Refugees and Mermaids

Fascinating article by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura in the Times about Ahmad Walid Rashidi, a refugee from Afghanistan who grew up in Europe. Although he hates the Taliban for what they did to him and his family, when he went to Syria he felt the appeal of the Islamic State:

“They are like, what do you call them? Mermaids,” he said recently, sitting in a restaurant here in Aarhus, where he lives. “They just sing, day to day, and I listen, you know.”

Although the Islamic State jailed and tortured him, he came eventually to bond with his captors, and he says, "I left half my heart in Syria."

A glimpe into the minds of children of violence:

“I was not afraid of death,” Mr. Rashidi said. As a child, he believed that death happened only to good people, those deemed worthy enough by God to be rescued from a living hell, like his father and brother. “I had nothing to lose.”

The Perils of Spycraft

In 1777, George Washington briefly employed Nathaniel Sackett of Orange County, New York as his spymaster. Sackett was recommended by Congressman William Duer as "a person of intrigue and secrecy" and for a few months Washington seems to have thought highly of him. But then Sackett launched a scheme that failed in spectacular fashion, and Washington quietly dismissed him. Washington never said what the scheme was or how it had gone wrong, and for years neither did Sackett. Then in 1789 Sackett wrote to Washington asking for help in procuring a government job, and he explained that

I had gone through all those dangers that awaited me in getting a regular plan laid, and was beginning to carry it on with every appearance of success, but the Jersey man fell in love with his horse, the doctor narrowly escaped with his life, and the whole scheme was frustrated.

And that is all that was ever said about the matter.

From Alexander Rose, Washington's Spies (2006)

The Weird Logic of Bringing on the Apocalypse

When you believe the end of the world will be a great thing, it's hard to keep straight what is good and what is bad. Consider these words from former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who can't decide whether to attack President Barack Obama or praise him for "bringing the world to end times":

We need to cry out to a Holy God. This is coming faster than anyone can see.. . . Barack Obama is intent, it is his number one goal, to ensure that Iran has a nuclear weapon. Why? Why would you put the nuclear weapon in the hands of madmen who are Islamic radicals? . . . We get to be living in the most exciting time in history. Christians should rejoice. Jesus Christ is coming back. We, in our lifetimes potentially, could see Jesus Christ returning to Earth, the Rapture of the Church. . . . These are wonderful times.

I thought I was a liberal about Iran, but not even I would describe an Iranian bomb as "wonderful times."

Altamura Man

This Neanderthal skull was found in Altamura Cave, Spain, back in 1993. It is 130,000 to 170,000 years old. It is in the news again this week because some DNA was extracted from its shoulder blade.

Take Your Child to Work Today, 2015

My company has a big to-do for Take Your Child to Work Day, six hours of workshops and speakers plus a catered lunch. I have spoken to the kids a couple of times about archaeology, but because it is so organized and determinedly educational I never thought my older kids would enjoy it. But Clara likes organized activities, so this year I brought her. Above, arrival in Washington in front of the sadly scaffolding-covered Capitol dome.

Clowning in my office before the events began. We came in on the train, which was packed, lots of people standing. This was partly because it is Thursday, always the busiest commuting day, but partly because there were several other kids being brought down to Washington by their parents. I would guess 20 to 40, since we could see three others from our seat. We saw others on the Metro, and our lunch pizza was an hour late because so many offices in Washington ordered pizza for the kids who came to work.

Parent-child selfie. I tried to take some pictures of the activities, but they are all dim and blurry. Anyway, it was a good day.

One of the other people who spoke to the kids was an architect I have worked with on a couple of projects. He told them something I thought was very interesting: the most important thing to remember about a design, he said, is that it does not exist. It is something entirely imaginary. Fascinating that after 35 years as an architect he chose that point to emphasize in explaining what he does to 10-year-olds.

Negative Polarization

Jonathan Chait:

Emory political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster have a new paper, not yet available online, exploring the nature of the new polarization. The paper is filled with interesting findings, but the major one is an attempt to resolve a paradox. Measured by self-identification, partisanship is actually declining — growing numbers of Americans describe themselves as “independent” rather than loyal to one of the parties. But measured by actual voting behavior, the opposite is happening: Straight ticket voting continues to grow. This matches what operatives like Dan Pfeiffer have seen, and what Karl Rove saw a decade before — the swing voter had nearly vanished.

