And it might even be true…

Milk tainted with melamine, a compound banned in food, has killed three other babies, two in China’s northwestern Gansu province and one in eastern Zhejiang. The health scare erupted after Sanlu Group last week revealed it had produced and sold melamine-laced milk, and a subsequent probe found a fifth of 109 Chinese dairy producers were selling products adulterated with the substance. [Emphasis mine] At the latest count, 6,244 children have become ill with kidney stones after drinking powdered milk laced with melamine, with three deaths and 158 suffering “acute kidney failure.”

Reading this reminded me of a Chinese academic and America expert I met over dinner last spring in Beijing while I was traveling with a delegation sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (the good people who brought you “ping-pong diplomacy”). Her current topic of study? America’s muckrakers like Upton Sinclair and Ida Tarbell, and incidents such as these, which led to our modern regulatory institutions.

No one had to spell out the obvious parallels to China’s current situation. That very morning, the New York Times had reported on a mass demonstration against a planned petrochemical plant near Chengdu, a project which had been approved by the central government’s National Development and Reform Commission. Such demonstrations seem to be generally tolerated, so long as the protesters don’t directly challenge the central government’s authority or legitimacy, as these protesters took pains to do:

“We’re not dissidents,” said Wen Di, an independent blogger and former journalist living in Chengdu. “We’re just people who care about our homeland. What we’re saying is that if you want to have this project, you need to follow certain procedures: for example, a public hearing and independent environmental assessment.”

Of course, there’s one big difference between China today and the U.S. in the first half of the last century: For all its imperfections, America had a democratic system of government which was better suited structurally for responding to scandals like these in a productive way.

I can face the idea of a president Obama taking on and finally defeating Osama. In fact, that’s the major reason why I favor his candidacy… . Obama will try to correct the massive stretegic error of the Iraq invasion and pivot Western allies toward a greater focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan. I believe that Obama will be able to do this with much less global p.r. blowback than McCain and that the support president Obama will get from our European allies will dwarf McCain’s.

First of all, I should point out that I, too, would welcome a President Obama “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” For what it’s worth, I could face a Honeydew-Beaker Administration “taking on and finally defeating Osama.” (Hey, I wouldn’t even mind if it happened in the next 3-4 months, under Bush, but I get the feeling that happenstance might upset someone…)

What I really wanted to draw attention to is Sullivan’s assumption that Obama will be able to formally and officially expand the Afghanistan problem into an Afghanistan-Pakistan problem with “much less global p.r. blowback than McCain.” Au contraire. I expect there will be more blowback against Obama.

Right now, he can ride high on a wave of global public support, but those thronging masses in Berlin and elsewhere are supporting him because they expect something in return: a massive rupture with Bush-era foreign policy. Since this is inchoate mob opinion we’re talking about here, it wouldn’t do to overanalyze it; basically they want more talk, fewer bombs, and they think he’s the one who’s going to give that to them. Americans, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take him at his word on his promises to get tough with Pakistan (though they still favor McCain on national security issues).

Something tells me that, if it comes to a choice between upsetting Americans’ expectations, and upsetting the world’s, the President of the United States is going to side with…well, the United States. And this is going to cut across a number of issues besides Afghanistan/Pakistan, as Slate pointed out awhile back:

If his diplomats or military advisers told him that the Iranians perceived his willingness to talk as a sign of weakness, he might reconsider his pledge to meet with the Iranian president as quickly as he now promises. Maybe when presented with confidential data gathered by eavesdropping on U.S. citizens, he would be less keen to drop all the measures taken by Bush and criticized by the opposition. Maybe his belief that “the United States needs to lead the world in ending this genocide” in Darfur would put him at odds with reality or with some members of the international community. In each of these cases, Obama would suffer the consequences of high expectations. He would be trapped between the desire to preserve his high standing in the world and the need to act in ways that would erode that standing. Of course—his advisers would argue—it is better to have this political goodwill in the first place. But even if that were true, political goodwill should always be handled delicately. Starting modestly and building up is also an option, sometimes a better one if you aim to keep expectations realistic. (This, I think, is the way John McCain would play his cards internationally.)

