Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

Oh, gawd, he’s SO tiresome…  This time Bobo is fizzing about kosher food…  In “The Orthodox Surge” he breathlessly tells us that a thriving Jewish counterculture prompts reflections on collective commitments in the modern age.  It’s as though he had no idea that there were such things as kosher grocery stores, and he talks about his tour guide to Brooklyn…  The boy needs to get out more, or at least take his head out of his butt and look around once in a while.  (Dairy-free cheese puffs?  Really???)  Mr. Cohen, in “Evil Banker Syndrome,” says the essential difference between the U.S. and Europe endures. It is over risk and reward.  In “The Market Speaks” Prof. Krugman says yes, the Dow Jones industrial average has been setting new records this week, but the message from the markets is actually not a happy one.  Here’s Bobo:

In Midwood, Brooklyn, there’s a luxury kosher grocery store called Pomegranate serving the modern Orthodox and Hasidic communities. It looks like a really nice Whole Foods. There’s a wide selection of kosher cheeses from Italy and France, wasabi herring, gluten-free ritual foods and nicely toned wood flooring.

The snack section is impressive. There’s a long aisle bursting with little bags of chips and pretzels, suitable for putting into school lunch boxes. That’s important because Orthodox Jews spend a lot of time packing school lunches.

Nationwide, only 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 are married. But an astounding 71 percent of Orthodox Jews are married at that age. And they are having four and five kids per couple. In the New York City area, for example, the Orthodox make up 32 percent of Jews over all. But the Orthodox make up 61 percent of Jewish children. Because the Orthodox are so fertile, in a few years, they will be the dominant group in New York Jewry.

Another really impressive thing about the store is not found in one section but is pervasive throughout. That’s the specialty products designed around this or that aspect of Jewish law. There are the dairy-free cheese puffs in case you want to have some cheese puffs with a meat dish. There are the precut disposable tablecloths so you don’t have to use scissors on the Sabbath. There are the specially designed sponges, which don’t retain water, so you don’t have to do the work of squeezing out water on Shabbat.

Pomegranate looks like any island of upscale consumerism, but deep down it is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.

Those of us in secular America live in a culture that takes the supremacy of individual autonomy as a given. Life is a journey. You choose your own path. You can live in the city or the suburbs, be a Wiccan or a biker.

For the people who shop at Pomegranate, the collective covenant with God is the primary reality and obedience to the laws is the primary obligation. They go shopping like the rest of us, but their shopping is minutely governed by an external moral order.

The laws, in this view, make for a decent society. They give structure to everyday life. They infuse everyday acts with spiritual significance. They build community. They regulate desires. They moderate religious zeal, making religion an everyday practical reality.

The laws are gradually internalized through a system of lifelong study, argument and practice. The external laws may seem, at first, like an imposition, but then they become welcome and finally seem like a person’s natural way of being.

Meir Soloveichik, my tour guide during this trip through Brooklyn, borrows a musical metaphor from the Catholic theologian George Weigel. At first piano practice seems like drudgery, like self-limitation, but mastering the technique gives you the freedom to play well and create new songs. Life is less a journey than it is mastering a discipline or craft.

Much of the delight in life comes from arguing about the law and different interpretations of God’s command. Soloveichik laughingly describes his debates over which blessing to say over Crispix cereal, which is part corn, but also part rice. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth who is on a tour through New York, notes that Jews are constitutional lawyers: “The Torah is an anthology of argument with a shared vocabulary of common restraint.”

But there are still obligations that precede choice. For example, a young person in mainstream America can choose to marry or not. In Orthodox society, young adults have an obligation to marry and perpetuate the covenant and it is a source of deep sadness when they cannot.

“Marriage is about love, but it is not first and foremost about love,” Soloveichik says. “First and foremost, marriage is about continuity and transmission.”

The modern Orthodox are rooted in that deeper sense of collective purpose. They are like the grocery store Pomegranate, superficially a comfortable part of mainstream American culture, but built upon a moral code that is deeply countercultural.

This sort of life involves a fascinating series of judgment calls about what aspects of secularism can safely be included in a covenantal life. For example, Soloveichik’s wife, Layaliza, was admitted into Harvard, but she went to a religious college, Yeshiva, instead. Then she went to a secular professional school, Yale Law, and now works as an assistant U.S. attorney.

All of us navigate certain tensions, between community and mobility, autonomy and moral order. Mainstream Americans have gravitated toward one set of solutions. The families stuffing their groceries into their Honda Odyssey minivans in the Pomegranate parking lot represent a challenging counterculture. Mostly, I notice how incredibly self-confident they are. Once dismissed as relics, they now feel that they are the future.

Next up is Mr. Cohen:

I was talking the other day to a U.S. banker who works in the City for a British bank. He was complaining about a decision-making process that was cumbersome by American standards. But his main issue was a feeling that bankers in Europe are seen as the enemy — overpaid profiteers. It was a relief to get to New York, he said, where the economic mood was more upbeat and post-meltdown fury fading.

The banker’s words came back to me on my return this week to Europe from the United States. The headlines were all about bankers’ bonuses and executive pay curbs. European Union finance ministers have approved, over British objections, the capping of bankers’ bonuses at twice their salary — and a bonus that big will require the approval of two-thirds of shareholders. The normal cap will be a 1:1 ratio of bonus-to-salary.

The Swiss — no less — have approved in a referendum a series of executive pay curbs, including banning golden hellos and goodbyes and giving shareholders a binding say on executive pay.

When the Swiss get riled over the rich and their money, some big shift is afoot. Europe is doubling down on solidarity.

I understand the anger. A 200 percent bonus should be sufficient for anyone. The recklessness of executives at too-big-to-fail banks in the run-up to the 2008 meltdown cost just about everyone — except themselves. Huge bonuses tend to encourage the taking of short-term risks. The masters of the universe have had their moment: the 1,701 people applying for 8 low-paid jobs as “baristas” in a new Costa Coffee branch in Nottingham should not have to read about multimillion-dollar golden handshakes.

All true — but beware the feel-good retribution that returns to haunt you. City jobs will disappear (Boris Johnson, the conservative mayor of London, called the measures “moronic”). Fixed salaries may rise to offset the loss; they are harder to claw back.

At a more fundamental level, John Authers has argued persuasively in the Financial Times that the real problem is not bonuses but corporate governance. As he writes: “Limit the leverage that banks can use, and require them to hold more capital, and bonuses will be less variable. Tell them that they cannot trade with depositors’ funds, or split the biggest banks, and compensation will be less variable.” What is needed is a “a banking system that can sensibly allocate savers’ capital to productive investment opportunities. The compensation issue, to the extent that there is one, is dealt with in the process.”

But when Europe sees an opportunity to control or regulate free markets it still has a hard time resisting. These measures are good politics for European politicians. They would not fly in the United States, for all the anti-Wall Street anger engendered by the Great Recession.

The essential difference between the United States and Europe endures. It is over risk and reward. The American experience begins with risk, that of immigrants who went there in the first place. The European experience ends with solidarity, the insurance policy an old and war-scarred Continent has taken out against the worst. America yearns to be free, Europe to be free of want: politicians must pitch their appeals accordingly. These are core characteristics, written into the respective DNAs on each side of the Atlantic.

Where America enshrines the individual, Europe ennobles the collective. As to which approach is preferable, that seems to me a matter of personal choice. Capitalist churn can be cruel. On the other hand social democratic solidarity can be stultifying. It may be easier to get ahead in America. It is certainly far better to be left behind in Europe. Which is more important to you?

We may dream of Eumerica, some transcontinental fusion where the can-do attitude is American and the healthcare French. But in the end a choice must be made: Do you want your capitalism raw or remedied?

Some say this is a time of transAtlantic convergence. When President Obama calls for a trans-Atlantic free-trade agreement in his State of the Union address and all the talk in Washington is of avoiding war and saving money, it may indeed seem that this is a time of U.S.-European coming together and that the days of inhabiting Mars and Venus (in Robert Kagan’s phrase) are over.

I do not believe it. Mark Leonard had an interesting Reuters column the other day called “The Europeanization of America,” which noted the points of apparent convergence and quoted Michele Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense, saying (with caveats): “We don’t want to be the world’s policemen.”

It is true that the U.S. wars without victory in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped the fires of Mars. America’s new God is the Drone. There is a touch of Europe’s Venus in the U.S. pivot away from Bush-era bellicosity.

The rise of the rest has left Europe and the United States with shared anxieties over insolvency. The convergence, such as it is, has about it something of a desire to dilute misery by sharing it.

But Americans will still take the bonus and run while Europeans strive worthily to redistribute it.

And now finally here’s Prof. Krugman:

Four years ago, as a newly elected president began his efforts to rescue the economy and strengthen the social safety net, conservative economic pundits — people who claimed to understand markets and know how to satisfy them — warned of imminent financial disaster. Stocks, they declared, would plunge, while interest rates would soar.

Even a casual trawl through the headlines of the time turns up one dire pronouncement after another. “Obama’s radicalism is killing the Dow,” warned an op-ed article by Michael Boskin, an economic adviser to both Presidents Bush. “The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return,” declared The Wall Street Journal, warning that the “bond vigilantes” would soon push Treasury yields to destructive heights.

Sure enough, this week the Dow Jones industrial average has been hitting all-time highs, while the current yield on 10-year U.S. government bonds is roughly half what it was when The Journal published that screed.

O.K., everyone makes a bad prediction now and then. But these predictions have special significance, and not just because the people who made them have had such a remarkable track record of error these past several years.

No, the important point about these particular bad predictions is that they came from people who constantly invoke the potential wrath of the markets as a reason we must follow their policy advice. Don’t try to cover America’s uninsured, they told us; if you do, you will undermine business confidence and the stock market will tank. Don’t try to reform Wall Street, or even criticize its abuses; you’ll hurt the plutocrats’ feelings, and that will lead to plunging markets. Don’t try to fight unemployment with higher government spending; if you do, interest rates will skyrocket.

And, of course, do slash Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid right away, or the markets will punish you for your presumption.

By the way, I’m not just talking about the hard right; a fair number of self-proclaimed centrists play the same game. For example, two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson warned us to expect an attack of the bond vigilantes within, um, two years unless we adopted, you guessed it, Simpson-Bowles.

So what the bad predictions tell us is that we are, in effect, dealing with priests who demand human sacrifices to appease their angry gods — but who actually have no insight whatsoever into what those gods actually want, and are simply projecting their own preferences onto the alleged mind of the market.

What, then, are the markets actually telling us?

I wish I could say that it’s all good news, but it isn’t. Those low interest rates are the sign of an economy that is nowhere near to a full recovery from the financial crisis of 2008, while the high level of stock prices shouldn’t be cause for celebration; it is, in large part, a reflection of the growing disconnect between productivity and wages.

The interest-rate story is fairly simple. As some of us have been trying to explain for four years and more, the financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble created a situation in which almost all of the economy’s major players are simultaneously trying to pay down debt by spending less than their income. Since my spending is your income and your spending is my income, this means a deeply depressed economy. It also means low interest rates, because another way to look at our situation is, to put it loosely, that right now everyone wants to save and nobody wants to invest. So we’re awash in desired savings with no place to go, and those excess savings are driving down borrowing costs.

Under these conditions, of course, the government should ignore its short-run deficit and ramp up spending to support the economy. Unfortunately, policy makers have been intimidated by those false priests, who have convinced them that they must pursue austerity or face the wrath of the invisible market gods.

Meanwhile, about the stock market: Stocks are high, in part, because bond yields are so low, and investors have to put their money somewhere. It’s also true, however, that while the economy remains deeply depressed, corporate profits have staged a strong recovery. And that’s a bad thing! Not only are workers failing to share in the fruits of their own rising productivity, hundreds of billions of dollars are piling up in the treasuries of corporations that, facing weak consumer demand, see no reason to put those dollars to work.

So the message from the markets is by no means a happy one. What the markets are clearly saying, however, is that the fears and prejudices that have dominated Washington discussion for years are entirely misguided. And they’re also telling us that the people who have been feeding those fears and peddling those prejudices don’t have a clue about how the economy actually works.

Me?  I live in terror that we’ll have another Republican president and my retirement savings will evaporate.  Under C+ Augustus I lost a year’s salary in one memorable month…

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

In “The Brutality Cascade” Bobo says that in some competitions, the most brutal player gets to set the rules.  It’s one of those columns where he bounces all over the place trying to equate things and failing.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Competition Drug,” says Adderall has become to college what steroids are to baseball: an illicit performance enhancer for a fiercely competitive environment.  Way back in the day it was amphetamine…  Not much new under the sun.  Mr. Nocera has delivered himself of another misguided screed in favor of the oil industry.  In “A Scientist’s Misguided Crusade” he howls that James Hansen hurts his climate cause with an obsession with the Keystone XL pipeline.  It’s a remarkably fact-challenged piece of crap.  Mr. Bruni, in “Knowing God’s Mind,” says an author asks, can those who condemn gays and lesbians be so sure of God’s will?  Here’s Bobo:

Let’s say you were a power hitter during baseball’s steroids era. You may have objected to steroids on moral and health grounds. But many of your competitors were using them, so you faced enormous pressure to use them too.

Let’s say you are a student at a good high school. You may want to have a normal adolescence. But you are surrounded by all these junior workaholics who have been preparing for the college admissions racket since they were 6. You find you can’t unilaterally withdraw from the rat race and still get into the college of your choice. So you also face enormous pressure to behave in a way you detest.

You might call these situations brutality cascades. In certain sorts of competitions, the most brutal player gets to set the rules. Everybody else feels pressure to imitate, whether they want to or not.

The political world is rife with brutality cascades. Let’s say you are a normal person who gets into Congress. You’d rather not spend all your time fund-raising. You’d like to be civil to your opponents and maybe even work out some compromises.

But you find yourself competing against opponents who fund-raise all the time, who prefer brutalism to civility and absolutism to compromise. Pretty soon you must follow their norms to survive.

Or take a case in world affairs. The United States is a traditional capitalist nation that has championed an open-seas economic doctrine. We think everybody benefits if global economics is like a conversation, with maximum openness, mutual trust and free exchange.

But along comes China, an economic superpower with a more mercantilist mind-set. Many Chinese, at least in the military-industrial complex, see global economics as a form of warfare, a struggle for national dominance.

Americans and Europeans tend to think it is self-defeating to engage in cyberattacks on private companies in a foreign country. You may learn something, but you destroy the trust that lubricates free exchange. Pretty soon your trade dries up because nobody wants to do business with a pirate. Investors go off in search of more transparent partners.

But China’s cybermercantilists regard deceit as a natural tool of warfare. Cyberattacks make perfect sense. Your competitors have worked hard to acquire intellectual property. Your system is more closed so innovation is not your competitive advantage. It is quicker and cheaper to steal. They will hate you for it, but who cares? They were going to hate you anyway. C’est la guerre.

In a brutality cascade the Chinese don’t become more like us as the competition continues. We become more like them. And that is indeed what’s happening. The first thing Western companies do in response to cyberattacks is build up walls. Instead of being open stalls in the global marketplace, they begin to look more like opaque, rigidified castles.

Next, the lines between private companies and Western governments begin to blur. When Western companies are attacked, they immediately turn to their national governments for technical and political support. On the one hand, the United States military is getting a lot more involved in computer counterespionage, eroding the distance between the military and private companies. On the other hand, you see the rise of these digital Blackwaters, private security firms that behave like information age armies, providing defense against foreign attack but also counterattacking against Chinese and Russian foes.

Pretty soon the global economy looks less like Monopoly and more like a game of Risk, with a Chinese military-industrial complex on one part of the board and the Western military-industrial complex on another part.

Brutality cascades are very hard to get out of. You can declare war and simply try to crush the people you think are despoiling the competition.

Or you can try what might be called friendship circles. In this approach, you first establish the norms of legitimacy that should govern the competition. You create a Geneva Convention of domestic political conduct or global cyberespionage. Then you organize as broad a coalition as possible to agree to uphold these norms.

Finally, you isolate the remaining violators and deliver a message: If you join our friendship circle and abide by our norms, the benefits will be overwhelming, but if you stay outside, the costs will be devastating.

In his effort to fight what he regards as Republican zealots, President Obama is caught between these two strategies. He never quite pushes budget showdowns to the limit to discredit Republicans, but he never offers enough to the members of the Republican common-sense caucus to tempt them to break ranks.

Clearly the second option is better for dealing with the Chinese. Establish a Geneva Convention that bans cyberactivity against citizens and private companies. Establish a broad coalition to enforce it.

Unfortunately, standard-setting is a dying art these days, so we are living with these brutality cascades.

Next up is Mr. Cohen, who’s in Boston:

This is America’s college town par excellence. Kids from all over the world flock to Boston to learn. I have a son who is a freshman here. Last autumn, as he entered school, I listened to warnings about the dangers of binge drinking. I think they missed the point.

The real epidemic involves so-called smart drugs, particularly Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (A.D.H.D.) but so freely available as to be the pill to take whenever academic pressure requires pulling an all-nighter with zero procrastination to get a paper done.

“Just popped an Addie, so I’m good to go” — this sort of pretest attitude has become pervasive. Conversations with several students suggested Adderall was always available, costing from $2 to $5 a pill. Adderall has become to college what steroids are to baseball: an illicit performance enhancer for a fiercely competitive environment.

What to say to doctors to get a prescription is now so widely known among students — “It’s like my thoughts are channel-surfing and I can’t stop” — as to have become a kind of joke.

“If there are no A.D.H.D. symptoms prior to college I have a very hard time writing a prescription,” Jill Kasper, a pediatrician, told me. “But if somebody wants a prescription for Adderall, they can find someone to give it to them.”

