Do Antidepressants Treat Depression?

There is a growing body of evidence showing that SSRI antidepressants do very little to improve people's moods:

In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from examining only published studies--had also been achieved by a dummy pill.

The extra effect of real drugs wasn't much to celebrate, either. It amounted to 1.8 points on the 54-point scale doctors use to gauge the severity of depression, through questions about mood, sleep habits, and the like. Sleeping better counts as six points. Being less fidgety during the assessment is worth two points. In other words, the clinical significance of the 1.8 extra points from real drugs was underwhelming. Now Kirsch was certain. "The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong," he told me in January on the eve of the publication of his book The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Anti-depressant Myth.

The 2002 study ignited a furious debate, but more and more scientists were becoming convinced that Kirsch--who had won respect for research on the placebo response and who had published scores of scientific papers--was on to something. One team of researchers wondered if antidepressants were "a triumph of marketing over science." Even defenders of antidepressants agreed that the drugs have "relatively small" effects. "Many have long been unimpressed by the magnitude of the differences observed between treatments and controls," psychology researcher Steven Hollon of Vanderbilt University and colleagues wrote--"what some of our colleagues refer to as 'the dirty little secret.' " In Britain, the agency that assesses which treatments are effective enough for the government to pay for stopped recommending antidepressants as a first-line treatment, especially for mild or moderate depression.

On the other hand, there is also evidence that SSRIs have other interesting effects on the brain. Jonah Lehrer:

But just because antidepressants don't work via some silly and obsolete chemical model of depression doesn't mean the drugs don't trigger important changes in the brain. In recent years, scientists have found that the little blue pills modulate the neural pathways of plasticity, up-regulating trophic factors and neurogenesis. Because they make our mind more malleable - and help counter the the toxic effects of stress - the drugs have potential implications far beyond the treatment of depression.

People Tell Pollsters All Sorts of Things

Matt Yglesias:

Des Moines register reports: “A third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.” But how loud a chorus is this, really? 55 percent of Americans say they’re personally protected by a guardian angel. 38 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Cuba and 36 percent are favorably disposed toward socialism, but I don’t see anyone writing newspaper articles about how a populist wave of socialism is sweeping the country. The number of Iowans who like the tea party movement is smaller than the number of Americans who want marijuana legalized or the number of Americans who believe the government has had secret contact with extra-terrestrials.

Polls register largish minorities of the population as saying all kinds of things. It’s very hard to know what to make of any of those polls as snapshots without some kind of context and duration over time.

Marc Ambinder on Sarah Palin

Ambers:

Next week, Palin will be a VIP guest of honor at the Daytona International Speedway for the Daytona 500. She'll walk among the campers and RVs set up infield. This summer, she's agreed to speak at an international bowling expo. In April, in Las Vegas, Palin will keynote the Wine and Spirit Wholesalers Convention at Caesar's Palace. She will make choices in Republican primaries -- she campaigned Sunday with Rick Perry, bearing a "Hi mom!" on her palm -- more on that in a bit -- and an eloquent jab at the President: "'We will proudly cling to our guns and our religion."

It has been noted that her conservatism is resentment-based, and is fueled and nourished by the specter of elite mistreatment. (Palin is savvy enough to tease back.) But it is more than that. More than a list of grievances, Palin mixes Nixonian derision for those who think they know better with an aspirational dimension that motivates the middle class to vote. Out of the tony leagues of Washington and New York, she is -- well, an Idahoan by birth, an exurbanite mother, able to expurgate the Republican Party of its own cosmopolitan tendencies. . . .

What's most appealing about Palin to these exurbanites, I think, is that the big Elite Crucible tore her apart -- and she rose again, stood up, straightened her dress, and is now confronting her tormentors. When it was pointed out that Palin had scribbled some policy points on to her hand during the Tea Party Q and A, she was widely mocked. The next day, Palin wrote "Hi Mom!" on her palm. Palin doesn't like to be mocked, but she doesn't like to be beaten, either.

Not a single other Republican presidential candidate can build a crowd like Palin, can run against something like Palin (be it Washington, the media, the McCain campaign or Obama); no one speaks to the resentment/aspirational conservatives like she does; no one's life has better exemplified the way they perceive their struggle against the elite. We like to think about presidential primaries in paradigms, but candidates who fit with the times often find ways to completely subvert established paradigms.

