I’m normally a big fan of John Stewart, and I also generally have a lot of respect for Ted Koppel. But I was bothered by something that the two of them said yesterday during Koppel’s appearance on The Daily Show. Koppel was promoting a Discovery Channel special that has yet to air on capitalism in China, and the subject quickly turned to America’s debt, about one quarter of which is owned by the Chinese. Stewart then asked Koppel if he thought that China was about to “pull the rug out” of the American economy. Koppel basically responded that “they rely too much on selling products to the American consumer to want to do that”–certainly a true response. But no one mentioned the larger point about the developing Chinese-American relationship, contained in an old adage: if you borrow $10,000, the bank owns you, if you borrow $10 million, you own the bank.
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The Supreme Court of the United States today struck down a Washington, DC ban on all handguns. I can’t say it’s one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever, but it’s surely a bad one–both in content and in language. First, the amendment in question:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
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My wife just sent me a fascinating article on Slate that I thought I would share with you. Some geneticists recently completed a study on how genes for homosexuality could continue to exist given that homosexual men tend not to procreate. They tested a number of theories against the data, and discovered that what seems to happen is that there actually isn’t a genetic marker for homosexuality, per se, but instead a series of genetic markers that lead to a dramatic increase in attraction for males. Women who have this set of genes tend to produce significantly more children than women who don’t have this set of genes; but if they pass those genetic markers to their sons, then those men are significantly more likely to be gay. (Which is not necessarily to say that most or even many of them are gay, just more than you would otherwise expect.) The study was only concerned with homosexuality in men, and does not address homosexuality in women at all.
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The GOP is trying to turn this election, in part, into a referendum on President Bush’s handling of the War on Terror. In particular, conservative pundits (cheered by both the White House and the McCain campaign) have attacked Obama for praising the response to the first World Trade Center attacks, bringing back the charge that Democrats have a “9/10″ outlook. It is certainly true that there is a vast divide between the two approaches; I just don’t understand how anyone with even a passing respect for either the Constitution or basic human dignity could prefer the current GOP strategy.
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I was reading an article in the National Review today, that really made me aware about a fundamental divide in this country. The article (predictably) argues against Obama. But it does so by putting forth 10 reasons to be wary of Obama. Of them, I found 4 to be strong arguments FOR Obama, and several others I didn’t really care one way or the other about.
It was interesting, because its a fundamental different paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) for thinking about foreign policy. I found the arguments totally unpersuasive, because they were talking from different assumptions about what guides behavior, and the causal mechanisms involved in foreign policy.
I’m a big fan of compromise, but I don’t know how compromise can occur when people come from such different central assumptions about effective foreign policy…
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