Have you been following the Johann Hari scandal? The prominent young left-wing English journalist was exposed as a Stephen Glass-like, Jayson Blairish fraud — but not a hell of a lot has happened to him as a result. Why? Jonathan Foreman writes in Commentary, it’s because left-wing British journalism forgives the corrupt as long as the corrupt espouse the correct prejudices:

Indeed, the response to the scandal from Hari’s employers at the Independent and from much of the media establishment was arguably even more revealing of a deficit in the ethics of British media culture than were Hari’s original derelictions.

Like several rising stars in American journalism over the past three decades—theWashington Post’s Janet Cooke in the early 1980s, the New Republic’s Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass in the 1990s, and the New York Times’s Jayson Blair in the early 2000s—Hari, now just 31, achieved his rapid success at a startlingly young age in large part thanks to his deceptions and fabrications. These went undetected for a long time because editors chose not to examine his work too closely. In Hari’s case (as in the case of Glass), his editors did not check his work because he skillfully played to their prejudices, in particular their anti-Americanism and loathing of Israel.

The reaction to his journalistic crimes stood in stark contrast to the American response to Glass and others. Hari’s sins were not greeted with the outrage, disappointment, and deep soul-searching of the sort that went on at all three American journalistic establishments—which led to editors being fired and new standards of exactitude being imposed—but rather with a blasé wave of the hand. In America, if a journalist is caught in repeated invention and deliberate dishonesty, his or her career ends. Not so in Britain. Hari was merely suspended from the Independent and is due to return to it after completing a journalism class in New York.

I would also add that Hari, who is himself gay and an atheist, is a strident advocate for atheism and homosexuality in his writing. Apparently all that matters to Hari’s employers is that he hates the right people, and all is forgiven.

Over the weekend, I was talking with a Christian friend about Mideast politics, and we agreed that the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel are a big problem for a number of reasons, but that from the point of view of maintaining Jewish identity and religious practice, they are in some ways an inconveniently good example. Inconvenient, because they demonstrate to everyone — not just to other Jews — that to hold on to one’s group identity against the assimilationist currents of modernity, one has to commit to live in ways that are a stumbling block to moderns. It’s not that everybody has to become Lubavitchers (or Amish, or any other separatist group), but any “tribe” that wants to maintain itself and its traditions is going to have to develop a more or less thick commitment to particularism, which implies an exclusivity that is appalling to bien pensant moderns.

I told my friend that as obnoxious as I found the Israeli government’s controversial recent ad campaign warning Israeli Jews not to move to America because they would lose their Jewishness — clarification: I personally didn’t find it obnoxious, because I don’t care, but I can easily imagine why so many American Jews (like Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin) did, which is why the ad campaign was politically stupid — I thought the Israeli government had a point. This morning, Spengler (David Goldman, who is an observant Jew) says yes, the Israelis really do. Excerpts:

Sadly, American Jews stand out as a horrible example of demographic failure. In the United States, secular and loosely affiliated American Jews, that is, the vast majority, have the lowest fertility rate of any identifiable segment of the American population.

As I wrote in my book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too):

”Nowhere is the fertility gap between religious and non-religious more extreme than among American Jews. As a group, American Jews show the lowest fertility of any ethnic group in the country. That is a matter of great anguish for Jewish community leaders. According to sociologist Steven Cohen, “We are now in the midst of a non-Orthodox Jewish population meltdown. … Among Jews in their 50s, for every 100 Orthodox adults, we have 192 Orthodox children. And for the non-Orthodox, for every 100 adults, we have merely 55 such children.”

Half of the non-Orthodox children, moreover, marry non-Jews, and very few children of mixed marriages will remain Jewish. As Reform Rabbi Lance J Sussman wrote in 2010, “With the exception of a number of Orthodox communities and a few other bright spots in or just off the mainstream of Jewish religious life, American Judaism is in precipitous decline … the Reform movement has probably contracted by a full third in the last ten years!” 

As Spengler’s column points out, it’s not the case that you have to be ultra-Orthodox in order to maintain a robust and resilient Judaism across the generations, but you do have to be committed to traditional Jewish life and practice in a way that most American Jews are not, but the most Israeli Jews — not just the ultra-Orthodox minority — are. More:

Most Israeli Jews are not secular, but are partially observant. In a Jewish state where everyone speaks Hebrew, public school students have 12 years of Bible study, and Jewish holidays also are official holidays, it is easy to maintain a loose affiliation to Jewish observance. In the United States, nothing but the comprehensive commitment of Orthodox life sustains the Jewish community over the long term.