The problem is that Adderall is dangerous, a Class 2 controlled substance like cocaine. While it has helped countless A.D.H.D. sufferers, it can also lead down a dark road of dependency, ever higher doses, fight-or-flight anxiety levels, sleeplessness and depression.

Here, in his own words, is the Adderall story of Steven Roderick, 24, a smart, soft-spoken, lost senior studying health science at the University of Massachusetts Boston:

“I started taking it my first year in college. My performance had always fluctuated a lot. It was hard to pay attention, even in classes I was interested in. I was getting D’s. I felt something had to change. Adderall flies around campus. The first time I took it I wrote a paper for an astronomy class that was out of this world. I could not believe it — I was so inspired it made me want to be a doctor!

“I thought — oh my God! — this is the whole problem. You have the ability. You are intelligent. You just don’t have the link between intelligence and the capacity to be productive. The pill is the link. I felt literally unstoppable.

“I went to the doctor, said I’d like to give Adderall a try. There were no diagnostic procedures. Doctors give in too easily. I did not think there could be a risk later on. I started on 20 milligrams. I went from D’s and F’s to straight A’s. But your brain adapts, you have to increase the dose, and by 2011 I was up to 45 milligrams.

“In the spring of that year I started to feel Adderall was my best friend and my worst enemy at the same time. Because I could not sleep I went to see my psychopharm, and she prescribed me Ativan to sleep. That worked O.K. for a while. But I really ran into trouble last year. I was up to 65 milligrams, and then during finals went to 80, even 120, milligrams, and I was just locked into this Adderall-Ativan cycle. My doctor seemed scatterbrained. She’d prescribe something but not follow up.

“It’s a complicated dependency. I mean I never took Adderall to get high, never took it in a way that was not academically oriented; and I think there’s a distinction between dependency and addiction, taking something for a purpose or for a rush. But I feel awful. My baseline anxiety level would be most people’s highest anxiety level. The drop of a pin makes me spin around.

“I am living at home. My parents are clueless, and it is hard to discuss with them, although my Mom helps me now. I alternate between ‘on’ and ‘off’ states — I come off the Adderall, take Ativan and sleep for days. I miss appointments. I know I need to go to the appointments, but I wonder if I will be functional enough.

“Adderall suddenly turned its back on me. It enabled me to focus, got me to a higher place academically. But then I could no longer rely on it. I was on my own. And although I have less than three credits to go, I may have to withdraw from school because I have not been able to make it to enough classes.

“Look, I am in a culture that constantly justifies the means to an end. So how do we persuade people not to take it? All you hear is how impossible it will be to get a job when you get out, and you are going more and more into debt, and you think without this I won’t be top of the class. With other drugs you know you are ruining your life. But Adderall manipulates you into thinking you are doing what is needed to have a great life.”

Now let’s slog through Mr. Nocera’s ode to Keystone XL:

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline.

Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow our well-oiled government to shepherd it into existence, would be the first step down the wrong road, perpetuating our addiction to dirty fossil fuels, moving to ever dirtier ones,” it began. After claiming that the carbon in the tar sands “exceeds that in all oil burned in human history,” Hansen’s statement concluded: “The public must demand that the government begin serving the public’s interest, not the fossil fuel industry’s interest.”

As a private citizen, Hansen, 71, has the same First Amendment rights as everyone else. He can publicly oppose the Keystone XL pipeline if he so chooses, just as he can be as politically active as he wants to be in the anti-Keystone movement, and even be arrested during protests, something he managed to do recently in front of the White House.

But the blast e-mail didn’t come from James Hansen, private citizen. It specifically identified Hansen as the head of the Goddard Institute, and went on to describe him as someone who “has drawn attention to the danger of passing climate tipping points, producing irreversible climate impacts that would yield a different planet from the one on which civilization developed.” All of which made me wonder whether such apocalyptic pronouncements were the sort of statements a government scientist should be making — and whether they were really helping the cause of reversing climate change.

Let’s acknowledge right here that the morphing of scientists into activists is nothing new. Linus Pauling, the great chemist, was a peace activist who pushed hard for a nuclear test ban treaty. Albert Einstein also became a public opponent of nuclear weapons.

It is also important to acknowledge that Hansen has been a crucial figure in developing modern climate science. In 2009, Eileen Claussen, now the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, told The New Yorker that Hansen was a “heroic” scientist who “faced all kinds of pressures politically.” Today, his body of work is one of the foundations upon which much climate science is built.

Yet what people hear from Hansen today is not so much his science but his broad, unscientific views on, say, the evils of oil companies. In 2008, he wrote a paper, the thesis of which was that runaway climate change would occur when carbon in the atmosphere reached 350 parts per million — a point it had already exceeded — unless it were quickly reduced. There are many climate change experts who disagree with this judgment — who believe that the 350 number is arbitrary and even meaningless. Yet an entire movement, 350.org, has been built around Hansen’s line in the sand.

Meanwhile, he has a department to run. For a midlevel scientist at the Goddard Institute, what signal is Hansen sending when he takes the day off to get arrested at the White House? Do his colleagues feel unfettered in their own work? There is, in fact, enormous resentment toward Hansen inside NASA, where many officials feel that their solid, analytical work on climate science is being lost in what many of them describe as “the Hansen sideshow.” His activism is not really doing any favors for the science his own subordinates are producing.

Finally, and most important, Hansen has placed all his credibility on one battle: the fight to persuade President Obama to block the Keystone XL pipeline. It is the wrong place for him to make a stand. Even in the unlikely event the pipeline is stopped, the tar sands oil will still be extracted and shipped. It might be harder to do without a pipeline, but it is already happening. And in the grand scheme, as I’ve written before, the tar sands oil is not a game changer. The oil we import from Venezuela today is dirtier than that from the tar sands. Not that the anti-pipeline activists seem to care.

What is particularly depressing is that Hansen has some genuinely important ideas, starting with placing a graduated carbon tax on fossil fuels. Such a tax would undoubtedly do far more to reduce carbon emissions and save the planet than stopping the Keystone XL pipeline.

A carbon tax might be worth getting arrested over. But by allowing himself to be distracted by Keystone, Hansen is hurting the very cause he claims to care so much about.

You, Mr. Nocera, are busy destroying whatever credibility you may have once had.  Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

Jeff Chu was married last September, on the lawn of a house on Cape Cod, against the backdrop of an ivy-covered fence. About 80 people came.

His mother and father weren’t among them.

His mother sent an e-mail just beforehand, to let him know that she was thinking of him. But to be a part of the ceremony? To celebrate the day? That much she couldn’t do, because Jeff was pledging his devotion to another man. And his parents, strict Southern Baptists, have always deemed such a love sinful, and against God’s wishes.

Against God’s wishes. That notion — that argument — is probably the most stubborn barrier to the full acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans, a last bastion and engine of bigotry. It’s what many preachers still thunder. It’s what some politicians still maintain.

It’s what Jeff himself once feared.

“How many nights have I spent sweaty and panicked and drained of tears, because I thought I would go to hell — for being gay, for being me?” he asks.

And how often, he adds, did he pray “that God would take these feelings from me?”

Those words come from a book that he wrote, its title yet another question: “Does Jesus Really Love Me?” It will be published this month, and is largely a travelogue.

For the span of a year, Jeff, who has written for Time magazine and many other publications, roamed the country, visiting Christian churches and groups of diverse theological stripes to explore their attitudes toward homosexuality. He also talked with devout Christians who’d dealt with homosexual feelings in different ways: by repressing them, by embracing them, by trying to divert them.

One man had elected celibacy. Another had married a woman and resolved to appreciate sex with her. He told Jeff: “It’s not like pizza or French fries — it’s more an acquired taste that I’ve come to like even better. It’s like olives.”

In the book Jeff, now 35, also shares his own story, which we discussed further in his Brooklyn town house recently.

His parents came to America from Hong Kong with the conservative beliefs that Baptist missionaries had spread through that area of the world. They reared Jeff in their religion, sending him to a Christian high school in Miami. One of his vivid memories from those years was the sudden banishment of a favorite teacher after the school discovered that he was involved with another man.

Jeff knew even then that he had feelings like the teacher’s, and writes: “This was the lesson that I learned: Nobody could ever, ever find out, because if they did, I would be damned and cast out, just like he was.”

At Princeton, he dated women. But in London for graduate school, he began to date men, and to wonder how that orientation could be wrong, when God had presumably made him the way he was.

Although his book doesn’t focus on the scattered references in the Bible to homosexuality, Jeff knows them well. And, yes, a few seem to condemn same-sex intimacy.

But have they been translated correctly? Interpreted the right way? Are they timeless verities or — more logically — reflections of an outmoded culture and obsolete mind-set? And if all of the Bible is to be taken literally, shouldn’t Christians refrain from planting multiple kinds of seed in one field or letting women speak in church or charging interest to the poor?

“You can twist the Bible any way you want,” Jeff told me, adding, “We overemphasize sexual morality, as if God puts a premium on what we do in the bedroom over what we do at the bank.”

He’s right. He’s also humble. He doesn’t claim, in his book or in conversation, to have definitive answers. He hasn’t determined beyond any doubt that his life and love are in concert with God’s wishes, because he thinks it arrogant to insist, as the zealots who condemn gay people do, that God’s will is so easily known.

And in light of that, he thinks it wrong for anyone to try to consign gays to the shame that so many of them have endured.

The stories in Jeff’s book made me sad, and they made me angry. How much needless pain have people like him been put through, and in God’s name no less?

But Jeff’s own story makes me hopeful. It’s one of grace. He still attends church, though not a Southern Baptist one. He’s patient with his parents; they’re struggling, too.

His mother actually plans to visit, and stay with, him and his husband this summer.

“I pull her along and she pulls me along, and we grow,” Jeff said, describing a dynamic and a tension not unlike America’s. “It’s uncomfortable for both of us. But it’s the path we have to take.”

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

In “The Learning Virtues” Bobo says a book on education cultures finds that the Chinese tend to define learning morally while Westerns define it cognitively.  Mr. Cohen, in “Zero Dark Zero,” says most Israelis now feel their security is assured without giving up anything.  Prof. Krugman, in “Ben Bernanke, Hippie,” says that dismissive attitude toward anyone who spoke out against the Iraq war 10 years ago is back to disparage any critic of fiscal austerity.  Here’s Bobo:

Jin Li grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. When the madness was over, the Chinese awoke to discover that far from overleaping the West, they were “economically destitute and culturally barren.” This inspired an arduous catch-up campaign. Students were recruited to learn what the West had to offer.

Li was one of the students. In university, she abandoned Confucian values, which were then blamed for Chinese backwardness, and embraced German culture. In her book, “Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West,” she writes that Chinese students at that time were aflame — excited by the sudden openness and the desire to catch up.

Li wound up marrying an American, moved to the States and became a teacher. She was stunned. American high school students had great facilities but didn’t seem much interested in learning. They giggled in class and goofed around.

This contrast between the Chinese superstudent and the American slacker could be described with the usual tired stereotypes. The Chinese are robots who unimaginatively memorize facts to score well on tests. The Americans are spoiled brats who love TV but don’t know how to work. But Li wasn’t satisfied with those clichés. She has spent her career, first at Harvard and now at Brown, trying to understand how Asians and Westerners think about learning.

The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.

You can look at the slogans on university crests to get a glimpse of the difference. Western mottos emphasize knowledge acquisition. Harvard’s motto is “Truth.” Yale’s is “Light and truth.” The University of Chicago’s is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”

Chinese universities usually take Confucian sayings that emphasize personal elevation. Tsinghua’s motto is “Strengthen self ceaselessly and cultivate virtue to nurture the world.” Nanjing’s motto is “Be sincere and hold high aspirations, learn diligently and practice earnestly.”

When Li asked Americans to randomly talk about learning they used words like: thinking, school, brain, discovery, understand and information. Chinese, on the other hand, tended to use phrases common in their culture: learn assiduously, study as if thirsting or hungering, be diligent in one’s learning.

In the Western understanding, students come to school with levels of innate intelligence and curiosity. Teachers try to further arouse that curiosity in specific subjects. There’s a lot of active learning — going on field trips, building things. There’s great emphasis on questioning authority, critical inquiry and sharing ideas in classroom discussion.

In the Chinese understanding, there’s less emphasis on innate curiosity or even on specific subject matter. Instead, the learning process itself is the crucial thing. The idea is to perfect the learning virtues in order to become, ultimately, a sage, which is equally a moral and intellectual state. These virtues include: sincerity (an authentic commitment to the task) as well as diligence, perseverance, concentration and respect for teachers.

In Chinese culture, the heroic scholar may possess less innate intelligence but triumphs over hardship. Li cites the story of the scholar who tied his hair to a ceiling beam so he could study through the night. Every time his head dropped from fatigue, the yank of his hair kept him awake.

Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.

These cultures are surprisingly enduring, Li notes, even with all the cross-pollination that goes on in the world today. Each has its advantages. I’m mostly struck by the way the intellectual and moral impulses are fused in the Chinese culture and separated in the West.

It’s easy to see historically why this came about. Hellenic culture emphasized skeptical scientific inquiry. With us, religion and science have often been at odds. We’re a diverse society, so it’s easier to teach our common academic standards in the classroom and relegate our diverse moralities to the privacy of the home.

I’d just note that cultures that do fuse the academic and the moral, like Confucianism or Jewish Torah study, produce these awesome motivation explosions. It might be possible to champion other moral/academic codes to boost motivation in places where it is absent.

Next up is Mr. Cohen:

A minister in the outgoing Israeli government put it to me bluntly during a recent visit to Israel: “For the first time in these elections, the Palestinians did not come into it.”

Israelis for the most part are comfortable enough to ignore their neighbors. If they are on the Titanic they prefer not to think about it.

It has become the received wisdom, in the White House and beyond, to suggest the current situation is unsustainable — the 46-year-old Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the undefined borders, the simmering conflict, the oppression. This may be no more than wishful thinking.

Israel’s situation feels sustainable. The economic miracle that makes swathes of the country feel like southern California can go on: Israel’s diplomatic loneliness does not amount to commercial isolation. Military domination will grow with U.S. support. A strong Israeli nationalist current — we won all the land on the battlefield, so it’s ours! — will prevail over the peace-talk fatigue among Israeli liberals and a splintered Palestinian movement.

Stepping across the wall-fence into the West Bank already feels like time travel back 30 years. Soon, given current momentum, it will feel like 40 years. Perhaps half a million Israelis living beyond the Green Line hardly know what it is: The two-state solution based around the 1967 borders, give or take agreed land swaps, is then a diplomatic and intellectual fiction.

Yes, Israel on all the land of Eretz Israel (a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, encompassing all of the West Bank) is sustainable. The status quo is not static. On balance, despite demographic patterns that favor the Palestinians, power tilts Israel’s way. Vitality trumps demography.

“Many years will pass without anything,” Tom Segev, the distinguished Israeli historian, told me. “We will go on oppressing; they will go on trying to fight. Most Israelis now feel their security is assured without giving up anything. That is the problem. The oppression of Palestinians is appalling. But the situation is calm. So Israelis don’t realize this everyday oppression. Nobody believes in peace any more.”

On the Palestinian side, too, believers in a two-state peace agreement have become harder to find. Settlement expansion with U.S. acquiescence has led to the conviction that there will be no viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Israel is not interested in permitting one and the U.S., who is subsidizing this effort, is unable and unwilling to change that because of domestic politics,” Yousef Munayyer, the executive director of the Washington-based Palestine Center wrote in an e-mail. He said Palestinians had lost faith in American mediation. Palestinians were likely to “re-strategize away from a state-based separatist struggle toward a rights-based struggle (already happening)” as “Israeli colonization” had “destroyed the territorial integrity of a would-be state.”

In other words, Palestinians will seek their rights — including that of return — within one state, rather than pursuing the establishment of their own national state. The only trouble is that, as the Israeli novelist Amos Oz told me recently, “The right of return is a euphemism for the liquidation of Israel. Even for a dove like myself this is out of the question.”

As Omar Barghouti, a leader of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, once put it: “If the refugees were to return, you would not have a two-state solution, you’d have a Palestine next to a Palestine.”

One state equals the end of Israel as a Jewish national state. It is not going to happen. It cannot be allowed to happen. Palestinian pursuit of that goal equals acceptance of eternal conflict. Jews, after the experience of the 20th century, are not going to give up the homeland they have battled so hard to build.

For any liberal Zionist — and I am one — convinced of the need for the two-state outcome envisaged in the United Nations resolution of 1947 establishing the modern state of Israel, both the religious-nationalist Israeli push to keep all the land and the Palestinian refusal to abandon the untenable, unacceptable “right of return” (there is no such right in history, just ask the Jews) are causes for deep despondency.

I said Israel’s situation is sustainable. It is in physical terms. It is not in ethical terms. This is a state whose Declaration of Independence in 1948 says it will “be founded on the principles of freedom, justice and peace in the spirit of the visions of the Prophets of Israel; will implement equality of complete social and national rights for all her citizens without distinction between religion, race and gender; will promise freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture.” The West Bank dominion over 2.6 million humiliated Palestinians runs counter to every word of this.

President Obama will soon visit Israel and the West Bank. He has zero cause for hope. Peace lies beyond the eye of a rusty needle. The limitlessness of Israeli strength and of Palestinian victimhood has narrowed the path to the well-known compromises needed to end the conflict.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 28, 2013

An earlier version of this column gave the wrong venue for a quote by Omar Barghouti. Mr Barghouti used these words at an appearance at the University of Ottawa. He says he was quoting a well-known position of Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University in Jerusalem.

