In the campus turmoil of 40 years ago, few would have anticipated the current "saturation of higher education with market thinking." His basic complaint was this: Campuses are no longer centers of rebellion. To which a junior at Yale responded:

"How do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution? How do we rebel against parents who sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don't. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the Internet."

Meanwhile, politics plods on as though nothing has happened.

A Slow-Motion Revolution

Behind closed doors, a secret cabal is planning the end of the United States as we know it. Inside a paranoid vision for our time.

Try the Texas-shaped sugar cookies, they're delicious. (Have you seen Bug?)

The amero conspiracy

Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

I recently cited this article; now the full text is available directly from The Atlantic.

A Tale of Two Town Houses

To an outsider, it may seem a mere bureaucratic blip that Gen. David Petraeus was called back from Iraq last week to chair the promotion board that picks the Army's next new one-star generals. But, in fact, the story (first reported by Ann Scott Tyson in the Washington Post) is a very big deal—potentially the first rumble of a seismic shift in the very core of the U.S. military establishment.

The promotion board is the vehicle through which the Army's dominant culture is perpetuated—a behind-closed-doors committee of 15 generals that each year selects the 35 to 40 colonels (out of 1,000 applicants) who rise to the rank with stars. As with all gateway panels in every profession, the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image—officers whose careers look like theirs.

...

"Everyone studies the brigadier-general promotion list like tarot cards. It communicates what qualities are valued and not valued." If innovative officers see that their innovations are not valued, they'll either conform or leave.

Army to Petraeus: Fix Us!

America was constructed to foster arguments, not to settle them.

For the new American Republic, “government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated.” To transform disagreement from a natural source of strife into a source of stability was a crucial insight, and is arguably the great achievement of the Constitution. What frustrates the passionate about America — its creaky checks and balances, diffuse sovereignties and general aversion to sudden change — is, Ellis argues, what makes possible the triumphs we do manage to pull off.

American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic

I was positively certain that this article had been recommended back in September, but now I cannot find any trace of it.

Goldsmith says he remains convinced of the seriousness of the terrorist threat and the need to take aggressive action to combat it, but he believes, quoting his conservative Harvard Law colleague Charles Fried, that the Bush administration “badly overplayed a winning hand.” In retrospect, Goldsmith told me, Bush “could have achieved all that he wanted to achieve, and put it on a firmer foundation, if he had been willing to reach out to other institutions of government.” Instead, Goldsmith said, he weakened the presidency he was so determined to strengthen. “I don’t think any president in the near future can have the same attitude toward executive power, because the other institutions of government won’t allow it,” he said softly. “The Bush administration has borrowed its power against future presidents.”

Can you find the original thread? All I can find is the PBS special, which aired more than a month later.

Conscience of a Conservative

There is a commonsense notion today that 24 ... is a show that tells us something about contemporary life. ...

Is 24 a political show? If so, in what ways is it political?

...

24 is a political show, but for entirely different reasons than might be assumed at the outset. 24 is political because the show embodies in its formal technique the essential grammar of the control society, dominated as it is by specific network and informatic logics.

This essay is unfortunately burdened by academic jargon, but the ideas are of interest nonetheless.

See also, The Politics of the Man Behind '24', from The New Yorker earlier this year, about which Decius wrote, "This article is more important than it sounds."

24/7, 16.8: is 24 a political show?

Remember how "peace is breaking out"?

Last week Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki mocked Iraqis calling for national reconciliation and dismissing them as self-interested conspirators. On Friday, he elaborated on his views of the current Iraqi political scene in a very intriguing, and frankly troubling, interview with al-Arabiya...The interview did not break any particularly new ground, but it did make one thing very clear: do not expect Maliki to pursue seriously any moves towards national reconciliation, defined in terms of legislation at the national level or agreements with Sunni political parties. The deadlock at the national political level, so clear at the time of the Petraeus-Crocker hearings in September, will not end any time soon. What that means for US strategy is something which I consider well worth publicly debating.

Maliki argued on al-Arabiya that Iraqi national reconciliation has not only already been achieved, it is "strong and stable and not fragile". There is no civil war in Iraq, or even any real sectarian conflict anymore - the sectarian hatreds incited by "some" in the past have been overcome. He made clear that he does not equate national reconciliation with political progress at the national level: "I think that national reconciliation will come about not as some understand it, as a reconciliation with this political party governed by an ideology or a specific mentality." Real national reconciliation, to Maliki, takes place at the local level...That, he suggests, has happened. The various Sunni awakenings demonstrate reconciliation at the local level, and their support for his national government. [...]

In other words, Maliki is gleefully hoisting the United States on its own bottom-up reconciliation petard. In order to sell the surge to Congress, the Bush team decided to focus on positive developments at the local level and downgrade the significance of the deadlocked national political process. Evidently, Maliki took notes. It's ironic, in a way which nobody could possibly have seen coming.

Clever.

Maliki: enough about reconciliation

On October 8, 2007, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati granted the government's request for a full-panel hearing in United States v. Warshak case centering on the right of privacy for stored electronic communications. At issue is whether the procedure whereby the government can subpoena stored copies of your email - similar to the way they could simply subpoena any physical mail sitting on your desk - is unconstitutionally broad.

This appears to be more than a mere argument in support of the constitutionality of a Congressional email privacy and access scheme. It represents what may be the fundamental governmental position on Constitutional email and electronic privacy - that there isn't any. What is important in this case is not the ultimate resolution of that narrow issue, but the position that the United States government is taking on the entire issue of electronic privacy. That position, if accepted, may mean that the government can read anybody's email at any time without a warrant.

No email privacy rights under Constitution, US gov claims

On Oct. 26, the State Department e-mailed 250 diplomats and told them that they might be ordered, whether they like it or not, to fill about 50 positions in Iraq next year. It was no secret the US was considering compulsory Iraq service for its diplomatic corps, but the e-mails sparked outrage nevertheless.

Why Diplomats Won't Go to Iraq