I keep trying to do some writing; so far, I have to stop after a little while and go back to bed. And now one of the cats seems to have some ailment, too. Thanks to the generosity of readers, I can afford to get her some medical attention once I'm able to make the trip to the vet. I hope to do that in the next few days . . .

. . .Once again, I'm deeply grateful to those who made donations, especially since the cats are also beneficiaries of your kindness. Sadly, the medical attention I myself require will forever be far out of reach financially. (And if Wendy's situation should cost more than several hundred dollars, that could be a problem, too. For the moment, I'll assume it's a relatively simply problem. But we'll find out soon.)

I hope to be able to do some work in the near future. I'll be back as soon as possible. My enormous thanks for your generosity and patience still another time.

. . .Conservative critics decried it as the advent of socialism, but the core of Keynesian politics was quite different. What Keynes proposed was not class conflict, but reconciliation. His economic prescriptions suggested the terms for peaceful resolution. . .

. . .Keynes (and Eccles and the others) provided the political community with a unifying principle for economic decisions: everyone rides in the same boat. Given the complex relationships of the modern economy, everyone will prosper together, or, ultimately, everyone will languish. Capital will not collect its rewards unless labor gets its due. Workers cannot be healthy if producers are sick. Savers cannot reap profit if no one is able to borrow their savings and use them productively.

Enlightened self-interest required cooperation, a negotiated sharing of rewards. . .Fierce political struggles between labor and management and other competing interests continued, of course, after Keynes, but his ideas were a moderating influence. . .

This generous political spirit - the truce implicit in Keynesian doctrine - closely resembled the practical principles by which Franklin Roosevelt governed. Despite the fractious politics and FDR's derisive attacks on Wall Street's "economic royalists", the true spirit of the New Deal was conciliatory and collaborative. He was remembered as labor's champion, but Roosevelt was also supported by important elements of Wall Street, including leading investment bankers. FDR's many reforms were, in a sense, a series of "new deals" worked out with various sectors of the economy, both the injured and the prosperous. His bargains did not, put an end to conflict, but they did lower the intensity. . .

-Giovanni Dosi talks about the confluence between Schumpeter and Keynes at the Institute for New Economic Thinking website. I think this is very important. Some people see Keynes as saying "saving is bad and spending is good". I think that's a strange way to look at it. I see Keynes as saying "investment is good and investment doesn't always match up with savings". The latter perspective, which stresses animal spirits, etc. - this sort of view of Keynes that is more common at the Institute for New Economic Thinking - is quite commensurate with a Schumpterian entrepreneurial view of the economy.

. . .Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute—one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, "The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries.". . .

. . .A new subdiscipline called "resilience engineering" looks at how systems can be made more resistant to failure, and better able to recover when they do fail. That kind of thinking, it seems to me, is relevant to all of us, not just engineers. . .

As I have for years, I spent a week of teaching and listening at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Fla., this spring. I've assured my bosses that this was my continuing search for the Fountain of Youth, a popular undertaking in Florida and at AARP.

This year, I also found wisdom. . .

. . .Most made sizable defense cuts, others closed tax loopholes and added or raised taxes, including higher gasoline taxes and a new 5 percent sales tax, even when they were warned that it could drive the cost of a Big Mac sky-high. They didn't cut education, protected the environment and didn't touch Social Security.

Here's the bottom line: Faced with the same options that have paralyzed Washington, the students worked to find success. They weren't selfish. The new taxes, for example, would affect them disproportionately. But the cuts were across the board, evenhanded and sensible. The human consequence of budget balancing was very much on their minds. "I don't think we should throw grandmas out on the street or deny the elderly health care services," said Victoria Priester, a senior from Jacksonville. . .

. . .At the end of the day, there was a role reversal: The students had some lessons to teach.

. . .If you want to save America from a crushing future debt burden, you need to repeal the Bush tax cuts, get out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and stop pursuing austerity policies that will slow down economic recovery.

Once we've done that, then it's time to talk about Medicare. But the other stuff comes first. . .

. . .Steven Aftergood . . .believes that the trial may also test whether the nation’s expanding secret intelligence bureaucracy is beyond meaningful accountability. . .

. . .Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who served in the Bush Justice Department, laments the lack of consistency in leak prosecutions. He notes that no investigations have been launched into the sourcing of Bob Woodward’s four most recent books, even though “they are filled with classified information that he could only have received from the top of the government.” Gabriel Schoenfeld, of the Hudson Institute, says, “The selectivity of the prosecutions here is nightmarish. It’s a broken system.”

. . .Tamm questions why the Drake case is proceeding, given that Drake never revealed anything as sensitive as what appeared in the Times. “The program he talked to the Baltimore Sun about was a failure and wasted billions of dollars,” Tamm says. “It’s embarrassing to the N.S.A., but it’s not giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”

Mark Klein, the former A.T. & T. employee who exposed the telecom-company wiretaps, is also dismayed by the Drake case. “I think it’s outrageous,” he says. “The Bush people have been let off. The telecom companies got immunity. The only people Obama has prosecuted are the whistle-blowers.”

