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- Independence Day in DC
- Why Egypt Needs New Elections as Soon as Possible
- A Stunning Time-Lapse Video of Shanghai
- To Be Born On The Fourth Of July
- <i>Nashville</i> in Paris: The Quintessential American Film, as Seen Abroad
- Is Sexism the Reason Julia Gillard Was Unseated?
- The Fourth of July—in 9 Graphs
- Red Smith and Horse Racing: A Sportswriting Love Story
- As America Celebrates Its Creation, Our Common Ground Is Disappearing
- If PRISM Is Good Policy, Why Stop With Terrorism?
- Doug Engelbart in his Prime
| Posted: 04 Jul 2013 01:05 PM PDT The best thing about the Palisades-MacArthur neighborhood in DC is the annual Fourth of July parade down MacArthur Boulevard. I offer today's snapshots as part of the long "the way we live now" chronicles. Also, with the sense that if a Tocqueville, a Frances Trollope, a Charles Dickens, or some other outside observer happened upon such a spectacle, he or she would marvel at the easy communal patriotism on display, the variety of civic organizations (one of Tocqueville's big themes), and the amazing absorptive capacity of American life. Not to mention: this is a different face of DC from the one familiar via West Wing, Veep, House of Cards, cable TV generally, etc. Here we go: Motorcycle cops to lead things off.
Bagpipes -- one of several such units.
Lead marchers for "Different Drummers," a LGBT marching band and drill team. This lead pair holding the sign, one with a rainbow-flag cape, kept chanting, "Now we're married -- just like you!"
Representing our city, Miss DC-USA.  One of the many fraternal orders in the parade.  More from the same group. I couldn't read the banner and thought I shouldn't yell, "Who are you?"
Van from the Bomb Squad. Most frequent comment from the crowd: "We have a 'Bomb Squad'??? "
The mayor and most city council people showed up, with boosters; this is the contingent for council member David Catania. Boosters of another member, Mary Cheh, are in the previous picture.
One of a very large number of groups protesting DC's indefensible "taxation without representation" status.
Another.  Another.  Another.  Seriously: this is unfair. Maybe you don't like your Senators or Representative, but at least you have some to complain about. A Burmese contingent.  Male dancers from a popular Bolivian-American organization.  Female dancers from the same group. On a sweltering day they danced nonstop along a several-mile course.  Male and female dancers from another popular Bolivian-American club.  The "Wong People" kung fu group -- its Chinese name means "Clan of Wong."  In their traditional place anchoring the parade, riders from the United Horsemen's Association.  This is why we are Americans. Enjoy your hotdogs, beer, and fireworks. 
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| Why Egypt Needs New Elections as Soon as Possible Posted: 04 Jul 2013 10:53 AM PDT  Reuters Mohamed Morsi's one-year rule of Egypt was disastrous. He ruled by fiat, alienated potential allies and failed to stabilize the country's spiraling economy. But a military coup is not an answer to Egypt's problems. It will exacerbate, not ease, Egypt's vast political divide. The Egyptian military's primary interest is maintaining its privileged role in society and vast network of businesses. Like the Pakistani military now and the Brazilian military in the past, its desire to maintain its economic interests will slow desperately needed economic and political reforms. There is little reason to have faith in Egypt's broken political process at this point. But the best ways to ease the country's bitter divisions are immediate elections and a transparent political process, not military rule. "Political inclusiveness is the only way forward," said Lauren Bohn, an American journalist who has covered Egypt. "And many worry they won't see much of that in the days ahead." First, many different - and seemingly contradictory things - are occurring in the country. The protesters that have filled Tahrir Square, David Ignatius noted Wednesday in the Washington Post, are a genuine citizens' movement. They are demanding basic rights, an accountable government and dignity. Most important, they will not accept autocratic rule from military dictators or Islamist political parties. The same can be said of the protesters in Istanbul's Taksim square. The remnants of Iran's Green Party, who elected a relative moderate as the country's new president, roughly fit that description as well. All these developments are positive and a sign of empowered citizens making legitimate demands of government. But other things now occurring in Egypt are not. The country's political elite is deeply polarized. Members of the secular opposition and its Islamists disdain one another. Any semblance of trust or compromise has disappeared. In Tahrir Square, some protesters carried signs calling for the Obama administration to stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood's "fascist regime." They scoffed at the idea that the Brotherhood would ever allow free elections and called the coup a "revolution." They insisted that they were stopping a Brotherhood plot to turn Egypt into theocratic state that resembled Afghanistan after the Taliban. Brotherhood supporters, meanwhile, were heartbroken, seeing the coup as a re-assertion of the military rule they have struggled to overcome in Egyptfor decades. They claimed the opposition had a "personal vendetta" against the Brotherhood. And they called the current struggle "an existential battle" with the military they will not lose. In a trenchant analysis in The New Republic, Nathan Brown, an expert on Islamist political movements, offers a detailed list of the colossal mistakes Morsi made in office. But also warns about what happens next. A crackdown on the Brotherhood, Brown suggests, could result in some of its members embracing violence. "It would be wise for those who are now victorious in Egypt to remember that the issue is not only what the Brotherhood learns," Brown wrote, "the issue is also what Islamists are taught." For the Obama administration, the coup is a minefield -- and a second chance. Washington's influence is enormously limited in Egypt. Forty-years of backing Egyptian military rulers who embraced peace with Israel have left Washington with no credibility. As Brown notes, "Egypt's rumor mill transformed preposterous rumor into established fact with breathtaking speed." Many members of the secular opposition are convinced the Obama administration placed the Brotherhood in power. Islamists, however, see an American hand behind the coup that toppled Morsi. That is why it is vital for Washington to demand immediate elections and no crackdown on the brotherhood. President Barack Obama's statement on Tuesday was surprisingly strong in some areas. "I now call on the Egyptian military," Obama said, "to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters." He also hinted at a cut off of the $1.3 billion in aid the United States provides to Egypt, most of it military. Under American law, all U.S. foreign assistance is cut off to a country if a military coup occurs. Some analysts called for the United States to turn a blind eye at the coup and continue providing assistance. They argued that American strategic interests - Egypt's peace treaty with Israel, the safety of the Suez canal and counter-terrorism efforts - justify support for military rule in Egypt. That would be an enormous mistake. For 30 years, the United States tried that approach in Egypt. Military rule and billions in Camp David Peace Accord aid produced economic stagnation and social unrest. Egypt and region have changed. Egyptians will not accept authoritarian rule from generals or Islamists. The most cogent reactions to the crisis from an American politician came from Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). He assailed Morsi, who he said had "squandered an historic opportunity, preferring to govern by fiat rather than work with other political parties." But Leahy was emphatic about the need for the United States to halt aid. "Our law is clear: U.S. aid is cut off when a democratically elected government is deposed by military coup or decree," Leahy said. "As the world's oldest democracy, this is a time to reaffirm our commitment to the principle that transfers of power should be by the ballot, not by force of arms." Leahy is right. Immediate elections and inclusive politics are what Egypt needs. Not military rule. This article also appears at Reuters.com, an Atlantic partner site. 