I remain unconcerned about Palin. She looks strong now because the economy is terrible and that makes people hate the powers that be. But by 2012 the economy will likely be roaring back, and barring a disaster like a major terrorist attack I expect Obama to cruise to re-election.

I have doubts that Palin can even win the Republican nomination. She might have an arc like Ross Perot's, appealing for a while because she represents a real alternative, but then fading. After all, the reason we have the same kinds of candidates saying the same things year after year is that's what Americans like and vote for.

Inkheart

I just finished reading Inkheart by Cornelia Funke. This was my son Thomas' favorite book when he was 9 or 10, and I enjoyed it. It is a fantastic story set in the modern world, and it is essentially about reading and writing. The premise is that great writers can put wonderful and terrible things into books, and great readers can bring them to life. It is the first of a trilogy, but I have not yet attempted the second volume, Inkspell.

I am tempted to try the second volume in German; anyone ever try or know what Funke's German is like?

Who moved me to Buffalo when I wasn't looking?

NWS forecast as of 8:30 this morning:

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM NOON TODAY TO 7 PM EST WEDNESDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE...SNOW.

* ACCUMULATIONS...10 TO 20 INCHES.

* TIMING...MID-AFTERNOON TODAY THROUGH WEDNESDAY.

And we are nowhere near dug out from the last storm. This could be an interesting week.

On Trial for Reporting Incompetence

In Texas, one of the most disturbing trials I can remember is unfolding. Nurse Anne Mitchell is facing a felony prosecution for "misuse of official information" for writing a letter to the state medical board complaining of misconduct by Dr. Rolando Arafiles. In the letter she cited six examples of misconduct, identifying them by file number rather than patient's name. The NY Times:

Mrs. Mitchell counters that as an administrative nurse, she had a professional obligation to protect patients from what she saw as a pattern of improper prescribing and surgical procedures — including a failed skin graft that Dr. Arafiles performed in the emergency room, without surgical privileges. He also sutured a rubber tip to a patient’s crushed finger for protection, an unconventional remedy that was later flagged as inappropriate by the Texas Department of State Health Services.

And Ms. Mitchell is not the only one to have complained about Dr. Arafiles:

The hospital administrator, Stan Wiley, said in an interview that Dr. Arafiles had been reprimanded on several occasions for improprieties in writing prescriptions and performing surgery and had agreed to make changes. Mr. Wiley, who said it was difficult to recruit physicians to remote West Texas, said he knew when he hired Dr. Arafiles that he had a restriction on his license stemming from his supervision of a weight-loss clinic.

In a surprise inspection last September, state investigators found several violations by Dr. Arafiles and concluded that the hospital had discriminated against the nurses by firing them for “reporting in good faith.”

If you know anything about American medicine, you know how rare it is for a doctor to be cited for any sort of violation, so to me this record suggests this Dr. Arafiles is very bad indeed. But it seems that Dr. Arafiles has the right friends:

When the medical board notified Dr. Arafiles of the anonymous complaint, he protested to his friend, the Winkler County sheriff, that he was being harassed. The sheriff, an admiring patient who credits the doctor with saving him after a heart attack, obtained a search warrant to seize the two nurses’ work computers and found the letter.

Like any good bully, he has responded by accusing his accusers of "harassing" him:

“I’ve been brutalized and abused,” he said. “I’m the victim in this case, and that is all I can say.”

The rank injustice of this makes me sick, and it is terrible policy as well. The main obstacle to any real reform of malpractice laws in America is that, in practice, we have no other way of weeding out bad doctors. This case shows why. Nobody within the hospital will complain about bad doctors because, first, nothing serious ever happens to the doctors -- Arafiles got a "reprimand" and "agreed to make changes" -- and second, because terrible things do sometimes happen to the people who complain. Texas like most states has laws that require medical professionals to report misconduct, but look what they are doing to a brave nurse who actually did so. So incompetent doctors go on practicing until they have been sued so many times that they can't get malpractice insurance, and everybody loses.