One common explanation is that it has become increasingly vogue, especially among college-educated voters, to describe yourself as independent, which implies that you form educated judgments about politics rather than blindly following the dictates of a party. Abramowitz and Webster add to this by introducing a phenomenon they call negative partisanship. That is to say, voters form strong loyalties based more on loathing for the opposing party than on the old kind of tribal loyalty (“My daddy was a Democrat, his daddy was a Democrat …”) that used to prevail. The party system has split along racial, cultural, and religious lines, creating a kind of tribal system where each party’s supporters regard the other side with incomprehension and loathing.

This discussion finds me on all-too-familiar ground. On the one hand I don't like this kind of deep polarization, and I don't like it when people vote against something rather than for something, but on the other this research describes me with disturbing fidelity. In the current climate is almost inconceivable that I could support a Republican for any national office, regardless of how much I preferred him or her as a person to the Democratic alternative -- I have become a Blue Dog Democrat. And this isn't because I have a very positive view of the Democratic Party, because I don't. It is because I regard the Republican Party with incomprehension and loathing.

I have enough knowledge of political history to understand that in the grand scheme of things the differences between Republicans and Democrats in America are not very big, and that a Republican sweep would hardly be a major disaster for the nation. But I believe it would be a bad thing, bad enough that in any national race I would rather vote for a corrupt Democratic mediocrity than a smart, hard-working Republican. I don't like it, but there it is.

25 Years of the Hubble Space Telescope

Hubble lifted off on April 24, 1989. Over the past 25 years, has anything else added so much beauty and wonder to the world? Star V838 Monocerotis.

Sombrero Galaxy.

Ultra deep field, one of the most mind-blowing of all images. Except for the single star down and right from the center, everything you see is a galaxy.

Ring Nebula.

Galaxy NGC 1300.

Two interacting galaxies known as the Mice.

Cat's Eye Nebula.

Dying Star HD 44179, the Red Rectangle.

Galaxy ESO 243-49.

Galaxy M 100.

The Butterfly Nebula.

The Cartwheel Galaxy.

The Scandal of Forensic "Evidence" Goes On

The Washington Post reports:

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison. . . .

Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, commended the FBI and department for the collaboration but said, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”

That this crap was admitted to American courtrooms as "science" disgusts me. And the FBI crime lab had the reputation of being the nation's most rigorous; Connor Friedersdorf has a round-up of some of the recent scandals in state-run labs, including:

In St. Paul, Minnesota, an independent review of the crime lab found "major errors in almost every area of the lab's work, including the fingerprint and crime scene evidence processing that has continued after the lab's drug testing was stopped in July. The failures include sloppy documentation, dirty equipment, faulty techniques and ignorance of basic scientific procedures ... Lab employees even used Wikipedia as a 'technical reference' in at least one drug case ... The lab lacked any clean area designated for the review and collection of DNA evidence. The lab stored crime-scene photos on a computer that anyone could access without a password.

and

In North Carolina, "agents withheld exculpatory evidence or distorted evidence in more than 230 cases over a 16-year period. Three of those cases resulted in execution. There was widespread lying, corruption, and pressure from prosecutors and other law-enforcement officials on crime lab analysts to produce results that would help secure convictions. And the pressure worked."

I don't know why anyone would single out the citing of Wikipedia as a problem; given what we know about crime labs, it is probably much more reliable than anything else the lab technicians rely on.

Radical reform is needed to solve this problem on both the institutional and technical sides. The basic institutional problem is that crime labs usually work for prosecutors, and prosecutors can and do pressure them to help get convictions, rather than find the truth. The labs must be made independent. The technical problem is that the labs are never subjected to double-blind testing; until they are, we have no way of knowing what their accuracy rate really is. Attempts at reform usually focus on "better training" of technicians and more rigorous procedures, but those are bunk. As the Post notes, when state and local labs want experts to train their people they look to the FBI, so the people whose work for the FBI is now being thrown out en masse have in the past trained more than 500 techs at other labs.

Violets

I transferred some violets into my front yard six or seven years ago, and every year there are more of them. Wonderful picture by my elder daughter.