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| A Stunning Time-Lapse Video of Shanghai Posted: 04 Jul 2013 10:39 AM PDT Shanghai is China's largest, most international city, and, with phenomenal architecture both old and new, is a real feast for the eyes. In this fantastic time-lapse video, the Shanghai-based photographer Rob Whitworth portrays his city as one big perpetual motion machine. Interviewed by Asia Blog, Whitworth says that capturing the "infectious optimism" of Shanghai and other Asian cities is what drives his work. 
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| To Be Born On The Fourth Of July Posted: 04 Jul 2013 08:30 AM PDT 
On July 4, 1854, at a grove in Framingham, Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison held up a copy of the Constitution, labeled it a compromise with tyranny, and burned it to ash. He then invited the abolitionist audience to join him by shouting "Amen." Ever since that Fourth of July, Garrison has been remembered primarily for his rejection of the Constitution, a document he once said was dripping with human blood. Look more closely however, and you'll find more complicated, even patriotic, Garrison. In fact, before he started setting paper on fire, Garrison delivered a less well-known speech that praised the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution as models for the world. He even began the day by declaring that the first Fourth of July was "the greatest political event in the annals of time." It had created a charter of inalienable rights that, if enforced, would mean the "eternal dethronement" of all tyrants everywhere and the "redemption of the world." In an 1824 speech he described the American Revolution as "the splendid, immaculate guide,---to all other nations, in their career after freedom." Around the same time, Garrison advised recent revolutionaries in South America to use the United States as their "model." Garrison never really stopped believing that the United States should be a "guide" to other nations--but a proslavery Constitution compromised such guidance. As Garrison said at Framingham in 1854, "we have proved recreant to our own faith, false to our own standard, treacherous to the trust committed to our hands." The result was that "instead of helping to extend the blessings of freedom" abroad, Americans had hindered the spread of their democratic ideals. Abraham Lincoln would not have applauded Garrison's actions, but he often echoed him. Because of slavery, Lincoln said, "our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust," leaving the world without an untarnished example of "spirit of '76." To prove the danger, Lincoln quoted from a recent London newspaper which expressed "apprehension" that slavery was "fatally violating the noblest political system the world ever saw" and thus undermining "the liberal party throughout the world." The idea that American slavery was a threat to American democracy, and thus democracy the world-over, was not an exaggeration in 1854. The future of political liberalism was far from clear, and many in the "liberal party throughout the world" looked to the United States, flawed though it was, as one of the only bastions of democratic politics. Nothing made democratization in the early America inevitable. It proceeded slowly, with great struggle, at different paces in different states. But by 1855, most states had either minimized or eliminated the property qualifications that previously kept even white adult men from voting. Universal white manhood suffrage had become the reality. Pure democracy, this was not. Women, slaves, and most free blacks remained disfranchised. Immigrants and industrial wage-workers faced renewed challenges to their voting rights even as universal white manhood suffrage took hold. In particular locales and states, even legally enfranchised voters grew accustomed to serious attacks on their rights. But the extent of voting rights in the United States made the nation seem like a radical democratic experiment, especially in comparison to the political arrangements that prevailed elsewhere in the nineteenth century. In South America and Haiti, for example, early nineteenth-century revolutions had created undemocratic governments that managed to beat back any calls for the radical expansion of the right to vote. Parts of Europe had inched towards more popular rule, but a few telling numbers show how little progress had been made. In the United Kingdom, which reformed its Parliament in 1832, only around twenty percent of the adult male population could vote. In 1830, the French elevated a new monarch to the throne who promised to be the "People's King." But even then, as historian Mike Rapport notes, "the electorate swelled to include only 170,000 of France's richest men: this was a mere 0.5 per cent of the French population, a sixth of those who enjoyed the vote in Britain after 1832." And even such small electorates did not yet exist to check the rule of monarchs in Europe's other great powers---Prussia, Austria, and Russia. The most serious challenge to Europe's crowned heads and landed classes came in a series of revolutions that swept the continent in 1848. Democratic European revolutionaries like Mazzini in Italy and Lamartine in France capitalized on the unrest of that year by establishing new republics in Rome and Paris. The tide seemed, for a moment, to be turning towards popular government. But by 1854 Europe's conservative forces had regained their balance, and republican experiments in Italy and France had ended. By the time Garrison rose at Framingham and Lincoln stood at Peoria, the fate of democracy worldwide seemed more fragile than ever, and even more dependent on the survival of the "spirit of '76." But after 1848 American slavery also seemed---more than ever---like a hindrance to the further spread of that spirit. Revolution and reform in Europe had not brought radical democracy to the continent, but they had, by 1848, abolished colonial slavery in the British and French Caribbean empires. Meanwhile, as the electorate grew in the United States, the American slave population had surged to nearly 4 million. These facts were a source of embarrassment for American abolitionists, of course, but increasingly they were embarrassments