This America, Man

On New Hampshire Avenue in Washington this morning, an East African limo driver helped an East Asian bellhop carry bags across the snow and said, "This America, man. Snow, no snow, you got to do the job just the same."

So True

Lots of Snow

And a good two more inches has fallen since these pictures were taken. It's hard to get an exact measurement because, first, there's a lot of wind so the snow is uneven, and second, whatever the total is it swallows my 2-foot carpenter's rule. I'm going to estimate 28 inches in my yard.

Still Snowing

I measure 16 inches in my front yard, and the snow is supposed to continue all day.

Ancient Vietnam

A 12th-century carving of a beast called a Gajasimha, from a show of ancient Vietnamese art at the Asia Society in New York.

They're Coming

NASA has tried to explain this obvious alien spaceship, only 100 million miles from earth, as an aberrant asteroid:

The mystery object was discovered on January 6, 2010, by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) sky survey. The object appears so unusual in ground-based telescopic images that discretionary time on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope was used to take a close-up look. The observations show a bizarre X-pattern of filamentary structures near the point-like nucleus of the object and trailing streamers of dust. This complex structure suggests the object is not a comet but instead the product of a head-on collision between two asteroids traveling five times faster than a rifle bullet. Astronomers have long thought that the asteroid belt is being ground down through collisions, but such a smashup has never before been seen.

As if. I know a Bird of Prey when I see one. And it's powering up its starboard disrupter.

Vitaliy Smyk

A Ukrainian digital artist whose work sometimes conveys raw ferocity in an impressive way.

Not so Long Ago

I have never felt emotional about the absence of dinosaurs from the world. They lived so long ago, and seem so alien.

But I occasionally get misty eyed about animals that disappeared within the past few thousand years -- in geological terms I came so close to seeing them. Just 13,000 years ago dozens of now vanished species of large mammals roamed the Americas. Imagine a world with dire wolves, cave bears, sabertoothed cats, mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths -- all gone. Pigmy mammoths survived even longer, until 5000 years ago. That marsupial ground sloth above, Parchestes azael, was another strange animal the lived long enough for people to know it well and depict it in rock art. I mourn these losses, sometimes, and I delight in thinking that we might be able to bring some of these vanished creatures back.

Article Positing Vaccine-Autism Link Withdrawn

About time:

The Lancet has retracted a 1998 study that kindled a firestorm of opposition to vaccines by suggesting that autism arose in a handful of children because they had received measles-mumps-rubella shots.

On January 28, the U.K. General Medical Council sealed the fate of the controversial study, saying its selection of participants may have been biased and that lead author Andrew Wakefield committed several breaches of ethics in his work.

The Lancet formally retracted the paper February 2. “It has become clear that several elements of the 1998 paper by Wakefield et al. are incorrect,” the journal editors wrote.

They weren’t the first to lose faith in the study. Six years ago, 10 of the 13 coauthors on the report got queasy about the findings and disowned the paper, fearing it could damage public health efforts.

Since then the Sunday Times of London has done much of the heavy lifting in bringing down the dubious research, publishing details of recruitment bias and ethics questions. The General Medical Council investigated and agreed, leading to the Lancet retraction this week.

Formally, the scientific paper no longer exists.

Unfortunately, enormous damage has already been done.

For the Record

This story is making the rounds in pro-Life circles in many versions; here is a version told by British Conservative MP Norman St. John Stevas, supposedly a conversation between two doctors:

"About the terminating of pregnancy, I want your opinion. The father was syphilitic. The mother tuberculous. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth was also tuberculous. What would you have done?"

"I would have terminated the pregnancy."

"Then you would have murdered Beethoven."

For the record, Beethoven was his parents' second child, his father was not syphilitic, and so far as we know, none of his siblings were born with severe birth defects, although four of the seven Beethoven offspring died in childhood.

How We Get Big Snow Storms

This composite satellite image shows that the storm bearing down on us is formed by the meeting a river of moisture flowing north from the Gulf of Mexico and a mass of cold, damp air flowing from the northwest. On the radar loop you can watch the moisture flowing north and then starting diffuse as it meets the cold air. At that meeting point the heaviest snow will fall, and that point is forecast to be right over Maryland all night.