And lastly we have Prof. Krugman:

We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy. Back then, all the important people decided that an unrelated war was an appropriate response to a terrorist attack; three years ago, they all decided that fiscal austerity was the appropriate response to an economic crisis caused by runaway bankers, with the supposedly imminent danger from budget deficits playing the role once played by Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Now, as then, this consensus has seemed impenetrable to counterarguments, no matter how well grounded in evidence. And now, as then, leaders of the consensus continue to be regarded as credible even though they’ve been wrong about everything (why do people keep treating Alan Simpson as a wise man?), while critics of the consensus are regarded as foolish hippies even though all their predictions — about interest rates, about inflation, about the dire effects of austerity — have come true.

So here’s my question: Will it make any difference that Ben Bernanke has now joined the ranks of the hippies?

Earlier this week, Mr. Bernanke delivered testimony that should have made everyone in Washington sit up and take notice. True, it wasn’t really a break with what he has said in the past or, for that matter, with what other Federal Reserve officials have been saying, but the Fed chairman spoke more clearly and forcefully on fiscal policy than ever before — and what he said, translated from Fedspeak into plain English, was that the Beltway obsession with deficits is a terrible mistake.

First of all, he pointed out that the budget picture just isn’t very scary, even over the medium run: “The federal debt held by the public (including that held by the Federal Reserve) is projected to remain roughly 75 percent of G.D.P. through much of the current decade.”

He then argued that given the state of the economy, we’re currently spending too little, not too much: “A substantial portion of the recent progress in lowering the deficit has been concentrated in near-term budget changes, which, taken together, could create a significant headwind for the economic recovery.”

Finally, he suggested that austerity in a depressed economy may well be self-defeating even in purely fiscal terms: “Besides having adverse effects on jobs and incomes, a slower recovery would lead to less actual deficit reduction in the short run for any given set of fiscal actions.”

So the deficit is not a clear and present danger, spending cuts in a depressed economy are a terrible idea and premature austerity doesn’t make sense even in budgetary terms. Regular readers may find these propositions familiar, since they’re pretty much what I and other progressive economists have been saying all along. But we’re irresponsible hippies. Is Ben Bernanke? (Well, he has a beard.)

The point is not that Mr. Bernanke is an unimpeachable source of wisdom; one hopes that the collapse of Alan Greenspan’s reputation has put an end to the practice of deifying Fed chairmen. Mr. Bernanke is a fine economist, but no more so than, say, Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and legendary economic theorist whose vocal criticism of our deficit obsession has nonetheless been ignored. No, the point is that Mr. Bernanke’s apostasy may help undermine the argument from authority — nobody who matters disagrees! — that has made the elite obsession with deficits so hard to dislodge.

And an end to deficit obsession can’t come a moment too soon. Right now Washington is focused on the idiocy of the sequester, but this is only the latest episode in an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy’s recovery. A misguided elite consensus has led us into an economic quagmire, and it’s time for us to get out.

Contrast that with this headline from the lead article in this morning’s NYT on the web:  “Boehner Halts Talks on Cuts, and House G.O.P. Cheers.”  Welcome to Bedlam.

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

In “Our Second Adolescence” Bobo says we need a president ready to shift the terms of the debate around big-versus-small government and nurture future investment in creative and courageous  ways.  Standard crap, and of course nothing but whining about his “dream Obama.”  In “Italian Moments” Mr. Cohen says reality in Italy is all in the head. Elections come and go. Human difference, thankfully, endures.  Mr. Nocera, in “Rebuilding on Their Own,” says if New Orleans is a guide, then the Rockaways will grow back organically, block by block.  Mr. Bruni considers “The Wages of Celibacy” and says a needless pledge does the Catholic Church, its priests and its parishioners no favors. It should go.  Here’s Bobo’s tiresome old self:

In Friday’s column, I wrote that the Obama administration has no plan to avoid the sequester save raising taxes on the rich. That was unfair. The White House approach is not what I would like, but it is more balanced than I described.

Humiliation is a good teacher. So, I’ve been trying to think through my dissatisfaction — and clarify what I think the administration should do.

First, I don’t believe that President Obama should become a Bill Clinton-style centrist. The Clinton policies were fine for their time. But, since then, we’ve had two decades in which inequality has gotten worse, the structural problems that slow growth have accumulated and debt levels have exploded. We simply need more robust policies than anything modeled in that era of centrism.

Second, I don’t think it’s in Obama’s interest to be the liberal Reagan. This is more or less the mode he has fallen into so far in his second term. The Republicans attack government, so the Democrats defend government. The Republicans champion the individual, so the Democrats champion the collective. This allows Obama to stay within the confines of Democratic orthodoxy. He can make gestures toward balance but doesn’t really crusade for anything that fundamentally challenges his electoral coalition.

The problem is that this approach locks us into the same debate framework we’ve been stuck in since 1980, which has produced so much gridlock. If politics is framed in this way, then the country divides and policy stagnates. We will keep having these endless budget squabbles. The dysfunction will metastasize.

My main complaint with Obama is that he promised to move us beyond these stale debates, but he’s, instead, become a participant in them.

My dream Obama would take advantage of the fact that only the president can fundamentally shift the terms. He’d take advantage of George Santayana’s observation that Americans don’t solve their problems; they leave them behind.

My dream Obama would abandon the big government versus small government argument. He’d point out that in a mature, aging society, government isn’t going anywhere. The issue is not size but sclerosis. The future has no lobby, so there are inexorable pressures favoring present consumption over future investment. The crucial point is not whether a dollar is spent publicly or privately, it’s whether it is spent on the present or future. The task today is to reform institutions and rearrange spending so we look like a young nation and not a comfort-seeking, declining one.

My dream Obama would nurture investment in three ways. First, he would take spending that currently goes to the affluent elderly and redirect it to the young and the struggling. He would build on the means-testing Medicare idea that Yuval Levin described recently in The Times. Older people with higher lifetime earnings would have fewer benefits, and they wouldn’t kick in until age 70.

That money could be used to reduce our children’s debt burden and to fund early education, community colleges, research and infrastructure projects. President Obama thinks the Democratic base would reject this shift. I’m not so sure. Democratic interest groups generally care more about discretionary spending than entitlement spending for the affluent. Moreover, I think Republicans could be persuaded that it’s crazy to harp on discretionary spending, which is a deficit sideshow. They should focus their energies on entitlements.

Second, Obama could nurture investment by starting a debate on the sort of consumption tax plan Michael Graetz describes in his book “100 Million Unnecessary Returns”: Enact a value-added tax, use money from that tax to finance an income tax exemption of $100,000, cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, replace the earned-income tax credit with payroll tax relief and debit cards.

This is a heavy lift politically, but it achieves Obama’s fairness goals while boosting growth.

Third, Obama could talk obsessively about family structure and social repair. Every week we get another statistic showing how social and income inequality is dividing the nation. A team led by Robert Putnam of Harvard recently completed research showing that while childhood obesity is falling among kids whose parents graduated from college, it is still rising among kids whose parents have a high school degree or less.

Because of his upbringing, President Obama is uniquely qualified to talk about family structures. Traditional values are an investment in the young, and he could do what he can to restitch the social fabric. If we don’t address this problem, inequality will be worse 30 years from now no matter what else we do.

My dream Obama wouldn’t be just one gladiator in the zero-sum budget wars. He’d transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.

MY dream Obama wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of feral children on the other side of the aisle, Bobo…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Italian paradox: An important election is held and the public seems uninterested. The economic numbers say crisis, yet Italians seem unperturbed. Why?

When I lived in Rome I found that two Italian expressions were central to understanding the country. The first was “Se non è vero, è ben trovato” — roughly “If it is not true, it is well observed,” or, more loosely, “If it is not true it damn well ought to be.”

The line between truth and untruth runs blurry in Italy, stripped of Anglo-Saxon exactitude. Truth is readily sacrificed on the altars of beauty and fantasy. Difficult realities are circumvented.

The second was “Il potere logora chi non ce l’ha” — “Power wears out those who do not have it.” The phrase, a favorite of Giulio Andreotti, the owlish Christian Democrat survivor, said much about the view that moralizing folk fixated on right and wrong are at heart just envious of the powerful.

A city like Rome that once ran an empire is bound to the daily contemplation of gilded palaces given over to diminished business. Freed of any obligation to administer or protect the world, but living with glorious architectural reminders of that time, Italians seemed to me wise in their pessimism about human nature, their knowledge that everything passes in the end, and their celebration of ephemeral pleasures.

Those were Cold War days. Italian elections were serious affairs, watched with some foreboding by the myriad folk up at the U.S. Embassy. Not only did they watch, they sought to influence the outcome. Italy was the soft underbelly of the West where the Communist Party might enter government. It never did.

By comparison, the Italian election unfolding as I write is a geostrategic minnow. Markets are worried, but then markets always are.

Silvio Berlusconi — a man enamored of power and dismissive of truth — has been doing his number. Beppe Grillo, an ex-comedian, has been making crazy promises about a 30-hour week that seem to have won over up to 20 percent of Italians. Meanwhile, the serious center-left represented by Pier Luigi Bersani and the outgoing prime minister, Mario Monti, has been making its case for cuts and needed reforms.

The spectacle, overall, has not been edifying. The temptation to dismiss Italy as unserious is always strong. The question is, which Italy? The north, serious to the point of dourness in cities like Turin, or the south, locked in habits of crime and corruption?

Another question is this: Does Italy, in its crisis-defying equanimity, hold lessons for us all? Last time I was there, three months ago, I was struck by an enduring humanity that gets lost elsewhere as pressures grow and life accelerates. Where interactions often seem purely transactional in New York or London — what can you do for me now this minute and if you can’t do anything why don’t you get out of my way? — they have an added layer in Rome. Encounters are more lingering. The eye dwells a moment, takes you in, registers your particular existence. These are Italian moments.

This humanity is accompanied by a flexibility that, again, reflects skepticism of hard lines and single truths. Technology is geared to the most efficient result. It can sift immense amounts of data in the instantaneous pursuit of optimization through efficiency. The chip is much less good at adaptability, the weighing of the intangible elements in human affairs. Italy holds the intangible precious in a unique way. Mario Draghi has proved such an adroit governor of the European Central Bank precisely because of this emotional intelligence.

I was talking the other day with my friend Ed Vulliamy of The Observer. He had just returned from the hilltop Tuscan town of Volterra, where he had been interviewing Aniello Arena, a convicted murderer serving a life sentence in the town’s prison. Arena is also the star of the award-winning movie, “Reality,” by the director Matteo Garrone.

Was it hard, I asked, to get permission to interview Arena? No, Vulliamy said, they went out for a drink at a local café: Arena can leave jail for a few hours every day. Here are a few lines from the fine piece Vulliamy wrote:

“Arena, according to the rather bizarrely agreed rules, must ‘check in’ to jail at midnight. So we go for a beer, the murderer and I, in a café on a pretty square on the edge of town with a view across the rolling Tuscan hills vanishing into the night. I ask him why he doesn’t just escape. ‘Why would I do that?’ he says. ‘Yes, we could be in Holland by tomorrow, but I’d be back in jail again, always afraid, looking around me. As things are, I don’t feel like a prisoner any more, just because I go to sleep in a jail. It’s all in the head, this so-called reality, freedom, whatever — all in the head, and in my head, I’m free.”’

Reality in Italy is all in the head. A prisoner is free. Elections come and go. Italy’s human difference, thankfully, endures.

Next up is Mr. Nocera, writing from New Orleans:

“Cities change from the bottom up, block by block,” said Roberta Gratz, as we drove down Magazine Street, on our way to the Lower Ninth Ward here.

The author of “The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs,” Gratz, like her friend and mentor Jacobs, is a student of what she calls “urban regeneration.” Since 2007, she has owned a home in New Orleans, and she was giving me what amounted to a tutorial on her next book subject: the rebuilding of the city post-Katrina.

“Look at this,” she said, gesturing to storefronts. “This is one of the longest shopping streets in the country. There are residential and commercial buildings, and local stores and chain stores. Very little was done for streets like this because the big money went to the tourism districts,” she said. “This grew back organically.” Which, she believes, is the way it always happens.

I was already coming around to that point of view. Some months earlier, when I had gone to the Rockaways, a stretch of New York coastal towns that had been pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, I had been struck by the lack of government response. Personnel from the Federal Emergency Management Agency set up offices, where they sipped coffee while waiting for Sandy victims to drop by. The city’s sanitation department did heroic work, but other city agencies were largely invisible. (City officials later complained that they had done much more than I had acknowledged.)

Mostly, people helped other people. Churches donated space where victims could get staples. Nonprofit organizations were everywhere. Volunteers went from house to house, helping homeowners clear out debris.

I remember wondering at the time if it was always going to be like this. Despite the billions of dollars appropriated by Congress for Sandy recovery, would the rebuilding be as ad hoc, and as volunteer-dependent, as the initial emergency phase? If New Orleans is any indication, the answer is yes.

It is not as if New Orleans didn’t have a grand plan. Its plan was put together by many of the city’s machers, which concluded that the Lower Ninth, the poorest district in the city, which had been virtually wiped out by Katrina, should never be rebuilt. The plan called for turning a neighborhood that once had 14,000 residents into “green space.” The plan died a quick, deserved death.

And then?

“I remember going to visit a house in the Lower Ninth four months after Katrina with the owner, who was seeing it for the first time,” said Gratz. “It was as bad as anything you’d ever seen. He looked at it and said, ‘It was in bad shape when I got it. I fixed it once, and I’ll fix it again.’ ”

Gratz told me this story in a sweet little restaurant called Café Dauphine in the Lower Ninth. It had been open for nine months. The woman who owned it lived across the street. Business was good, said the maître d’. Many of the houses on the surrounding street had been rebuilt, but there were still many that had not been touched since Katrina.

That is what you saw all over the Lower Ninth. People had trickled back — not everyone because not everyone could afford to come back, but more than you’d think. Volunteer groups were helping to rebuild homes. Neighbors were helping neighbors. Most strikingly, Brad Pitt’s rebuilding organization, Make It Right, has spent $24 million to build around 90 colorful, environmentally friendly homes in the Lower Ninth — with plans to build about 60 more. There are many people in New Orleans, Gratz included, who believe Pitt is one of the true heroes of the rebuilding effort.

The city government no longer ignores the rebuilding in the Lower Ninth. It has small but meaningful programs to help smooth the path for people who want to move there. Then again, it has idiotically planted palm trees along one of the Lower Ninth’s major streets, an inexplicable choice in a city known for its great live oaks.

Back in the Rockaways, the “ground up” rebuilding has already begun. Habitat for Humanity has arrived in force. In 2005, firefighters from New York went to New Orleans to help out after Katrina; now, firefighters from New Orleans are returning the favor. A group called Friends of Rockaway, using grant money from the Robin Hood Foundation, the primary philanthropy of the hedge fund industry, is employing local people to rebuild homes in their neighborhoods.

And government? New York City started a program called Rapid Repairs. People would order a boiler from the program and then wait for weeks for it to arrive. And half the time, it was the wrong boiler and had to be returned. It only reinforced what people in the Rockaways were coming to understand.

They’re on their own.

Last but not least we have Mr. Bruni:

The resignation of Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic clergyman, accused of unwanted advances toward younger priests, will ratchet up the usual talk about lies, double lives and hypocrisy in the church, and rightly so. The church’s leaders preach a purity that its own clerics can’t maintain. They cast stones, and are so very far from blameless.

But before we range across that sadly familiar terrain, let’s give a moment’s thought to loneliness. And longing. And this: the pledge of celibacy that the church requires of its servants is an often cruel and corrosive thing. It runs counter to human nature. It asks too much.

Just so we’re clear: I’m not excusing priests who’ve sexually abused minors, or even talking principally about them. The British clergyman, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, isn’t charged with any such crime. He’s charged with failing to obey the moral absolutes he pronounces. And if true, the allegations represent more than yet another peek behind a false curtain of fraudulent righteousness. They’re a suggestion of celibacy’s foolishness, even its recklessness: of the way it warps the culture of the priesthood; of the unreasonable standard it sets.

Last week, just before the allegations came to light, Cardinal O’Brien raised questions about the wisdom of the church’s tradition, for the last 900 years, of consigning clerics to a single, unmarried, ostensibly sexless life. He told the BBC that the next pope should consider dropping the celibacy rule, on account of how isolated clergymen can be.

“Many priests have found it very difficult to cope with celibacy as they lived out their priesthood and felt the need of a companion,” said Cardinal O’Brien, 74, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland. By companion, he specified a woman, and he mentioned marriage, which is technically what celibacy forbids. Chastity is a byproduct of that, since the church doesn’t condone sex outside the bounds of matrimony.

Did he find it difficult to cope? The accusations against him appeared in a British newspaper, The Observer, which reported that three priests and one former priest had recently complained to Pope Benedict XVI’s diplomatic representative in Britain of “inappropriate contact,” an “inappropriate approach” and other such behavior, some of it from decades ago. The cardinal has vaguely contested these charges.

According to The Observer, they were received by Benedict’s representative in the week immediately preceding the pope’s announcement that he would retire. Vatican observers will invariably try to connect those dots, just as they’ve theorized a bridge between Benedict’s retirement and a rumored dossier that he supposedly got about Vatican officials who’d consorted with male hustlers. It’s surely possible that a seemingly ceaseless tide of scandals contributed to his yearning for an exit.

But such speculation diverts attention from a more important truth that arches over these various tales. Celibacy is a bad idea with painful consequences. It not only renders the priesthood less attractive, contributing to a shortage of priests, but also influences which men pursue ordination and how they fare.