Secret Files of the Islamic State

Der Spiegel has a fascinating article by Christoph Reuter on cache of documents supposed to have been captured in northern Syria. The documents were the files of Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, aka Haji Bakr, who was once a colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein's air defense force. The documents lay out the structure for an organization that would seize control of Iraq using a mix of fanatical Islam and police state methods. According to Reuter, after al-Khifawi settled in the Syrian town of Tal Rifaat in 2012 and began planning seriously planning for his return to power in Iraq:

It was there that the "Lord of the Shadows," as some called him, sketched out the structure of the Islamic State, all the way down to the local level, compiled lists relating to the gradual infiltration of villages and determined who would oversee whom. Using a ballpoint pen, he drew the chains of command in the security apparatus on stationery. Though presumably a coincidence, the stationery was from the Syrian Defense Ministry and bore the letterhead of the department in charge of accommodations and furniture.

What Bakr put on paper, page by page, with carefully outlined boxes for individual responsibilities, was nothing less than a blueprint for a takeover. It was not a manifesto of faith, but a technically precise plan for an "Islamic Intelligence State" -- a caliphate run by an organization that resembled East Germany's notorious Stasi domestic intelligence agency.

Al-Khlifawi was killed in January, 2014, but his scheme continues to unfold.

This makes a fascinating companion to Graeme Wood's piece in the Atlantic on the fanatical religiosity of the Islamic State's rank and file. If Reuter is right, the Islamic State is not at a religious construction at its heart, but a totalitarian police state with a religious veneer.

Whatever the mix of religious and secular motives in its founding, by combining fanatical Islam with Saddam Hussein's police methods the Islamic State has truly created the worst of all possible worlds.

Today in Dupont Circle

Spring blooms on in the nation's capital. This mix of tulips is very popular this year.

My favorite redbud tree.

Ornamental cherries.

And one of the neighborhood's oddities, the Great Grape Vine.

Gay Marriage and Miscegenation

Noah Millman has a brilliant take on why gay marriage is a big deal for many American Christians, and how the issue resembles the fight over interracial marriage. After reviewing the rapid progress of Civil Rights in America from 1954 to 1971, he writes:

Considering the depth and longevity of official white supremacy in American history, we broke with the past with what one might call “all deliberate speed,” and moved quickly to moral condemnation even though huge numbers of people stubbornly refused to change their no-longer-respectable views.

Now, I’m not arguing that the analogy is a good one in all respects. In particular, the social and legal disabilities that gay people and black people suffered under in American history are wildly disparate in their operation and effects. I’m just saying that the end of legal and social support for miscegenation in America was radical. It didn’t radically redefine what marriage was – but it radically redefined what the United States was. It made it impossible to argue that the United States was a country by and for white people, and arguing that the United States was precisely such a country had a long, long history in America.

Gay marriage, he says, is also a question about the sort of country we live in:

I am suspicious of claims that gay marriage radically redefines marriage as such. It seems to me instead that it’s a capstone achievement of the “Romeo and Juliet revolution” that treats marriage as rooted in love, and that sees its legal purpose as an institution for mutual aid and responsibility between individuals (particularly for child-rearing), rather than as a means of securing legitimacy for heirs and the continuity of extended family lines – and, not at all incidentally, of the feminist revolution that questions any distinction between “natural” male and female roles as likely to be a way of enforcing an inegalitarian distribution of power.

But gay marriage may, in fact, make it extremely difficult for traditional Christians to continue to think of the United States as a Christian country. Which, notwithstanding that equality for non-Christian citizens goes all the way back to the founding, we have a long, long history of thinking of this country as being. That, I think, is where the radicalism of gay marriage really lies, for America’s many conservative Christians. And if I’m right, then the potency of the analogy with miscegenation may not be so weak after all.

Deimel+Wittmar

German photography studio specializing in architecture. Lots more at their web site.

Conservatives, Liberals, and Capitalists

There are not two great political factions in the modern world, but three. Here is a summary of what Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noche said on the subject back in 1970:

Del Noce argues that while the Left in Europe had largely failed at the level of politics, it had won at the level of values. The still greater victory, however, was won by what he calls the “technocratic right,” because “it has been able to completely turn the culture of the left into its own tool.”

