Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

"And here they say: Don't question, humble yourself, fall on your knees, try, drive out base thoughts, chase away the tempter. So perhaps this is the way, perhaps one should begin not with love for Thee, but with hate for Thy enemies? Hate is so much easier; how can it be, Oh God, that the road that leadeth to Thee should begin with hate? Can this be so, when Thou hast ordered us to purge from our hearts all hate for our enemies? For if, as Thou teachest, we are to love our enemies, this must include Satan, who is our enemy too. And so even that only road, the one shown by Thee, begins in contradiction to Thy commandment. And if one is allowed to begin with pure hate on the road toward Thy feast, why cannot one begin with sinful love, which, though sinful, must carry in it the vestiges of some warmth from Thy hearth, while hate exudes only coldness? So I should begin with that sinful love, but I cannot do so because its sinfulness grips me like a hoop on the pillory in front of Thy people. And thus I must return to where I began, as always, to where I began."

- From "The Prayer of Heloise," Conversations With The Devil, Leszek Kolakowski

When Iraq Is Israel

This is helpful, especially since Israel represents a source of peace and stability in the region. From TPM:

Hed: Bush cites Israel as model for Iraq

President Bush held up Israel as a model for defining success in Iraq, saying Thursday the U.S. goal there is not to eliminate attacks but to enable a democracy that can function despite violence.

With his Iraq policy under increasing criticism from the public and lawmakers in both parties, Bush went to the U.S. Naval War College to declare progress and plead for patience. At the same time, his top national security went to Capitol Hill to hear out Republican critics.

We'll have succeeded in Iraq when it's like Israel.

Our Candidates: Mitt Romney

In a Phronesisaical public service series of brief glimpses we hope will shed light upon the deepest, hollowest recesses of the current slate of presidential candidates, we begin this week with Mitt Romney.

...Republican presidential candidate former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., has angered animal rights activists for strapping his dog to the roof of his car on a family trip from Boston to Ontario, Canada.

According to the Boston Globe, in one of the family's 12-hour drives to their family's cottage in Canada over 25 years ago, Romney strapped a dog carrier to the roof of the car for the whole trip -- with the family Irish setter, Seamus, inside.

Seamus protested in a scatological way, going to the bathroom on the roof of the car.

UPDATE:

Woolcott:

The defeat of the comprehensive immigration bill may be the tastiest victory for the mau-mau right since "Rathergate," but it's dealt a deflating blow to the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. To exploit the bill's unpopularity, Romney's crack team of advisors had planned to strap an illegal alien to the top of Romney's motorcade limo and chauffeur the undocumented worker around New Hampshire from campaign stop to campaign stop. This publicity brainstorm was intended to serve double duty: highlighting Romney's opposition to illegal immigration and converting the media storm over his strapping the family dog, an Irish setter named Seamus, to the roof of the car on a long vacation trip until the poor animal diarrhea'd ("'Dad!...Gross!'' A brown liquid was dripping down the back window...") into a political plus. His staff convinced their doofus boss that his best bet to defuse the controversy was to tackle it head-on on his own terms. To prevent similar bowel troubles from bedevilling the wind-whipped rooftop Guatamalan or Mexican in custody, Romney's "people" intended to have a Port-o-potty hooked up to one of the motorcade cars and make regular "pit stops" at gas stations where Mitt could have his picture taken at the pumps. With the defeat of the immigration bill, alas, the lease on the Port-o-potty has been null-and-voided and Mitt's eager-beaver staffers have been pulled off the manhunt for a suitably grungy looking illegal immigrant with no English language skills and sinister eyebrows.

UPDATE (29 June):

Ouch. Romney responds:

"...PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air."

Sweetsop

Photo: Selvin Chance

Real Persons

I haven't met many fellow bloggers in person. In fact, only one: Neddie (well, and bloggers I know personally first and their blogging second). Ned and I went to a Ray Davies concert together along with XTCFan (see here, here, and here). But Cheryl Rofer of Whirled View is in town for the Carnegie International Non-Proliferation Conference and we're meeting up this afternoon at Bistro du Coin in Dupont Circle. What a pleasure to have such occasions.