It’s a trap, falsely promising some men a refuge from sexual desires that worry them. That’s one explanation for what many church experts believe is a disproportionate percentage of gay men in the priesthood. In a world that has often convinced these men that they’ll be outcasts, the all-male priesthood can seem like a safe haven, and the vow of celibacy an opportunity to tuck one’s sexuality away on a shelf.

The promise of celibacy most likely factored into the church’s child sexual abuse crisis. Many years ago, when I wrote a book about it, more than a few mental health professionals told me that men trying to vanquish a sexual attraction to kids might well drift toward the priesthood in the hope that extra prayer and an intention of chastity would make everything right. One Catholic archbishop, Daniel Sheehan, who has since died, told me: “It could well be that a person with this kind of a hidden psychosexual problem could escape to the seminary and the like, thinking in some way that this would be a way of sublimating this problem.”

No matter what a person’s sexual orientation, the celibate culture runs the risk of stunting its development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?

If the stories about Cardinal O’Brien are true, you can look at him as the latest in a long line of Catholic hypocrites, his deeds in conflict with his words. That’s fair enough. But you can also look at him as someone whose needs couldn’t conform to a needless commitment to aloneness. And you can reserve your harshest judgment for the institution that puts him and so many others in that bind.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

In “The D.C. Dubstep” Bobo says politicians in both parties are dancing as though they’re secretly in love with sequestration, a total disaster for the country.  In “Finding the Missing Word” Mr. Cohen says an ancient clay cylinder smaller than an American football journeys to the United States with a message of tolerance.  Prof. Krugman, in “Sequester of Fools!”, says here we go again! That terrible fiscal crisis we were warned about two years ago is just around the corner. Is anyone interested?  Here’s Bobo:

On July 26, 2011, Jack Lew, then the White House budget director, went to Harry Reid’s office for a budget strategy session. According to Bob Woodward’s book, “The Price of Politics,” Lew told the Senate majority leader that they had come up with a trigger idea to force a budget deal.

“What’s the idea?” Reid asked.

“Sequestration,” Lew responded.

Reid folded himself over with his head between his knees, as if he were going to throw up. Then he came upright and gaped at the ceiling. “A couple of weeks ago,” he exclaimed, “my staff said to me there is one more possible” enforcement method: sequestration. Reid said he had told his staff at the time, “Get the hell out of here. That’s insane. The White House surely will come up with a plan that will save the day. And you come to me with sequestration?”

Sequestration may have seemed insane back then. But politicians in both parties are secretly discovering that they love sequestration now. It allows them to do the dance moves they enjoy the most.

Democrats get to do the P.C. Shimmy. Traditional presidents go through a normal set of motions: They identify a problem. They come up with a proposal to address the problem. They try to convince the country that their proposal is the best approach.

Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy, the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition for not having as politically popular a concept. Then he returns to Washington and congratulates himself for being the only serious and substantive person in town.

Sequestration allows the White House to do this all over again. The president hasn’t actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible.

He does have a vague and politically convenient concept. (Tax increases on the rich!) He does have a chance to lead the country into a budget showdown with furloughed workers and general mayhem, for which people will primarily blame Republicans. And he does have the chance to achieve the same thing he has achieved so frequently over the past two years, political success and legislative mediocrity.

Republicans also secretly love the sequester. It allows them to do their favorite dance move, the Suicide Stage Dive. It was pioneered by Newt Gingrich in 1995 and has been repeated constantly since.

In this dance, the Republicans mount the stage and roar that they are about to courageously cut spending. In this anthem they carefully emphasize cuts to programs the country sympathizes with, such as special education, while sparing programs that actually created the debt problem, like Medicare.

Then, when they have worked themselves up into a frenzy of self-admiration, they sprint across the stage and leap into what they imagine is the loving arms of their adoring fans. When they are 4 feet off the ground, they realize the voters have left the building in disgust and they land with a thud on the floor.

Sequestration allows the Republicans to do the Suicide Stage Dive to perfection. Voters disdain the G.O.P. because they think Republicans are mindless antigovernment fanatics who can’t distinguish good government programs from bad ones. Sequestration is a fanatically mindless piece of legislation that can’t distinguish good government programs from bad ones. Sequestration carefully spares programs like Medicare and Social Security that actually contribute to the debt problem. Sequestration will cause maximum political disgust for a trivial amount of budget savings.

So, of course, the conservative press is filling up with essays with titles like “Learning to Love Sequestration.” Of course, Republican legislators are screwing up their courage to embrace it. Of course, after the cuts hit and the furor rises, they are going to come crawling back with concessions as they do after every Suicide Stage Dive.

These two dance moves, the P.C. Shimmy and the Suicide Stage Dive, when combined, are beautifully guaranteed to cause maximum damage to the country. What’s America’s biggest problem right now? It is that business people think that government is so dysfunctional that they are afraid to invest and spur growth. So what are the parties going to do? They are going to prove that government is so dysfunctional that you’d be crazy to invest and spur growth.

In a normal country, the politicians would try some new moves. For example, if they agreed to further means test Medicare they could save a lot of money. Democrats would be hitting the rich. Republicans would be reforming entitlements.

But no. Both parties love their current moves. It’s enough to make Harry Reid put his head between his legs and throw up.

Yeah, let’s gut Medicare and Social Security.  Or we could just flat out ask the olds and poors to off themselves…  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

I wanted to test a theory about Iran, so the other evening I made my way to the British Museum, strolled past glass cases full of the sarcophagi and mummies of ancient Egypt, and found myself in a room whose centerpiece is a baked clay cylinder smaller than an American football.

The object, somewhat the worse for wear after two-and-a-half millennia, was dug up in what once was Babylon, now Iraq, in 1879 during a British Museum excavation. Made soon after Cyrus of Persia captured Babylon in 539 B.C., it is covered in the spiky characters of Babylonian cuneiform. Neil MacGregor, the director of the museum, has called it “the first real press release.” More dubiously, and more frequently, it has been called “the first bill of human rights.”

This, of course, is the much debated Cyrus Cylinder, which says that, aided by the chief Babylonian god Marduk, Cyrus (“King of the universe, the great king”) captured Babylon without a fight, repatriated deported people living in Babylonian exile, and, as the museum put it in 2010, “restored shrines dedicated to different gods.”

It has been widely interpreted as the decree of an enlightened ruler determined to allow diverse peoples to rebuild their altars and worship their gods in their own way in their own place with their own sacred images. Cyrus, in this reading, is a father of the multifaith society.

Among the peoples allowed by Cyrus to return — at least in a widely accepted reading recounted in the Bible — were the Jews, who went back to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple. So did their exile end. Weeping beside the waters of Babylon ceased. Cyrus the Persian became a revered figure in the Hebrew Bible, a monarch from what is now Iran who ended the banishment of the Jews.

A small crowd had gathered around the Cylinder. They were there to wish it well. This week it departs for a nine-month stay in the United States, where it has not previously been seen, although presidents, including Thomas Jefferson (who owned two copies of the Cyropaedia, Xenophon’s description of a ruler’s ideal education), have been admirers of Cyrus.

The Cylinder will be displayed on the East Coast at the Smithsonian in Washington and the Metropolitan Museum in New York; and on the West Coast at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and the Getty Villa in Los Angeles. It will also make an appearance in Texas at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

This New World odyssey of the Cyrus Cylinder is timely. It occurs with the United States and Iran still locked in the negative stereotypes the movie “Argo” has done nothing to assuage. As John Limbert, a former U.S. hostage in Iran, has observed, the Islamic Republic sees America as “belligerent, sanctimonious, godless and immoral.” America, in turn, sees Iran as “devious, mendacious, fanatical.” Or at least on the surface they do. Somewhere beneath that lurks mutual fascination.

The Cylinder will not resolve this antagonism. But, compact and mute, it carries a message of tolerance. It is a powerful antidote to belligerent certitudes and shrieking “truths” — an object packed with ambiguity and now freighted with a 2,500-year-old tale of human vanity and frailty.

What is it? A Babylonian artifact written by a Babylonian scribe about a Persian conqueror; prized by Iranians as an emblem of their civilization; valued by many Jews whose Bible gives credit for Cyrus’s acts not to a Babylonian God but to Jehovah; found in modern Iraq by British-sponsored archaeologists who acquired it from the Ottomans; exploited by the shah to underwrite his megalomania; a pre-Islamic text adopted by the Islamic Republic during the Iran-Iraq War as a symbol of past victories; a declaration compared to the U.S. Constitution because of what it says about peoples worshiping freely in a single state; and now an object that within the space of a few years has traveled to Tehran (where more than one million Iranians saw it) and to Washington.

All of this is contained in a cylinder that is about nine inches long and four inches wide. If nothing else, it speaks volumes about connections.

With its talk of a king of the universe and its benign message, the Cylinder is also a reminder of contradictions, of the riddles within riddles that make up Iran, a country where people open a book of Hafez’s poetry at random to decide on a course of action. Like many much-conquered nations, Iran loves artifice. Ambiguity is infinitely preferable to clarity because it more accurately reflects life. Direct speech is abhorred.

National conventions include the ceremonial form of intention-veiling flattery known as “taarof,” and the sacrifice of truth to higher religious imperative known as “tagieh” (The Shiites, like the Jews, have been lonely in the Middle East; lying was often a means to survive.) The third “T” of the Iranian psyche is “tazieh,” effectively a synonym for dramatic lament and epic resistance.

My theory, by the way, was this: It may just be possible to write a column about Iran without using the “N” word.

Last but certainly not least here’s Prof. Krugman:

They’re baaack! Just about two years ago, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the co-chairmen of the late unlamented debt commission, warned us to expect a terrible fiscal crisis within, um, two years unless we adopted their plan. The crisis hasn’t materialized, but they’re nonetheless back with a new version. And, in case you’re interested, after last year’s election — in which American voters made it clear that they want to preserve the social safety net while raising taxes on the rich — the famous fomenters of fiscal fear have moved to the right, calling for even less revenue and even more spending cuts.

But you aren’t interested, are you? Almost nobody is. Messrs. Bowles and Simpson had their moment — the annus horribilis of 2011, when Washington was in thrall to deficit scolds insisting that, in the face of record-high long-term unemployment and record-low borrowing costs, we forget about jobs and concentrate exclusively on a “grand bargain” that would supposedly (not actually) settle budget disputes for ever after.

That moment has now passed; even Mr. Bowles concedes that the search for a grand bargain is on “life support.” Let’s convene a death panel! But the legacy of that year of living foolishly lives on, in the form of the “sequester,” one of the worst policy ideas in our nation’s history.

Here’s how it happened: Republicans engaged in unprecedented hostage-taking, threatening to push America into default by refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless President Obama agreed to a grand bargain on their terms. Mr. Obama, alas, didn’t stand firm; instead, he tried to buy time. And, somehow, both sides decided that the way to buy time was to create a fiscal doomsday machine that would inflict gratuitous damage on the nation through spending cuts unless a grand bargain was reached. Sure enough, there is no bargain, and the doomsday machine will go off at the end of next week.

There’s a silly debate under way about who bears responsibility for the sequester, which almost everyone now agrees was a really bad idea. The truth is that Republicans and Democrats alike signed on to this idea. But that’s water under the bridge. The question we should be asking is who has a better plan for dealing with the aftermath of that shared mistake.

The right policy would be to forget about the whole thing. America doesn’t face a deficit crisis, nor will it face such a crisis anytime soon. Meanwhile, we have a weak economy that is recovering far too slowly from the recession that began in 2007. And, as Janet Yellen, the vice chairwoman of the Federal Reserve, recently emphasized, one main reason for the sluggish recovery is that government spending has been far weaker in this business cycle than in the past. We should be spending more, not less, until we’re close to full employment; the sequester is exactly what the doctor didn’t order.

Unfortunately, neither party is proposing that we just call the whole thing off. But the proposal from Senate Democrats at least moves in the right direction, replacing the most destructive spending cuts — those that fall on the most vulnerable members of our society — with tax increases on the wealthy, and delaying austerity in a way that would protect the economy.

House Republicans, on the other hand, want to take everything that’s bad about the sequester and make it worse: canceling cuts in the defense budget, which actually does contain a lot of waste and fraud, and replacing them with severe cuts in aid to America’s neediest. This would hit the nation with a double whammy, reducing growth while increasing injustice.

As always, many pundits want to portray the deadlock over the sequester as a situation in which both sides are at fault, and in which both should give ground. But there’s really no symmetry here. A middle-of-the-road solution would presumably involve a mix of spending cuts and tax increases; well, that’s what Democrats are proposing, while Republicans are adamant that it should be cuts only. And given that the proposed Republican cuts would be even worse than those set to happen under the sequester, it’s hard to see why Democrats should negotiate at all, as opposed to just letting the sequester happen.

So here we go. The good news is that compared with our last two self-inflicted crises, the sequester is relatively small potatoes. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would have threatened chaos in world financial markets; failure to reach a deal on the so-called fiscal cliff would have led to so much sudden austerity that we might well have plunged back into recession. The sequester, by contrast, will probably cost “only” around 700,000 jobs.

But the looming mess remains a monument to the power of truly bad ideas — ideas that the entire Washington establishment was somehow convinced represented deep wisdom.

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Oh, gawd.  Bobo’s decided to go all “data man” on us.  In “What Data Can’t Do” he opines that data can’t account for everything in our experience, nor serve as the only guide for our thinking, planning and decision-making.  (Of course, he opens his column by saying he recently had dinner with the chief executive of a large bank…)  Mr. Cohen, in “Beltway Foreign Policy,” splains to us how the first-term Obama White House shunned diplomacy for domestic political calculation.  Mr. Nocera LURVES him some big oil.  In “How Not to Fix Climate Change” he states that stopping the Keystone XL oil pipeline is actually counterproductive in more ways than one.  Mr. Bruni, in “The Pope’s Muffled Voice,” says don’t let the media frenzy fool you. American Catholics pay only glancing attention to the Vatican.  Here’s Bobo:

Not long ago, I was at a dinner with the chief executive of a large bank. He had just had to decide whether to pull out of Italy, given the weak economy and the prospect of a future euro crisis.

The C.E.O. had his economists project out a series of downside scenarios and calculate what they would mean for his company. But, in the end, he made his decision on the basis of values.

His bank had been in Italy for decades. He didn’t want Italians to think of the company as a fair-weather friend. He didn’t want people inside the company thinking they would cut and run when times got hard. He decided to stay in Italy and ride out any potential crisis, even with the short-term costs.

He wasn’t oblivious to data in making this decision, but ultimately, he was guided by a different way of thinking. And, of course, he was right to be. Commerce depends on trust. Trust is reciprocity coated by emotion. People and companies that behave well in tough times earn affection and self-respect that is extremely valuable, even if it is hard to capture in data.

I tell this story because it hints at the strengths and limitations of data analysis. The big novelty of this historic moment is that our lives are now mediated through data-collecting computers. In this world, data can be used to make sense of mind-bogglingly complex situations. Data can help compensate for our overconfidence in our own intuitions and can help reduce the extent to which our desires distort our perceptions.

But there are many things big data does poorly. Let’s note a few in rapid-fire fashion:

Data struggles with the social. Your brain is pretty bad at math (quick, what’s the square root of 437), but it’s excellent at social cognition. People are really good at mirroring each other’s emotional states, at detecting uncooperative behavior and at assigning value to things through emotion.

Computer-driven data analysis, on the other hand, excels at measuring the quantity of social interactions but not the quality. Network scientists can map your interactions with the six co-workers you see during 76 percent of your days, but they can’t capture your devotion to the childhood friends you see twice a year, let alone Dante’s love for Beatrice, whom he met twice.

Therefore, when making decisions about social relationships, it’s foolish to swap the amazing machine in your skull for the crude machine on your desk.

Data struggles with context. Human decisions are not discrete events. They are embedded in sequences and contexts. The human brain has evolved to account for this reality. People are really good at telling stories that weave together multiple causes and multiple contexts. Data analysis is pretty bad at narrative and emergent thinking, and it cannot match the explanatory suppleness of even a mediocre novel.

Data creates bigger haystacks. This is a point Nassim Taleb, the author of “Antifragile,” has made. As we acquire more data, we have the ability to find many, many more statistically significant correlations. Most of these correlations are spurious and deceive us when we’re trying to understand a situation. Falsity grows exponentially the more data we collect. The haystack gets bigger, but the needle we are looking for is still buried deep inside.

One of the features of the era of big data is the number of “significant” findings that don’t replicate the expansion, as Nate Silver would say, of noise to signal.

Big data has trouble with big problems. If you are trying to figure out which e-mail produces the most campaign contributions, you can do a randomized control experiment. But let’s say you are trying to stimulate an economy in a recession. You don’t have an alternate society to use as a control group. For example, we’ve had huge debates over the best economic stimulus, with mountains of data, and as far as I know not a single major player in this debate has been persuaded by data to switch sides.

Data favors memes over masterpieces. Data analysis can detect when large numbers of people take an instant liking to some cultural product. But many important (and profitable) products are hated initially because they are unfamiliar.

Data obscures values. I recently saw an academic book with the excellent title, “ ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron.” One of the points was that data is never raw; it’s always structured according to somebody’s predispositions and values. The end result looks disinterested, but, in reality, there are value choices all the way through, from construction to interpretation.

This is not to argue that big data isn’t a great tool. It’s just that, like any tool, it’s good at some things and not at others. As the Yale professor Edward Tufte has said, “The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.”