If present trends continue, Orthodox Jews will form the majority of a much-diminished American Jewish presence within a generation or two. And it is the Orthodox who identify most with the State of Israel; their children often spend a year at an Israeli yeshivabefore college, and many serve in the Israeli army. None of the Orthodox organizations seem to have objected to the expat-come-home videos, and for good reason: living in the land of Israel is one of the most important commandments, and the Orthodox respect those who observe it.

On reflection, American Jews should reconsider their umbrage at Israel’s Immigration Ministry. Their own organizations are painfully aware that loosely affiliated Jews of all shadings are falling away from the Jewish community, failing to bring enough children in the world to replace their existing numbers, and failing to raise them as Jews.

There are lessons in this for traditional-minded Christians as well. There is a real and hard to navigate tension between universalist ideals that most of us moderns — conservative and liberal — share, and the pre-modern, indeed anti-modern, convictions necessary to sustain traditional religious and cultural identities in contemporary life.

How is it possible, say, for a black man to affirm publicly that he wants his children to marry black people because it’s important to him to maintain black cultural traditions? You can’t get away from the racism of that position, though it’s the case that in our culture, blacks can get away with that in a way that whites cannot, for obvious reasons. And you know, I can completely understand why a black man would feel that way, and I don’t consider him bad for holding to that point of view, as long as he does not also believe that non-black races are inferior. It’s a difficult distinction to maintain, granted, but it’s easier to appreciate, perhaps, when you consider Jews who only want their kids to marry Jews, or Catholics, or Muslims who want their kids marrying Catholics. It need not imply bigotry towards non-Jews, or non-Catholics, but rather a love of one’s own “tribe,” and the laudable desire to see one’s traditions living on in the next generation. There is a difference, I suppose, in that there is an ethnic component to blacks and Jews preferring their own kind to Catholics or Muslims doing so, but I think the distinction is, in practice, minimal. The great sin of our times is preferring one’s own “tribe” to others. If one’s preferences in these sorts of things cannot be established according to universalist principles, then it is immediately to be suspected as a species of bigotry.

The thing is, how do you separate a laudable and indeed necessary (if you wish to preserve tradition) preference for one’s own tribe (ethnic, religious, cultural) without it becoming bigotry? I think the grounds for asserting this sort of preference within a moral framework acceptable to liberal universalism are pretty thin. This is mainly why white conservatives get so ticked at liberals over the whole “diversity” racket: asserting tribal identity and demanding exclusivist institutional expression of that identity is Good, but only if it’s done by a “tribe” officially approved of by liberals. The double standard is galling, and makes liberalism in practice look like a politics that exists not to ensure greater justice for all, but to disempower and exile disfavored ethnic, cultural, and religious groups. Which, it might be said, Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans spent much of the past two centuries doing, and finding a philosophical and political rationale to justify it.

We are far away from the question in the subject line of this post, but I hope I’ve indicated why the question of assimilation, liberal democracy, and identity is by no means one that the Jews alone face. It’s a bitter irony that Jewish life, which endured through countless persecutions and oppression in many nations, finds itself in an existential crisis in a society and polity in which it Jews are more free to be the kind of Jews they want to be, and more secure from anti-Semitism, than in any society except Israel’s. Absent social context reinforcing group identity, maintaining that identity in a modern society — which is to say, passing it on to your children — is far more difficult than many of us think. And again, by no means is this only a problem for Jews (says the man who was raised Methodist, converted to Catholicism, then to Orthodoxy, becoming one of the 40 percent of contemporary Americans who no longer practice religion in the church of their birth, or at all).

Nota bene, on the comments thread to this entry, I’m simply not going to post any by-the-numbers rants about Zionism, eeeevil Israel, blah blah blah. Stick to the broader topic.

Film Journalist confesses that there was always something he didn’t like about Robert Downey Jr., and now he knows what he is: the actor is a Republican. This explains why he appears in movies Film Journalist doesn’t like, says film journalist. More:

In 2009 Downey conveyed his politically rightward drift to N.Y. Times reporter David Carr. “I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics ever since.” [Emphasis Film Journalist’s — RD].