. . .To be sure, Pakistan’s India-centric policy is harmful and counterproductive. The present crisis provides an opportunity for the Pakistani military to give up this strategically misguided obsession. India should also use this window of opportunity to step forward and normalize relations with its neighbor, instead of gloating over Pakistan’s misfortunes.

The killing of Bin Laden proves once and for all that the Pakistani military cannot look the other way as Afghan Taliban gather in Pakistan. Failing to act with full force against Islamist extremists at home is no longer an option. However, the United States needs to show greater understanding and patience while Pakistan undertakes this necessary strategic shift. . .

. . .Our support for these principles is not a secondary interest. Today I want to make it clear that it is a top priority that must be translated into concrete actions, and supported by all of the diplomatic, economic and strategic tools at our disposal.

Let me be specific. . .

. . .the purpose of libraries is to make human knowledge as widely available as possible, something for which digital media are ideal. But we haven’t had the kind of deliberate public focus on this that our ancestors put into library building.

Kevin Carey reports, however, that this is quickly changing thanks to a little-noted Obama administration initiative:

. . .The open-resource movement has been under way since the 1990s, with free content distributed by institutions including Carnegie Mellon and Yale Universities, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But there has never been an effort to promulgate OER’s on a $2-billion scale. . .

Neal: ". . .People, and especially students, are weaselly creatures. I was a student, I know people who have students, and I am a father to students. They are weaselly creatures. The danger to the value of an on-line education is the pretending that the weaselly factor does not exist. The embedded nature of what was learned in the face-to-face accountability is replaced by what? I know how my children skitter and skate through the "inter-web net-tubey" thing and there is very little of value that remains after the interaction. Quick solutions seized from here and there, on-line boards and chats for the "smart" persons answer, "cut and paste", done, and on to another round of COD4."

peenerbambina: "This kind of crap pisses me of in such a spectrum of ways. Of course, in the nasty racist arsehole way, but also because it is BAD SCIENCE and BAD SCIENCE can make GOOD SCIENCE look STUPID because it is all called SCIENCE. . ."

'Do you think that women should be educate?' . . .'But government scientist Dr Yamuka has proved women have brain of squirrel'. . .

. . .the either-or argument about 1948 versus 1967 is deeply misleading. Both years are part of Israeli-Palestinian history. But history isn't made of rock. . .When Israel pursues a peace agreement based mainly on the 1967 issues of dividing territory, it has a better chance of resolving the 1948 issue of refugees. . .

. . .In those 20 years of talks, from the Madrid Conference through the Oslo Accord up to Abbas' negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, both the 1967 and the 1948 issues were on the table. The Palestinians sought a state next to Israel and a resolution of the refugee issue. . .

. . .At the time of the Abbas-Olmert talks, as Bernard Avishai has reported, the two sides were still dickering about the number of refugees going to Israel, but it was clear that they would be the "exceptional cases." . . .

. . .But once Netanyahu took office, unwilling to continue the talks where his predecessor left off. . .Abbas finally gave up on negotiating. He hopes the United Nations will impose a two-state solution. . .

. . .All this might please [Netanyahu's] ally in recalcitrance, Ismail Haniyeh. I can't figure out why [AIPAC] should be happy. . .

. . .in addressing Hamas, the president got his emphasis wrong. He focused on Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist, and while deeply regrettable, that position belongs in the context of a solution rather than as a precondition -- Israel, for instance, has not recognized the right to Palestinian statehood on the 1967 lines or any Palestinian fundamental rights for that matter. Obama would have been better advised to emphasize the need for all Palestinian factions, including Hamas, to adhere to international law, notably the inadmissibility of terror or attacks on civilians. . .

. . .strategies featuring massive retaliation were less successful than TIT FOR TAT with its more gentle policy of restrained retaliation. Forgiveness is the key here, for it helps to restore the proverbial "atmosphere of mutual cooperation" (to use the phrase of international diplomacy) after a small skirmish.

"Be nice and forgiving" was in essence the overall lesson of the first tournament. Apparently, though, many people just couldn't get themselves to to believe it, and were convinced that with cleverer trickery and scheming, they could win the day. It took the second tournament to prove them dead wrong. And out of the second tournament, a third key strategic concept emerged: that of provocability - the notion that one should "get mad" quickly at defectors, and retaliate. Thus a more general lesson is: "Be nice, provocable, and forgiving."

Strategies that do well in a wide variety of environments are called by Axelrod robust, and it seems that ones with "good personality traits" - that is, nice, provocable, and forgiving strategies - are sure to be robust. TIT FOR TAT is by no means the only possible strategy with these traits, but it is the canonical example of such a strategy, and it is astonishingly robust. . .

. . .The thing that Liberal Humanism finds it most difficult to understand or cope with is the riddle of the evil mind, practising a purposeless malignity for its own sake. The love of evil is sub-rational, as the Divine charity is super-rational; and the golden mean of reason is as incapable of the one as the other.

posted by Anonymous at 1:11 AM