Thus, the cultural revolution of the 60s, which began as a rebellion against bourgeois values (mistakenly considered “traditional”) was captured and then used by the very thing it was rebelling against. Transfer this to our place and time, and we observe that the same thing has happened here, that American corporatism, our “technocratic right,” has, in effect, harnessed the Sexual Revolution for its own purposes.

Del Noce says, “Because of the culture that inspires it, the technocratic right is mortally opposed to traditional thought…” and “the alliance between technocratic right and cultural left is there for everyone to see.”

In certain ways capitalism is naturally allied with conservatism: an emphasis on stolid bourgeois hard work and personal responsibility, a ready acceptance of great inequalities in wealth, a belief that the little people should keep their noses to the grindstone and not challenge their betters. But in other ways capitalism and conservatism are natural enemies. Capitalism is all about changing the world, not keeping it the way it was. In a capitalist society money acts as a solvent dissolving bonds of neighborhood, ethnicity, class, and profession, ramping up individualism. Advertising is at the heart of contemporary capitalism, and advertising is all about being cool and up-to-date, dancing past the old fogeys to music they can't understand. Rod Dreher, the Christian conservative from whose blog I got the passage on Del Noche, titled his post “Enemies of Tradition, Left and Right.”

My grand vision for a more liberal America involves liberals allying with capitalists on social issues like gay marriage, and then with conservatives to fight corporate power, pollution, and the destruction of lovely old neighborhoods. But American politics have gotten so firmly organized into Left and Right, with people defining their whole identities as conservative or liberal, that capitalists and conservatives have been forced to paper over their differences and pretend to always agree, blocking many potential alliances with liberals that would suit their interests better.

Droughts, Good and Bad

The latest from the study of climate change and Maya history:

Paleoclimate records indicate a series of severe droughts was associated with societal collapse of the Classic Maya during the Terminal Classic period (∼800–950 C.E.). Evidence for drought largely derives from the drier, less populated northern Maya Lowlands but does not explain more pronounced and earlier societal disruption in the relatively humid southern Maya Lowlands. Here we apply hydrogen and carbon isotope compositions of plant wax lipids in two lake sediment cores to assess changes in water availability and land use in both the northern and southern Maya lowlands. We show that relatively more intense drying occurred in the southern lowlands than in the northern lowlands during the Terminal Classic period, consistent with earlier and more persistent societal decline in the south. 

So, according to this study, there was a severe drought that coincides with the collapse of the great Maya city states. This drought was also worse in the south than the north, helping to explain why Maya civilization continued in the north. But wait:

Our results also indicate a period of substantial drying in the southern Maya Lowlands from ∼200 C.E. to 500 C.E., during the Terminal Preclassic and Early Classic periods. Plant wax carbon isotope records indicate a decline in C4 plants in both lake catchments during the Early Classic period, interpreted to reflect a shift from extensive agriculture to intensive, water-conservative maize cultivation that was motivated by a drying climate. Our results imply that agricultural adaptations developed in response to earlier droughts were initially successful, but failed under the more severe droughts of the Terminal Classic period.

So an earlier drought was, they think, responsible for the adoption of the famous intensive agriculture that made possible the rise of the great Maya cities in the first place.

There is nothing logically impossible about this scenario; a mild drought might have inspired creativity that still could not cope with a much worse drought. But this reminds us of how complex the relationship is between climate and human civilization.

Cities Don't Just Happen

James Fallows has been investigating older cities that have made big comebacks, places like Seattle and Oakland that have been transformed from declining wastelands into the hippest places to be. What he finds is that this doesn't just happen; it happens because big groups of people, led by city halls, make it happen:

It's tempting, if you haven't seen the varied stages of this process, to imagine that some cities just "naturally" have attractive and successful downtowns, and others just don't happen to. It's like happening to be located on a river, or not.

But in every city we've visited with a good downtown, we've heard accounts of the long, deliberate process that led to today's result. The standard discussion will go: "See this restaurant [bar / theater / condo / Apple store with surrounding retail outlets]? Ten years ago, you wouldn't have [dreamed of coming here at night / seen anyone but crack addicts / been able to rent a condo, or wanted to]." We've heard variations of this account so often we now feel a little let down if we don't get the "this used to be a crack house" speech when visiting a nice hotel or downtown tech-company headquarters.