Film Journalist doesn’t stop to wonder what Downey might have meant by that. What did he see in prison, what might he have had done to him in prison, that forced his political conversion? There are really interesting questions there, but not to Film Journalist, to whom this quote from Downey has value only in that it confirms that he’s a horrible, filthy, no good right-winger. Film Journalist finds an Unnamed Source who knew Downey back then to say that yes, the man is a whore:

“His values are pure Republican values.” the guy says. “He’s a serious materialist. He loves the great clothes, the beautiful house, the cool cars. He’s a ‘protect the rich’ guy. Why should the rich have to pay for this or that? The people who have it should keep it, and the people who don’t have it shouldn’t complain. … .”

The gall of that Robert Downey Jr., walking around Hollywood — which, as we know, is Calvin’s Geneva with palm trees and valet parking — as a serious materialist with a world-class sense of entitlement. What a freak!

Seriously, I love this. I really do. This is the liberal version of the born-again Christian belief that all you have to do is confess Jesus Christ as your Personal Savior, and whatever you do is somehow okay. In Hollywood, all you have to do is profess liberalism, and all your materialism — the cars, the houses, the clothes, the adultery, the substance abuse, the egotism — is all forgivable. Robert Downey Jr. is a disgusting reprobate, while David Geffen and Barry Diller are SS. Peter and Paul. Got it.

Where would England be without the National Secular Society bravely standing athwart history’s tracks yelling “Stop!” to the onrushing locomotive of Christian theocracy? Excerpt:

The long tradition of prayers being said before local council meetings is to be challenged at the high court on Friday.

The National Secular Society (NSS) says the ritual is inappropriate in what should be “a secular environment concerned with civic business”. NSS president Terry Sanderson said the practice was leading to a worrying “potential for conflict”.

A survey of local authorities found most include prayers as part of the council meeting agenda.

In what could serve as a test case, the NSS is taking Bideford town council in Devon to the court, acting on a complaint from councillor Clive Bone, a non-believer who says he is “disadvantaged and embarrassed” when Christian prayers are said.

What is tradition in the face of Clive Bone’s embarrassment? God Null forbid that Clive Bone should ever be made to feel uncomfortable about anything, ever. Anyway, as Niall, who sent this from London, remarks:

What I love in this story is how the guy says the prayers have “worrying potential for conflict”. Erm, they didn’t until you picked a fight about it. I don’t think prayers before council meetings have ever caused any conflict in Britain until the touchy, intolerant, passive-aggressive atheist movement got into full swing. It’s like a mugger complaining that his victim’s iPad has a worrying potential for conflict.

More National Secular Society freaking out here, endorsing a local politician’s call for the Boy Scouts to drop the God stuff and to quit meeting in churches so as not to upset “Asian” (read: Muslim) kids, who supposedly won’t go there because they find the meeting places offensive. A Muslim politician says Asians have their own groups, and are happy with them. Why, exactly, is this a problem for anybody? It’s not, except for the Puritanical busybodies at the National Secular Society, who are so thin-skinned it’s a wonder their guts don’t fall out onto the sidewalk every time they bump into something.

Via Andrew Sullivan, this observation from  Jonathan McCalmont’s critical appraisal of the film Melancholia:

When happiness became the end point of human existence, pain and suffering took on an altogether different character. Under Christianity, pain and suffering had been tangible proof of God’s promise that the meek would inherit the Earth and that worldly happiness is only fleeting when compared to the infinite joy of union with the Godhead. Under the grand ideologies of the Enlightenment’s children, pain and suffering were things to be extinguished either by revolution (surgery) or by reform (chemotherapy). Now our culture no longer sees misery as divine, it sees it as something to be eradicated and avoided at all costs. Every advert screams promises of material and sensory happiness while bookshops explode with self-help guides designed to help you kick the sadness habit. Films, food, books and even sex are commodified, packaged and sold to us as means to greater and more intense forms of happiness. Even the miseries of work become vehicles for happiness as we are encouraged to work harder for bigger rewards and grander promotions. You must have a career. You must be successful. You must be happy. And if you can’t be happy by your own means then the multi billion-dollar neuropharmacology industry stands poised to offer you deliverance. You have no choice… you must comply.

Yes, the oppression of compulsive happiness. The book to read, of course, is Philip Rieff’s “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” which diagnoses a world in which the achievement of happiness is the point of all existence. (Buy the book via the ISI Press site, and it’s only $14.40). There is perhaps no surer way to be unhappy than to make happiness the absolute telos of one’s life. Anyway, I love cello music and rainy days and autumn and winter. Just so you know.