Another Dinosaur in Color

Anchiornis huxleyi, which lived around 150 million years ago, its colors based on the shape on the melanin containing bodies in its feathers. Expect a flood of such studies over the next few years, as paleontologists apply this technique to every feathered fossil.

This thing really looks like a bird, doesn't it?

A Broach from the Ashes

The Irish Times:

A 1,400-YEAR-OLD brooch dating from the early Christian period has been discovered in the remnants of a turf fire in a range in north Kerry. It is believed the brooch fastened the cloak of a clergyman and was dropped, probably on a forest road which later became bog. It ended up in a sod of turf in the range of Sheila and Pat Joe Edgeworth at Martara, Ballylongford, near the Shannon estuary. . . .

Pat Joe Edgeworth told the Kerryman newspaper: “Sheila found it while cleaning the grate. ‘What in the name of God is this?’ she asked me. I said it looked like half a donkey’s mouth-bit, as they were always drawing turf out with donkeys. It was blackened from the fire, but as we looked at it closer and cleaned it up I had a good idea it was a brooch, because it was similar to the ones I had seen in books,” he said.

The New Plan for NASA

The headline from the new NASA budget was the cancellation of the plan to get back to the Moon by 2020. Good riddance, as far as I am concerned; who wants to go back to the Moon?

But as James Cameron explains, there is a lot more to the administration's plan than that:

Last year President Obama instructed the Augustine commission to report on the likely prognosis for NASA's exploration activities. After months of study, the conclusions the panel released in October were gloomy. The Constellation program, designed to put humans back on the moon by 2020, could not possibly succeed within that time frame or budgeted amount, it reported.

In response, the president and NASA have crafted a bold plan that truly makes possible this nation's dreams for space. Their plan calls for the full embrace of commercial solutions for transporting astronauts to low Earth orbit after the space shuttle is retired this year. This frees NASA to do what it does best: deep space exploration, both robotic and human. By selecting commercial solutions for transportation to the international space station, NASA is empowering American free enterprise to do what it does best: develop technology quickly and efficiently in a competitive environment. . . .

The money saved will be plowed into research and development of robotic explorers that will act as precursors and technology demonstrators, paving the way for human exploration of the moon, asteroids and Mars. Additional funding has been committed to the development of advanced propulsion technology, which can bring down the cost of spaceflight.

The idea is that the government has taken the technology of reaching low earth orbit that private companies can now take it over, and certainly a lot of entrepreneurs are eager to try. Getting to Mars, though, still requires a huge technological leap that only the government can afford, if it is even possible at all.

Waiting for the Storm

From the National Weather Service, as of 6 PM:

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 10 AM
FRIDAY TO 10 PM EST SATURDAY.

* PRECIPITATION TYPE...HEAVY SNOW.

* STORM TOTAL ACCUMULATIONS OF 18 TO 24 INCHES.

* TIMING...SNOW WILL BEGIN MID-MORNING FRIDAY...
 AND WILL CONTINUE THROUGH SATURDAY EVENING.
 CONDITIONS WILL DETERIORATE RAPIDLY FRIDAY
 AFTERNOON...WITH HEAVIEST SNOWFALL OCCURRING
 BETWEEN SUNSET FRIDAY TO SUNRISE SATURDAY.
 THE MOST HAZARDOUS WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS
 WILL OCCUR FRIDAY NIGHT.

This is going to be fun.

Meteorite Impacts are Cool

Ever since Luis Alvarez got famous for proposing that the impact of an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, a merry band of geologists has been searching the world for impact craters that would explain every other mass extinction and rapid climate change. A few years ago we got the theory that a meteorite impact in the Great Lakes area caused the Younger Dryas cold snap at the end of the last Ice Age. Now another geologist says that a meteorite impact off Australia caused the cold period of AD 536 to 545. So many impacts have been proposed that astrophysicists are starting to wonder where all these rocks could have come from:

Members of an informal association called the Holocene Impact Working Group are finding evidence for more impact events than astronomers calculate should be possible. [They] argue that several climate events during the Holocene epoch—11,500 years ago to the present—were actually triggered by impacts, and therefore such large impacts are more common than currently believed.