It’s undeniable that the “get tough on Pakistan” rhetoric is good for Obama’s short-term political interests. The world simply isn’t listening as closely to the candidates’ statements as are Americans, so it’s easier for them to bask in the unadulterated glow of St. Barack. But if Obama wins in November, he may soon come to realize that hell hath no fury like a Berliner scorned.

[T]he empirical evidence is that the universe has been running trillions of these high-energy physics “experiments” for billions of years without disastrous results. In fact, Ord’s colleagues Nick Bostrom and Max Tegmark from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculate that the empirical evidence suggests a conservative estimate of the annual risk that LHC-like experiments would destroy the earth is 1-in-a-trillion.

As I’ve mentioned before, the precautionary principle cuts both ways. What if, because we neglected to do the LHC experiments, we didn’t know some crucial bit of physics that was the only way we could avoid some future calamity on Earth? Certainly, the chances of that coming to pass aren’t terribly high. Then again the chances aren’t zero, are they?

And yet I note that Palin studiously avoided mentioning a military response or a military presence, unless one were to read “vigilance” and “support” as codewords for boots on the ground. I agree it makes Palin’s bit about NATO—shall we say—less than coherent. But Obama and his foreign policy advisers apparently agree almost point by point with this policy that Damir calls scary.

I think what this points to is the fact that certain elements of American foreign policy these days are idées fixes that cross party lines. And until someone comes along once again to smash these ideas with a hammer, Nietzsche-like, then we will find that foreign policy folly is a bipartisan issue.

UPDATE: I dumbly did not click through to read the original source comments on that Palin interview, where she spells out more explicitly that, yes, NATO membership means the possibility of a war. But I stand by the fact that Obama has unfortunately matched the McCain-Palin position.

Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that appreciating Walter is essential to understanding what the Coen brothers are up to in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that’s because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He’s a neocon. If that seems like a stretch, consider the traits Walter exhibits over the course of the film: faith in American military might (the Gulf War, he says, “is gonna be a piece of cake”; in the original script, he calls it “a fucking cakewalk”); nostalgia for the Cold War (“Charlie,” he says, referring to the Viet Cong, was a “worthy fuckin’ adversary”); strong support for the state of Israel (to judge from his reverent paraphrase of Theodor Herzl: “If you will it, Dude, it is no dream”); and even, perhaps, past affiliation with the left (he refers knowingly to Lenin’s given name and admits to having “dabbled in pacifism”). Goodman, who has called the role his all-time favorite, seems also to have sensed Walter’s imperialist side. “Dude has a rather, let’s say, Eastern approach to bowling,” he said in an interview. “Walter is strictly Manifest Destiny.”

So, yeah, all the points of comparison do line up kind of conveniently, like Haglund says. But if we’re going to be interpreting the movie this way, why stop with Walter? The entire cast of characters, one could say, represents a skewering of the entire American political landscape. When you start to make pat interpretations, it’s hard to stop: There’s the dude (Sixties radicalism as a spent force), Maude Lebowski (Europhilic coastal elites), Jeffrey Lebowski…the other Jeffrey Lebowski (a straigh-from-central casting, cigar-chomping GOP corporate welfare case), and Donny (the “silent majority” in America’s flyover country, who can’t get a word in edgewise over all the partisan bickering). Indeed you can make a good case for these and many more readings, but by doing so, don’t we lose a little of the magic of the original?

As The Dude himself might put it, “No, you’re not wrong, Haglund. You’re just an asshole.”

In the end, though, it is not just Palin’s large family and important job which have made her the topic of the day at every school pick-up queue in America. It is also the fact that she breaks the Hillary Clinton mould, not only in personality and lifestyle but in ideology as well. By this, I don’t mean merely that she’s a conservative, that she’s an evangelical Christian, or that she opposes abortion. More interesting are the ways in which she shatters all of the stereotypes altogether: Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative. In practice, it isn’t even easy to say on which side of America’s increasingly confusing culture wars she stands. Is it “Right-wing” to go back to work two days after having a baby, as she did while governor? It is “feminist” to support one’s unwed daughter’s decision to have her baby? Is it liberal or conservative for women to play sports or drive snowmobiles? Or is it the case that, especially where women are concerned, none of these categories were [ever] as rigid as politicians have sometimes made them seem? While I wouldn’t say that women like Palin are a dime a dozen, in real life there are plenty of conservative women with full-time jobs and post-feminist lifestyles, just as there are plenty of liberal or Left-wing women who decide to stay home with their children.

