I came across an article at Hot Air, where Justice Scalia talked about how fundamentally misunderstood our government is by it’s own citizens:

I ask them, “Why do you think America is such a free country? What is it in out Constitution that makes us what we are?” And I guarantee you that the response I will get — and you will get this from almost any American *** the answer would be: freedom of speech; freedom of the press; no unreasonable searches and seizures; no quartering of troops in homes… those marvelous provisions of the Bill of Rights.

But then I tell them, “If you think a bill of rights is what sets us apart, you’re crazy.” Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights. Every president for life has a bill of rights. The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours. I mean it. Literally, it was much better. We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!

Of course, it’s just words on paper, what our Framers would have called a “parchment guarantee.” And the reason is that the real constitution of the Soviet Union — you think of the word “constitution” — it doesn’t mean “bill” it means “structure”: [when] you say a person has a good constitution you mean a sound structure. The real constitution of the Soviet Union *** that constitution did not prevent the centralization of power in one person or in one party. And when that happens, the game is over, the Bill of Rights is just what our Framers would call a “parchment guarantee.”

So, the real key to the distinctiveness of America is the structure of our govenment. One part of it, of course, is the independence of the judiciary, but there’s a lot more. There are very few countries in the world, for example, that have a bicameral legislature. England has a House of Lords, for the time being, but the House of Lords has no substantial power; they can just make the [House of] Commons pass a bill a second time. France has a senate; it’s honorific. Italy has a senate; it’s honorific. Very few countries have two separate bodies in the legislature equally powerful. That’s a lot of trouble, as you gentlemen doubtless know, to get the same language through two different bodies elected in a different fashion.

Very few countries in the world have a separately elected chief executive. Sometimes, I go to Europe to talk about separation of powers, and when I get there I find that all I’m talking about is independence of the judiciary because the Europeans don’t even try to divide the two political powers, the two political branches, the legislature and the chief executive. In all of the parliamentary countries the chief executive is the creature of the legislature. There’s never any disagreement between them and the prime minister, as there is sometimes between you and the president. When there’s a disagreement, they just kick him out! They have a no confidence vote, a new election, and they get a prime minister who agrees with the legislature.

The Europeans look at this system and say “It passes one house, it doesn’t pass the other house, sometimes the other house is in the control of a different party. it passes both, and this president, who has a veto power, vetoes it,” and they look at this, and they say (adopting an accent) “Ach, it is gridlock.” I hear Americans saying this nowadays, and there’s a lot of it going around. They talk about a disfunctional government because there’s disagreement… and the Framers would have said, “Yes! That’s exactly the way we set it up. We wanted this to be power contradicting power because the main ill besetting us — as Hamilton said in The Federalist when he talked about a separate Senate: “Yes, it seems inconvenient, inasmuch as the main ill that besets us is an excess of legislation, it won’t be so bad.” This is 1787; he didn’t know what an excess of legislation was.

Unless Americans can appreciate that and learn to love the separation of powers, which means learning to love the gridlock which the Framers believed would be the main protector of minorities, [we lose] the main protection. If a bill is about to pass that really comes down hard on some minority [and] they think it’s terribly unfair, it doesn’t take much to throw a monkey wrench into this complex system. Americans should appreciate that; they should learn to love the gridlock. It’s there so the legislation that does get out is good legislation.

Let me leave you with this – of all the nations of the world, many of which concentrate power into the hands of a single party, which is better governed than the US?  And I don’t simply mean right now, as many a nation can have a good ten year run only to see it turn to ash (looking at you Ireland) but over the course of decades?

A few years ago, in 2005, there were similarly high expectations and anxieties regarding the situation in Lebanon – popular uprising forced the Syrians out for the first time in decades.  But, without the Syrians keeping a lid on things, that would let Hezbollah free to try and take over the country.  Such an event had many westerners, remembering the Beirut of the 1980′s, and Israel very worried.  But, during this period of angst, Reuel Marc Gerecht, writing in The Weekly Standard, made a very insightful point – “[Y]ou don’t get to arrive at Thomas Jefferson unless you first pass through Martin Luther.”

Much praise can be and has been given to the Muslim Renaissance, the great rediscovering of pagan knowledge and the reintroduction of philosophy and science, all of which began before the European Renaissance.  But, in Europe, it was followed by the Enlightenment, the great introspective period where science and philosophy move beyond the shadow of Rome and Greece, and into new areas of thought, and civilization moved forward into the age of Reason.  But, for all it’s advancement, this was not a peaceful time.  It was the time of the wars of religion, a period lasting centuries of nearly continuous, bloody conflict, often motivated by extreme religious fervor.  But, out of this crucible, came new ways of thinking about governance and society.  John Locke and Thomas Jefferson.

We are so far removed from this era of our civilization we take it for granted.  But, for us, it was a necessary trial, and it very well may be as well for the Muslim world.  All I know is that democracy is the first, crucial step in the right direction, and it’s inevitable.  We might not like where the road takes us, but it’s the only way forward.

But, the story isn’t one of those rare moments in history upon which the narrative changes.  Rather, the story is a warning.  The underlying culture of Sicily hasn’t changed – the Prince switched sides not to reform but to retain power.  All the people had done was chase out a old, corrupt leadership, but they kept in place the same social structures that created it in the first place.

This appears to be what has happened in Egypt.  The Army was always the power behind the throne there.  As many of the journalists covering the events have begun to realize, the fall of the dictator is not the fall of the regime.  Indeed, by siding with the people against the dictator (the dictator that they put and kept in power), they have usurped the legitimacy of the uprising.  In this case, the Army plays the role of the Sicilian Prince.

But what if these revolutions were to bring about fundamental change?  What would it look like?

