Today in the Garden

Darwinism Defined

Robert Beverly MacKenzie (1798-1868), one of Darwin's fiercest critics, had this to say about his theory:

In the theory with which we have to deal, Absolute Ignorance is the artificer; so that we may enunciate as the fundamental principle of the whole system, that, in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it. This proposition will be found, on careful examination, to express, in condensed form, the essential purport of the Theory, and to express in a few words all Mr. Darwin's meaning; who, by a strange inversion of reasoning, seems to think Absolute Ignorance fully qualified to take the place of Absolute Wisdom in all the achievements of creative skill.

Although he meant this to be a telling criticism, it is actually a pretty good description of what natural selection achieves.

A Pocket Sundial from Jamestown

A wristwatch sundial seems like a joke from the Flintstones, but sundials you could carry in your pocket really existed. One was recently found at Jamestown. It was made at Nuremberg by Hans Miller, in the early 1600s and brought to America by one of those lazy gentlemen who gave John Smith so much trouble.

The problem with using a pocket sundial is that the things only work if they are aligned exactly north-south, which is easiest to tell at night; you have to watch the sun for a couple of hours around noon to find north from the sun's position. Rather than a practical timekeeper, such a device was more like a memento mori, the human bones or depictions of death that Europeans carried to remind themselves that life was vanity and death inevitable. Elizabethan Englishmen were still part of the old civilization that related religion to astronomy and the movements of heavenly bodies, and the movement of the shadow across the sundial was a common metaphor for the passage of time and the expiration of life.

Gone with the Wind in 1939 Poland

I just started listening to a book about World War II, and it mentions that Gone with the Wind was hugely popular in Poland in 1939. The author cites several letters by Polish soldiers who compared their going off to war with the Confederates of 1861.

The Real Consequences of an Israeli Attack on Iran

Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed former Mossad chief Meir Dagan about his campaign against the notion of an Israeli air attack on Iran:

what angers him most is what he sees as a total lack of understanding on the part of the men who lead the Israeli government about what may come the day after an Israeli strike. Some senior Israeli officials have argued to me that a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities might actually trigger the eventual downfall of the regime. Dagan predicts the opposite: "Judging by the war Iran fought against Iraq, even people who supported the Shah, even the Communists, joined hands with (Ayatollah) Khomeini to fight Saddam," he said, adding, "In case of an attack, political pressure on the regime will disappear. If Israel will attack, there is no doubt in my mind that this will also provide them with the justification to go ahead and move quickly to nuclear weapons." He also predicted that the sanctions program engineered principally by President Obama may collapse as a result of an Israeli strike, which would make it easier for Iran to obtain the material necessary for it to cross the nuclear threshold.

Dagan believes that sanctions may still yet work, especially the sort of sanctions, combined with sabotage programs, that threaten the stability of the regime. If the Iranian economy is squeezed in a way that causes average citizens to rise up against their government's policies, Dagan believes that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, might be forced to shelve his nuclear ambitions. And Dagan believes the tempo of sabotage should, if anything, be increased. "Covert operations have a better impact on proliferation than an attack," he said. 

Bombing Iran would be a terrible, terrible idea, and some of the men most responsible for Israel's defense understand this.

Gavin Jantjes

Untitled, 1989-1990, by a South African artist. From the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.

A Push for Open Access Publication in Britain

A British government panel has issued a report urging that all publicly-funded research should be published on open-access journals. About time, I say; it is simply maddening that research paid for by taxpayers should end up locked away in journals that charge $10,000 a year for a subscription, and $35 to view a single article. This will cost some money, since the new, open-access journals charge contributors instead of subscribers. The report estimates the government would have to pay $80 million a year in publication fees. On the other hand, Britain's universities (all publicly owned) are currently paying $175 million for journal subscriptions, so a complete switch to the open-access model would save the taxpayers a bundle while it gave them greater access to work that they funded in the first place.

Academic journals arose as a way to spread information, and the requirement that scientists "publish" their work meant "make it available to the public." A century ago, journals were the best way to spread information. Now that we have the internet, this is no longer true, and journals now do more to prevent the spread of knowledge than to promote it. They survive because the careers of scientists and other academics are tied to their publication output. I sincerely doubt that the universities will change this system on their own. Change can only come from the governments and foundations that now fund most academic work. They should all start insisting that any research funded by the public be published where the public can have access to it for free.