Now here’s Mr. Cohen’s screed:

“It is not going too far to say that American foreign policy has become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”

This stern verdict comes from Vali Nasr, who spent two years working for the Obama administration before becoming dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. In a book called “The Dispensable Nation,” to be published in April, Nasr delivers a devastating portrait of a first-term foreign policy that shunned the tough choices of real diplomacy, often descended into pettiness, and was controlled “by a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisers.”

Nasr, one of the most respected American authorities on the Middle East, served as senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death in December 2010. From that vantage point, and later as a close observer, Nasr was led to the reluctant conclusion that the principal aim of Obama’s policies “is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion.”

In this sense the first-term Obama foreign policy was successful: He was re-elected. Americans wanted extrication from the big wars and a smaller global footprint: Obama, with some back and forth, delivered. But the price was high and opportunities lost.

“The Dispensable Nation” constitutes important reading as John Kerry moves into his new job as secretary of state. It nails the drift away from the art of diplomacy — with its painful give-and-take — toward a U.S. foreign policy driven by the Pentagon, intelligence agencies and short-term political calculus. It holds the president to account for his zigzags from Kabul to Jerusalem.

It demonstrates the emasculation of the State Department: Vasr quotes Admiral Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling him of Hillary Clinton that, “It is incredible how little support she got from the White House. They want to control everything.” And it paints a persuasive picture of an American decline driven not so much by the inevitable rise of other powers as by “inconsistency” that has “cast doubt on our leadership.”

Nowhere was this inconsistency more evident than in Afghanistan. Obama doubled-down by committing tens of thousands more troops to show he was no wimp, only to set a date for a drawdown to show he was no warmonger. Marines died; few cared.

He appointed Holbrooke as his point man only to ensure that he “never received the authority to do diplomacy.” Obama’s message to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan was: “Ignore my special representative.” The White House campaign against Holbrooke was “a theater of the absurd,” Nasr writes. “Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s videoconferences with Karzai and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”

The White House seemed “more interested in bringing Holbrooke down than getting the policy right.” The pettiness was striking: “The White House kept a dossier on Holbrooke’s misdeeds and Clinton kept a folder on churlish attempts by the White House’s AfPak office to undermine Holbrooke.”

Diplomacy died. Serious negotiation with the Taliban and involving Iran in talks on Afghanistan’s future — bold steps that carried a domestic political price — were shunned. The use of trade as a bridge got scant attention. Nasr concludes on Afghanistan: “We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm — a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow.”

In Pakistan, too nuclear to ignore, the ultimate “frenemy,” Nasr observed policy veering between frustrated confrontation and half-hearted attempts to change the relationship through engagement. “The crucial reality was that the Taliban helped Pakistan face down India in the contest over Afghanistan,” Nasr writes. America was never able to change that equation. Aid poured in to secure those nukes and win hearts and minds: Drones drained away any gratitude. A proposed “strategic dialogue” went nowhere. “Pakistan is a failure of American policy, a failure of the sort that comes from the president handing foreign policy over to the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies.”

In Iran, Nasr demonstrates Obama’s deep ambivalence about any deal on the nuclear program. “Pressure,” he writes, “has become an end in itself.” The dual track of ever tougher sanctions combined with diplomatic outreach was “not even dual. It relied on one track, and that was pressure.” The reality was that, “Engagement was a cover for a coercive campaign of sabotage, economic pressure and cyberwarfare.”

Opportunities to begin real step-by-step diplomacy involving Iran giving up its low-enriched uranium in exchange for progressive sanctions relief were lost. What was Tehran to think when “the sum total of three major rounds of diplomatic negotiation was that America would give some bits and bobs of old aircraft in exchange for Iran’s nuclear program”?

On Israel-Palestine, as with Iran, Obama began with some fresh ideas only to retreat. He tried to stop Israeli settlement expansion. Then he gave up when the domestic price looked too high. The result has been drift.

“The Dispensable Nation” is a brave book. Its core message is: Diplomacy is tough and carries a price, but the price is higher when it is abandoned.

Yeah.  And C+ Augustus was SUCH a skilled diplomat…  Now, heaven help us, is Mr. Nocera’s cri du coeur for tar sands:

After much back and forth, James E. Hansen and I had agreed on a date to meet. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the scientist most closely associated with climate change activists like Bill McKibben, who has led the charge against the Keystone XL pipeline, and Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club. In Hansen’s view, the country needs to start moving away from fossil fuels now, before the damage becomes irreversible.

As regular readers know, I believe the Obama administration should approve the Keystone pipeline, which would transport oil mined and processed from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. Like it or not, fossil fuels are going to remain the world’s dominant energy source for the foreseeable future, and we are far better off getting our oil from Canada than, say, Venezuela. And the climate change effects of tar sands oil are, all in all, pretty small. I had the strong sense that Hansen hoped that once we met, I would begin to see the error of my ways.

The date we set was on Thursday, Feb. 14. The only glitch, he said, is that on the 13th, he was participating in an anti-Keystone demonstration in front of the White House led by his friend McKibben. The plan was they’d all try to get arrested. “It is conceivable that we will be spending the night of the 13th in the clink, in which case it is not clear when I will arrive on the 14th,” Hansen wrote in an e-mail. (He added, “Yes, I know, the merits of this continuing activity may be dubious, but Bill is working his butt off so hard that I can’t refuse.”) I postponed the meeting.

Suddenly, it appears, the Keystone XL pipeline, which President Obama temporarily blocked during his re-election campaign, is back in the news. The State of Nebraska, which had previously opposed the pipeline, recently dropped its opposition after TransCanada, the company hoping to build it, rerouted portions of it to avoid sensitive lands and aquifers. Canada, still miffed by Obama’s rejection of the pipeline last year, is threatening to sell the oil to China if the United States says no again.

In fact, this should be a no-brainer for the president, for all the reasons I stated earlier, and one more: the strategy of activists like McKibben, Brune and Hansen, who have made the Keystone pipeline their line in the sand, is utterly boneheaded.

Brune and McKibben have been very clear about what they hope to accomplish. Oil companies have invested upward of $100 billion to extract the unconventional oil in the sands. A pipeline is the only way to export it. The Keystone pipeline is Canada’s Plan A. Plan B is a pipeline to British Columbia, which would get the oil to China. If the president blocks Keystone, and the First Nation tribes continue their staunch opposition to the western pipeline, then Canada will have the second largest oil reserves in the world — and no place to sell it. The assumption of the activists is that by choking off the supply of new oil sources like the tar sands, the U.S. — and maybe the world — will be forced to transition more quickly to green energy.

Can you see how backward this logic is? As Adam Brandt, an energy expert at Stanford University, pointed out to me recently, so long as the demand is there, energy producers are going to search for new supplies of fossil fuel — many of them using unconventional means like tar sands extraction. “With growing global demand, the economic pressure to develop unconventional resources is enormous and not going away,” he said. “Can environmental groups expect to win a series of fights for decades to come, when the economic forces are aligned very strongly against them in each round?” The answer is obvious: no. The emphasis should be on demand, not supply. If the U.S. stopped consuming so much of the world’s oil, the economic need for the tar sands would evaporate.

On Monday, I finally spoke to Hansen. His knowledge and sincerity are easy to admire, even if his tactics are not. He told me he would like to see oil companies pay a fee, which would rise annually, based on carbon emissions. He said that such a tax could reduce emissions by 30 percent within 10 years. Well, maybe. But it would also likely make the expensive tar sands oil more viable. If you really want to eliminate expensive new fossil fuel sources, the best way is to lower the price of oil, which would render them uneconomical. But, of course, that wouldn’t exactly lower demand either.

In any case, McKibben, Hansen and others were arrested on Wednesday, as planned. They spent a few hours in jail and paid $100 fines. And that was it.

Until the next time, of course.

And now here’s Mr. Bruni:

There were reports over the weekend that cardinals might tweak the rules and begin the conclave to choose Pope Benedict XVI’s successor sooner than March 15, which had been the earliest date mentioned. That would be a blessing. Already in the American news media it’s all pope all the time, a tsunami of papal coverage, and until a new pope is named, the tide won’t quit. You’d be forgiven for concluding that he’ll actually have significant sway over Catholics in this country.

He won’t, not over the majority of them, not in any immediate sense. And it’s worth pausing, amid this hoopla, to remember that. In large parts of the Roman Catholic world, certainly in North America and Western Europe, most Catholics don’t feel any particular debt or duty to the self-appointed caretakers of their church. They don’t feel bound by the pope’s interpretation of doctrine or moral commands. And many regard him and other Vatican officials as totems, a royal family of dubious relevance, partly because these officials have often shown greater concern for the church’s reputation than for the needs, and wounds, of the people in the pews.

The blanket coverage of matters papal is deceptive, a function to some degree of habit and convenience. We in the media love the clear-cut drama of transitions. They’re easy to grasp and frame. And in the case of the Vatican, they come with majestic visual backdrops, colorfully costumed characters: a pageant extraordinaire. It looks splendid on the front page and even better on the nightly news.

We traffic in celebrities, and the pope qualifies as one. We also relish the narrative of any winner-take-all contest in which there are multiple hopefuls, murky dynamics and a familiar brand of suspense. This informs the way we approach presidential elections, focusing on the horse race. It explains all the cook-offs, the sing-offs, the analyses of the face-off between “Argo” and “Lincoln” for Best Picture. The papal selection process is in one sense “Top Chef” without the cooking. It’s the ecclesiastical Oscars. It fits a mold, regardless of import.

There’s import, certainly. The Roman Catholic Church is a worldwide organization with enormous financial resources; with a network of charities and agencies that provide crucial help to the downtrodden; and with parishes in which the prayerful nurture their relationship with God. And the pope is its C.E.O., ultimately responsible for where the money flows and for the placement and policing of its staff. The policing part matters, as the child sexual abuse crisis made agonizingly clear.

But the trend over the last half century has been for the prayerful in this country to feel less invested in that organization, less attached to its traditions. Polls chart a decline in churchgoing among American Catholics and a robust disobedience.

A 2011 survey published in the National Catholic Reporter showed that while 73 percent of American Catholics described their belief in Jesus’ resurrection as “very important” to them, only 30 percent described the teaching authority of the Vatican that way, and only 21 percent characterized an all-male, celibate priesthood in those terms. More than 60 percent supported the ordination of women as priests.

When it comes to divorce, premarital sex, abortion and more, Catholics routinely break with the church’s edicts. Pew polling last year found that more than half of American Catholics support same-sex marriage, which church leaders vociferously oppose. This particular renunciation of church teaching travels beyond the United States. Spain, Portugal and Argentina have legalized same-sex marriage; all have populations that are more than 75 percent Catholic, at least nominally.

A Gallup poll last year showed that 82 percent of American Catholics had no qualms about birth control. Church leaders do, and during the presidential campaign they railed against President Obama’s health care reform for mandating insurance coverage of contraception. He won the Catholic vote anyway.

Andrew Cuomo certainly doesn’t sweat the church’s ire the way his father did. Three decades ago Mario Cuomo felt the need for a major address at the University of Notre Dame to explain the discrepancy between his support for abortion rights and the church’s antiabortion position. Without any such handwringing, his son is plotting to shore up abortion rights in New York. Andrew Cuomo also lobbied for, and signed, New York’s gay marriage law. Divorced, he lives outside of wedlock with Sandra Lee. There’s been no Notre Dame soul-baring about any of this.

Does the pope fully appreciate this drift? Every Sunday, he looks from his window onto St. Peter’s Square and sees adoring, rapt masses. Everywhere he goes, traffic parts and cameras follow him. But here in America, the Catholics watching closely are fewer and fewer. They’re Christian. They’re caring. They’re moral. But they have minds and wills of their own, and no conclave will change that.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

In “When Families Fail” Bobo says President Obama’s new prekindergarten initiative focuses on reform, as it should.  Mr. Cohen, in “The Success That Failed,” says the story of Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, is a case study in wasted opportunity.  Prof. Krugman looks at “Rubio and the Zombies” and says the Republican response to the State of the Union sure was revealing.  Here’s Bobo:

Today millions of American children grow up in homes where they don’t learn the skills they need to succeed in life. Their vocabularies are tiny. They can’t regulate their emotions. When they get to kindergarten they’ve never been read a book, so they don’t know the difference between the front cover and the back cover.

But, starting a few decades ago, we learned that preschool intervention programs could help. The efforts were small and expensive, but early childhood programs like the Perry and Abecedarian projects made big differences in kids’ lives. The success of these programs set off a lot of rhapsodic writing, including by me, about the importance of early childhood education. If government could step in and provide quality preschool, then we could reduce poverty and increase social mobility.

But this problem, like most social problems, is hard. The big federal early childhood program, Head Start, has been chugging along since 1965, and the outcomes are dismal. Russ Whitehurst of the Brookings Institution summarizes the findings of the most rigorous research: “There is no measurable advantage to children in elementary school of having participated in Head Start. Further, children attending Head Start remain far behind academically once they are in elementary school. Head Start does not improve the school readiness of children from low-income families.”

Fortunately, that is not the end of the story. Over the past several years, there’s been a flurry of activity, as states and private groups put together better early childhood programs. In these programs, the teachers are better trained. There are more rigorous performance standards. The curriculum is better matched to the one the children will find when they enter kindergarten.

These state programs, in places like Oklahoma, Georgia and New Jersey, have not been studied as rigorously as Head Start. There are huge quality differences between different facilities in the same state or the same town. The best experts avoid sweeping conclusions. Nonetheless, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that these state programs can make at least an incremental difference in preparing children for school and in getting parents to be more engaged in their kids’ education.

These programs do not perform miracles, but incremental improvements add up year by year and produce significantly better lives.

Enter President Obama. This week he announced the most ambitious early childhood education expansion in decades. Early Thursday morning, early education advocates were sending each other ecstatic e-mails. They were stunned by the scope of what Obama is proposing.

But, on this subject, it’s best to be hardheaded. So I spent Wednesday and Thursday talking with experts and administration officials, trying to be skeptical. Does the president’s plan merely expand the failing federal effort or does it focus on quality and reform? Is the president trying to organize a bloated centralized program or is he trying to be a catalyst for local experimentation?

So far the news is very good. Obama is trying to significantly increase the number of kids with access to early education. The White House will come up with a dedicated revenue stream that will fund early education projects without adding to the deficit. These federal dollars will be used to match state spending, giving states, many of whom want to move aggressively, further incentive to expand and create programs.

But Washington’s main role will be to measure outcomes, not determine the way states design their operations. Washington will insist that states establish good assessment tools. They will insist that pre-K efforts align with the K-12 system. But beyond that, states will have a lot of latitude.

Should early education centers be integrated with K-12 school buildings or not? Should the early childhood teachers be unionized or certified? Obama officials say they want to leave those sorts of questions up to state experimentation. “I’m just about building quality,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me. The goal is to make the federal oversight as simple as possible.

That’s crucial. There’s still a lot we don’t know about how to educate children that young. The essential thing is to build systems that can measure progress, learn and adapt to local circumstances. Over time, many children will migrate from Head Start into state programs.

This is rude to say, but here’s what this is about: Millions of parents don’t have the means, the skill or, in some cases, the interest in building their children’s future. Early childhood education is about building structures so both parents and children learn practical life skills. It’s about getting kids from disorganized homes into rooms with kids from organized homes so good habits will rub off. It’s about instilling achievement values where they are absent.

President Obama has taken on a big challenge in a realistic and ambitious way. If Republicans really believe in opportunity and local control, they will get on board.

But of course they won’t, Bobo.  Haven’t you noticed that the president’s a n[CLANG]?  Now here’s Mr. Cohen:

The most progressive and innovative Palestinian thinker on a Middle East peace settlement has been steadily isolated over the past several years. Undercut by Israel, undermined by his own people’s factionalism, unable to meet even once with President Obama, this dynamic Palestinian leader is now close to the end of his rope.

The story of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the enfeebled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, is a case study in wasted opportunity. Obama, who chose not to see Fayyad during his first term, may do so during his visit to the region next month. What the president will hear is how bad things happen when America looks away.

Texas-educated, more interested in the future than a tormented past, a former International Monetary Fund official determined to fight corruption and establish security, a doer not a dreamer, Fayyad was a new kind of Palestinian leader: a nonviolent pragmatist with a genuine readiness for territorial compromise.

To Israel he was a conundrum: a potential partner but also the politician from hell. For if Fayyadism was the new reasonable face of Palestine, why could putative Palestine not come into being?

In Ramallah last month I sat down with Fayyad for a couple of hours. I had negotiated the time-warp traverse from Israel to the West Bank, through the barrier into the mess Israelis would rather not think about, past the striking teachers who had not been paid because the Palestinian Authority is starved for cash, and found the prime minister, dapper as ever, in a dark mood. His program of preparation for statehood, which won a World Bank stamp of approval before its completion in August 2011, was a success that failed: It led nowhere.

“Everything evolved negatively,” Fayyad told me. “In deeds, Israel never got behind me; in fact it was quite hostile. The occupation regime is more entrenched, with no sign it is beginning to relinquish its grip on our life.

“There are more settlements, more settler violence, more intrusiveness into all aspects of Palestinian life, and there are overlooked actions that are wholly unacceptable, like systematically making the Jordan Valley, about a quarter of our land mass, inhospitable.

“I was in a tent with people there recently — most Palestinian life in the valley is nomadic — and they were meters away from a water main. Not only did they not have access to running water, even water tanks were subject to periodic confiscation by the Israeli Army.”

As we spoke, three unarmed Palestinians had been killed in the West Bank in disputed circumstances by the Israeli Defense Forces since the start of the year — two young men aged 15 and 16, and a 22-year-old woman walking on a college campus south of Bethlehem. “The treatment of nonviolent protest has been very violent,” Fayyad noted.