No Mercenaries Here

I apparently once gave a blog post the title, "Mercenary Jobs." I haven't done an actual tally of google search terms, but it appears that, by far, "mercenary jobs" is the most common google search that brings people to this here blog. That and "naked people doing naughty things." The "mercenary jobs" hits come from all over - most from the US, as usual, but also many from the UK, Australia, the Persian Gulf countries, and SE Asia.

We regret to inform you that there are no mercenary jobs here. Although you are fine candidates, and we have had to choose from among other excellent candidates, we have found that other items fit our needs at this time. We wish you all the best in your future search.

Don't say we're not helpful, though. Below is the main address to contact for those of you looking for well-paying jobs, mercenary and otherwise. We suggest that you inquire into the availability of the "donor," "good old boy," and "uses for meat" package options.

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500 USA

Grateful Philosophy

Fellow blogger and philosopher Steve Gimbel's new book is on the shelves: The Grateful Dead and Philosophy.

I hope that girl - that girl - the sad one who was holding up one finger that night in the cold, pouring rain in Paris - I had been given two "VIP" tickets to see the Dead at Zenith - hadn't found anyone to go with me - that cute forlorn girl, a drenched lonely moppet in an over-sized sweater - I walked over to her and handed her my extra ticket - she didn't even look at me - she yelled out to friends nearby (I didn't know these were friends nearby), "I got one!" - she snatched the ticket and ran to the front doors - no acknowledgment that the ticket was given to her by another human, no thanks - it was as if it was a lucky but natural occurrence, the ticket was a trout and I was the stream - fool, was I - yeah, I hope that girl reads Steve's book.

Climate Change Chic

Brought to you by Diesel® (via Next Nature)

The Anti-Democrats

Democracy, as almost all thinkers about democracy have argued, is about more than a concrete set of procedures such as universal suffrage. Voting, after all, is not simply an activity randomly chosen from among other things we could do in politics, such as throw all political opponents onto the pyre. It is justified by a deeper set of norms, which are themselves the product of trial-and-error reforms, historically cumulative wisdom, rational argumentation, and evolving sentiments about human relationships. But it is a mistake also to think of democracy as equivalent to suffrage. It's not. Saddam Hussein's Iraq voted. Our own current US administration has no interest in a fair outcome to a vote, perhaps especially now given their radical unpopularity. They are only interested in maintaining the public illusion of protecting the thing they actually want to destroy in their own favor.

Further, however, equating democracy with static institutions such as the vote is a way of saying that democracy is something that can arrive at completion. You get the vote, you're done. Now you're a democracy. Tally ho.

The problem is that democracy is by its very nature an idea that embodies social and political dynamism and evolution. This goes not only for the outcomes of its procedures but also those procedures themselves. John Dewey, the great philosopher of democracy, went so far as to say that democracy as a political entity is best seen as the very best we can do now. But we should never think that it is final answer to human organization - we would already be a fair piece down the road to becoming anti-democrats by doing so. The grounding for this general political form over other political forms is that the world is such that things evolve, change, require new ideas and new actions. Regardless of how far human beings can go in understanding the nature of the world through science, social science, and so on, we will never be in complete knowledge of who we ought to be and can only speak to others' desires about who they want to be to the extent that their desires do not cause harm to others or general social harm.

Democracy is therefore born out of radical uncertainty and contingency and the use of experimental intelligence in attempting to find the right socio-political configurations for the time-being in response to particular, historically contingent problems. As we construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the idea of democracy and its concrete institutions, we then require a number of key features to democracy if we are to maintain an intelligent and decent democracy. These features include transparency, accountability, relatively accurate information, and some level of equal participation by those who would be affected by democratic procedural outcomes. Those who have a particular interest in corroding any of these elements of democracy, even if they genuinely believe they are doing so in the public interest, are anti-democrats. We now see how it is possible to have a popular vote and yet be non-democratic. In fact, most tyrants have excused their intentional erosion of democratic institutions and qualities through appeal to some form of the claim that "these are dangerous times" and we thus don't have time for such fluffy notions as democracy. Not only is this disdainful of the citizenry, it is an assault on the basics of democracy itself.