I personally think the new "pay to play" journals are a sort of half-way measure. Why have formal journals at all, with their staffs and systems of peer review? I say we should just set up web sites where anyone can post research, and rely on the scientific community to call attention to the best work.

The Mad Widow of New Rochelle

Crazy, indeed. Who on earth would pay $12,000 for a husband? From the Times of Washington, DC, July 30, 1898,

UVA in Crisis, or, Who Controls State Universities?

As the crisis at the University of Virginia rumbles on, I am pondering who ought to run the university in the first place. UVA's popular president, Teresa Sullivan, was ousted by the Board of Visitors in what struck many people as a midnight coup. The faculty are up in arms in her defense, and many students are upset, too. So far as any outsider can tell, the issue was a clash of visions and personalities between Sullivan and the Rector of the Board, property developer Helen Dragas.

The complaints that news accounts attribute to Dragas -- who has herself not spoken publicly about the matter -- are that Sullivan did not have a "strategic vision" for the future of the university, and so the place was drifting along down the same wasteful path, with rising expenses, rising tuition, and no particular mission focus. It seems that Dragas has a particular interest in online education, although I am not sure why.

I am, myself, programmed to vomit whenever any business executive speaks about "strategic vision." You can tell the degree of real knowledge in any field by the prominence of short-lived fads and buzzwords, which people reflexively substitute for real information. With the possible exception of alternative medicine, no area of American life is more faddish and more ridden with short-lived jargon than business management. Ergo, there is no one in America more ignorant than business managers. I suppose it is possible that Dragas actually has some concrete issues with Sullivan's management, but you certainly can't tell that from the news accounts I have seen. From what I have read, it seems like Dragas wanted somebody with a well-tailored suit and a confident attitude to produce a Strategic Plan with a bold-sounding name (say, "Excellence: a Twenty-Year Vision"), preferably with a slick PowerPoint presentation and lots of madly optimistic budgetary projections.

But, whatever. I, as my readers know, have my own grave doubts about the drifting mission of public universities and their ever-rising costs, and in that sense I empathize with Dragas. She sees costs rising while the average student studies less and learns less, and wants to know what is UVA's plan to turn this around. UVA's President has no plan to turn this around, because UVA's problems are not her fault, nor the fault of the faculty, but a reflection of deep social and cultural changes. One of those changes is a declining respect for learning. Which, incidentally, Helen Dragas seems to personify with her management- based assault on a president who, whatever her other faults, cares about scholarship and teaching.

Universities are very hard ships to steer because they do about a million separate things, from biomedical research to providing a safe environment where 19-year-olds can learn to drink. The modern university's goal is to be all things to all people -- an engine of high-tech economic growth, a citadel of traditional learning, a salon for grooming future leaders, a refuge for unfashionable political ideas, a source, via sports, of entertainment and local pride, and a place to grow up. Each of the university's many constituencies has its own agenda, for which it will fight.

Which brings me to the question of who runs, or tries to run, this multifarious endeavor. UVA's Board of Visitors is entirely appointed by the governor, and every member is a political player who has made lots of campaign contributions. All are businessmen or lawyers. And although the governor gets to appoint the entire board, the state provides only about 10 percent of the university's operating budget (see above). If the governor wants to run the whole show, shouldn't he have to find more of the money?

I don't know what the solution is for American higher education. My personal thought is that we should act to preserve the quality of the enterprise by limiting the quantity, converting half of our colleges into two-year programs and putting more resources into those that remain. The proliferation of highly-paid administrators ought to be another easy target. (Can't one of these businessmen offer some help here? What good are business executives if they can't offer advice on firing people?) But unless Virginia wants to dramatically cut back on the various missions of its university, there is no simple solution to UVA's problems.

Rebecca Norris Webb's South Dakota

Rebecca Norris Webb grew up in South Dakota, and now she has published a book of photographs documenting her home. More at the NY Times.

War and Taxes

Senator Patrick Leahy and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta finally discuss the problem that has been bugging me for a decade, the way we launched the Iraq and Afghanistan wars while simultaneously cutting taxes.