And this is only part of the reason I would have loved to have waited until 2012 to back Sarah Palin for President.

The Palin pick is the politicial equivalent of bear-baiting. Yes, ridiculing Palin as a hick and a rube, and devaluing her experience, comes naturally to the kind of people who take Barack Obama seriously as a presidential candidate. Philip Gourevitch discussed the parallels between Palin and Obama — but of course Palin is in many respects the cultural and stylistic opposite of Obama. Obama speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a certain kind of urban liberal. Palin, in contrast, speaks to the highest aspirations and self-conceptions of a different set of Americans. That’s why insults and ridicule are counter-productive for Democrats. Why? Because the kind of Americans inclined to like Obama, without the aid of Joe Biden or free factory-reviving supercars, will never vote for a Republican. The kind of Americans inclined to like Palin might vote for a Democrat, particularly this year.

There are at least four pitfalls for Democrats in Palin’s biography: 1) The “experience” charge. As Sonny has explained better than I could, it invites Obamaphiles to give in to their temptation to mock flyover country (not a good strategy to win those Western battleground states, is it?). But this charge is at least covered over by a patina of respectability. The other charges, not so much: 2) The “pandering” charge. To criticize McCain for picking this woman, as if just any woman would do to bring in woman voters, may only serve to remind Hillary’s disgruntled supporters that Obama himself could have chosen a (supposedly) eminently qualified woman but chose not to. 3) The “her family’s too young and too big for her to be VP” charge. Probably not the kind of argument that should be made by a party that has had trouble winning over married voters with children. 4) The “Alaskan secessionist” charge. Admittedly it’s a bizarre one, but not so strange that the Times didn’t see it as fit to print. And as for candidates with associations to fringe organizations, well, at least the Alaskan Independence Party hasn’t set off any bombs.

But that said, I have to part company with the conservatives who are thrilled with the Palin pick and count myself with Peggy Noonan, raw and uncut. The fact that Obama is also inexperienced doesn’t make McCain’s choice of an inexperienced running-mate any less troubling.

UPDATE: I forgot to add that #3 above isn’t a charge that will endear Obama to feminists, either.

I think the answer is clear: if possible, the current superpower should embrace its possible successor. It should bind it as closely as possible with ties of blood, commerce, and culture—so that should the emerging superpower come to its full strength, it will to as great an extent possible share the world view of and regard itself as part of the same civilization as its predecessor: Romans to their Greeks.

In 1877, the rising superpower to the west across the ocean was the United States. The preeminent superpower was Britain. Today the preeminent superpower is the United States. The rising superpower to the west across the ocean is China.

I’d be curious to know what Brad thinks we can actually do to bind China to us. Putting aside the ethno-cultural dimension for the time being, the main problem as I see it is one of rootedness and tradition. In both of Brad’s examples, he’s describing an older society making way for a younger, more malleable one on which the elder can impress itself. The Chinese, however, are not upstarts—they’ve been around for literally thousands of years. There’s precious little we can do to mould China one way or another. China will be ineffably Chinese and will fashion a dominant place in this world according to its own precepts and self-understanding.

This article by Charlie Szrom in The Weekly Standard lays out the argument as clearly and as cogently as you can hope to read anywhere.

The West should recognize Moscow’s less-than-noble motives in opposing a free Kosovo, and it must blunt the power of the Nord and South Stream pipeline projects. Europe can either accept a grim future under Russia’s thrall, or it can begin walking a difficult, if necessary, path.

Do we care about Eastern Europe falling back into Russia’s orbit? Working through the implications of how you answer that question will yield a coherent policy for the United States. Any other approach will yield confused half-measures and disastrous prevarication.