I recently worked in Patterson Park, Baltimore, which was transformed from a violent drug market to a wonderful place for everyone by the efforts of a network of private and public groups.

This doesn't always work -- consider Detroit, East St. Louis, or, a very different place, Tampa, where the downtown remains largely desolate despite 50 years of efforts to bring it back. But when it does work it works because people come together to make it happen. Alone, there is nothing you can do to save your city. Working together with enough other people, you can -- but only if you have city and state government on your side. Every city that has been transformed like Seattle or Washington, DC has had an activist government determined to make change happen.

This gets at the heart of my politics. In a libertarian world, common spaces become sumps for society's dregs, and people protect themselves by moving to gated neighborhoods with private police forces. A world with great public goods -- parks, libraries, subways, vibrant downtowns, health care for the homeless -- is only possible through collective action. The most important sort of collection action is government. Conservatives often suggest that public and private action are opposing forces, and that if we got government out of the way more private groups would step forward to take action. Experience shows that this is bunk. In all these cases and many others, government has been a crucial player in efforts to bring cities back, working hand in hand with private groups; the reality is that the more city governments do, the more private help they attract. The Friends of Patterson Park is a private group but its work in the park is partially funded by the city and the city provides its office space. It is these private-public synergies that really help cities improve.

Only a big, expensive, intrusive government can do the things necessary to protect and promote public goods. And it is public goods that make cities, towns and countries worth living in.

The Three Iron Laws of Social Science

1. Sometimes it's this way, and sometimes it's that way.

2. The data are insufficient.

3. The methodology is flawed.

From Merle Kling

Choice

Nice little essay by Cass Sunstein on the issues surrounding the freedom to choose:

In countless contexts, the government, or some private institution, must decide among three possible approaches: Give people the opportunity to opt in; give people the opportunity to opt out; or require people to make some kind of active choice. For example, an employer may say that employees will be enrolled in a pension plan only if they opt in. Alternatively, it may automatically enroll employees in a pension plan (while allowing them the opportunity to opt out). Or it may instead tell employees that they can’t start work unless they say whether they want to participate in a pension plan.

As one of the legions of people suffering from "decision fatigue," I am a great fan of opt-out clauses. Please, let the thing that will probably be best for me happen without my being involved at all:

Much of the time, sensible people choose not to choose.

Sultans of Deccan India, 1500–1700: Opulence and Fantasy

Spectacular exhibit at the Met. This is a stone standard, c. 1600.

Jahangir Shoots Malik Ambar, Painting by Abu'l Hasan, ca. 1616. Looks to me like Jahangir's enemy's head was brought to him after his men killed the poor fool, so the emperor could shoot the severed head himself.

Brass ewer with dragons' heads, 1600-1650.

Shah Jehan Diamond, 56 carats.

Parrot in a Mango Tree, with a Ram below, 1630-1700.

Dagger, 1650-1700,

Huqqa base, zinc alloy and brass, 17th century.

Book cover,c. 1700.

Pendant with diamonds, rubies and emeralds, 1600 to 1650.

Religious Belief and Other Beliefs

T.M. Luhrmann lays out some of the research that shows people hold religious beliefs in a different way than they hold factual beliefs about the physical world:

A broad group of scholars is beginning to demonstrate that religious belief and factual belief are indeed different kinds of mental creatures. People process evidence differently when they think with a factual mind-set rather than with a religious mind-set. Even what they count as evidence is different. And they are motivated differently, based on what they conclude. . . .

We evaluate factual beliefs often with perceptual evidence. If I believe that the dog is in the study but I find her in the kitchen, I change my belief. We evaluate religious beliefs more with our sense of destiny, purpose and the way we think the world should be.

I have often thought about this with regard to evolution. Natural selection is the view of biology you end up with if you reason with the same parts of your brain you use for fixing the plumbing. Nobody can seriously dispute that evolution happens using their rational brain centers. The dispute is really over whether that is the right way to think about human origins; fundamentalists believe that rationality is simply not the right way to approach a question that they regard as divine, so rational arguments have no effect on them.