My sister’s attitude toward the cancer that killed her was both inspirational and mysterious. People couldn’t believe how upbeat she was through the ordeal. Well, “upbeat” is not the right word; it sounds too girlish and glib. Ruthie said flat-out that she hoped for the best, and was willing to submit to whatever therapies her oncologist though would give her a chance at life, no matter how onerous the chemo would be. And she did. But she also always maintained that whatever happened to her was God’s will, and that He had a plan for her. That is to say, her suffering was never meaningless, not to her. She refused either to be angry at God, or to think of herself as a victim of cosmic injustice. She was not fatalistic — if she had been, she wouldn’t have endured all that gruesome chemotherapy — but she did have a peace about her that came from accepting that she might not live, and that that was okay too, because God Had A Plan.

But here’s the thing: she never dwelled on the prospect of death. She just didn’t. She told me more than once that she felt that meditating on death, on the prospect of her non-existence, would be pointless at best, and at worst would tip her into depression, and sap her will to resist. Personally, I have philosophical objections to that, and see it as a kind of denial, but then again, I wasn’t the one who was faced with a painful death, and leaving behind a husband and three children. I don’t think I could have resisted thinking and meditating at length on my own death, and the Meaning Of It All — this, even though I would have known by faith that God had a plan. I can’t imagine taking the path that Ruthie took — the path of pushing meditation on death to the margins of my consciousness by force of will — but I can’t fault her for taking that path. She knew what she needed to do to survive, or at least to make the days she had left full of joy and gratitude, not melancholy. It’s a hard thing for me to draw into focus, though. Was she so serene because she was genuinely at peace with her mortality? Or was she so serene because she was so terrified of it that she refused to look at it, lest it shatter her resolve to live her last months as she thought she should?

Is there a difference? How can you tell?

Next, this from the Jesuit priest Francis X. Clooney’s remarks about the film:

I suppose the theme is an old one: Justine is in tune with a reality others do not see, from which they hide themselves; she was depressed because reality is depressing; she felt, before knowing why, that the ordinary life of wealth and pleasure and business, partying and marrying, had no point at all, since everything was about to change, absolutely. By ordinary standards, Justine is simply clinically depressed. In a larger perspective, in light of what actually happens, she is right. She has seen what no one else can see.

The point of this tale? I do not have anything useful to say about depression or astronomy or the end of the world, but wish to make another kind of point. I suggest that there is a sensitivity to unseen realities that utterly, radically changes the way some people live, and that makes them seem weird — odd, marginal, useless, a bother — to those who have no inkling of what they feel or see. We need to take this intuition, invisible as it may be, into account, when we judge one another.

Perhaps the subtle intuition of what no one else can see or feel is what the saints are about; they live by a sense of God, the living God, that no one else sees, feels, notices. What is just words to others, is a burning mark on their souls.

True. This is a big reason why I feel deeply, and in a way I struggle to articulate persuasively, why the idea of IQ is misleading and even dangerous. In our scientistic age, we privilege science as a way of knowing above all others, which leads us to esteem cognitive ability and raw intellectual capacity most of all. But where does this leave the artist, the saint, the seer, the intuitive genius? IQ doesn’t measure moral worth, I know, but we tend to value people by what they know, and by what they can do and produce with their knowledge. St. Silouan, an Athonite monk, was one of the great religious geniuses of the 20th century, but he was a barely literate peasant. What would his IQ be? I know someone who was told by a psychologist his IQ was so high it couldn’t be measured. This guy can talk in the stratosphere about intellectual matters, but he struggles with everyday things, and from what I’ve been able to see, is pretty well emotionally crippled. Conversely, I know an author whom I used to think was incredibly intelligent in a conventional way, until I realized after some time that she was off-the-charts in intuitive (emotional) intelligence. I thought her profound analytical insights were something that came to her because of education and systematic thought, but it’s not true; this stuff came to her naturally, through her extreme intuition. And yet, the results were the same. I suspect she wouldn’t have be much above average if given an IQ test. She sees what not too many other people can see, or at least can’t see without a lot of training.

This is not really to the point, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. In New York this past weekend, we were talking with our friends about an old Catholic priest we all knew when we were back in Brooklyn. We shared stories about how Monsignor S. often exhibited deep insights, including things he couldn’t have possibly known. I learned things I hadn’t known about him. One of our group talked about how when she would go to confession to him, he would bring up things she needed to confess that she hadn’t thought to mention. He just somehow knew. Someone else at the table mentioned a time a recently ordained friend from out of town came to mass with them, dressed in street clothes, and how Monsignor S., who had never laid eyes on him before, spoke to the young man by name after mass, and asked why he didn’t concelebrate with him. Those may be small things, but I remember being told by an immigrant from the old country, where Monsignor had served in a parish there, that one night in a war when the parish came under bombardment, Monsignor opened the church in the middle of the bombardment, and remained at the altar, praying for the safety of the parish. When the bombing stopped, said this immigrant, not a single bomb had fallen in the parish, though they had fallen all around it. It was uncanny, he said.