And thus we come to today's lesson. We know about Cheney's outlandish claim that his office is outside of the Executive branch. We know about his and Bush's ongoing secrecy and deceit. But let's now read the excerpts below through the lens of the democracy discussion above.

NY Times editorial (via Norwegianity):

Since the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush has tried to excuse his administration’s obsession with secrecy by saying that dangerous times require greater discretion. He rammed the Patriot Act through Congress with a promise that national security agencies would make sure the new powers were not abused...

Washington Post:

Stealth is among Cheney's most effective tools. Man-size Mosler safes, used elsewhere in government for classified secrets, store the workaday business of the office of the vice president. Even talking points for reporters are sometimes stamped "Treated As: Top Secret/SCI." Experts in and out of government said Cheney's office appears to have invented that designation, which alludes to "sensitive compartmented information," the most closely guarded category of government secrets. By adding the words "treated as," they said, Cheney seeks to protect unclassified work as though its disclosure would cause "exceptionally grave damage to national security."...

Across the board, the vice president's office goes to unusual lengths to avoid transparency. Cheney declines to disclose the names or even the size of his staff, generally releases no public calendar and ordered the Secret Service to destroy his visitor logs. His general counsel has asserted that "the vice presidency is a unique office that is neither a part of the executive branch nor a part of the legislative branch," and is therefore exempt from rules governing either. Cheney is refusing to observe an executive order on the handling of national security secrets, and he proposed to abolish a federal office that insisted on auditing his compliance.

A Reminder

Photo: Sudan, 1993 by James Nachtwey

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

The human agent, shaped and manacled by context and tradition, by established arrangements and enacted dogma, fastened to a decaying body, surrounded in birth and death by enigmas he cannot dispel, desperately wanting he knows not what, confusing the unlimited for which he longs with an endless series of paltry tokens, demanding assurance from other people, yet hiding within himself and using things as shields against the others, somnambulant most of the time yet sometimes charged and always inexhaustible, recognizing his fate and struggling with it even as he appears to accept it, trying to reconcile his contradictory ambitions but acknowledging in the end or, deep down, all the time that no such reconciliation is possible or if possible not lasting: this is the one topic from which there is no escape.

- Roberto Unger, The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

The United States of GDP

US states named after countries with similar GDP (GDP = consumption + investment + government spending + (exports – imports)). From Strange Maps (via Cynical-C).

An Ethiopian Civil War?

This is a terrific article from the Monday NY Times that I would have missed if it weren't for Truthout. Read. A cobbled summary:

In village after village, people said they had been brutalized by government troops. They described a widespread and longstanding reign of terror, with Ethiopian soldiers gang-raping women, burning down huts and killing civilians at will.

It is the same military that the American government helps train and equip — and provides with prized intelligence. The two nations have been allies for years, but recently they have grown especially close, teaming up last winter to oust an Islamic movement that controlled much of Somalia and rid the region of a potential terrorist threat.

The Bush administration, particularly the military, considers Ethiopia its best bet in the volatile Horn — which, with Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, is fast becoming intensely violent, virulently anti-American and an incubator for terrorism...

“We’ve not only looked the other way but we’ve pushed them to intrude in other sovereign nations,” he added, referring to the satellite images and other strategic help the American military gave Ethiopia in December, when thousands of Ethiopian troops poured into Somalia and overthrew the Islamist leadership...

Its leaders, many whom were once rebels themselves, from a neglected patch of northern Ethiopia, are widely known as some of the savviest officials on the continent. They had promised to let some air into a very stultified political system during the national elections of 2005, which were billed as a milestone on the road to democracy.