for overseas democrats as well, who often heard conservative aristocrats cite American racism and slavery as reasons enough to doubt that majority rule was a good idea. Many transatlantic liberals expressed their apprehensions about this directly to American abolitionists. As I show in my new book, the "liberal party throughout the world" was not just an abstraction for Garrison; it was a network of antislavery sympathizers and democrats who communicated directly with abolitionists in the United States. In Illinois, Lincoln gathered his perceptions of overseas liberals from the newspapers; Garrison and his allies got theirs directly, and sometimes in person, from Europeans like Mazzini, Victor Hugo, and leading British Chartists who fought for universal manhood suffrage. By the time he burned the Constitution, many of these allies had warned Garrison explicitly that slavery in the United States was materially damaging their causes overseas. In 1852, for example, the French abolitionist and republican Victor Schoelcher wrote in a Garrisonian publication that it was "an incalculable danger to the democratic idea, both now and hereafter, that the most democratic people existing should be holders of Slaves!" And in 1853, Garrison had shared with another abolitionist audience an address from "the Democrats of England to the Democrats of America" which declared that the abolition of slavery would give the United States "double moral power to reanimate the swooning liberties of Europe." Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary whom Garrison had met personally in 1847, also wrote to his friend that same summer that abolitionism in America and the struggle for the People in Europe were "one single cause." A long history of such statements set the stage for Garrison's address at Framingham the following year, and before setting the Constitution ablaze, Garrison made sure his audience remembered the situation confronting their faraway friends. Garrison's speech first carefully reviewed the current, depressing state of "the freedom of continental Europe" since 1848. He noted "the perfidious and high-handed usurpation" of Louis Napoleon, who had by then dissolved the Second Republic and declared himself Emperor. And in Austria and Russia, Garrison continued, the people still suffered under "bloody despotism" and "iron autocracy." In the Europe of 1854, it seemed once again that "the reign of tyranny is as absolute as fate, and the extinction of the people complete." Then, drawing on what he had heard from the "liberal party throughout the world," Garrison declared that Americans had contributed to this sorry situation by trumpeting their own example while brutalizing millions of human beings. The Declaration of Independence should have inspired the overthrow of tyrannies everywhere, Garrison affirmed. But "our flag is red with the blood of our slaves, and marked by their stripes," and those stains had prevented the nation's signature document from doing its work. After surveying European politics, he concluded that "this tells the story of American influence upon the liberties of the world." If Americans' democratic ideals suffered abroad, it was because of imperfections at home. Here Garrison underlined that being a radical critic of the United States, even one who reproached the Constitution and the flag, did not require giving up on the hope of positive American influence on the world. Garrison did disavow the sort of exceptionalism which led many Americans to believe that the United States could never fall from grace. As early as 1829, he ridiculed the idea that "the republic is immortal; that its flight, like a strong angel's, has been perpetually upward, till it has soared above the impurities of earth ... and, having attained perfection, is forever out of the reach of circumstance and change." But Garrison did believe, like Lincoln, that this corruptible and imperfect republic could be improved and could, eventually, fulfill its high calling as an example to other nations of government of, by, and for the people. To borrow a term used in slightly different ways by historians Timothy Mason Roberts and H. W. Brands, the views of Lincoln and Garrison represented variations on the idea of "American exemplarism," instead of the idea of "American exceptionalism." And while subtle, the difference between "exemplarism" and "exceptionalism" had significant implications. For one thing, it meant that Lincoln and Garrison refused to immunize their countrymen from critique. On the contrary, the nation's flaws as a model required thoughtful Americans to begin their improvement of the world at home, to prefer humility to hubris, to balance patriotism with cosmopolitan concern, and to focus less on making the world safe for democracy and more on making democracy safe for the world. This was not, then or now, an easy position to maintain. Burning the Constitution without spurning the Declaration was a difficult balancing act, and it often left abolitionists struggling to make the same, complex assessments of the American experiment familiar to readers of this blog. If, as an earlier post here put it, "the challenge for someone trying to assess America, at this moment, is properly calibrating how far we've gone with how far we have to go," this was the challenge for Garrison and Lincoln in their moment, too. Peer past the fire and smoke of Garrison's most iconic gesture and it's possible to glimpse a figure whose dilemmas are still relevant today, on another sweltering and polarized Fourth of July. 
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| <i>Nashville</i> in Paris: The Quintessential American Film, as Seen Abroad Posted: 04 Jul 2013 06:01 AM PDT  Paramount Pictures It was by coincidence that our hotel in Paris--an aging, dusty place short on electrical outlets and space in the lift--was a mere three doors down from the "Grand Action Cinema," a two-screen revival house specializing in American films. But I could not have selected a better location, particularly when I glanced at their posted schedule and discovered a screening of Robert Altman's Nashville scheduled for the following evening: July Fourth, America's birthday. One of our traveling companions had never seen it. Plans were made.