First off, impressions of who is vulnerable and who isn’t.  Aged dictatorships seem to be the ones most at risk – Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya are all headed by old regimes near the end of their life, and were equally corrupt and inept.  Jordan, with a youthful, largely benign dictatorship/monarchy, weathered the storm.

Bahrain is a bit of a special case.  There, a demographic minority, the Sunni monarchy, oppresses the Shiite majority.  Not only do you have tribalism at work, but it’s also a political proxy battlefront between Shiite Iran (who, incidentally, claim the island as a province) and Sunni Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations who are very wealthy and a significant portion of the population benefits from the status quo, unsurprisingly, appear immune.

Additionally, nations that are truly ruthless, Syria and Iran, have tight enough control that they can simply wipe out opposition.

So, apart from Bahrain, what this largely appears to be is a clearing out of the old guard.  The question is, what will replace it?

Krugman is a Keynesian.  Keynesians believe that in economic downturns massive government spending  must take place to turn the economy around.  This was the prevalent school of thought in the FDR administration, and the economic policies of the 1930′s reflect that.  However, Krugman goes too far with his attempts to interpret Keynesian success from the 1940′s:

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today. They would have warned about crushing debt and runaway inflation. They would also have said, rightly, that the Depression was in large part caused by excess debt — and then have declared that it was impossible to fix this problem by issuing even more debt.

But guess what? Deficit spending created an economic boom — and the boom laid the foundation for long-run prosperity. Overall debt in the economy — public plus private — actually fell as a percentage of G.D.P., thanks to economic growth and, yes, some inflation, which reduced the real value of outstanding debts. And after the war, thanks to the improved financial position of the private sector, the economy was able to thrive without continuing deficits.

I’m no economist, nor even an economic historian, but it strikes me fairly obvious that America’s economic prosperity following WWII might have had something to do with the fact that it was the only industrialized nation that hadn’t been devastated by war.  Germany, Russia, Britain, France – all had their industrial centers ravaged, their male populations decimated.   BMW and Mitsubishi weren’t exactly in a position to challenge GM, Ford or Chrysler in 1946.  Britain didn’t end food rationing until 1954 – nine years after the war ended.

I’m sure America’s economy would see an uptick if the rest of the world’s industrial infrastructure crumbled overnight.  I don’t think we’d even need to go into public debt if it did happen to trigger the boom.  I’m just not sure how Krugman is proposing for it happen.

He now has throat cancer.  He was well known for his fondness of cigarettes and drink, and unfortunately those vices that helped to define him now appear to have caught up to him.  I hope he’ll forgive me if I wish him godspeed in recovery.

It turns out that they have been engaged in some very shady things – blocking research critical of their findings, “losing” raw data so their findings couldn’t be checked, circumventing Freedom of Information Requests.  Eventually, the head of the CRU had to step down.  Yesterday, he was questioned by the British Parliament.  The Guardian (which isn’t exactly a right-wing, global warming denier outfit) has a rather unflattering writeup.  A few quick highlights:

But for the first time he did concede publicly that when he tried to repeat the 1990 study in 2008, he came up with radically different findings. Or, as he put it, “a slightly different conclusion”. Fully 40% of warming there in the past 60 years was due to urban influences. “It’s something we need to consider,” he said.

Also:

[T]he committee will be hard pressed to ignore the issue after the intervention of no less a body than the Institute of Physics. In 13 coruscating paragraphs of written evidence to MPs, it spoke of “prima facie evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law”, “manipulation of the publication and peer review system”, and “intolerance to challenge … which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process.” Ouch.

Ouch indeed.

Of particular note over the last few years was the “Hockey Stick Graph”, which showed a rapid rise in temperatures, and is featured frequently in discussions on Global Warming.  The graph has come into some controversy, as a growing number of people question it’s accuracy.  But the unique thing about the Watts Up With That post is that it puts aside those arguments and says, “Let’s assume it’s correct for a minute.  Let’s look at it in the context of historical ice-core samples from Greenland and the Antarctic”.  The result, to my mind, is pretty damning of the hysteria surrounding Global Warming.

In it, it shows that, if one frames the graph over the last 600 years or so, you end up with a picture very similar to the Hockey Stick graph.  But, as one stretches out the view to include more time, the change in temperature becomes smaller and smaller, eventually becoming irrelevant when compared to the much larger variations that have occurred over the last half-million years.

I wanted to get some sort of confirmation of what I was seeing, and sure enough, I checked out the Wikipedia article on Ice Cores, and there was a plotting of Vostok Ice Core data the mirrored what was compiled by Watts Up With That.

In fact, one gets the impression that the whole of modern human civilization has occurred during a relatively brief warm period, and that the temperature variations we’ve seen over the last hundred or so years are insignificant compared to what happens naturally.  Perhaps we should stop worrying about how to deal with things beyond our control and focus on things that we can.  Clean, renewable sources of energy are worth-while in their own right, not because the world is going to end in the next ten years.

His basic contention is that the fundamental difference between cronically destitute nations and prosperous ones is the ability of the common people to own and leverage property.  He did a study, examining several very prosperous area, such as Hong Kong (pre-handover) and the US against places such as Egypt, to determine the number of bureaucratic steps needed to create a legal business.  In the US and Hong Kong, it was only a handful of steps – in poor nations it would frequently take over a hundred, some not legal, in order to start a small business.   De Soto’s contention is that the chief result of this inability to legally own businesses and property is that these nations have locked up a great deal of wealth that the poor would otherwise be able to leverage – it’s impossible to get a loan to expand or improve your business or property if you can’t get a loan because the bank can’t see evidence that you actually own anything.

De Soto understands how capitalism works at a very low level, and how it benefits the poor, far better than the talking heads you see on nightly news programs.  I really look forward to watching the program.