Physicist Mark Boslough and other experts, meanwhile, have been cataloging asteroids and other bodies that cross Earth's orbit and calculating how frequently space rocks should strike the planet.

"We have a pretty good idea about how many there are and what the frequency of impact should be, and the abundances based on [the working group's claimed crater count] are orders of magnitude greater than what astronomers observe," Boslough said.

"It's pretty hard to imagine where these things could be coming from so that astronomers wouldn't see them."

Parenthood by Choice

Heather MacDonald in the National Review:

Parental identity and responsibility for children in a homosexual family do not flow from biology; they result from choice and intent. . . . This division of genetic and parental responsibility has been present throughout human history, of course. Orphans and abandoned children are raised by non-biological adoptive parents; divorce alienates one biological parent from the child’s household and sometimes replaces that parent with another adult. But these arrangements were considered outliers to the normal practice of conceiving and raising children, forced on the parties by sad necessity.

I don't think that's right at all. Many societies have practiced fostering even when both biological parents of the child were alive. Among the Celtic nobility of ancient Ireland sons were often sent away to be raised by distant kinsmen, or by their parents' overlords. Some may have considered this a "sad necessity," but to others it was a canny move to enhance the future prospects of both the child and his family. And what about those matrilineal societies in which the biological father was considered to have only a tenuous relationship with the child?

Humans have used a remarkable variety of different family and childrearing strategies over the course of our history, so to think that gay parenting is doomed to cause some kind of awful crisis is silly.

MacDonald tries to relate gay parenting to the ongoing problems we have in the US with absent fathers:

If parental status is a matter of intent, however, not of genes, absent fathers can say: “I never intended to take on the role of that child’s parent; therefore I’m not morally bound to act as a parent.” . . . Gay child-rearing undercuts another understanding of why fathers should stay with their children: that mothers and fathers bring complementary attributes to child-rearing.

I think this is also silly. To suppose that preventing gay people from raising children will somehow bring back the whole intense structure of Victorian society, and the huge pressure it put on parents to get married and stay married, defies sense. That world is gone, swept away by our cult of freedom, and it is not coming back. I think that we need to forget about the old notion of parenthood as an obligation and emphasize the very thing that is central to gay parenthood: choice. We need to get beyond parenthood as an obligation that falls like a rock on the foolish, leading to shotgun weddings and so many awful marriages, and make it something done willingly, joyfully, by people with every intention of following through.We need better birth control, better economic opportunities for poor women, more support for poor fathers who want to participate. Above all, we need parents who are willing to do whatever it takes to have children, like the gay couples MacDonald thinks are such a threat.

The K'aba of Zoroaster

This ancient Persian monument, nearly 2500 years old, is reported to be on the verge of collapse because the ground under it is sinking. The structure was some kind of Zoroastrian religious shrine, but its exact purpose is unknown. It may have housed a complete copy of the Zoroastrian scriptures, or the perpetual sacred fire.

The group warning about the threat to the shrine is something called the Circle for Ancient Iranian Studies, based in London. They must be run by Iranian exiles, because their press release blames the whole situation on the current government, a regime "runs by mixture of opportunist-corrupts":

Islamic Republic is considered to be one of the most destructive, brutal and corrupt regimes has ever ruled over Iran. Their reign of tyranny and terror surpasses the Alexander, Arabs, and Mongols invasion of Iran . . . . Since taking over the power in Iran, the Islamic republic has begun their cultural-cleansing of the pre-Islamic Iranian heritage under the guise of the development projects. The totalitarian-theocratic regime since then has damaged and destroyed large number of major pre-Islamic cultural landmarks.

Enough with the 70-Year Budgeting

Notice anything strange about this document?

To me the weirdest thing is that it projects government revenues and expenditures out to 2082. Think about that. Do you have any idea what the world will be like in 2082?

I don't. Maybe we will be living in a paradise of nearly free fusion power, bioengineered bacteria that can make anything in vats, and vastly extended lifespans. Or maybe civilization will have been destroyed by terrorists using genetically engineered bacteria weaponized in microcapsule aerosol sprays. But one thing I am quite certain of is that any projection we make now about the Federal budget in 2082 is going to be very wrong.