We had prepared poorly for our trip to France. There was not a French speaker among us, and when you visit France all but ignorant of the native tongue, you end up saying merci a lot. Merci, merci. Merci beaucoup. Thank you for your patience, thank you for your service, thank you for not laughing at our strained mangling of your beautiful language, thank you, thank you, merci. Luckily, many of the locals speak English. You will ask if they do, and they will say "A little," but then they speak it fluently, beautifully. They're shockingly modest in their bilingualism, or at least were compared to our party, who had learned four words of French and couldn't stop congratulating ourselves over it. Pardon, toilette, merci, merci beaucoup. Thankfully, the box-office attendant at Grand Action Cinema spoke English and sensed my embarrassment over not having learned to count to two in his language ("Um, two, Nashville, merci?"). He sent us to the "Salle Henri Langlois," an auditorium named after the famed French cinephile and director of the Cinémathèque Française. Plastered across the back of the room is a large photograph of Langlois leaning onto a railing, as if he is watching the film along with you. A French woman picked up a microphone to introduce the film; her introduction was gibberish to us, excepting the heavily accented names and titles ("French French French French Robert Alt-men... French French French French Gosfard Parrk"). Then she finished, and the film began. I wondered how much of the film would be lost on our fellow moviegoers, as the French subtitles can only translate so much of Altman's famed multi-tracked, overlapping dialogue. I also wondered if it would feel strange to observe this quintessentially American film from the outside looking in. Released in 1975, on the eve of the American bicentennial, the picture opens with the recording of a jingoistic anthem called "200 Years" ("We must be doin' somethin' right to last 200 years!"). It spends a few days in the title city, using the country-music capital as a microcosm for the country, where Altman assembles a large, unruly cast of unforgettable (and indisputably American) characters and caricatures, rotates between them, combines and disrupts them, gathers them together and tears them apart. The narrative is loosely organized around a series of threads: an upcoming rally for populist third-party candidate Hal Philip Walker (who sounded, in that summer of 2011, alarmingly like Ron Paul), the homecoming of popular but troubled country star Barbara Jean, a BBC reporter documenting the local scene. But as with any Altman film, Nashville is not about plot. It is about moments, moods, emotions, the subtext of a tense silence, the exchange of a loaded glance. It is about the horrible split second when tone-deaf Sueleen Gay realizes that she has not been invited to that sleazy "fundraiser" to sing; it is about the impotent helplessness that Barnett feels as his wife falls apart on stage, the band giving up behind her as she spins off into another pointless anecdote; it is about the terrible longing that married mother Linnea feels as she sits in the audience while Tom sings, it seems, only to her--though a good half-dozen women in the room are sharing the same delusion. In that moment, Linnea (played by Lily Tomlin, who gives perhaps the finest performance in a film where that is not an easy call) knows what is wrong and what is right--knows how she should act, but also realizes how she will act. Throughout his long and fascinating career, Robert Altman frequently explored the theme of the American identity--how we think of ourselves, who we really are, and the tension between those two notions. With rare exceptions, Altman does not judge his characters for that dichotomy. He loves them both for all they are and for all they wish they were, and he loves them for the space in between. That space is where his films live: The United States of Altman, a wild, eccentric place where the authoritarian establishment was to be sneered and laughed at, where kooks and oddballs were our heroes. It was a vivid, earthy, low-down world, where people talked over one another and the backgrounds were often more interesting than the foregrounds, where women were strong and men were broken, where everything was connected to everything else while simultaneously having nothing to do with anything. He did not stand aloof; he was embedded in that country, invested in it. Altman frequently explored the theme of the American identity--how we think of ourselves, who we really are, and the tension between those two notions. Watching Nashville from outside of that country puts Altman's intentions to the test. Perhaps critics like Greil Marcus and Robert Mazzocco were right; maybe he is, in fact, judging these people, pointing and laughing at them, as we snicker when Haven Hamilton sings his insipid ballad "For the Sake of the Children," or when Barbara Jean tees up another down-home chestnut. But I don't think so--I didn't before, and I certainly didn't in Paris, where the French audience seemed just as willing to accept Altman's 24 characters, with all of their faults and flaws, into their open arms. They are with these people, and with the film, and they gasp at its ending (despite all of its broad foreshadowing). When Haven Hamilton picks up the microphone and implores the crowd, "This is Nashville! You show 'em what we're made of," the gooseflesh rises, and it continues through the heartbreaking sing-along of "It Don't Worry Me," as good a choice for an alternate national anthem as any. The scene does not summarize or explain the three hours that has preceded it; nothing could. But it is a rejoinder to what has come immediately before--it is a chorus of "yes" shouting down a single "no," an honest-to-God display of that hoariest of clichés, "the American spirit," united in the face of tragedy. It's the kind of moment that usually makes us feel sickened or, at the very least, manipulated. Not in Nashville; in Nashville, we are moved, and exhausted, and elated. Most of all, we are thankful--thankful for a film that inspires those emotions, all of those and more. Merci, Robert Altman. Merci. 
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| Is Sexism the Reason Julia Gillard Was Unseated? Posted: 04 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd laughs during an address to the Health Services Union annual convention in Sydney on June 7, 2010. (Tim Wimborne/Reuters) In a classic sixth-season episode of The Simpsons, Bart is indicted for fraud in Australia after a long-distance collect call to a home in the outback sticks its residents with an astronomical phone bill. Bart's mistake, we soon learn, was to prank the friend of a member of Parliament, who appeals to his prime minister for help in punishing the cheeky American. Australia's head of government, a middle-aged bogan who answers to "Andy," is introduced floating in a cow pond, nude and sipping a can of Foster's. If this is the only image most Americans have of Australian politics, they can hardly be blamed. Like a sun-baked, antipodean Canada, Australia has flown below the radar thanks to its own success and constancy. It's a nation that breeds odd wildlife and imperceptibly foreign Hollywood stars, but little in the way of Machiavellian intrigue. If you've read anything at all about Canberra, Australia's remote capital, it's probably that the planned seat of government is pleasantly dull. But if you didn't catch the events in Canberra last week, you missed a political drama worthy of House of Cards, in which an unexpected last-minute shift in allegiances allowed a former premier to retake the executive reins from his predecessor. The winner of this struggle, at least for the moment, was Kevin Rudd, a Twitter-loving Mandarin speaker who had previously served as prime minister from 2007 until 2010. The victim of the coup - or "spill," if you speak Australian - was incumbent Julia Gillard, who led the successful effort to unseat Rudd in 2010, and is also the first woman to serve as Australia's chief executive. Both politicians are members of the ruling Labor Party, and their contest was determined based on which would be best able to hold off the opposition Liberals in September's general election. "Liberal," in Australia's political lexicon, refers to those of the classical variety (centrist economic liberalism), which explains why Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party leader, turns out to be a conservative as well as - pause again to consider the context - an ardent anti-republican, meaning he wants to preserve the country as a constitutional monarchy. Today, Abbot may be best known outside Australia as the target of a broadside Gillard delivered last October on the floor of Parliament, a scathing indictment of misogyny in Australian politics that went viral:
With Rudd having unseated Gillard, such fireworks are less likely to recur in the general election. But some in Australia have questioned whether the same attitudes that Gillard deplored last fall also played a role in her downfall, with a British correspondent describing casual racism and sexism as "common" in Australia, and noting that criticism of Gillard always had "distinctly sexist tinge, although it was complicated by the fact that she was also unmarried, had no children, and was an atheist." Not long ago, none of these events would have aroused much interest in Washington. But as the U.S. rebalances attention and resources towards the Indo-Pacific, Australia - long a reliable ally - is poised to become a key player in American regional strategy. This development has left one expert marveling at "the sudden vogue for Australian foreign policy" overseas. Doings in Canberra may still be less fun than "Down Under" stereotypes, but their resonance will be felt beyond Australia's shores. This post is part of a collaboration between The Atlantic and the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. 