Not one Israeli was killed in the West Bank in 2012. Under Fayyad, the U.S.-backed training of Palestinian security forces, with cooperation from Israel, has brought guns into state control — a prerequisite for statehood. Israel in general enjoys a calm that has allowed jobs and better pay to become Israelis’ main preoccupation and the Palestinians a peripheral issue. The West Bank economy has grown in difficult circumstances.

Yet despite speaking for the first time in 2009 of two states for two peoples, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has seemed intent on sending this message to Fayyad: Good behavior brings further punishment.

“People say Netanyahu remains in power for the sake of power,” Shlomo Avineri, a prominent Israeli political scientist, told me. “I don’t agree. He has a core agenda. He is not going to give up one inch of Eretz Israel. He stays in power for that. The speech about two states was a tactic that gained three years of peace and quiet. He said it and did nothing about it.” Eretz Israel is a biblical term widely used to refer to the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, encompassing all of the West Bank.

Or, as a disillusioned member of the outgoing Netanyahu government put it to me: “The world does not believe we are serious about two states because of the settlement policy. If we are building all over the place, where is the Palestinian state?”

Fayyad sees a de facto attempt to undermine the Palestinian Authority. “I still believe the Authority is a key building block in the effort to resolve the conflict,” he said. “Then somebody needs to explain to me how something viewed as central to building peace is left on the ropes for three years, reeling under bankruptcy, and every action is taken to erode its political viability.

“We have sustained a doctrinal defeat. We have not delivered. I represent the address for failure. Our people question whether the P.A. can deliver. Meanwhile, Hamas gains recognition and is strengthened. This is the result of nothingness. It is not just that we have been having a bad day.”

Part of that “nothingness” emanated from Obama’s Washington. “After the failed attempt to stop Israeli settlement expansion, the administration gave up,” Fayyad told me. “After the first year in office, U.S. diplomacy shifted to maintenance — getting a process going rather than looking at the issues.”

So there has been negative drift, largely peaceful but increasingly uneasy. “The risk this situation poses is of sliding back to a cycle of violence,” Fayyad said. “When you keep getting banged on the head, you know one day it will be one bang on the head too many.”

He identified some of the issues: settlement expansion; Israeli military incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas; the failure to extend the Palestinian security presence in the West Bank; the “complex and capricious” process of gaining access to the more than 60 percent of the West Bank known as “Area C” and under direct Israeli military control; the Israeli use of tax revenues as a spigot that can be turned on and off to hurt the Palestinian Authority; the lack of access to 3G technology and Israeli control of frequencies; the difficulty of exporting to Israel. All of these factors together, Fayyad said, had made governance “an exercise in impossibility.”

Then, of course, there is the internal Palestinian question, now referred to as the “reconciliation” issue. The Palestinian national movement is crippled by its split. Hamas rules in Gaza. President Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah rule in the West Bank.

The Palestinians have still not decided whether the war is between two nationalisms with rival claims to the same land — one that could in theory be settled by territorial compromise, as Fayyad passionately believes — or whether it is an anti-colonial war, comparable to the Algerian conflict, whose end result must be the expulsion of the Jews and the destruction of the state of Israel, as Hamas contends.

The absolutist approach — not compromise at the 1967 lines with agreed land swaps but rejection of the 1947 U.N. resolution to create the modern state of Israel — has led to Palestinian defeat and humiliation. All the evidence is that it would continue to do so.

So far reconciliation talks have produced only accords that have proved meaningless. “This rivalry and instability are very destructive,” Fayyad said. “The most basic requirement for this plane to take off is, first, security. If we all commit to nonviolence, this will be basic to our interests. We need to formalize this: The path of nonviolence to freedom. If we can unify under that banner, it would be an adequate basis. After all, much of the current coalition in Israel does not subscribe to a two-state solution.” Hamas, the prime minister noted, is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, with which the United States now “deals in an open way.”

The other essential ingredient for the Palestinian movement is elections this year, Fayyad said. “Elections are critical. The thing I lament most is the absence of a functioning legislature. We need to rebuild our political system democratically with elections in Gaza and the West Bank. Democracy cannot be holding an election once. I think President Abbas should issue a decree calling for elections and if Hamas says no, so be it.”

The prime minister continued: “I have no sense of entitlement. I have done what I could; I am completely satisfied over that and at peace with myself. I don’t want to be a source of pain to anyone. It is just not acceptable to continue doing this while preaching democracy. A functioning legislature can give you a pink slip. The fact that there is not one does not mean there should not be a self-imposed restraint.”

Fayyad has reached the limit. Fayyadism is another matter. “People will go back to this story,” he mused. “It was about a new way of thinking. And ideas have lasting power.”

And now we have Prof. Krugman:

The State of the Union address was not, I’m sorry to say, very interesting. True, the president offered many good ideas. But we already know that almost none of those ideas will make it past a hostile House of Representatives.

On the other hand, the G.O.P. reply, delivered by Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, was both interesting and revelatory. And I mean that in the worst way. For Mr. Rubio is a rising star, to such an extent that Time magazine put him on its cover, calling him “The Republican Savior.” What we learned Tuesday, however, was that zombie economic ideas have eaten his brain.

In case you’re wondering, a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves, but there are many more. And, as I said, when it comes to economics it appears that Mr. Rubio’s mind is zombie-infested.

Start with the big question: How did we get into the mess we’re in?

The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we’re still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse.

Instead of learning from this experience, however, many on the right have chosen to rewrite history. Back then, they thought things were great, and their only complaint was that the government was getting in the way of even more mortgage lending; now they claim that government policies, somehow dictated by liberals even though the G.O.P. controlled both Congress and the White House, were promoting excessive borrowing and causing all the problems.

Every piece of this revisionist history has been refuted in detail. No, the government didn’t force banks to lend to Those People; no, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac didn’t cause the housing bubble (they were doing relatively little lending during the peak bubble years); no, government-sponsored lenders weren’t responsible for the surge in risky mortgages (private mortgage issuers accounted for the vast majority of the riskiest loans).

But the zombie keeps shambling on — and here’s Mr. Rubio Tuesday night: “This idea — that our problems were caused by a government that was too small  — it’s just not true. In fact, a major cause of our recent downturn was a housing crisis created by reckless government policies.” Yep, it’s the full zombie.

What about responding to the crisis? Four years ago, right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy.

Now, this argument was obviously fallacious from the beginning. As people like me tried to point out, the whole reason our economy was depressed was that businesses weren’t willing to invest as much as consumers were trying to save. So government borrowing would not, in fact, drive up interest rates — and trying to balance the budget would simply deepen the depression.

Sure enough, interest rates, far from soaring, are at historic lows — and countries that slashed spending have also seen sharp job losses. You rarely get this clear a test of competing economic ideas, and the right’s ideas failed.

But the zombie still shambles on. And here’s Mr. Rubio: “Every dollar our government borrows is money that isn’t being invested to create jobs. And the uncertainty created by the debt is one reason why many businesses aren’t hiring.” Zombies 2, Reality 0.

In fairness to Mr. Rubio, what he’s saying isn’t any different from what everyone else in his party is saying. But that, of course, is what’s so scary.

For here we are, more than five years into the worst economic slump since the Great Depression, and one of our two great political parties has seen its economic doctrine crash and burn twice: first in the run-up to crisis, then again in the aftermath. Yet that party has learned nothing; it apparently believes that all will be well if it just keeps repeating the old slogans, but louder.

It’s a disturbing picture, and one that bodes ill for our nation’s future.

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

In “Carpe Diem Nation” Bobo says here’s hoping President Obama will frame his State of the Union address in terms of the present vs. the future.  Mr. Cohen has decided to explain to us all “Why ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ Works.”  He says the charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of artistic truth.  In “The ‘Die Hard’ Quandary” Mr. Nocera has a question:  Can kids really watch gun violence all hours of the day and remain unaffected?  Mr. Bruni has stolen another one of MoDo’s columns.  In “A Spritz of Power” he giggles that if our lawmakers are going to preen, they might as well do it fragrantly.  Here’s Bobo:

Europeans who settled America gave their lives a slingshot shape. They pulled back so they could shoot forward. They volunteered to live in harsh conditions today so their descendants could live well for centuries. The pioneers who traveled West did the same thing. So has each generation of immigrants — sacrificing the present for the sake of the future.

This slingshot manner of life led to one of those true national clichés: that America is the nation of futurity, that Americans organize their lives around romantic visions of what is to be.

In 1775, Sam Adams confidently predicted that the scraggly little colonies would one day be the world’s most powerful nation. In 1800, Noah Webster projected that the U.S. would someday have 300 million citizens, and that a country that big should have its own dictionary.

In his novel, “Giants in the Earth,” Ole Rolvaag has a pioneering farmer give a visitor a tour of his land. The farmer describes his beautiful home and his large buildings. The visitor confesses that he can’t see them. That’s because they haven’t been built yet, the farmer acknowledges, but they already exist as reality in his mind.

This future-oriented mentality had practical effects. For decades, government invested heavily in long-range projects like railroads and canals.

Today, Americans have inverted this way of thinking. Instead of sacrificing the present for the sake of the future, Americans now sacrifice the future for the sake of the present.

Federal spending is the most obvious example. The federal government is a machine that takes money from future earners and spends it on health care for retirees. Entitlement spending hurts the young in two ways. It squeezes government investment programs that boost future growth. Second, the young will have to pay the money back. To cover current obligations, according to the International Monetary Fund, young people will have to pay 35 percent more taxes and receive 35 percent fewer benefits.

But government is not the only place you can see signs of this present-ism. Business has slipped into this pattern, too. C.E.O.’s serve short stints and their main incentive is to make quarterly numbers, not to build for the long term.

Banks can lend money in two ways. They can lend to fund investments or they can lend to fund real estate purchases and other consumption. In 1982, banks were lending out 80 cents for investments for every $1 they were lending for consumption. By 2011, they lent only 30 cents to fund investments for every $1 of consumption.

As Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell note in their book “Innovation Economics,” American firms are also lagging in their commitment to research and development. Between 1999 and 2006, for example, German firms increased research-and-development spending by 11 percent, Finnish firms by 28 percent and South Korean firms by 58 percent. During that same period, U.S. spending increased by a paltry 3 percent.

Increasingly, companies have to spend their money on retirees, not future growth. Last week, for example, Ford announced that it was spending $5 billion to shore up its pension program. That’s an amount nearly equal to Ford’s investments in factories, equipment and innovation.

Why have Americans lost their devotion to the future? Part of the answer must be cultural. The Great Depression and World War II forced Americans to live with 16 straight years of scarcity. In the years after the war, people decided they’d had enough. There was what one historian called a “renunciation of renunciation.” We’ve now had a few generations raised with this consumption mind-set. There’s less of a sense that life is a partnership among the dead, the living and the unborn, with obligations to those to come.

The political debate, though, is largely oblivious to this mental shift. Republicans and Democrats are so busy arguing about the merits of government versus business that they are blind to the problem that afflicts them both.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday night, President Obama is apparently planning to give us yet another salvo in that left-right war, as he did in his second Inaugural Address. One of his aides, in a fit of hubris, told Politico that the president will be offering Republicans a golden bridge to ease their retreat.

But it would be great if Obama gave an imaginative speech that reframed things as present versus future.

If the president were to propose an agenda for the future, he’d double spending on the National Institutes of Health. He’d approve the Keystone XL pipeline. He’d cut corporate tax rates while adding a progressive consumption tax. He’d take money from Social Security and build Harlem Children’s Zone-type projects across the nation. He’d means test Medicare and use the money to revive state universities and pay down debt.

Would Americans buy that agenda? Maybe. Americans are neglecting the future, but I bet they’re still in love with it.

Thanks for asking me to have to go live in a refrigerator carton under the bridge and eat cat food, Bobo.  While I’m eating cat food why don’t you dine on a large plate of over-salted weasel dicks?  Asshole.  Now here’s Mr. Cohen’s ode to torture:

“Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s movie about the epic decade-long search for Osama bin Laden, is a courageous work that is disturbing in the way that art should be. It surfaces suppressed feelings. It ushers the viewer into the “dark side” — that murky world of renditions, secret facilities and torture birthed when the United States shelved its principles and declared war on a noun, terrorism.

George W. Bush has been rightly mocked for once commenting on Bin Laden that, “I just don’t spend that much time on him.” But the truth is not that many people did. Bin Laden had vanished, perhaps he was already dead. Anyway he was best not dwelled upon. Years went by, 9/11 receded. Bigelow lasers in on those for whom finding the mastermind behind the killing of almost 3,000 Americans was an undying obsession.

Or rather she and her scriptwriter Mark Boal, a former journalist, focus on a single C.I.A. analyst, “Maya,” played by Jessica Chastain. (The film has much to say about female single-mindedness and good sense as contrasted with male huffiness and volatility.) Maya is based on a real-life agent. But she is clearly a fictionalized creation who serves an essential narrative purpose — the conflation in one attractive, patriotic woman of all the practical, police-work determination to find Bin Laden from which her country, the United States, had found myriad distractions at the mall.

The movie woven around Maya is a feature, not a documentary. It says that it is “based on firsthand accounts of actual events.” It does not say that it is a factual, unembroidered recounting of those events. Boal did a lot of reporting at the C.I.A. and at the White House. Good scriptwriters, like good novelists, research their subjects. But as one good novelist, Amos Oz, has observed, “Facts at times become the dire enemies of truth.”

Or, put another way, while reality is the raw material journalism attempts to render with accuracy and fairness, it is the raw material that art must transform. Picasso’s “Guernica” is not a factual account of what happened in a Basque village in northern Spain on April 26, 1937. It does say something eternal and essential about war.

Now I am not suggesting that “Zero Dark Thirty” is art on the level of Guernica. But it is an important movie and much of the heated debate around it is misplaced. The chief accusation is that it is inaccurate in that it exaggerates the part played by torture in securing information that led to the killing of Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011.

Three senators — Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin and John McCain — called the movie “grossly inaccurate.” Michael Morell, the acting C.I.A. director, opined: “Whether enhanced interrogation techniques were the only timely and effective way to obtain information from those detainees, as the film suggests, is a matter of debate that cannot and never will be definitively resolved.”

Watching torture — the C.I.A. should abandon its ghastly euphemism — is profoundly unsettling. But Bigelow and Boal have done an important service in setting before a wide U.S. and global audience images of a traumatized America’s dark side. This happened: the waterboarding, the sleep deprivation, the sexual humiliation, the cruelty. Not exactly as depicted, but yes it did, in places that, as if in a totalitarian world, existed on no map.

And I think the movie’s portrayal of torture is truthful: It helped at times but at others did not. It provided clues that might have been gleaned by other means. And the ultimate success in finding Bin Laden occurred after President Obama had banned the methods “Zero Dark Thirty” portrays so powerfully.

In the end the case for the unacceptability of torture is not best made by sweeping assertions that it is useless. The nuance of this movie builds a much stronger case that, whatever torture’s marginal usefulness, it is morally indefensible.

The charge of inaccuracy is a poor thing measured against the potency of truth. “Zero Dark Thirty” is a truthful artistic creation, one reason it has provoked debate. Boal told The New York Times he did not want “to play fast and loose with history” — a statement held against him by several of the movie’s critics, most eloquently Steve Coll in The New York Review of Books. My sense, however, is that Boal has honored those words.

There were few more minute observers of fact than George Orwell. As Timothy Garton Ash has written, if Orwell had a God it was Kipling’s “God of Things as They are.” Yet, as Garton Ash says of Orwell: “One of his most powerful early essays describes witnessing a hanging in Burma. But he later told three separate people that this was ‘only a story.’ So did he ever witness a hanging? He annotates a copy of “Down and Out in Paris and London” for a girlfriend: this really happened, this happened almost like this, but “this incident is invented.”’

Truth is art’s highest calling. For it the facts must sometimes be adjusted. “Zero Dark Thirty” meets the demands of truth.

I’ll bet he got a chubby watching “24″ too.  Next up we have Mr. Nocera:

Later this week, the fifth installment of the “Die Hard” movies is scheduled to open in theaters across the country. “A Good Day to Die Hard” stars, once again, Bruce Willis as John McClane, a too-stubborn-for-his-own-good cop who has to stop a highly trained army of bad guys out to wreak destruction and death. It will undoubtedly be a giant hit for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the owner of the “Die Hard” franchise.

In promoting the new movie, both the Regal and AMC movie chains are holding “Die Hard” marathons on Wednesday. Starting at noon, an AMC theatergoer can spend 12 straight hours watching all five “Die Hard” movies.

That’s a lot of “Die Hard.” Among the guns used — and used, and used, and used — in just the first “Die Hard” are a Steyr AUG assault rifle, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun, and a Walther PPK pistol with silencer. McClane himself relies on a Beretta 92 semiautomatic pistol in the first three movies, and a Sig Sauer P220 in the more recent films. (He also favors the bald look in the last two movies.)

Of course, it is cartoonish violence, in the sense that rarely — in all the innumerable killings — is blood seen pouring out of the victims, or does anyone cry out in anguish and pain. Incredibly, the Motion Picture Association of America judges foul language to be more problematic for children than this kind of bloodless violence, which perhaps explains why the 2007 installment, “Live Free or Die Hard,” was rated PG-13: the normally foul-mouthed McClane barely swears in it. (The new one has reclaimed its traditional R.)

What got me thinking about “Die Hard” — and guns in the movies more generally — is, of course, the furious gun debate since the killings in Newtown, Conn. On one side are those who believe we can cut down on gun violence by, among other things, banning the assault weapons that always seem to be used in mass shootings.