You’d never know any of this to talk to Monsignor. He was, and I guess still is, very modest and humble. He just smiles and says God bless you. But that man knows things. He’s onto something. I have no idea if he is brilliant, if he is of average intelligence, or any of that. But I do know that that man knows things that the rest of us don’t.

Ever see the Russian movie Ostrov (The Island)? Take a look at the trailer.  It’s an amazing film about a holy fool, a familiar type in Orthodox Christianity (also present in the West, but more prominent in the East). Holy fools are saints who appear to be fools, or who perhaps really are mentally unbalanced, but who are believed to touched with the divine, and to have extraordinary prophetic insights because of that. In the film, at least for a while, you can’t be quite sure whether the central character is crazy, or saintly, or both. But he sees things others don’t, and as the film goes on, those who seek his counsel are humbled by what the fool reveals to them.

The point I want to make here is not that a fool is on the same cognitive level as an astrophysicist or an evolutionary biologist. The point is that we should judge knowledge not by the standards of academic knowledge, and scientific knowledge, but rather as someone who understands reality. It is much more difficult to judge by that standard. Some of the most obviously intelligent people I’ve ever known are, in some respects, fools, and not holy fools either. One of the most consistent messages of the Hebrew Bible, and on into the Christian Bible, is how God mocks the proud. I just finished reading the story of David to my younger children, and showed them how God, through his Prophet Samuel, brought the last son of Jesse out of the fields and into kingship. You see this over and over in the Bible, I pointed out. Think of Joseph and his brothers. And think, obviously, of Jesus of Nazareth. He must have sounded like a crazy person to most people of his time and place. And yet, Christians believe He was God incarnate.

Question: Are there any happy-go-lucky saints? Any great artists who are thoroughgoing optimists? I can’t see that.

Finally — aren’t you sorry you started reading this rambling post? — I commend to your attention Jody Bottum’s essay on the great pessimist E.M. Cioran, from a 2009 issue of First Things, especially this passage:

The difference between Pascal and Cioran cannot be reduced to a question of rhetoric, outbidding each other on whose thought allows the greater suffering and thereby shows more clearly the core of existence. Cioran remains Pascal’s greatest reader, and he strives throughout his work to account for Pascal—in a way that is possible only for someone whose sensibility is fundamentally religious, despite his antireligious demeanor. Cioran’s quarrel with Christianity is not that it is false but that it attempts to cancel the fear of death by the “abstract construct” of salvation.

Still, he admired Christian religion for at least recognizing the abyss. Much worse is philosophy, which is, he wrote, “the art of masking inner torment.” Death is particular to each of us, and the philosophers are wrong when they think that anyone can teach someone else how to die. “The irrevocability of agony is experienced by each individual alone, through infinite and intense suffering. . . . Only such moments of agony bring about important existential revelations in consciousness. . . . Most people are unaware of the slow agony within themselves. . . . Since agony unfolds in time, temporality is a condition not only of creativity but also for death.” Even if all philosophical questions were answered, we would still experience anxiety: “Nobody in despair suffers from ‘problems,’ but from his inner torment and fire.”

I would have loved to see what Cioran would have done with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It would have been like a wolverine setting upon a cocktail wiener. Here, to circle back to the beginning of this post, is the opening of Cioran’s book about the saints. As Bottum says, Cioran was an unbeliever (though the son of a Romanian Orthodox priest), but he had a deeply religious consciousness:

As I searched for the origin of tears, I thought of the saints. Could they be the source of tears’ bitter light? Who can tell? To be sure, tears are their trace. Tears did not enter this world through the saints but without them we never would have known that we cry because we long for a lost paradise. Show me a single tear swallowed up by the earth! No, by paths unknown to us, they all go upwards. Pain comes before tears. But the saints rehabilitated them.

Saints cannot be known. Only when we awaken the tears sleeping in our depths and know through them, do we come to know how someone could renounce being a man.

… The difference between mystics and saints is that the former stop at an inner vision, while the latter put it into practice.