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| The Fourth of July—in 9 Graphs Posted: 04 Jul 2013 05:46 AM PDT Two hundred and thirty-seven years ago today, America was born. Kind of. More like we announced an intention to be born. In that year, there were just 2.5 million people living in what would, in a few years, become the United States of America, according to current Census estimates. Today, the metropolitan areas of both New York City and Los Angeles have larger populations. Essentially, America was the size of modern Chicago.  Although the country has grown in both space and population, not everybody knows exactly what we're meant to be celebrating on the Fourth of July. Asked in what year America claimed independence, less than a third of Millennials correctly guessed 1776, according to a 2011 Marist Poll survey.  But enough celebrating ignorance and more celebrating America. In 2012, Americans spent nearly $1 billion on about 207 million pounds of display and consumer fireworks. That's about 60 percent more than we spent in 2000. Interestingly, the sheer number of pounds of fireworks we bought peaked in 2005.
The U.S. imports about a quarter of a billion dollars worth of fireworks with the vast, vast majority coming from China (appropriately enough, since the first fireworks in recorded history were from 7th century China).  The American Pyrotechnics Association (actual URL: http://www.americanpyro.com) claims that the rate of firework injuries has declined by about 80 percent since 1980. But there are still 4 recorded injuries for every 100,000 pounds of fireworks today. Here's how those injuries tend to break down (graph via Wonkblog). For a safer way to celebrate, there are always flags. The Flag Manufacturers Association of America claims its members sell more than $300 million in "fabricated flags, banners and similar emblems" each year. We still import nearly $4 million of American flags every year, six-times more than we export.
Famously, we get the vast, vast majority of our flag imports from China.
Fireworks and flags are fine, but you can't eat them (safely). Fortunately for our stomachs, the final hallmarks of the holiday are hot dogs and burgers. So where do our American-bred pigs, hogs, and cattle come from? The folks at the Census and the USDA have data on that $90 billion mega-meat business, too. If the meat of choice on your grill is beef hot dogs, steaks or burgers, there's a decent chance your food came from Texas, Nebraska, and Kansas, which combined account for about a third of annual meat production from cattle and calves in the U.S. (The American Meat Institute has slightly different figures.)
The hog and pig industry is more centralized. There are 66 million hogs and pigs in the U.S. today. About a third of them, producing 10 billion pounds of meat, are in Iowa.
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| Red Smith and Horse Racing: A Sportswriting Love Story Posted: 04 Jul 2013 05:07 AM PDT  Johnny "Red" Pollard in the winner's circle after his horse Seabiscuit won the $100,000 Santa Anita Handicap at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, Ca, on Feb. 24, 1940 (AP) Just in time for another season of long odds and short fields, there's a new book out that highlights some of the best newspaper columns of iconic 20th-century sportswriter Red Smith, who wrote for decades for the New York Herald Tribune and, later, The New York Times. There are probably a hundred different reasons to read American Pastimes: The Very Best of Red Smith (Daniel Okrent's introduction being one of them, Terence Smith's tribute to his dad being another), but let me focus briefly here upon one that is dear to my heart. Red Smith loved to write about horse racing—the horses, the people, the tracks, the races. And he did so in a way that seamlessly bridged the great turf-and-track writing style of his youth (the poetry of Damon Runyon, for example*) with that of our own time (like the prose of Bill Nack**). Much about the Sport of Kings is timeless, and so is Smith's work. In May 1947, for example, he wrote sardonically about the debut of Sunshine Park in Florida: "Aptly named," he declared, "because the sun has steadfastly refused to shine upon it and the nearest park of consequence is Yellowstone." What was the dusty track like in those days? In "Belmont of the Backwoods," in a tone that mirrored Runyon's, Smith explained: [I]t has a totalizer, a daily double, touts, a 37-percent average of winning favorites, forms, scratch sheets and handicappers' cards for sale at the gate, seasoned, alert racing officials and—oh yes—horses of a sort. Which makes it as close an approximation of paradise as an honest man has a right to expect. Part of the reason for Smith's unique status is that he lasted so long. His career spanned both the rise and the fall of racing's popularity in North America. He wrote about Seabiscuit and was still around to write about Spectacular Bid; In a June 1979 piece titled "Always Ready to Lose," Smith shared this gem: "'So your horse won't be remembered with Secretariat,' a man said to [Bid's trainer] Buddy Delp [after his horse lost the Belmont to miss the Triple Crown]. 'No,' the trainer said. 'He sure won't be. But I'll remember him pretty good.'" Smith could be poignant, too, especially in his coverage of the hard-working, decent honest people who animated horse racing at that time (and who, for the most part, still do today). Another aspect of Smith's allure was that he rarely seemed to take what he was seeing seriously. So he wrote about Jet Pilot, the winner of the 1947 Kentucky Derby, kicking a cop in the ass in the winner's circle at Churchill Downs. And, just a few days after the 1948 Kentucky Derby, Citation's Derby, he wrote a piece titled "A Very Pious Story," about a "Christian bettor." It's an all-time classic, but I'll only give you the punch line: "'Thank you, Lord,' the guy says. 