Today, only 39 percent of black children are growing up in two-parent families. One hundred years ago, despite economic and political privation, twice as many black families were intact. Those are the wages of sexual liberation. The secondary effects include a welfare explosion, crime, wrecked cities and public schools, violence and abuse, and endless human misery. Most of the victims are innocent third parties who don't see the fun in a casual approach to sexuality.

Remember this the next time you hear arguments about the privacy of sexual choices.

A Very Private Public Affair

The most important speech of Al Gore’s post–non-presidency was neither well-covered nor particularly dramatic. He delivered it against a plain blue curtain, and when he finished, the applause rippled but never roared. None in attendance, however, would have dared call it boring.

The New New Gore

For its part, the New York Times editorial page remains serenely confident that the problem is not our national security but the overreaching of our own government. Condescending to notice that the “nation’s safety is obviously a most serious issue,” the paper wants us to focus instead on how “that very fact has caused this administration and many others to use it as a catch-all for any matter it wants to keep secret.” If these are not the precise words used by Colonel McCormick’s Tribune as it gave away secrets that could have cost untold numbers of American lives, the self-justifying spirit is exactly the same.

Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?

The best way to deal with China is to continue to let it prosper. The larger and more buoyant China’s middle class becomes, the less we have to fear. Prosperity is not a “zero-sum” game of winners and losers. We win if they win.

The Fallacy of Chinese Containment, by Robert Reich

From Booklist
*Starred Review* At first glance, this book appears to be a retort to geographic theories of societal evolution, of the sort advanced by Jared Diamond's popular Guns, Germs, and Steel. Rather than patterns of weather and agriculture, Stark argues, Europe's primacy in economic, political, and social progress was due to its embrace of Christianity, which opened a space for reason and hence science-driven technology. Emphasizing the connection between medieval scholasticism, with its notion of theological progress--the logical science of thinking one's way closer to God--and Renaissance capitalism, Stark maintains that Christianity alone embraced reason and logic, and this gave Christian regions a tactical advantage in developing commerce. An argument made with unavoidably broad strokes, its actual targets are Max Weber's notion of the Protestant work ethic and the conventional story that religion was a barrier to be overcome en route to progress. At times approaching the invective, its defiant tone will invigorate readers who feel religion's place in the trajectory of world history is under attack. But the theological side of Stark's argument--that Christianity is fraternally bound to reason--will challenge the very same readers to reexamine their own relationship with reason.

The Victory of Reason : How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

Unlike many social scientists, we affirm that the phenomenon of cultural polarization is real—and of real concern for American democracy. But contrary to many popular observers, we believe that the foundation of such conflict is soft. The overwhelming majority of Americans are not zealots but persons of good will who want the same things. Their disagreement is tractable. It can be civilized—perhaps even dispelled—through structured deliberation and culturally sophisticated policy framing. Our account of the cultural cognition of the American public offers a realistic psychological explanation of our current political situation. And it offers hope—the hope that politics can be something more than the struggle of elites to grab the reins of power, and that the people can, after all, govern themselves.

Ending Polarization

Pity the poor mandarin in a modern western democracy.

'In defence of mandarins' by Michael Lind

Podcasts and Web streaming widen college radio's reach, but some stations worry about becoming too mainstream

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Turning Campus Radio on Its Head

The "better idea" consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.

Rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less.

This is not a trivial point.

Read that again.

Rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less.

This is not a trivial point.

Right.

The United States and its Western allies should be helping genuine, traditional and pious Muslims to reassert their dominance over a beautiful and capacious religious civilization in the face of a well-financed assault by extremist thugs.

The new NSS keeps referring to Islam as "proud", which I find incredibly galling. Hasn't the President seen Se7en?

The last thing that democracy activists need right now is more American fingerprints on outside funding.

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.

A Better Idea, By Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle

Do we really believe that the U.S. military thinks that Russia had a spy in the middle of American war planning for Iraq or that Russia broke some American code and listened in on U.S. war preparations in 2003?

And do we really think that Secretary of State and former national security advisor Condoleezza Rice first heard of this on Friday, as she made believe she did yesterday in television interviews?

The answer to both questions is no.

Early Warning