Instead, they turned into Ethiopia’s version of Tiananmen Square. With the opposition poised to win a record number of seats in Parliament, the government cracked down brutally, opening fire on demonstrators, rounding up tens of thousands of opposition supporters and students and leveling charges of treason and even attempted to kill top opposition leaders, including the man elected mayor of Addis Ababa...

The armed resistance began in 1994, after the Ogaden National Liberation Front, then a political organization, broached the idea of splitting off from Ethiopia. The central government responded by imprisoning Ogadeni leaders, and according to academics and human rights groups, assassinating others. The Ogaden is part of the Somali National Regional State, one of nine ethnic-based states within Ethiopia’s unusual ethnic-based federal system. On paper, all states have the right to secede, if they follow the proper procedures. But it seemed that the government feared that if the Somalis broke away, so too would the Oromos, the Afar and many other ethnic groups pining for a country of their own.

The Ethiopian government calls the Ogaden rebels terrorists and says they are armed and trained by Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor and bitter enemy. One of the reasons Ethiopia decided to invade Somalia was to prevent the rebels from using it as a base.

The government blames them for a string of recent bombings and assassinations and says they often single out rival clan members. Ethiopian officials have been pressuring the State Department to add the Ogaden National Liberation Front to its list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. Until recently, American officials refused, saying the rebels had not threatened civilians or American interests.

“But after the oil field attack in April,” said one American official who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “we are reassessing that.”...

Many Ogaden villagers said that when they tried to bring up abuses with clan chiefs or local authorities, they were told it was better to keep quiet.

The rebels said thats was precisely why they attacked the Chinese oil field: to get publicity for their cause and the plight of their region (and to discourage foreign companies from exploiting local resources). According to them, they strike freely in the Ogaden all the time, ambushing military convoys and raiding police stations.

Mr. Mohammed, the government spokesman, denied that, saying the rebels “will not confront Ethiopian military forces because they are not well trained.”

Expert or not, they are determined. They march for hours powered by a few handfuls of rice. They travel extremely light, carrying only their guns, two clips of bullets, a grenade and a tarp. They brag about how many Ethiopians they have killed, and every piece of their camouflage, they say, is pulled off dead soldiers. They joke about slaughtering Ethiopian troops the same way they slaughter goats.

Progressive Foreign Policy Points... or Attitudes

Max Sawicky, in the context of a discussion of the recent "Take Back America" (and a remark by Digby), outlines some basic considerations for progressives regarding US foreign policy.

1. There is no 'we.' Never was. Policy is of, by, and for elites.

2. Morality is not the policy. U.S. policy is always justified on humanitarian grounds, but never motivated by such considerations.

3. "Get a life." Genuine 'existential' threats to U.S. interests justifying the use of mass violence are rare. A nuclear Iran is not such a threat.

4. Let's look at the record. The practice of U.S. foreign policy (as for most great powers) is soaked with the blood of innocents. Blowback is the result, and the setting in which foreign policy should be evaluated.

5. It wasn't a mistake, it was on purpose. Characterizing Iraq or, say, Vietnam, as a 'mistake' glosses over the actual intents of policy-makers, as opposed to their public apologetics. Because the use of force is padded with phony justifications, the failure to achieve purported objectives is seen as the result of error, rather than the fact that such objectives were never seriously entertained to begin with.

6. Good stuff can happen. Positive outcomes from U.S. policy are possible and have been observed, but they are typically fortuitous, rather than the fruits of intelligent design.

I humbly suggest that failure to appreciate these points weakens our ability to forestall the next criminal war.

Unfortunately, I think - at least today - that this is basically right. Even non-governmental policy on the part of American-operated organizations addressing, say, international development issues is often formed by an eternal quest for funding which relies ultimately upon some of those same elites. This often undercuts any original humanitarian rationale, which remains as much a rhetorical gesture as it does any sort of problem-solving reality. Thus, because recipients are not stupid, even much of the best-intentioned policy can result in "blowback."

Labyrinths

Story here at BLDGBLOG.