'I'll take him from here. Come on, you son of a bitch!'" Only slightly less raucous, but no less funny, was his November 1967 piece, titled "Dead Sea Downs," written in "Occupied Jordan" following its Six-Day War with Israel. The subtitle of the column—"A Racetrack Where it All Began"—led to this: The lowest gambling hell in the world lies hard by the shore of the Dead Sea, 1,291 feet below sea level. Nowhere on the face of the earth can you get lower, not at CharlesTown or Suffolk Downs, not even at Aqueduct on a Tuesday in November. The gambling hell has no official name. Call it Dead Sea Downs or Qumran Park. It is a little Shoeless Joe of a racetrack on the desert, at present a casualty of last June's Six-Day War but in its time a center of cheerful debauchery in a region where sin isn't exactly an innovation. But Smith could be poignant, too, especially in his coverage of the hard-working, decent honest people who animated horse racing at that time (and who, for the most part, still do today). For example, his September 1949 piece "Super," about Frank Keogh, the steward at Aqueduct, ends on a lovely note, in Keogh's own voice: "There are plenty of headaches in this, too. Phone rings all hours of the night. Man ships in without stalls reserved, the gateman doesn't know what to do, so he calls me out of bed. Sometimes you can find stalls for a man overnight, and then the next day you can't get him out. There's one was ordered out of here last fall and he's still here with his horses. A real good stayer." And after the 1950 Kentucky Derby, a forgettable affair won by a horse named Middleground ridden by Bill Boland, Smith described the young jockey at center of the storm in a piece titled "One Red Rose": Boland is an immature kid with a lean, unsmiling face, ice-blue eyes, and wavy blond hair. The cameramen hollered to him and turned him this way and that and he complied reluctantly, never relaxing. They kept calling for a great big smile and he'd give them the faintest twisted grin, showing widely spaced teeth out of one corner of his mouth. He was in a hurry to get it over with. And you couldn't tell whether he was scared or bewildered or utterly indifferent. On Seabiscuit After that Haas came up in his stirrups, glanced to right and left as though seeking possible contention for the Howard favorite, and proceeded the rest of the way in the sedate and orderly fashion of a policeman assigned to protect a $100,000 bauble from hijackers but under no circumstances to snatch it for himself. You can watch the 1940 Handicap here and judge for yourself. Anyone who remembers the 2003 movie Seabiscuit, based upon Laura Hillenbrand's epic book, remembers that George Woolf, played by real-life jockey Gary Stevens, played a critical role in the Seabiscuit story. Woolf died in early 1946 after an accident in a race at Santa Anita, the scene of so many of his triumphs. And Smith, who had followed the jockey's exploits for decades, led his January 5, 1946 column, titled "Death of 'The Iceman,'" with this blunt assessment: The fatal injury of Georgie Woolf in a spill at Santa Anita Thursday is a reminder of something which race fans forget with the greatest of ease when they boo and sneer and rail at some dusty kid who has just finished out of the money astride a horse they're betting. That is that every time one of these little guys scrambles into the saddle for a race he is literally taking his life in his hands. Seabiscuit survived Woolf by less than 18 months. And when the world-famous horse died in May 1947, Smith memorialized him with a level of sentimentality that rarely touched his work. In "A Horse You Had To Like," published on May 20, 1947, Smith offered this: It isn't mawkish to say that there was a racehorse, a horse that gave race fans as much pleasure as any that ever lived, and one that will be remembered as long and as warmly. If someone asked you to list horses that had, apart from speed or endurance, some special quality that fired the imagination and captured the regard of more people than ever saw them run, you'd have to mention Man O'War and Equipoise and Exterminator and Whirlaway and Seabiscuit. And the honest son of Hard Take wouldn't be last. On Whirlaway Well, Whirlaway's love-child won a race the other day and that recalls a story which may or may not have been told here before but can, in any event, bear retelling because it is a tale of pure and lofty sentiment suitable to the ears of young and old. It is a yarn about horse-lovers in the strict sense of the term, meaning one horse that's in love with another horse, and not the sort of horse-lovers you see out at Jamaica, where affection is peddled at $2 a heartthrob, less taxes, take and breakage. Whirlaway died in France in 1953 and Smith again was called upon to eulogize a great horse. On April 8th, in a piece titled "The Swiftest Halfwit," Smith wrote of the colt's Preakness win 12 years earlier: The story was told later that Johnny Gilbert, setting the pace with King Cole, heard a rush of win and glanced to his right, and [Eddie] Arcaro [aboard Whirlaway] shouted "So long, Johnny!" "So long, Eddie," Gilbert shouted at the diminishing copper blur ahead of him. That was all. Arcaro took hold of his horse and eased him in--five lengths behind the field going away, five lengths in front coming home. "Johnny," Arcaro said to Gilbert as they dismounted, "wipe the jam off my mouth, will you? I been on a picnic." On Citation Twenty-five years later, when it came time to crown the next Triple Crown champion, Smith would write about Secretariat's win in the Belmont. "The colt was entitled to his margin and his record," he wrote. "Last Saturday belonged to him." And then, because he had seen both Citation and Secretariat at their very best, he was able to declare "striking" the parallels between the two champions. Which brings us back again, finally, to race horses and love. "Citation won his next ten starts" after the Belmont, Smith wrote, but "Secretariat's stud duties won't permit that. Love will rear its pretty, tousled head." *From his masterwork "All Horse Players Die Broke," which appeared in the September 11, 1937 issue of Collier's Weekly. If you have the time, and you really want a treat, you can actually listen to the story told some 60 years ago to a radio audience by the folks of the Damon Runyon Theatre. The first paragraph of Runyon's piece tells you all you need to know: It is during the last race meeting at Saratoga and one evening I am standing out under the elms in front of the Grand Union Hotel thinking what a beautiful world it is, to be sure, for what do I do in the afternoon at the track but grab myself a piece of a 10-to-1 shot. **From "Pure Heart," which appeared in the June 4, 1990 issue of Sports Illustrated: Secretariat was an amiable, gentlemanly colt, with a poised and playful nature that at times made him seem as much a pet as the stable dog was. I was standing in front of his stall one morning, writing, when he reached out, grabbed my notebook in his teeth and sank back inside, looking to see what I would do. "Give the man his notebook back!" yelled Sweat. As the groom dipped under the webbing, Secretariat dropped the notebook on the bed of straw. 