Leahy:

What would be the impact of going to war again without committing to pay for that war with up-front taxes, something we did not do in either Iraq or Afghanistan, for the first time in the history of the country?

Panetta:

We basically ran that war [Iraq] on a credit card. Now we find people who are calling for more military action in other parts of the world; at the same time, they do not want to consider any way of paying for it. . . .  Obviously, if we repeated the mistake of not paying for the war that we decide to engage in, whatever that might be, the results would be that you would simply add more to the deficit and to the debt of this country for the future. You just put that burden on our kids for the future. All of us bear some responsibility to pay those costs if we’re willing to engage in war.

Any authorization of force against Syria or Iran ought to include a mechanism for raising taxes to pay for the war.  How many Republicans would vote for it then?

Happy Summer

Yesterday was the solstice, the longest day of the year. It always catches me by surprise that this comes so early in the summer, and sometimes it makes me sad. Years when it is 98 degrees on solstice day (37 C), like yesterday, I tend to get happy that summer will eventually end. The picture shows the view of midsummer sunrise from inside the great mound at Newgrange, Ireland.

Fossilized Turtle Sex

The latest wonderful fossil from Germany's Messel Pit is these two 47 million year old turtles, who died and were then fossilized in the act of coitus. What a way to go.

David Brooks Ponders How Young People See their Future Careers

David Brooks was puzzled by a discussion he had with elite college students about potential futures:

The student discussion was smart, civil and illuminating. But I was struck by the unspoken assumptions. Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors.

The ministry? That calling is, I think, limited to people who actually believe in the teachings of some particular church. Although most Americans believe in God only a small minority knows or cares about the details of theology, and every poll I have seen shows large majorities espousing heretical beliefs.

The military? The American military is certainly impressive in some ways, but to serve as an officer you have to wear a uniform, cut your hair to regulation, salute idiots who happen to rank above you, and obey orders even when you think they are immoral and stupid, all of which is absolute anathema to the average American 20-year-old. It was about as plausible for me as becoming a Jesuit.

There is no such career as "government service." The government hires people with particular skills to do particular things, and the good jobs in the government, from park ranger at the Grand Canyon to economist in the Treasury, are really hard to get. Plus, when most Americans think of working for the government they think of bureaucrats drowning in reams of procedural paperwork -- which, to be fair, is what many people in the government actually do. Government service has also been blackened by Brooks' Republican friends, who can't stop ranting about what a bunch of overpaid, lazy, corrupt obstacles to progress government employees are. Who, after listening to Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, could possibly think that working for the government is a good idea?

The academy? So many smart young people are already taking this route that there are not nearly enough jobs to go around.

As for the zillion other sectors he mentions, sure, but how do you get jobs in any of them? We are back to the problem I write about all the time, the disconnect between what people do in school and the jobs they will eventually hold. How do people end up in their jobs? For a few sectors, the career path is well laid out: study this, do that, get a job. Medicine, for example. Pharmacy. Or the academic world. Investment banks, as Brooks points out, have well established programs that take in smart college graduates and train them, and this is one reason people do it. For most people, though, the route from college to career is mysterious and winding and involves a lot of luck. I am one of the many people I know who blindly lucked into the first job in what became my career.

Unless Brooks has some practical advice about how to actually get a job in one of those zillion sectors, he should leave people alone.

The Elkins A Site and Route 301 Archaeology in Delaware

This small cellar was just uncovered in New Castle County, Delaware. The site, known as Elkins A, dates to between 1700 and 1780. A certain John Greenwater bought the site in 1707 and this may be part of his house.

You can read a little more about the site here. Above, a white stoneware mustard pot from the Elkins A Site, and a selection of red earthenware vessels.

I am following this because the excavation is part of the Delaware US 301 project. I worked on this project last year and will probably be working there myself from about the beginning of August until the end of the year. The project has a blog, which you can see here, and to which I will be contributing once I start digging.