Autograph Tree Fruit

Zzzzzzzzz

We here at Phronesisaical have been saying this over the life of this blog and beyond: it's a matter of legitimacy (do a keyword search of "legitimacy"). Now Princeton's John Ikenberry says it too and Harvard's Dani Rodrik thinks it's "the best thing I have read from a political scientist in a while." Sigh. Ikenberry (.pdf):

The most serious threat to American national security today is not a specific enemy but the erosion of the institutional foundations of the global order that the United States has commanded for half a century and through which it has pursued its interests and national security. America’s leadership position and authority within the global system is in serious crisis – and this puts American national security at risk. The grand strategy America needs to pursue in the years ahead is not one aimed at a particular threat but rather at restoring its role as the recognized and legitimate leader of the system – and rebuilding the institutions and partnerships upon which this leadership position is based. America’s global position is in crisis, but it is a crisis that is largely of its own making, and one that can be overcome in a way that leaves the United States in a stronger position to meet the diffuse, shifting, and uncertain threats of the 21st century.

The grand strategy I am proposing can be called “liberal order building.” It is essentially a 21st century version of the strategy that the United States pursued after World War II in the shadow of the Cold War – a strategy which produced the liberal hegemonic order that has provided the framework for the Western and global system ever since. This is a strategy in which the United States leads the way in the creation and operation of a loose rule-based international order. The United States provides public goods and solves global collection action problems. American “rule” is established through the provisioning of international rules and institutions and its willingness to operate within them. American power is put in the service of an agreed upon system of Western-oriented global governance. American power is made acceptable to the world because it is embedded in these agreed upon rules and institutions. The system itself leverages resources and fosters cooperation that makes the actual functioning of the order one that solves problems, creates stability, and allows democracy and capitalism to flourish. Liberal order building is America’s distinctive contribution to world politics – and it is a grand strategy that it should return to in the post-Bush era.

The Bush administration did not embrace the logic of liberal hegemonic rule or support the rules and institutions on which it is based – and America is now paying the price in an extraordinary decline in its authority, credibility, prestige, and the ready support of other states. Along the way, the Bush administration has made America less rather than more secure and its ruinous foreign policy is fast becoming an icon of grand strategic failure.

UPDATE (20 June):

I should clarify a bit. Legitimacy is the key issue for me here, not "liberal order building." The US has indeed represented some decent liberal values, ones that are hardly exclusive to the US. It has also engaged in some terrible actions that belie those values (Iraq being only the most recent). One reason other countries have, in spite of the horrible actions, continued to support the US is its economic influence and their economic dependency. Another reason is that the US could be counted on to stick up for - even when hypocritical, and even when highly selective - some notion of a decent international order representing widely shared values we might call "liberal." These two strands run throughout US history, especially during the 20th Century. But the current administration in my view has decided that international relations are about force and turning the screw of economic dependency alone. They've horribly misunderstood that, given alternatives, a country that disdains any international order than one that serves its own interests is one that is undeserving of support and ultimately will only receive cynical and opportunistic support. And when it comes to legitimacy, economic dependence is either too weak a factor to sustain the underlying values that constitute claims to legitimacy or so strong as to deceive political leaders into believing that they can get away with anything. For many in the world, the latter is what they view as American "liberal order building" where the rules are always written by America in America's favor. The Bush Administration has confirmed this view both implicitly and explicitly.

Climate Change Fairness?

I earlier summarized some of the main political and ethical points of dealing with climate change. One central political dispute is, of course, the participation of China and India and other large developing nations in any future climate change regime. The dispute centers on conflicting notions of fairness.