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| As America Celebrates Its Creation, Our Common Ground Is Disappearing Posted: 04 Jul 2013 05:00 AM PDT  Reuters It seems entirely revealing, if dispiriting, that the days before the July Fourth holiday showed Red America and Blue America pulling apart at an accelerating rate. Of all of our national holidays, Independence Day is the one most intimately rooted in our common history and shared experience. Yet this year it arrives against a background of polarization, separation, and confrontation in the states and Washington alike. With municipal politics as the occasional exception, the pattern of solidifying agreement within the parties -- and widening disagreement between them -- is dominating our decisions at every level. On almost all of our major policy choices, the common thread is that the election of 2012 did not "break the fever" of polarization, as President Obama once hoped it might. Last November, Obama became only the third Democrat in the party's history to win a majority of the popular vote twice. But congressional Republicans, preponderantly representing the minority that voted against Obama, have conceded almost nothing to his majority -- leaving the two sides at a stalemate. Meanwhile, beyond the Beltway, states that lean Democratic and those that lean Republican are separating at a frenetic pace. Consider a few recent headlines. The Supreme Court decision upholding the lower-court invalidation of California's Proposition 8 restored gay marriage in the nation's largest state. It also capped a remarkable 2013 march for gay marriage through blue states, including Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island (with Illinois and New Jersey possibly joining before long). The consensus is solidifying fast enough that 2014 could see several blue-state Republican gubernatorial candidates running on accepting gay-marriage statutes as settled law. Former California Lt. Gov Abel Maldonado, a likely 2014 GOP gubernatorial contender who this week reversed his earlier opposition to support gay marriage, may be an early straw in that breeze. The story in red states, though, remains very different. Almost all of them have banned gay marriage. Some activists believe Justice Anthony Kennedy's embrace of equal-protection arguments in the decision striking down the federal Defense of Marriage Act might enable litigation challenging those bans; but if not, it may take a very long time for the support for gay marriage among younger voters to dissolve the resistance to the idea in culturally conservative states. Absent further Supreme Court action, the nation could remain a "house divided" on gay marriage for longer than many may expect: The high court's ruling striking down the remaining 16 state laws banning interracial marriage came in 1967 -- nearly two centuries after the first state had revoked its ban (Pennsylvania in 1780). Meanwhile, as gay marriage advances in blue states, red states are competing to impose the tightest restrictions on abortion since the Supreme Court established the national right to it in Roe v. Wade. In Ohio this week, Republican Gov. John Kasich signed legislation requiring ultrasound exams before abortions, effectively cutting off funding for Planned Parenthood and making it more difficult for abortion providers to transfer patients to public hospitals. In Texas, after the dramatic filibuster by Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis temporarily disrupted his plans, Republican Gov. Rick Perry this week opened another legislative special session that is likely to ban abortion at 20 weeks and impose stringent new safety requirements that would shutter most of the state's abortion providers. All of this follows a cascade of legislation restricting abortion in Republican-run states from Arkansas and Louisiana to Kansas and North Dakota -- most of which are already facing legal challenges. In Washington, there's little sign of convergence. Hopes for a budget "grand bargain" are flickering. In the Senate, the two parties have worked together to pass a farm bill, and more dramatically a sweeping immigration overhaul that won support from all 54 Democrats and 14 Republicans. But House Republicans, who recently collapsed into chaos when they couldn't pass a farm bill, are pledging to block any reform that includes a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants -- an indispensable component of legislation as far as Democrats are concerned. On big issues, the Supreme Court looks just as chronically divided, and the split often comes down to Republican- and Democratic-appointed justices. All of this reveals a political system losing its capacity to create common ground between party coalitions divided along economic, racial, generational, and even religious lines. Some variation in state policy is healthy, but states are now diverging to an extent that threatens to undermine equal protection under the law. The stalemate in Congress reflects genuine differences, but the reluctance to compromise -- most intractable among House Republicans -- prevents us from confronting common challenges. In all these ways, our contemporary politics is ignoring the simple truth that none of us are going away -- not the cosmopolitan coasts, nor the evangelical South. Our choices ultimately come down to bridging our differences or surrendering to endemic separation in the states and stalemate in Washington. This week we celebrate the moment when the authors of the Declaration of Independence concluded they had no choice but "to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another." It's an excellent opportunity to consider how ominously our own "political bands" are fraying. 
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| If PRISM Is Good Policy, Why Stop With Terrorism? Posted: 04 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  Why bother with these gentlemen? (Associated Press) "There are more instance of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." -- James Madison, 1788 My first day in college, the professor for Public Policy 101 asked a 200-person class, "If there were a policy that saved over 20,000 lives, reduced carbon emissions by 20 percent, reduced gasoline usage by 20 percent, decreased average insurance costs by 75 percent, and which would increase revenues to the federal government and not cost any additional money to implement -- who in this room would support this policy?" Of course, everyone's hands went up. The policy solution that he was referring to, he soon revealed, was to cap national speed limits at 40 miles per hour. The room, filled mainly with 18-to-20-year-olds, was horrified at the prospect of never being able to drive their car above 40 mph on the highway. Individual freedom is difficult to quantify in public-policy analysis until its real costs are clear, but it has to be part of the conversation. The government's policies in the NSA's PRISM program reflect perhaps the perfect storm of public-policy conundrums. This surveillance seems to offer short-term advantages, with the real costs hidden, diffuse, unknown, and, seemingly, far in the future. What, many ask, is the real price of giving up privacy? The government has presented PRISM, and other similar surveillance programs, as a solution to a danger and fear -- terrorism -- which is almost impossible to comprehend: Terrorism is everywhere and nowhere; the battlefield is across the globe; the threat is omnipresent. It is difficult for the average person to perceive and understand until it is splashed across television screens. Terrorism is by definition designed to "shock and awe." It is theatre of the macabre. The government has used this fear to justify unprecedented intrusions into our privacy, including monitoring who we call, our location data, and allegedly even the contents of our communication (if there is a 51 percent chance that one party to the communication is foreign). Our personal calling data, emails, letters, credit-card transaction data -- everything seems fair game. The fact that the NSA wants this much information shouldn't be surprising. The old maxim that to a hammer every problem looks like a nail is appropriate here. A spy agency specializing in "signals" intelligence is always looking for more phone calls, emails, and other signals-based data to analyze. The more data NSA receives, the more powerful it becomes. The most worrying facet of this story is the willingness of some Americans and members of Congress to so quickly disregard the Fourth Amendment and our liberty in the name of terrorism. Not so long ago, the U.S. faced arguably higher stakes, and more significant dangers, but made the opposite choices -- choices more consistent with our founding principles. Throughout the Cold War there was a real threat of apocalyptic proportions. The Soviet Union assembled and deployed more than 45,000 nuclear warheads, enough destructive power to annihilate the United States and end humanity as we know it. The U.S. government did plenty of reprehensible things during the Cold War, including trying to assassinate elected leaders, subverting democracies, and wiretapping political rivals and "subversives" such as Martin Luther King Jr. As a result of these scandals, along with Watergate, the American people responded and demanded accountability through the Church and Pike Committees of the 1970s in the House and Senate.