's leaders are more morally upright and much more able to resist being corrupted by secrecy and power. Just think about it. Doesn't it intuitively seem like we're better than our elders, and that the kinds of abuses that happened in the past couldn't possible happen now? Let's go with our gut.

"Even if the program could be misused in that way, for it to happen you would have to have a malevolent government," Hertzberg continues, "or, at least, a government with a malevolent, out-of-control component or powerful official or officials." Indeed, some low-level guy unknown to most Americans could never steal this data and flee to China or Russia. And obviously, all abuses of power are perpetrated by malevolent, out-of-control sociopaths. Well-meaning leaders never perpetrate abuses, and miscarriages of justice are always deliberate and never mistakes. Institutional arrangements and the degree of public scrutiny to which they're subject aren't even important unless you've got guys like Richard Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover running things. And what are the odds of a pair like that becoming, say, president and FBI director at the same time? Listening to civil libertarians, you'd swear that America was capable of building torture chambers. What a bunch of alarmist crazies.

What you have to understand is that rules are in place to protect your rights. Sure, the government has the technical ability to look at domestic and not just foreign communications; and it has the technical ability to look at the contents of your communications, not just the metadata. But do you really think that NSA personnel would break the rules? Is there any precedent to suggest they'd break the law, or that people who broke surveillance law would be granted retroactive immunity? And if they just focus on metadata, what compromising material on innocent people could they possibly find? How many members of Congress would gladly hand over their metadata to any reporter who asked? Dozens? Hundreds?

After all, even if a malevolent leader was in charge of the surveillance state, it isn't like innocent people would have to worry. Save terrorists and criminals, who has anything to hide? To worry about public officials being blackmailed by a Snowden type who wants to make a dishonest buck rather than a headline is to assume that our senators, governors, and judges have dark secrets -- as if a substantial part of our ruling class is out cheating on their taxes or having affairs or ingesting illegal substances or breaking campaign-finance laws. Cynics!

Regular citizens who have nothing to hide needn't worry about the surveillance state at all. Daniel Solove writes:

... suppose government officials learn that a person has bought a number of books on how to manufacture methamphetamine. That information makes them suspect that he's building a meth lab. What is missing from the records is the full story: The person is writing a novel about a character who makes meth. When he bought the books, he didn't consider how suspicious the purchase might appear to government officials, and his records didn't reveal the reason for the purchases. Should he have to worry about government scrutiny of all his purchases and actions? Should he have to be concerned that he'll wind up on a suspicious-persons list?
Even if he isn't doing anything wrong, he may want to keep his records away from government officials who might make faulty inferences from them. He might not want to have to worry about how everything he does will be perceived by officials nervously monitoring for criminal activity. He might not want to have a computer flag him as suspicious because he has an unusual pattern of behavior.

But this assumes that government officials make faulty inferences. We're talking about highly trained surveillance-state professionals who are always fully cognizant of the power they wield and the seriousness of mistakes. Just look at the unparalleled success that is the No-Fly List. In the absence of any hard numbers about how often people are put on it erroneously, it's only fair to assume that it doesn't happen very often, and surely anyone who is wrongly classified is able to easily remedy the mistake, just as surely as it's very easy to correct mistakes made by the IRS or by federal prosecutors whose convictions are called into question by DNA evidence.

Watching the behavior of the parts of the federal government that operate with relative transparency, can anyone doubt the eagerness of huge bureaucracies to promptly acknowledge, address, and remedy mistakes? Just imagine how much more diligent and conscientious employees of a secret bureaucracy must be. There's certainly no reason for citizens to avoid using words in private emails or making innocent purchases that might appear suspicious.

Like David Simon said, intrusive surveillance has long been used in the War on Drugs. That should definitely make you less upset about the NSA. After all, if there's any government effort that demonstrates how heavy-handed tactics can achieve important goals without infringing on civil liberties, it's the highly successful eradication of narcotics from our society. If civil libertarians had succeeded in stopping the War on Drugs there might still be drug gangs running large chunks of Latin American countries and waging war on our streets. With all we've gained, thank goodness the Fourth Amendment was weakened.

In the final analysis of NSA surveillance, blogger Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post puts it best. "This is very straight forward. It is therefore somewhat shocking (maybe we shouldn't expect more) that lawmakers (not to mention pundits) got themselves riled up, claiming gross constitutional violations," she wrote. "The administration, which failed to adequately explain the program, is partly to blame. But there really is no excuse for lawmakers charged with national security obligations to be so ignorant of both the law and the facts. They have a serious obligation to conduct oversight and to keep the American people safe and informed. In running through the halls with their hair on fire, they show themselves, not the program, to be deficient. If anything this episode should remind us to exercise some quality control -- when it comes to voting."

Yes, as Rubin explains, Congress can only fulfill its oversight responsibilities when its members stop paying so much attention to NSA and the possibility of Constitutional violations. And we should make sure to elect a Congress that does much less to challenge these programs.

That's the best way to safeguard our liberty, especially if there's ever another terrorist attack, which the national-security state would never overreact to or use as an excuse to tap into data that it stores but isn't presently allowed to look at. No, these powers will never, ever be abused.