The US (and now the G-8) maintains that it is unfair for rapidly growing greenhouse gas emitters - China and India - not to be part of the international environmental regime. It worries, of course, about US economic standing vis-a-vis China in particular, but the more reasonable case is that China and India should not exacerbate the problem while other countries attempt to mitigate climate change (notwithstanding the fact that very little has indeed been done to date by the developed nations). China and India maintain, rightly, that the problem was created by countries such as the US and that developing nations should not have to pay economically for a problem created by countries that have reaped the economic benefits of pollution. In the earlier post, I put the matter as follows:

• that the US views ratification of Kyoto as not in its national interests. This position assumes that a) national interests are synonymous with economic interests; b) that there is no technological alternative for economic growth [also a value assumption] to increasing emissions; and c) that only national interests matter when it comes to climate change.

• that developing countries excluded from the first round of Kyoto should have been included, especially China and India, along with the developed Annex I countries...

...The basic argument from the developing nations is that, given the disproportional emissions on the part of the industrialized countries - which are a direct result of industrialization or modernization of their economies - to call for regulation on emissions from developing nations is to unfairly disadvantage their own industrialization or economic growth. In other words, it is a luxury to have modernized economically, while producing the majority of emissions, and now demand of economically developing nations that they reel in emissions (and thus, by implication, halt their economic growth or experiment with new technologies, something which the US in particular has been wont to do). This is, of course, not perceived to be in developing countries' economic interests by those countries.

Peter Singer in a recent essay summarizes the matter similarly:

China, India, and other developing nations, have a point – or rather, three points. First, if we apply the principle “You broke it, you fix it,” then the developed nations have to take responsibility for our “broken” atmosphere, which can no longer absorb more greenhouse gases without the world’s climate changing. Second, even if we wipe the slate clean and forget about who caused the problem, it remains true that the typical US resident is responsible for about six times more greenhouse gas emissions than the typical Chinese, and as much as 18 times more than the average Indian. Third, the richer nations are better able than less well-off nations to absorb the costs of fixing the problem without causing serious harm to their populations.

But it is also true that if China and India continue to increase their output of greenhouse gases, they will eventually undo all the good that would be achieved by deep emissions cuts in the industrialized nations. This year or next, China will overtake the US as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter – on a national, rather than a per capita basis, of course. In 25 years, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, China’s emissions could be double those of the US, Europe, and Japan combined.

Now, most environmental issues involve questions of justice. When an environmental problem is created as a by-product of economic activity, not only are the costs usually externalized when evaluating the benefits of that economic activity, but the by-product has to go somewhere and ends up affecting someone. This is most clearly illustrated in environmental justice cases of toxic waste disposal - toxic waste generally tends to gravitate miraculously (since few claim it to be policy) to poor neighborhoods or poor countries.

In the case of climate change, everyone is potentially affected in multiple, complex ways from immediate effects of coastal or small-island flooding, for example, to long-term indirect economic losses, for example. But some - the industrialized nations - have contributed far more to the problem than developing nations, and some - poor nations, generally - will be more drastically affected than the industrialized nations. This puts the whole climate change regime framework on an unfair footing in the first place. Again, the issue is fairness or justice. Singer has a proposal:

...there is a solution that is both fair and practical:

• Establish the total amount of greenhouse gases that we can allow to be emitted without causing the earth’s average temperature to rise more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the point beyond which climate change could become extremely dangerous.
• Divide that total by the world’s population, thus calculating what each person’s share of the total is.
• Allocate to each country a greenhouse gas emissions quota equal to the country’s population, multiplied by the per person share.
• Finally, allow countries that need a higher quota to buy it from those that emit less than their quota.

The fairness of giving every person on earth an equal share of the atmosphere’s capacity to absorb our greenhouse gas emissions is difficult to deny. Why should anyone have a greater entitlement than others to use the earth’s atmosphere?

But, in addition to being fair, this scheme also has practical benefits. It would give developing nations a strong incentive to accept mandatory quotas, because if they can keep their per capita emissions low, they will have excess emissions rights to sell to the industrialized nations. The rich countries will benefit, too, because they will be able to choose their preferred mix of reducing emissions and buying up emissions rights from developing nations.