* Will they do the same today? If the justification for PRISM and associated programs is predicated on their potential effectiveness, why shouldn't such logic shouldn't be applied elsewhere? Here are several other even more effective public-policy solutions that also violate the Fourth Amendment in similar ways and are just as reprehensible. There is some dispute over whether PRISM and other reported programs are legal or Constitutional. I believe third-party records should be protected under the Fourth Amendment, so that access to these records requires a warrant. This is not the perspective the courts have taken. But if we are going to use personal data obtained through PRISM for terrorism purposes in a way that violates our privacy and which I would argue violates the Fourth Amendment, why not do it for other legitimate purposes? 1. Child Pornography: Whenever the FBI receives a computer for a routine search, it searches the computer for known "hashes" of video and picture files of child pornography. This allows it to quickly and easily search every computer brought in, time permitting, for known child pornography. Of course the FBI receives many computers through warrants, but this is still a small percentage of all computers. Since the NSA seems to have access to a substantial amount of web traffic, what if it used spare capacity for "deep packet inspection" technology to identify known child-pornography pictures and videos? Software would only flag the transfer if there were a 100 percent certainty of it being the exact same file. (Since this is a hypothetical, let's assume the technology exists and can be implemented.) Laws against child pornography are partially designed to dry up the market for child exploitation. This policy could greatly reduce child pornography, catch potential pedophiles, and reduce existing child exploitation. From a legal perspective, the courts have found that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy for contraband; therefore, if such a search only finds contraband then it may be on more solid legal territory. Should the government be able to use technologies like PRISM and related exposed programs to find child pornography? 2. Speed Limits: Many accidents are related to reckless driving, and speeding can make them significantly more dangerous and deadly. What if instead of enforcing speed limits by stationing police officers to patrol our streets, a relatively ineffective and costly method of enforcement, the government instead monitored the speed of all cars in real time using cellphones. If NSA data on phone location were analyzed in real time, it could potentially determine the speed of any user. All phones traveling below 20 mph would be excluded on the assumption that they're not driving. All phones traveling faster than 20 mph would be plotted to discern what road they are traveling on and what the speed limit is for that road. The government could then identify drivers who were speeding and send them tickets in the mail, text them to slow down (then ticket them for opening it while driving!), or dispatch an officer to catch them. Further data analysis could identify potential drunk driving for police investigation, based upon erratic driving patterns or when phones were at known bars for several hours before being in a vehicle. Such policies could potentially save tens of thousands of lives and increase revenues from speeding fines while reducing the costs of patrolling the road. Should the government be able to use technologies like PRISM and related exposed programs to make our roads safer? 3. Illegal Downloading: Millions of Americans have used BitTorrent or other technologies to illegally download music, movies, TV shows, and software. While torrents can be used to download non-copyrighted and copyrighted digital goods, a substantial amount (one study found 89 percent) of the traffic appears to be used for illegal downloading. NSA PRISM level surveillance could be of use in identifying which users are using BitTorrent, then identifying the users who have uploaded or downloaded the most, and identifying whether their downloads involved illegal content. (Again, let's assume the technology is available.) This information could be forwarded to the Department of Justice for prosecution (or more crafty lobbyists could get the information forwarded to a private entity like the RIAA or MPAA for lawsuits). Should the government be able to use technologies like PRISM and related exposed programs to protect copyright holders? **** If the barometer for violating the Fourth Amendment is efficacy, then why should these not also be up for discussion? The answer is clear: The Fourth Amendment was not designed for efficacy. It was designed for privacy and to defend our liberty. If that's not the case, why even stop with these examples? Most of our phones have cameras and microphones that, at least in some circumstances, can be turned on remotely that would surely provide invaluable information for intelligence and law enforcement (the FBI has used this for organized crime prosecution, remotely turning on the microphone of phones to record non phone-call conversations). Information given to the government for the NSA may be made available to other agencies such as the IRS, why wouldn't it be? We already know that it has been shared with foreign agencies (e.g., Dutch intelligence and British intelligence). Even if a court were to find that PRISM data violates the Fourth Amendment, courts have traditionally held that even information that was illegally obtained can be used in court to impeach testimony -- in other words, it could plausibly be admissible to catch a tax cheat. And as many of us in the technology world know, once something exists in data form it is often retained forever. In an era where data storage is cheap and getting cheaper, American citizens' information will likely be retained indefinitely. At some point this massive repository of information may be hacked, at some point could be available to political appointees looking for partisan gain, or it may be used for "security" reasons against "troublemakers" trying to change our society -- social change often comes through those who are perceived to be dangerous to the state. If humans were angels there would be no need for government to begin with, and if elected leaders were angels there would be less need for protection of our privacy -- but humans are not angels and we have experience with elected leaders that are partisan, opportunist, short-sighted and, sometimes, even corrupt. Government's natural inclination is to abuse its power, one critical reason why our Founders limited it. The danger of a surveillance state is not the obscure chance of a truly evil person abusing the system; rather, the actual threat, the real danger, is a person with good intentions who believes that their draconian actions are morally justified and prudent. It is such a leader, perhaps with the best of intentions, who can make the most heinous of mistakes with eyes wide open and belief that the ends justify the means. Those ends never justify eviscerating the Fourth Amendment. * This is not to say that the Church and Pike Committees completely dealt with abuses -- they did not -- but they were a clear step in the right direction and demanding accountability and limits to government abuse. 
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| Posted: 03 Jul 2013 09:10 PM PDT
As you've heard, the tech-industry visionary Douglas Engelbart has died, at age 88. I met him only a few times and have no special standing to comment on his passing. But on the eve of our nation's birthday, I wanted to be sure our site noted the work and achievements of a person who exemplified what we'd like to think of as our national traits and temperament. This site, maintained by Stanford, has clips and background of Engelbart in computing's infant age -- including a carefully annotated version of his famous "Mother of All Demos," 45 years ago, source of the photo above. In it, amid machines that look laughably crude by modern standards, he laid out with surprising foresight many aspects of the evolving human/machine interaction as we know it today. In the NYT, John Markoff has a nice appreciation of Engelbart; it includes a mention of the seminal role a famous Atlantic article played in Engelbart's thinking. Harry McCracken has another good piece in Time. Two years ago during a guest-blogging stint here Mark Bernstein, of Eastgate software, put Engelbart's influence in context. He was a man who made a difference, and was both respected and liked. 
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