On the other side are the Second Amendment absolutists, who argue that the real problem is the culture, soaked in so much violent imagery that it is virtually impossible to avoid. They add that a ban on assault weapons would be the beginning of a slippery slope that would ultimately lead to a ban on weapons of every kind.

It’s not that I don’t want to see a ban on assault weapons. I sincerely do. But after poking around the world of gun-crazed movies and other media, I have to say, the Second Amendment absolutists have a point. For instance, when you ask a spokesman for the M.P.A.A. about the real-world effect of gun imagery in the movies, he actually pushes back by claiming that “there is a predominance of findings that show there is no consistent or convincing evidence that exposure causes people to be more violent.”

This is, quite simply, untrue. “There is tons of research on this,” says Joanne Cantor, professor emerita of communications at the University of Wisconsin, and an expert on the effect of violent movies and video games. “Watching violence makes kids feel they can use violence to solve a problem. It brings increased feelings of hostility. It increases desensitization.” Every parent understands this instinctively, of course, but those instincts are backed by decades of solid research.

There is a second reason many people — indeed, many of the same people who would like to ban assault weapons — shrink from demanding changes in the culture’s tolerance for violent images. To do anything about it legislatively would likely violate the First Amendment. Just as an assault weapon ban is the slippery slope for Second Amendment advocates, efforts to restrict violent images — or pornography, for that matter — is the slippery slope for First Amendment absolutists.

Craig Anderson, a psychologist at Iowa State University, told me that children who watch even something as seemingly benign as Woody Woodpecker cartoons — in which Woody often pecks on someone’s head — can become temporarily more aggressive. “If you are going to start to ban media violence, where do you stop?” he asked.

Violent video games and movies, he went on to say, are certainly not the only factor that can lead someone to commit an act of gun violence. “If someone has no other risk factors, he can play Grand Theft Auto all day and never commit a violent act. But if he has a number of the other risk factors. …” Anderson let the thought hang.

On Monday, I called an AMC spokesman to ask if his company was worried about its customers watching nonstop shootings for 12 straight hours.

“We are very excited about the ‘Die Hard’ marathon,” he replied. “It will be a great time for our guests.” He added, however, that the company had its “security measures in place.”

Just, you know, in case.

And next we’re subjected to Mr. Bruni:

It’s kind of amazing, given our politicians’ obsession with self-promotion, that we haven’t yet seen a line of Congressional colognes.

Think about it. Actors, athletes, models and singers have signature scents. Snooki has two. So why not one for the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee?

Or for …Marco Rubio?

He could deliver the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address not just as an immigration reformer with an eye on 2016 but as the pitchman for Amnesty by Marco Rubio, the eau de toilette for the man or woman who craves a clean break, a new beginning. I imagine a top note of citrus, nodding to Rubio’s native Florida, and a middle note of tea, nodding to his party-within-a-party.

Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic majority leader, could be the face and spirit of Nevada Naughty, named for his home state and his habit of playing rough. I detect a whiff of desert wildflowers. Vanilla, too. Also some nutmeg, clove and coriander. No, wait, that’s my lentil soup recipe.

From John Boehner I’m getting tobacco. And leather. And I don’t mean his cigarette dependence or dependably tanned skin. I mean his sporty new scent, Acqua di Speaker. It comes not just in a spray and a splash but also in a shower gel, for those times when you want to wash away the stink of lobbyists and emerge feeling refreshed and smelling like Camel Ultra Lights.

And John McCain could channel his spooky fury into a fragrance for the grudge holder who has never suffered a slight that he didn’t avenge. Its name would be Payback, and it would smell of sour grapes and scorched earth.

It’s past time for lawmakers, and not just in the nation’s capital, to get in on the aromatic action. The distinction between a headliner in politics and a headliner in movies, music, fashion or sports has pretty much evaporated. It’s all show business now, all relentless marketing and meticulous brand management, and Chris Christie is just Beyoncé with shorter hair, bigger lungs and a less rigorous workout routine. She calls one of her colognes Midnight Heat. He could call his Autumn Hurricane, to capture the pummeling force of his personality and the event that made him, politically speaking, destiny’s child.

With signature scents, our designated leaders might be much more appealing. The television cameras could pan the senators, representatives, cabinet members and Supreme Court justices in the Capitol on Tuesday night and we’d see not just a snake pit of bitter enemies taking a rare timeout. We’d behold a human potpourri of nose-tickling possibility.

Why, there’s Eric Cantor, who recently joined the Republicans’ reinvention mission with talk and tweets about transcending partisanship and helping the little guy. He’s worried about immigrant kids. He’s oozing empathy for working moms. And he’s wearing Eric Cantor’s Eau de Changement, a chameleon of a cologne that makes you smell harsh at certain times, approachable at others. Eau de Changement keeps voters guessing. Paul Ryan wears it, too.

Sonia Sotomayor may turn up in the Capitol for Obama’s remarks. She’s taking a breather from the tour for “My Beloved World,” her memoir, which is just the first chapter in a new saga of Supreme merchandising. Next comes her scent, Black Robe, with currents of jasmine and bergamot, in a bottle shaped like Lady Justice.

Of course Hillary Clinton’s stratospheric approval ratings demand a cologne all her own. It should be a symphony of spices and flowers from the different continents she visited as secretary of state, a bouquet of international ambition, with a moniker to match. All our diplomats will wear Beyond Borders, or they’ll wear nothing at all.

It’ll be unisex, while Bill Clinton’s signature scent will be a musky number for men only. It’ll use cedar, incense and wormwood to rewrite history, and be called Unimpeachable.

The way I figure it, politicians aren’t making much progress in fixing the budget or saving the post office. But they just might be able to make America smell a little better. A more perfect union eludes us. Perhaps we should set our sights on a more perfumed one.

C-Span could evolve into something like QVC, where you’d see the former governor of Tennessee, now its senior senator, pop up to present a special deal on Lamar Noir, with half off the after-shave balm if you also get the soap on a rope.

And instead of showily haranguing Cabinet nominees, Ted Cruz, the Texas Tea Partier, could lend his aggrieved voice and censorious visage to a showy cologne, Cruz Control. It’s tailor-made for preening, with a top note of sandalwood, a middle note of tonka bean and a base of self-righteousness.

Brooks, Cohen and Krugman

In “Florence and the Drones” Bobo thinks that as we debate the ethics of using drones, it might be surprisingly useful to take a page out of Machiavelli’s tough-minded view of human nature.  I think Mr. Cohen has filched one of MoDo’s pieces.  In “A ‘Son of Hell,’ Reconsidered” he yowls that we need our villains in all their scheming iniquity, and that Richard III is unsuited to rehabilitation.  He’s obviously never heard of Titulus Regius…  Prof. Krugman, in “Kick That Can,” says given the state we’re in, now is not the time for spending cuts.  Again, the voice crying in the wilderness…  Here’s Bobo:

This winter I’m taking part in a great course at Yale called Grand Strategy. We’re reading strategic thought from Sun Tzu and Pericles straight through to Churchill and George F. Kennan. This week we read Machiavelli.

Machiavelli is a tonic because he counteracts the sentiments of our age. We’re awash in TV news segments celebrating the human spirit, but Machiavelli had a lower estimation of our worth. “For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain,” he writes in “The Prince.”

“It needs to be taken for granted that all men are wicked and that they will always give vent to the malignity that is in their minds when opportunity offers,” he adds in “The Discourses.”

The conventional view is that Machiavelli believed that since people are brutes then everything is permitted. Leaders should do anything they can to hold power. The ends justify the means.

In fact, Machiavelli was a moralistic thinker. He wrote movingly of his love for his city, Florence. His vision of a great and unified Italy was romantic and idealistic. He barely goes a page without some appeal to honor and virtue.

He just had a different concept of political virtue. It would be nice, he writes, if a political leader could practice the Christian virtues like charity, mercy and gentleness and still provide for his people. But, in the real world, that’s usually not possible. In the real world, a great leader is called upon to create a civilized order for the city he serves. To create that order, to defeat the forces of anarchy and savagery, the virtuous leader is compelled to do hard things, to take, as it were, the sins of the situation upon himself.

The leader who does good things cannot always be good himself. Sometimes bad acts produce good outcomes. Sometimes a leader has to love his country more than his soul.

Since a leader is forced by circumstances to do morally suspect things, Machiavelli at least wants him to do them effectively. Machiavelli is full of advice. If you have to do something cruel, do it fast; if you get to do something generous, do it slowly. If you lead a country, you have more to fear from the scheming elites than the masses, so you should try to form an alliance with the people against the aristocracy.

When you read Machiavelli, you realize how lucky we are. Unlike 16th-century Florence, we have a good Constitution that channels conflict. We have manners, respect for law and social trust that softens behavior, at least a bit. Even in the realm of foreign affairs, we’ve inherited an international order that restrains conflict. Our ancestors behaved savagely to build our world, so we don’t have to.

But it’s still not possible to rule with perfectly clean hands. There are still terrorists out there, hiding in the shadows and plotting to kill Americans. So even today’s leaders face the Machiavellian choice: Do I have to be brutal to protect the people I serve? Do I have to use drones, which sometimes kill innocent children, in order to thwart terror and save the lives of my own?

When Barack Obama was a senator, he wasn’t compelled to confront the brutal logic of leadership. Now in office, he’s thrown into the Machiavellian world. He’s decided, correctly, that we are in a long war against Al Qaeda; that drone strikes do effectively kill terrorists; that, in fact, they inflict fewer civilian deaths than bombing campaigns, boots on the ground or any practical alternative; that, in fact, civilian death rates are dropping sharply as the C.I.A. gets better at this. Acting brutally abroad saves lives at home.

Still, there’s another aspect of Machiavellian thought relevant to the drone debate. This is a core weakness in his thought. He puts too much faith in the self-restraint of his leaders. Machiavelli tells us that men are venal self-deceivers, but then he gives his Prince permission to do all these monstrous things, trusting him not to get carried away or turn into a monster himself.

Our founders were more careful. Our founders understood that leaders are as venal and untrustworthy as anybody else. They abhorred concentrated power, and they set up checks and balances to disperse it.

Our drone policy should take account of our founders’ superior realism. Drone strikes are so easy, hidden and abstract. There should be some independent judicial panel to review the kill lists. There should be an independent panel of former military and intelligence officers issuing reports on the program’s efficacy.

If you take Machiavelli’s tough-minded view of human nature, you have to be brutal to your enemies — but you also have to set up skeptical checks on the people you empower to destroy them.

I wonder if this is really the first time Bobo’s read “The Prince.”  We read it in the 12th grade…  Next up we have Mr. Cohen:

So the last — and worst — of the Plantagenets is back after a long sojourn beneath a Leicester parking lot, here to give the lie to that Tudor propagandist, William Shakespeare. At school, influenced by the bard’s devastating portrait, we knew him as Dick the Bad. But no, King Richard III is simpatico.

I say “is” not “was” for Richard lives, almost 528 years after his death in 1485 at Bosworth Field, debated on page after page of the British press as he awaits reburial in Leicester Cathedral (if rival claims and an e-petition from York are rebuffed). His identity proved “beyond a reasonable doubt” through DNA analysis, Shakespeare’s “troubler of the poor world’s peace” bestrides the stage once more.

Einstein observed that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” We have moved beyond time.

No “bunch-backed toad,” no “slave of nature and the son of hell,” no “bottled spider,” the exhumed Richard is enjoying a remake as a physically challenged fellow with spinal curvature who might have starred in last year’s London Paralympics if given the chance.

Alas he got clobbered several times with a halberd (presumably wielded by a halberdier ignoring late 15th century safety regulations), and may have suffered the ignominy of being sodomized with an unlicensed dagger while being carried naked on horseback to Leicester. There inglorious burial awaited him after just two years on the throne. The Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since 1154, was no more.

“I’ve spoken to scoliosis experts and they say acute scoliosis like that was painful,” Philippa Langley, a Richard III enthusiast, told The Guardian. “So we know that he was working through the pain barrier every day just to do his job.”

Right. Langley, a leading member of the Richard III Society (founded in 1924 as the Fellowship of the White Boar to clean up the king’s Tudor-besmirched image), suggested the deformed schemer of Shakespeare’s play had been misunderstood: “He had an incredibly powerful, strong work ethic. This man never stopped. He was on a horse every day, fighting skirmishes, doing everything they had to do.”

Such duties for a workaholic English monarch during this era of violent feuds included plotting dynastic murder on a substantial scale. But of course this, like most things, is now up for debate. Granted, history is written by the victors: The Tudors, in search of legitimacy, were hard on Richard, commissioning eminent scribblers to pen hatchet jobs. The king, his would-be rehabilitators say, passed some good laws and cared for the common people (living, like himself, without painkillers or disability welfare.)

Still, too much smoke swirls around Richard III for there to be no fire. And besides, don’t we need our villains in all their ugly, scheming iniquity to give shape to our moral universe? Spare me Leonardo DiCaprio as this unquiet king. Give me a snarling Javier Bardem!

Richard III has been implicated in the killing of his brother, Clarence, and may well have dispatched Edward, Prince of Wales, in cold blood after the battle of Tewkesbury before wedding the prince’s widow within a year (“Your beauty that did haunt me in my sleep” — Shakespeare allows his villain a voluptuary’s charm). Did he not kill Henry VI and, most damning of all, have his nephews, aged 9 and 12, murdered in the Tower of London after getting them declared illegitimate by an act of Parliament? Dick was very bad.

The remains of the princes in the Tower (where you can push a button to register the most likely suspects in their murder — Richard III leads comfortably), are now in Westminster Abbey, contained in an urn designed by Sir Christopher Wren. A movement is afoot to do DNA testing on these little vestiges in order to date them and help settle the matter of the princes’ killer. The idea has been resisted on the grounds it may lead to “sensational speculation,” in the words of a former dean of the abbey, and a cascade of further exhumations. Besides, what would be done with the bones if they all prove bogus?

These arguments smack of ageism: The kids deserve their day with the scientific-archaeological team, too. I see no reason why equal opportunity should not be extended to bones. With luck many wrongs will get righted. There will be grounds for a deluge of retrospective apologies from tearful, lip-biting folk stretching all the way back to the case of Cain.

I happen to work near Buckingham Palace, and strolling in the twilight the other day I noticed a hunch-backed fellow of murderous mien clutching the wrought-iron railings. Something in his malevolent gaze troubled me. “Because I cannot flatter and speak fair, do not hold me a rancorous enemy,” he said. “Can you direct me to a parking lot where I might find some peace?”

“Head up Pall Mall, sir, and take the first left — but you’ll need to text your credit card number to the authorities.”

The horror on his twisted face was terrifying. “A hearse!” he wailed. “A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!”

Typical MoDo crap, Mr. Cohen.  You should be ashamed.  Last but not least here’s Prof. Krugman:

John Boehner, the speaker of the House, claims to be exasperated. “At some point, Washington has to deal with its spending problem,” he said Wednesday. “I’ve watched them kick this can down the road for 22 years since I’ve been here. I’ve had enough of it. It’s time to act.”

Actually, Mr. Boehner needs to refresh his memory. During the first decade of his time in Congress, the U.S. government was doing just fine on the fiscal front. In particular, the ratio of federal debt to G.D.P. was a third lower when Bill Clinton left office than it was when he came in. It was only when George W. Bush arrived and squandered the Clinton surplus on tax cuts and unfunded wars that the budget outlook began deteriorating again.

But that’s a secondary issue. The key point is this: While it’s true that we will eventually need some combination of revenue increases and spending cuts to rein in the growth of U.S. government debt, now is very much not the time to act. Given the state we’re in, it would be irresponsible and destructive not to kick that can down the road.

Start with a basic point: Slashing government spending destroys jobs and causes the economy to shrink.

This really isn’t a debatable proposition at this point. The contractionary effects of fiscal austerity have been demonstrated by study after study and overwhelmingly confirmed by recent experience — for example, by the severe and continuing slump in Ireland, which was for a while touted as a shining example of responsible policy, or by the way the Cameron government’s turn to austerity derailed recovery in Britain.

Even Republicans admit, albeit selectively, that spending cuts hurt employment. Thus John McCain warned earlier this week that the defense cuts scheduled to happen under the budget sequester would cause the loss of a million jobs. It’s true that Republicans often seem to believe in “weaponized Keynesianism,” a doctrine under which military spending, and only military spending, creates jobs. But that is, of course, nonsense. By talking about job losses from defense cuts, the G.O.P. has already conceded the principle of the thing.

Still, won’t spending cuts (or tax increases) cost jobs whenever they take place, so we might as well bite the bullet now? The answer is no — given the state of our economy, this is a uniquely bad time for austerity.

One way to see this is to compare today’s economic situation with the environment prevailing during an earlier round of defense cuts: the big winding down of military spending in the late 1980s and early 1990s, following the end of the cold war. Those spending cuts destroyed jobs, too, with especially severe consequences in places like southern California that relied heavily on defense contracts. At the national level, however, the effects were softened by monetary policy: the Federal Reserve cut interest rates more or less in tandem with the spending cuts, helping to boost private spending and minimize the overall adverse effect.

Today, by contrast, we’re still living in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the Fed, in its effort to fight the slump, has already cut interest rates as far as it can — basically to zero. So the Fed can’t blunt the job-destroying effects of spending cuts, which would hit with full force.

The point, again, is that now is very much not the time to act; fiscal austerity should wait until the economy has recovered, and the Fed can once again cushion the impact.

But aren’t we facing a fiscal crisis? No, not at all. The federal government can borrow more cheaply than at almost any point in history, and medium-term forecasts, like the 10-year projections released Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, are distinctly not alarming. Yes, there’s a long-term fiscal problem, but it’s not urgent that we resolve that long-term problem right now. The alleged fiscal crisis exists only in the minds of Beltway insiders.