Closure

Closure -- that dreaded word, flaunted by death penalty proponents and the victim's rights movement, a piece of bogus pop psychology that somehow made it into our political and legal discourse. In case you were wondering, there is no evidence whatsoever that the execution of killers, whether watched or not, helps the victims' families recover from their loss. And now comes law professor Jody Lynee Madeira with Killing McVeigh: The Death Penalty and the Myth of Closure, a serious look at the relatives of the people McVeigh murdered in Oklahoma City. When they found healing, it had nothing to do with the machinery of justice. In his Atlantic review, Andrew Cohen highlighted this passage:

One of the most spectacular participant experiences with perpetrators' family members arose out of media interview with McVeigh's father. Bud Welch [the father of bombing victim Julie Welch] was struck by a television interview with Bill McVeigh [the bomber's father] about a year after the bombing in which he was "physically stooped in grief"; Welch explained, "He had a deep pain in his eye that I recognized immediately because I was living that same pain at that same moment," Then and there, he said, "I knew that someday I needed to go tell that man that I truly cared how he felt and did not blame him or his family for what his son had done."

The two men eventually met at McVeigh's home:

One particular photo of Tim soon caught Welch's attention, and his gaze was repeatedly drawn to that image. He eventually realized that he had to say something about why he was drawn to the picture. "Finally, I just said, 'God, what a good looking kid," Welch recalled. His comment was greeted by silence; finally, Bill McVeigh looked at him and said, "That's Timothy's high school graduation picture." At that moment, Welch related, "There was this big tear that rolled out of right eye, down his cheek. And I could see at that moment that this father could cry for his son."

Reflecting back upon this meeting, Welch said: "I think what happened that Saturday morning in western New York is that I found a bigger victim of the Oklahoma City bombing than myself." While Welch has had numerous opportunities to talk about [his daughter Julie], he emphasized, "Bill doesn't have a chance to ever say anything positive about Tim."

Cohen writes:

What happened inside the kitchen of Bill McVeigh's house that September day is how and why tortured people achieve a measure of peace from the torment in their lives.

It is not revenge that heals us, but compassion.

William Trost Richards

American artist, (1833-1905). Above is Otter Cliffs, Mount Desert Island, Maine (1866) which is currently up for auction.

Wilimington Notch, Lake Placid, New York.

A Storm.

The Big Short and the Crowd Psychology of Wall Street

I have been listening to The Big Short by Michael Lewis, an interesting account of the bond market crash of 2007 that nearly crashed the world economy. Lewis considers the story from the point of view of men who made a ton of money betting that the sub-prime mortgage market would collapse in just the way it did. After all, lots of people made noises about how bad things were on Wall Street, but only a handful actually bet big money on this outcome.

What strikes me most about the book is the psychology of this bold bet against the whole direction of Wall Street. The mortgage bond market was a trillion dollar industry generating huge profits for insiders and reliable returns for investors, employing tens of thousands of people, making it possible for millions of lower-middle class Americans to own their own homes. The people who bet against this vast edifice were all very much outsiders, and they defined themselves as outsiders. The first guy to figure out that the market was a doomed ponzi scheme, and to figure out how to make money off its inevitable collapse, was a very strange, self-taught trader who had classic Aspergers and couldn't look people in the eye when he talked to them. Another was a leftist who saw himself as a crusader against capitalist excess, and had made a specialty of picking which sleazy lending firms were going to go bust and betting against them. Two were self-taught trust-fund kids who were just investing their own money, and whose biggest problem was getting banks to take them seriously. A few were self-styled bad guys, the kind of investors who name their yachts Queen Anne's Revenge and love to be seen as pirates. Only one of them was an insider who actually understood the mortgage bond market.

The bond market was set up for institutional investors, and the credit-default swaps these gamblers bought were only sold in million-dollar increments, so all the players were hedge fund managers or traders with big firms. Still, that's a good ten thousand people, and Lewis found fewer than 20 guys who bet against these bonds before the very end of the run. As they told the story to Lewis, after the collapse, they all had the same reaction to their realization that the market was insane. "This is too good to be true," they thought. "We must be missing something. This is the greatest investment opportunity in history, and how can we be the only guys who have figured that out?"

What these guys did was buy credit default swaps on bonds that were based on low-end sub-prime mortgages. The value of the bonds depended on the performance of the loans, so if too many of the borrowers defaulted, the bond would become worthless. A credit default swap is an insurance policy on a security, like one of these bonds. The buyer of the swap payed an insurance premium for as long as the security existed, and in return would be payed for any losses on the security. The bond market was based on the assumption that housing prices would keep going up forever, so that few people would default on their loans. So they priced the insurance at only 2 percent of the value of the bond each year. The investors who took this bet all thought that whatever the real risk was that the bonds would go bad, it was certainly a lot higher than 1 in 50. So they bought these insurance policies and held onto them, waiting for the bonds to fail. They knew this might take years, but they thought the chance of a huge return was worth those payments.