I Know What You Did Last Errand

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:20 AM PDT

Here are some of the things that stores -- physical, street-side stores -- might know about you from your recent visit to them:

• your age
• your gender
• your mood as you travel through the store
• how long you spend in each section of the store
• which items you spend time looking at during your visit
• how long you looked at an item before purchasing it
• which of the store's products you previously looked up on the store's website
• your purchase history with the store
• the number of times you recently visited the store
• the average time elapsed between your visits to the store

And also your blood type, and your middle name, and the way you take your coffee. (Just kidding -- I think.) Stores may be constructed of dumb brick-and-mortar ... but they're increasingly being outfitted with surveillance technologies that make them newly smart, or "smart." Retailers not named Amazon are trying to catch up to their digital rivals, The New York Times reports, by applying digital tricks to their physical retail spaces. Through video of your movements through the store, and images of your facial expressions as you do that moving, and facial recognition software that analyzes those expressions, stores are attempting to recreate in the physical world the paths of digital breadcrumbs customers leave as they explore websites. Cookies, made mobile (though sadly, still inedible).

Retailers can also use the wifi search signals embedded in customers' phones -- even when those phones aren't connected to the stores' wifi networks -- to track their customers' movements throughout a store. (To within, according to an executive at the in-store analytics firm RetailNext, a 10-foot radius.) And if you have a retailer's app on your phone, all the better. That allows the business to cross-reference your digital movements against your physical ones, adding to the picture they have of you as a consumer.

The goal of all these applied analytics, per the stores that are experimenting with them? The same goal as the stores' digital counterparts: improved targeting. The in-store surveillance, retailers say, makes them better able to provide their customers with the stuff they want to buy -- even if the customers themselves might not know, yet, that they want to buy it. The Russian startup Synqera, for example, uses facial recognition technology to tailor marketing messages to customers according to their gender, age, and mood. (So, per a company representative, "if you are an angry man of 30, and it is Friday evening, [the Synqera software] may offer you a bottle of whiskey.")

All this analytic effort is simply a way for retailers to even the playing field when said field stretches all the way to the Internet. If physical stores are going to have to compete with Amazon, they're going to have to do so on Amazon's terms -- which means, in turn, that they're probably going to have to do so using Amazon's rules. As one purveyor of customer surveillance technology put it, "I walk into Macy's, Macy's knows that I just entered the store, and they're able to give me a personalized recommendation through my phone the moment I enter the store. It's literally bringing the Amazon experience into the store."

Indeed. For the customer, however, that merger of digital and analog approaches to commercial tracking will force some questions when it comes to privacy. It's one thing to follow consumer movements through the Internet, where users -- through privacy software, web history management, and the like -- have at least a modicum of control over the information retailers have access to. It's another thing to have your movements monitored as you go buy milk. It's the difference, in some sense, between tracking and pseudo-stalking.

And yet there's reason to think that in-store surveillance will become yet another example of the fluidity we're willing to tolerate when it comes to the balance of privacy and convenience. Consumer reactions to the store-stalking practices, the Times points out, are decidedly (and, I'd add, tellingly) mixed. Some users, when informed of the practices, are disturbed; others seem to see the in-store movement-tracking as a fair compromise for a shopping experience that is personalized and therefore efficient. ("I would just love it if a coupon pops up on my phone," one shopper put it. The stores, she noted, are "trying to sell, so that makes sense.")

And there's reason to think, furthermore, that the latter group -- the permissive group, the group that is happy to be tracked, because coupons! and customization! -- will win the day when it comes to our overall tolerance for tracking technologies. "The truth is that privacy jumped the shark in America long ago," Frank Rich wrote in a recent New York magazine essay.

Many of us not only don't care about having our privacy invaded but surrender more and more of our personal data, family secrets, and intimate yearnings with open eyes and full hearts to anyone who asks and many who don't, from the servers of Fortune 500 corporations to the casting directors of reality-television shows to our 1.1 billion potential friends on Facebook. Indeed, there's a considerable constituency in this country -- always present and now arguably larger than ever -- that's begging for its privacy to be invaded and, God willing, to be exposed in every gory detail before the largest audience possible. We don't like the government to be watching as well -- many Americans don't like government, period -- but most of us are willing to give such surveillance a pass rather than forsake the pleasures and rewards of self-exposure, convenience, and consumerism.

Self-exposure, convenience, consumerism. These are American characteristics, if not American values. And they're precisely the things retailers are offering us as they track our movements within their spaces. Which leaves us with a bit of a paradox when it comes to our sense of privacy as it stretches from the home to the web to the mall: stores are surveilling us. Stores are, sort of, stalking us. And yet many of us are willing to let them do it. Some of us are sort of excited to let them do it, because the stores are monitoring us in the name of giving us what we want. A quick trip to the store can now be big data; our desires, made manifest through our movements, can be met with a brute efficiency that has never before been possible. For many of Americans, that is ultimately good news. Stores are tracking us because some of us, in some sense, want them to.

China's Bernie Madoff Was Executed for Fraud—and Nobody Told His Family

Posted: 15 Jul 2013 08:10 AM PDT

Zeng Chengjie (Sina Weibo)

Zeng Chengjie, a self-made businessman who pulled himself up by the bootstraps from abject poverty to become a powerful real estate developer, was showered with accolades and superfluous praises for most of his life. In 2006, the local state-owned media in Hunan, his home province, wrote a glowing profile of the "diligent, wise and conscientious man," concluding that "the future, for Zeng, is starting new ventures, new glories and new legends!"

But the future had other plans. Zeng was executed on July 12, 2013 by lethal injection. His crimes were illegal fundraising activities and financial fraud. He allegedly defrauded more than 57,000 investors out of approximately RMB 2.8 billion (US $460 million), of which RMB 1.7 billion had been returned. He used the money to fund his company that bid for urban development projects, including key local landmarks and public facilities, in Jishou, a small city in Hunan.