Let's concentrate on putting our house in order over the next 5 years and let 2082 take care of itself.

Gay Soldiers

Admiral Mike Mullen, on Twitter:

Stand by what I said: Allowing homosexuals to serve openly is the right thing to do. Comes down to integrity.

Three things. First: the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is on twitter?

Second: That a careerist military boss like Mullen can be so strongly in favor of openly gay servicemen shows how much things have changed in America.

Third: This is a good illustration of Obama's approach to government. He has spent the past year working very closely with the military brass to develop new approaches to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has solicited their advice on weapons programs, he has gone out of his way to avoid conflict with them. And now, instead of ordering them to ignore the law on gay soldiers, as his liberal critics think he should, he is working with them to enlist as many supporters as possible for a gradual lifting of the ban. If he succeeds, he will put the issue to rest forever, and the support of the generals will give a great deal of political protection against Republican attacks. Of course, he might fail. But until he does, I think we should let him try this his way.

North Korea just Keeps Getting Creepier

Christopher Hitchens reviews a new book by B.R. Myers, The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why it Matters:

The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia.

This causes Hitchens to rethink the importance of what he saw at the time as a minor incident during his own North Korean travels:

One evening, as we tried to dine on some gristly bits of duck, [his minder] mentioned yet another reason why the day should not long be postponed when the whole peninsula was united under the beaming rule of the Dear Leader. The people of South Korea, he pointed out, were becoming mongrelized. They wedded foreigners—even black American soldiers, or so he'd heard to his evident disgust—and were losing their purity and distinction.

North Korea questions every optimistic thought we have about humanity. It really is possible to brainwash a whole nation into believing that they are a privileged people, when really they are slaves. Complete ignorance, leavened with racism, hatred of every outsider, gung-ho militarism, and worship of the Dear Leader, can make people compliant under conditions of mass famine.

Spirit's Final Home

NASA just released this picture from the Spirit rover, which has lost two wheels and is now hopelessly mired in deep sand. The rover is still transmitting and will continue to serve as a stationary observation post, sending back data on the Martian weather and other matters, but its roving days are over. Here in this sand pit it will rest until some far future explorers show up to retrieve its carcass. It roved Mars for six years, which is not bad considering that its original mission was only scheduled to last 90 days.

Those Restless Migrants

Consider John and Anna Steif, both born in Hesse, Germany, around 1818. In 1860 they were living on a small farm in Prince William County, Virginia. John listed his profession as cooper. They had two daughters. Sabenia, seven years old, was born in Missouri, while four-year-old Clara was born in Kansas Territory. In 1872 they sold their Prince William County land and disappeared from the Virginia records, no doubt gone to some other distant place.

Why Do We Take this Man Seriously?

The Washington Post chose to grant Henry Kissinger more space on its Op-Ed page today, this time to complain that Obama is ignoring Iraq. Iraq, he says, is a "strategic linchpin," and he says a lot about why it is important. He doesn't, though, say anything constructive about how our policies there ought to be different.

I am baffled. Here is a man who has been wrong in almost every public stand he has ever taken, yet he still commands attention. What's more, the reason he is wrong all the time is that his whole view of the world is dark and twisted. Think back to his days as Nixon's henchman: Kissinger's position was that totalitarian states have a great advantage in the conflict between nations, so to compete with the Soviets we had to become more like them. Conservatives in particular ought to be ashamed of this, since it was their own standard-bearer, Reagan, who most forcefully articulated the idea that the way to fight totalitarianism was to make our own country more free. Somehow Kissinger's reputation survived the collapse of the Soviet Union he so feared and admired. In 1989 Kissinger managed to insert himself into the negotiations over the reunification of Germany. His initial position was that reunification of Germany within NATO was too radical and too much to ask of the Soviets, so we ought to accept some lesser compromise. Fortunately for the world, the elder Bush ignored him and insisted on the full reunification that eventually took place. Then in 2002 Kissinger was back, this time endorsing Bush's planned invasion of Iraq and talking up how important it was for the future of the Middle East. With a record like that, why does the man keep getting speaking gigs?