Making this play required these gamblers to take losses every year for an indefinite period of time, while their competitors were still making good money in stocks and bonds, in the hope that something bad would eventually happen. It was hard to watch those losses mount, month after month, hard to cling to their lonely positions while the rest of Wall Street laughed at them and called them fools. Those who had investors had to explain again and again why they were losing money in a rising market, and had to watch their customers pull money out of their funds in the midst of what they were sure was the smartest play they ever made. Only people who already thought of themselves as outsiders, and who saw their competitors as fools or crooks, could tough it out. They had an especially hard time in the spring of 2007, when the mortgages that made up the bonds started to go delinquent in record numbers, and yet the value of the bonds did not fall as it should have. Some of these investors figured out that the big banks were artificially propping up the market, and they started to wonder if they would ever be allowed to cash in their bets. Eventually, though, the losses in sub-prime mortgages got so enormous that even Goldman-Sachs and Morgan Stanley couldn't prop up the bonds any more. The whole sub-prime market unraveled, and those insurance contracts were suddenly gold. The two trust fund kids Lewis followed sold their swaps for 60 times what they paid for them and instantly become two of the richest men in America.

It is hard, very hard, to go against a culture as powerful as the one on Wall Street. Insiders in such a system find it almost impossible to get their minds outside it and see that it is based on bad logic and fraud. Only the most stubborn of eccentrics can swim against such an overwhelming current.

A Very Rare Book

The British Museum is displaying a remarkable edition of Shakespeare's complete works, which was kept by political prisoner Sonny Venkatrathnam at South Africa’s apartheid-era Robben Island jail in the 1970s. The book is signed by 33 inmates, including former South African leader Nelson Mandela, marking their favorite passage or play with a signature and date.

The passage that Mandela marked is this speech from Julius Caesar:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.

Electing Romney = War With Iran

Daniel Larison finds Mitt Romney laying out his justification for war with Iran, with or without Congressional approval:

I can assure you if I’m president, the Iranians will have no question but that I will be willing to take military action if necessary to prevent them from becoming a nuclear threat to the world. I don’t believe at this stage, therefore, if I’m president that we need to have a war powers approval or special authorization for military force. The President has that capacity now. I understand that some in the Senate for instance have written letters to the President indicating you should know that a containment strategy is unacceptable. We cannot survive a course of action would include a nuclear Iran -- we must be willing to take any and all actions. All those actions must be on the table.

As Larison says,

These are not statements that Romney’s critics are putting into his mouth. No one is speculating about what Romney’s position on Iran might be, and no one is imputing views to him that he doesn’t claim to hold. He is telling the public plainly that he believes the United States cannot survive a containment policy directed against Iran. It is fair to conclude from this that Romney is delusional (or is pretending to be delusional) and cannot be entrusted with the responsibilities of the Presidency.

The one thing George W. Bush cannot be accused of is going to war without Congressional authorization; he did that according to law. Romney's foreign policy would like Bush's but without even the restraints on force that Bush accepted. It would be perpetual war, first with Iran and Syria, but then, who knows? All of these wars would be financed by borrowing, since he has also promised to cut taxes.

I find it disturbing that this makes sense to so many Americans.

Danja Akulin

Russian artist, born 1977, educated in Berlin. His latest show is called 'Penumbra.' Most of these works are untitled, done in 2011 and 2012

An earlier work, Tree, 2008.

Night Labyrinth, Mars

Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photo of the region known as Noctis Labyrinthus. NASA is not sure what the white stuff is, but it seems to be a hydrated mineral deposit.

Four-Leafed Clovers

Two four-leafed clovers and a five-leafed clover growing together, today. Does anybody know whether five-leafed clovers are extra good luck, or a sign of the devil, or nothing? Is there any folklore about them?