And, really, whether people believe in evolution is not all that important to how life goes on in our century. The great danger is that people can move all sorts of beliefs to the sacred modules of the brain, where they become impenetrable to factual refutation. We are seeing this happen all around us with regard to climate change. (On both sides, I would say -- the evidence for anthropogenic climate change is good but far from perfect, and I am just as suspicious of predictions of this or that climate catastrophe as I am of outright denial.) Certain cranky conservatives seem convinced that paper money is some kind of scam, and that the economic policies of the Fed are criminal acts. Even bits of mundane politics like tax rates or health insurance exchanges can be turned into Beliefs, people holding views that have nothing to do with what is actually happening in the world. When that happens, any notion of politics as a conversation breaks down, and we are left shouting at each other, and counting votes.

Inbreeding Dooms the Wolves of Isle Royale

Sad news from Isle Royale in Lake Superior, where this winter's census revealed only three surviving wolves:

The three wolves included a pair, probably the last ​known to have reproduced, plus a notably smaller wolf that might be their pup. The other wolves are presumed to have either died or left the island last year, in a reverse of how carnivores originally came to Isle Royale, when a bitter winter completely froze the channel to the mainland. . . .

The wolves on Isle Royale, which once numbered as many as 50, have been mostly isolated for generations, and the population has been overrun with spinal defects likely as a result of the inbreeding. This winter’s small wolf also displayed an abnormally short tail with raccoonlike stripes and a hunched back—possibly dramatic new effects from the lack of genetic diversity. “It [didn’t] look particularly healthy” in February, Vucetich says, and may be dead by now. He and Peterson collected frozen wolf scat and vomit for DNA analyses to identify the trio.

At least one wolf, a mature male, has been found dead; the others may have died or perhaps left the island across the ice, which froze solid to the mainland this winter. Without wolves the park managers are going to have to start shooting moose; the moose population has been rising 22% per year in the three years since the wolf population first started to collapse.

The interaction between wolves and moose on Isle Royale has been studied intensely for 57 years now, the longest-running study of predators and prey. But not much longer.

The War on Drugs and the Presidential Campaign

Back when Ron Paul was running for President, he was often a lonely voice calling for sentencing reform and a truce in the war on drugs. Now those ideas have gone mainstream and his son Rand is having trouble distinguishing himself from other candidates on the issue. Consider this account of Ted Cruz campaigning in New Hampshire, courting libertarian voters who might be expected to go for Paul:

Afterward, Bloomberg asked Cruz if, as president, he would continue the war on drugs. It was a question Paul could answer with a quick no. Yet Cruz, while not saying whether the war on drugs had been a failure or success, emphasized that he wanted the same sort of legal reform that Paul wanted. He had co-sponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act (though not Paul's other bills) and agreed with him that the justice system had become slanted against one group of Americans.

“I think there are a great many people serving sentences right now that are unfair, and that are frankly taking up prison space and prison facilities that should have been taken up by violent criminals,” said Cruz. “I don't think it makes sense for so many young people, particularly young African-Americans, to serve long prison sentences for non-violent crime.”

Wasn't that heart-warming? And it makes me think again that pundits writing off Cruz may be making a mistake.

Death Panels are Back

In New Hampshire, Jeb Bush was asked about his handling of the Terry Schiavo case. After defending his indefensible involvement, he said this:

However, Mr. Bush said, “In hindsight, the one thing that I would have loved to have seen was an advance directive where the family would have sorted this out” before courts became involved. “I think if we’re going to mandate anything from government, it might be that if you’re going to take Medicare, you also sign up for an advance directive where you talk about this before you’re so disabled,” Mr. Bush said.

The original Obama administration proposal that sparked Sarah Palin's “death panels” comment simply allowed Medicare to pay for end-of-life consultations; the plan that Bush tossed off would require such consultations. I guess now we'll find out if the issue has lost any of its emotional charge in the five years since Palin won Politifact's Lie of the Year award. Will Rick Santorum or Herman Cain step forward to attack Bush on the issue? Would it work?

Peter Hone: Neoclassicism

Plaster casts by British artisan Peter Hone, on display in his apartment and Ben Pentreath's shop. Of his work, he says "I've indulged my whims."