Still, even if we should put off spending cuts for now, wouldn’t it be a good thing if our politicians could simultaneously agree on a long-term fiscal plan? Indeed, it would. It would also be a good thing if we had peace on earth and universal marital fidelity. In the real world, Republican senators are saying that the situation is desperate — but not desperate enough to justify even a penny in additional taxes. Do these sound like men ready and willing to reach a grand fiscal bargain?

Realistically, we’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts.

So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do.

Brooks, Cohen, Nocera and Bruni

Bobo thinks he understands statistics, FSM help us.  In “The Philosophy of Data” he cobbles together some disparate studies about statistics and gurgles that our ability to gather and process huge amounts of data does many things, including correcting intuitive biases and illuminating patterns of behavior.  He really needs to sit down with Nate Silver who can explain data collection and statistics to him in words of one syllable.  Mr. Cohen is in Munich, and has tottered very close to a “let’s you and him fight” column.  In “Intervene in Syria” he says a political solution cannot be achieved until the balance of power is altered.  So of course we’re supposed to train and arm the Syrian Free Army and, of course, he agrees with the use of cruise missiles to destroy Assad’s aircraft on the runway.  Just what we need to get embroiled in!  Our other adventures in the area have gone so very, very well…  In “Academic Counseling Racket” Mr. Nocera says the case of Michael McAdoo, now a Baltimore Raven, shines a light on the real scandal at the University of North Carolina.  In “A Convenient Morality” Mr. Bruni says that Catholic officials all too often pick and choose when laws apply to the church.  Here’s Bobo:

If you asked me to describe the rising philosophy of the day, I’d say it is data-ism. We now have the ability to gather huge amounts of data. This ability seems to carry with it certain cultural assumptions — that everything that can be measured should be measured; that data is a transparent and reliable lens that allows us to filter out emotionalism and ideology; that data will help us do remarkable things — like foretell the future.

Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?

I confess I enter this in a skeptical frame of mind, believing that we tend to get carried away in our desire to reduce everything to the quantifiable. But at the outset let me celebrate two things data does really well.

First, it’s really good at exposing when our intuitive view of reality is wrong. For example, every person who plays basketball and nearly every person who watches it believes that players go through hot streaks, when they are in the groove, and cold streaks, when they are just not feeling it.

But Thomas Gilovich, Amos Tversky and Robert Vallone found that a player who has made six consecutive foul shots has the same chance of making his seventh as if he had missed the previous six foul shots.

When a player has hit six shots in a row, we imagine that he has tapped into some elevated performance groove. In fact, it’s just random statistical noise, like having a coin flip come up tails repeatedly. Each individual shot’s success rate will still devolve back to the player’s career shooting percentage.

Similarly, nearly every person who runs for political office has an intuitive sense that they can powerfully influence their odds of winning the election if they can just raise and spend more money. But this, too, is largely wrong.

The data show that in state and national elections that are well-financed, television ad buys barely matter. After the 2004 election, political scientists tried to measure the effectiveness of campaign commercials. They found that if one candidate ran 1,000 more commercials than his opponent in a county — a huge disproportion — that translated into a paltry 0.19 percent advantage in the vote.

After the 2006 election, Sean Trende constructed a graph comparing the incumbent campaign spending advantages with their eventual margins of victory. There was barely any relationship between more spending and a bigger victory.

In May and June of 2012, the Obama campaign unleashed a giant ad barrage against Mitt Romney, but as political scientist John Sides wrote in The Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog recently, the ads had no lasting effect.

Likewise, many teachers have an intuitive sense that different students have different learning styles: some are verbal and some are visual; some are linear, some are holistic. Teachers imagine they will improve outcomes if they tailor their presentations to each student. But there’s no evidence to support this either.

Second, data can illuminate patterns of behavior we haven’t yet noticed. For example, I’ve always assumed that people who frequently use words like “I,” “me,” and “mine” are probably more egotistical than people who don’t.

But as James Pennebaker of the University of Texas notes in his book, “The Secret Life of Pronouns,” when people are feeling confident, they are focused on the task at hand, not on themselves. High status, confident people use fewer “I” words, not more.

Pennebaker analyzed the Nixon tapes. Nixon used few “I” words early in his presidency, but used many more after the Watergate scandal ravaged his self-confidence. Rudy Giuliani used few “I” words through his mayoralty, but used many more later, during the two weeks when his cancer was diagnosed and his marriage dissolved. Barack Obama, a self-confident person, uses fewer “I” words than any other modern president.

Our brains often don’t notice subtle verbal patterns, but Pennebaker’s computers can. Younger writers use more downbeat and past-tense words than older writers who use more positive and future-tense words.

Liars use more upbeat words like “pal” and “friend” but fewer excluding words like “but,” “except” and “without.” (When you are telling a false story, it’s hard to include the things you did not see or think about.)

We think of John Lennon as the most intellectual of the Beatles, but, in fact, Paul McCartney’s lyrics had more flexible and diverse structures and George Harrison’s were more cognitively complex.

In sum, the data revolution is giving us wonderful ways to understand the present and the past. Will it transform our ability to predict and make decisions about the future? We’ll see.

Bobo, sweetie, the phrase “lies, damn lies and statistics” isn’t new…  Go have a little sit-down with Nate Silver.  Here’s Mr. Cohen:

Syria, for Israel, is a conundrum. The ousting of its despotic ruler, Bashar al-Assad, would remove Iran’s sole Arab ally and cut the Iranian conduit to its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah. That is in Israel’s strategic interest. On the other hand Israel does not relish post-Assad chaos in Syria that allows sophisticated weaponry to fall into the hands of Al Qaeda splinter groups that love a vacuum and loathe Jews.

So it was interesting to hear Israel’s outgoing defense minister, Ehud Barak, speak in favor of Assad’s departure at the Munich Security Conference, saying he hoped to see it happen “imminently.” No option on Syria at this stage of its unraveling is without significant risk. But the worst course is the one President Obama and Western leaders have fallen into: Feeble paralysis most foul.

Israel has just bombed a Syrian convoy of antiaircraft weapons in a sortie that also hit a weapons research center — with no response from Assad beyond a belated grumble that this was “destabilizing” (that process seems advanced already). Just how much of a paper tiger Assad has become is one question raised by this attack. Another is whether the Western use of force will inevitably provoke a strong Syrian riposte; it seems not.

Syria, 22 months into its uprising, presents an unconscionable picture. Lakhdar Brahimi, the United Nations special representative for Syria, summed up the disaster in a leaked report to the Security Council on Jan. 29. He spoke of “cities that look like Berlin in 1945.” He decried the 60,000 killed, the massacres, the 700,000 refugees (rising to one million in a few months), the more than two million internally displaced and the tens of thousands of detainees. He warned of neighbors including Jordan and Lebanon collapsing under a further flood of refugees.

“I am sorry if I sound like an old, broken record,” Brahimi told the Security Council. “But I seriously don’t see where else one should start or end except in saying that things are bad and getting worse, the country is breaking up before everyone’s eyes; there is no military solution to this conflict — at least not one that will not destroy Syria completely and destroy also the nation of Syria; Syrians cannot themselves start a peace process, their neighbors are not able to help them; only the international community may help.”

But of course the “international community” — that awful phrase — is divided, with a Libya-burned Russia and an anti-intervention China deep in a blocking game. Brahimi wants a transitional government formed with “full executive powers” (this, he explained, is diplomatic speak for Assad having “no role in the transition”). The government would be the fruit of negotiations outside Syria between opposition representatives and a “strong civilian-military” government delegation. It would then oversee a democratic transition including elections and constitutional reform.

This sounds good but will not fly. I agree with Brahimi that there is no military solution. Syria, with its mosaic of faiths and ethnicities, requires political compromise to survive. That is the endgame. But this does not mean there is no military action that can advance the desired political result by bolstering the armed capacity of the Syrian opposition, leveling the military playing field, and hastening the departure of Assad essential for the birth of a new Syria. Assad the Alawite will not go until the balance of power is decisively against him.

The United States does not want to get dragged into another intractable Middle Eastern conflict. Americans are tired of war. My colleagues Michael Gordon and Mark Landler have revealed how Obama blocked an attempt last summer by Hillary Clinton to train and supply weapons to selected Syrian rebel groups.

Nor does Obama want to find himself in the business of helping Islamist extremists inherit a Syrian vacuum. The opposition coalition is divided and lacks credibility. But the net result of these concerns cannot be feckless drift as Syria burns. Senator John McCain was right to say here that, “We should be ashamed of our collective failure to come to the aid of the Syrian people” and to answer a question about how to break the impasse with two words: “American leadership.”

An inflection point has been reached. Inaction spurs the progressive radicalization of Syria, the further disintegration of the state, the intensification of Assad’s mass killings, and the chances of the conflict spilling out of Syria in sectarian mayhem. It squanders an opportunity to weaken Iran. This is not in the West’s interest. The agreement that Assad has to go is broad; a tacit understanding that it is inevitable exists in Moscow. The Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, spluttered in justified incredulity at the notion the opposition would sit down with a regime that has slaughtered its own.

It is time to alter the Syrian balance of power enough to give political compromise a chance and Assad no option but departure. That means an aggressive program to train and arm the Free Syrian Army. It also means McCain’s call to use U.S. cruise missiles to destroy Assad’s aircraft on the runway is daily more persuasive.

Any excuse to use weapons, right?  Next up is Mr. Nocera:

On the day after the Super Bowl, I got a call from Michael McAdoo, a 22-year-old defensive lineman for the winning Baltimore Ravens. I had been expecting his call for several weeks, ever since the North Carolina Court of Appeals refused to revive his lawsuit against the N.C.A.A. and the University of North Carolina, where he had played for two years before being declared permanently ineligible. Though he didn’t dress for the big game — he’s been injured most of his short professional career — McAdoo had attended the team’s practices and meetings; he told me he’d been too busy to call earlier.

Athletes almost never win lawsuits against the N.C.A.A. There is, after all, no constitutional right to play college sports, and because the N.C.A.A. is a “voluntary” organization made up of member institutions, courts are loath to interfere, even when the rules seem unfair.

In 2008, in his first semester at North Carolina, McAdoo had asked a former tutor to help him write citations for a paper, something he was unsure about. With the due date fast approaching, the woman — whom he wasn’t supposed to talk to because she was no longer an official tutor — essentially wrote the citations herself. Several years later, in the middle of a burgeoning “scandal” involving more than a dozen Carolina football players, the e-mail exchange between McAdoo and the former tutor was unearthed, and his actions were reported to the N.C.A.A. and the school’s honor court.

The honor court ruled that McAdoo should be suspended for a semester. Never one to show mercy, the N.C.A.A. went further, barring him from ever playing college football again. McAdoo sued to get reinstated, but the case was tossed. Because his college career ended prematurely, he signed with the Ravens for the professional minimum (which, at $450,000 a year, is admittedly none too shabby).

When stories like McAdoo’s burst into public view, the athlete is almost always cast as the villain, a cheater gaming the academy. But, in this case, McAdoo was the true victim. The real scandal is what goes on under the rubric of “academic counseling.”

It is not news, of course, that universities accept athletes who read at the fifth-grade level or worse; quite often academic counseling is remedial. But McAdoo wasn’t in that category. He had been an O.K. student in high school, and his mother, a schoolteacher, was adamant that he get a college education. He told his recruiters he wanted to major in criminal justice.

Once he got on campus, however, he was quickly informed by his academic counselors that North Carolina didn’t have a criminal justice major. According to McAdoo, his counselor picked his major, African-American studies, because it wouldn’t interfere with football practice.

Among the first classes he was “assigned” (as he phrases it) was a Swahili course, an “independent studies” class taught by the department chairman, Julius Nyang’oro. “There wasn’t any class,” McAdoo recalled. “You sign up. You write the paper. You get credit. I had never seen anything like it.” He never once met his professor. Despite the strange circumstances, he researched and wrote the paper. It was that paper that got him in the trouble with the N.C.A.A.

“All the academic counselors knew about the paper classes” — as they were called — “and they all steered athletes to them,” says Mary Willingham, a former academic counselor at the university.

But when the N.C.A.A. went after McAdoo, there was no mention of the phony classes. The school certainly never mentioned them, and as for the N.C.A.A., all it cared about was whether McAdoo had committed academic fraud for getting citation help in a class that never met. McAdoo’s contention — that he had no reason to believe he had done anything wrong, because he had simply done what he’d been told to do — fell on deaf ears. His college career was sacrificed so that the N.C.A.A. could maintain its longstanding pretense that college athletes are supposed to be students first.

The paper classes were eventually exposed by The News & Observer, after which the university asked former Gov. James Martin of North Carolina to conduct an investigation. Martin, who issued his report a few months ago, found that 216 courses were problematic, and that as many as 560 grades had been changed. He laid all the problems at the feet of Nyang’oro (who had earlier been allowed to retire), and one department colleague. Martin insisted that the scandal wasn’t strictly an athletic one, because nonathletes also took some of the paper classes. Well, maybe.

As for Michael McAdoo, the public humiliation still stings. “I had days when I was so depressed, I could barely get out of bed,” he told me. He feels that he put his trust in an institution that ultimately betrayed him.

“I would still like to get a college degree someday,” he said. “But not at the University of North Carolina. They just wasted my time.”

As long as billions and billions of dollars are involved in the bread and circuses of college (and professional) sports nothing will change.  Last but not least here’s Mr. Bruni:

Last week, the Obama administration proposed a further tweak to its rules about insurance coverage of contraception, trying to quiet religious organizations’ complaints that the edict tramples on their beliefs. Roman Catholic officials have been especially vociferous. Their moral conviction, they insist, cannot be slave to secular convention.

Except, that is, when it works to their advantage. When it profits them. And this two-tracked approach was illustrated by another recent news story, one that flickered onto and then off the public’s radar more quickly than it should have, and deserves a closer look.

The news story brought to light a wrongful-death suit by a widower, Jeremy Stodghill, in regard to his wife and the twin 28-week-old fetuses inside her when she died in a Catholic hospital, St. Thomas More, in Cañon City, Colorado.

The hospital’s lawyers argued that the woman’s death couldn’t have been prevented. As to whether proper medical attention might have yielded the delivery of two healthy baby boys, lawyers argued that the question was ultimately irrelevant, because wrongful death can apply only to people and, legally speaking, fetuses aren’t human lives.

This isn’t how the Catholic Church is supposed to see things. It’s the opposite. The church staunchly opposes abortion, holding that life begins at conception, and has even raised concerns about the morning-after pill. And the fetuses inside Lori Stodghill, 31, were four weeks past what’s generally considered viability.

Lawyers by nature use the best strategies available to them, in a brutal arena where failing to do so puts clients at a disadvantage. And the Colorado litigation is just one case involving one Catholic hospital, which may not have gotten any green light for its arguments from high-ranking church officials. In fact, Colorado’s three Catholic bishops on Monday released a statement that articulated their objection to the hospital’s legal approach and said it should be abandoned henceforth.

But the hospital isn’t some random outlier. It’s run by Catholic Health Initiatives, which operates 78 hospitals in more than a dozen states. And a habit of clinging to a religious identity one moment and abandoning it the next is visible beyond this case, especially in the church’s management of its child sexual abuse crisis.

We’ve been getting a fresh and galling peek into that with the court-compelled release of documents from the Los Angeles Archdiocese, which engaged in a pattern of willful blindness and outright cover-up so egregious that the current archbishop, José Gomez, took the shocking step last week of publicly reprimanding his predecessor, Cardinal Roger Mahony.

The documents show that Mahony and his lieutenants repeatedly failed to report allegations to law enforcement officials and urged accused priests to leave or stay out of the state, lest they face prosecution. They decided, in short, that the church’s representatives and reputation mattered more than justice: that the church could hold itself above laws that governed everybody else.

This was hardly isolated behavior. Around the country, the church has beaten back lawsuits by priests’ victims and tried not to furnish information about priests’ wrongdoing by claiming that such scrutiny violates the free exercise of religion, said Jeffrey Anderson, a Minnesota lawyer who has represented hundreds of victims over three decades. “It’s audacious, it’s bold and it’s across the board,” he said.

But the church has simultaneously reserved the right to behave just like any other institution, leaning on legal technicalities, smearing victims and demonstrating no more compassion than a tobacco company might show. “In the name of Jesus,” Anderson told me, “they do things that Jesus would abhor.”

They do things erratically, that’s for sure. From my extensive reporting on the sexual abuse crisis in the 1990s, I don’t recall any great push to excommunicate priests who forced themselves on kids. But when Sister Margaret McBride, in 2009, was part of a Phoenix hospital’s decision to abort an 11-week-old fetus inside a 27-year-old woman whose life was gravely endangered by the pregnancy, she indeed suffered excommunication (later reversed).

So a fetus matters more than the ravaged psyche of a raped adolescent? And Sister McBride deserved harsher rebuke than a rapist? It’s hard not to conclude that a church run by men shows them more mercy than it does women (or, for that matter, children).

And it’s hard to keep track: just when is the church of this world, and when not? It inserts itself into political debates, trying to shape legislation to its ethics. But it also demands exemption: from taxes, from accountability, from health care directives.

And in the Colorado wrongful-death case, the hospital suddenly adopted the courts’, not the church’s, definition of life. Only now, with that argument already made, is Catholic Health Initiatives saying it made a moral error.

A district court rejected Jeremy Stodghill’s wrongful-death claims. He and his lawyer, Beth Krulewitch, have appealed to the state’s Supreme Court.

One final verdict is already in. On the charge of self-serving hypocrisy, the church is guilty.