I think that this is perhaps the best we can do, at least in terms of an argument from fairness. But it requires the all-important factor that individual states commit to, first, acknowledging climate change as a serious problem that demands efforts from all countries and, second, accepting the climate change problem as currently grave enough to require a change in national policies today rather than tomorrow. Furthermore, it requires that individual states view the issue as a matter of fairness in the first place.

Now, here's the rub: I don't think there is enough pressure at this point for individual states, especially the United States, to take up the seriousness of the argument from fairness. Much of US federal policy is dictated by "national interest" (and, remember, this is almost always determined by particular economic interests), and the current administration is too beholden to a world-view that is so constricted it's a dot. There are already plenty of economic incentives to enter into climate change mitigation, but these seem to have made little dent in US federal policy or foreign policy, at least not relative to the gravity of the climate change problem. There are those in the US who look at climate change exclusively in terms of the damage caused to the national economy and geography and then suggest that the US can rather inexpensively adapt. That is the limit of the ethical claim for these people.

The key issue is that taking up a proposal like Singer's requires that we view the world in terms of more fully taking responsibility for our own actions, especially when those actions cause harm to others. It requires that we view non-citizens more fully in moral terms. But US policy - whether environmental, humanitarian or whatever - seems to me today to be concerned principally with US self-interest. Note how the US often demands of other countries things that it itself has no intention of doing (on, say, nuclear energy policy and proliferation). The ethics of self interest is the most primitive and unimaginative of ethical thinking. Much of our thinking about politics, economics, and so on remains at the normative level of self interest, whether individual or national. This is a cognitive framework for continual morally stunted policy.

In the Richest Country in the World...

The cash-strapped city of New Orleans is turning to foreign countries for help to rebuild as federal hurricane-recovery dollars remain slow to flow.

Kenya Smith, director of intergovernmental relations for Mayor Ray Nagin, said city leaders are talking with more than five countries. He wouldn't identify the countries, saying discussions were in the early stages. But he said the city is "very serious" about pursuing foreign help.

"Of course, we would love to have all the resources we need from federal and state partners, but we're comfortable now in having to be creative," Smith said. He did not know if the city would have to overcome any obstacles if it got firm pledges for aid, but "we want to make sure we're leaving no options unexplored."

For months Nagin has complained bureaucracy is choking the flow of much-needed federal aid dollars to New Orleans - slowing the city's recovery. As of June 8, the city said it had received just over half of the $320 million FEMA has obligated for rebuilding city infrastructure and emergency response-related costs. The city has estimated its damage at far more than that - at least $1 billion. And that doesn't include other improvements - such as raised neighborhoods - meant to help build the stronger city promoted by Nagin and his recovery director.

Discussions with foreign representatives have been occurring off and on since the storm, but Smith said the city became re-engaged after a news report in April that millions of dollars in aid offered by foreign countries after Hurricane Katrina went unaccepted.

It wasn't clear how much of the $854 million in aid originally offered remained on the table.

Helicopter Questions

Today is the first day of the Paris Air Show, always a wondrous occasion in which is celebrated humankind's gravitational léger de main. The IHT, of course, writes about the big business side of the show: Airbus vs. Boeing and how many contracts they rake in. But the organizers are celebrating 100 years of the helicopter this year. (Via Frogsmoke).

The first working helicopter was invented by Frenchman Paul Cornu, whose contraption is shown above. The feat of the bicycle-maker and engineer is all the more astounding because the contraption resembles less a bird, as regular aircraft do, and more an abstract notion of suspension. Many ideas for new technologies began through a continuity by conceptual analogy: the thorned branches of osage orange hedges and barbed wire, stones and hammers, birds and airplanes. Others came from new principles of physics, chemistry, engineering, such as the steam engine. But where did the helicopter come from? The Chinese had a flying top too made out of bamboo as early as the 5th Century. Leonardo designed a flying machine in the 15th Century based on his observations of bird flight.

Other European inventors designed prototype models to Cornu's version through the 19th Century. But, still, how does one move from the observation of bird flight to the rotary wing of the helicopter? Perhaps, rather, the source was the seeds of maple trees?