Ray Bradbury, Art, and Life

Ray Bradbury died a few weeks ago at the age of 91. Margaret Atwood, a huge fan, wrote an obituary from which I discovered this remarkable tale of how life becomes art:

At the age of 12 – as he tells us on his website – he had a definitive encounter with a stage magician called Mr Electrico. This was in the age of travelling circuses and the like, and Mr Electrico had a unique act: he sat in an electrified chair, thus in turn electrifying a sword he held, with which he in turn electrified the spectators, making their hair stand on end and sparks come out of their ears. He electrified young Bradbury in this manner, while shouting, "Live Forever!" The child had to go to a funeral the next day, a close encounter with death that led him to seek out Mr Electrico once more to find out how this living forever thing was to be done. The old carney showed him around what used to be called the freak show – complete with a tattooed man who was later to morph into the Illustrated Man – and then told him that he, Ray, contained the soul of Mr Electrico's best friend, who had died in the first world war. You can see how all this would have made an impression. Right after his baptism by electricity at the hands of Mr Electrico, Bradbury started writing; nor did he stop until his own death.

Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Illustrated Man both spring in an obvious way from this experience, which you can read about here. Bradbury did not just retell the story, though, but transformed it into magical and horrific stories:

Leaving the carnival grounds that day I stood by the carousel and watched the horses go round and round to the music of "Beautiful Ohio." Standing there, the tears poured down my face, for I felt that something strange and wonderful had happened to me because of my encounter with Mr. Electrico.

Something wonderful did happen, something called art.

Escher and Star Wars

Some people have a lot of time on their hands.

Steung Meanchey by Alessandro Vannucci

The Steung Meanchey Municipal Waste Dump was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; it closed in 2009. Before it closed, photographer Alessandro Vannucci documented the lives of the 2,000 people who made their livings sorting and scavenging the trash. From Photography Served. Vannucci's web site has more of his work.

A Soldier of Waterloo

During grading for a car park near the Waterloo battlefield in Belgium, archaeologists were surprised to see a human skeleton emerge from the ground.

The musket ball in his chest and the early nineteenth-century coins in his purse show that he was a soldier in the great battle, in which 30,000 died. (That's more than twice as many as died at Gettysburg, the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War.) The site is a few hundred yards behind British lines, so the general view is that the soldier was British.

He must have been buried by his comrades, since anyone else would have taken the small pouch of coins in his pocket. He lost his head to the backhoe, but his hands and feet had already been lost when he went in the ground, which makes me wonder if he had been gnawed by dogs.

In his grave were a spoon and a small block of wood carved with the initials CB. The excavators think those were the soldier's initials, and they hope that when the spoon is conserved, it may prove to bear the symbol of his regiment.

The promotion of battlefields as tourist spots is a new thing in Europe. European history buffs have long been intensely jealous of the wonderful job the US has done preserving the battlegrounds of our Civil War; I have been told by three different Europeans that their countries have "nothing like" the battlefield parks of Gettysburg, Antietam, and Manassas. There has been a museum at Waterloo for some years now, and a tour. I guess the construction of this car park means the Belgians are gearing up for a big effort to promote the 200th anniversary of the battle in 2015.

Closing the Barn Door in New Orleans

At a cost of $14.5 billion, the system the Corps of Engineers designed to protect New Orleans from hurricanes is finally in place. Of course, Hurricane Katrina was what they call a 400-year event, that is, the city will have such a storm only once every 400 years. So in all likelihood the new flood gates will mostly rust. Meanwhile, all of southern Louisiana is eroding into the Gulf at the rate of about 30 square miles a year, because the walled-in Mississippi no longer spreads its flood waters across those wetlands to refurbish them with silt. Unless something is done to reroute the Mississippi's floods, New Orleans will be a lonely island in the ocean before its flood gates are ever tested.

Americans Want a Smaller Government that Spends More

I just love these polls. The latest from Pew shows that Americans say they want a smaller government, by 52 to 39%. And they are quite worried about the budget deficit.

But then if you ask them about all the things that the government actually spends money on:

Once again the only thing the American people want to spend less on is aid to foreigners, which is an insignificant part of the budget.

As to taxes, Americans oppose all proposals to raise taxes on themselves, whether income taxes, gas taxes, or anything else, but they do support raising income taxes on rich people. (Presumably rich people oppose this, too.)

Hraunfossar Waterfall, Iceland

By Orsolya and Erlend Haarberg. From National Geographic.