When I said goodbye to our friends from the ever-memorable Taproot Farm, the main vegetable supplier we go to at our local farmer’s market, one of them said to me, “It’s been great being your lacinato kale dealer these past two years.” They know I’m a kale junkie. It’s just about my favorite vegetable. I once bought 10 bunches of the stuff for a single week. I’m all about kale, baby. And that means I’m all about the Eat More Kale man who’s being pushed around by Chick-fil-A. I respect Chick-fil-A for closing on Sundays out of respect for the Sabbath, and my wife and children have certainly consumed enough of their chicken over the years. But this is just wrong, picking on this guy because his slogan supposedly sounds like “Eat mor chikin.” I didn’t even think of the Chick-fil-A connection until the restaurant sued the Vermont hippie.

Boo, Chick-fil-A! I’m going to order an Eat More Kale shirt, and we’re not going to eat Chick-Fil-A until they back off. Come on, Chikins, you’re supposed to be Christians of some sort. You make $3.5 billion per year, yet you’ve sicced your lawyers on this hippie because he uses the words “eat more”? How can that be right? People may not eat more kale after this, but you’re sure going to make them eat a lot more Raising Cane’s (mmm … Cane’s sauce).

OK, gang, I have a few Christmas questions, but inasmuch as we’re moving in 10 days, not enough time to research them. If you can help with advice, please give it.

1. On bikes for kids. We’re pretty sure we’re going to buy all three children bicycles. They will have lots of open space in which to ride at my mom and dad’s, and the streets in town where we’ll ride are also quiet and safe. We’re going to get a cheapy Wal-mart bike for Nora, who’s five. But I’m not sure whether or not we should go cheap or not with Matthew and Lucas.

Matt knows how to ride a bike, but doesn’t much care for it. I think he’ll get more into it once he sees how much fun it is down there. But I’m really not sure. If I buy him a flimsy bike, I might end up regretting it. But I would say there’s an equal chance of spending several hundred dollars on a bike for him that ends up sitting in the garage. And that would be a huge regret on my part (spending all that money, I mean).

Lucas doesn’t know how to ride a bike, but we’ll teach him, and I’m sure he’ll love it, and love it hard. He’s the athletic, energetic one in the family. He and I were out riding around today, and stopped by REI to look at the bikes in case Santa brings him one. He’s almost eight, so a 24″ bike fits him fine. The model they had that he liked — and it was one of the less expensive models — was $250. This is significantly more than we want to spend, but of all the kids, Lucas is the one who will get the most use out of the bike. The reason I hesitate, though, is not knowing how long he’ll be able to ride it, given how kids grow.

I’m not a cyclist by any means, and haven’t ridden bikes since I was a kid. I asked the guy at REI how come they didn’t have kids bikes with just one gear. He smiled and said those are rare these days. Really? I told him that when I was a kid, Schwinn was the best bike on the street, at least in my town. He said that Schwinn was bought out by someone, and now their bikes aren’t nearly as well made. Is that true? I know he was trying to sell me a more expensive bike, but he also could have been telling me the truth. I have no way of knowing.

So, cyclists, please give me some advice here. We’re not going to buy from REI simply because there are no REI stores in Louisiana. Still, I need to know if we’re okay getting Wal-mart bikes for the boys, or if we should aim for something higher. Is it worth investing in quality? For both of them?

2. On games for the Wii, would you recommend Guitar Hero or Rock Band? And if so, which version of either, and why? We’ve played Guitar Hero at a friend’s house before, as a family, and had a blast. That was three years ago. I don’t know how much has changed since then.

Scientists have now observed quantum effects at the macro level, in a laboratory experiment involving entanglement. This is a fairly big deal, not only because of what it tells us about the strange ways matter relates to matter, but because of what technology might come of it, especially with quantum computing:

He doubts that there will be any immediate applications for the technique, partly because the entanglement is very short-lived. “I am not sure where this particular work will go from here,” says Cleland. “I can’t think of a particular use for entanglement that lasts for only a few picoseconds” (10^-12 seconds).

But Walmsley is more optimistic. “Diamond could form the basis of a powerful technology for practical quantum information processing,” he says. “The optical properties of diamond make it ideal for producing tiny optical circuits on chips.”

Entanglement is one of the most bizarre aspects of quantum theory. In essence, it involves two objects that become “entangled” with each other, which is to say develop a relationship such that anything that happens to one happens to the other simultaneously, no matter how far apart they are. Einstein, who struggled to accept this, called it “spooky action at a distance.” How does this happen? Scientists don’t know. But they’ve observed it many, many times. Earlier this year, the quantum physicist Vlatko Vedral wrote a great cover story for Scientific American (behind the paywall, alas) talking about how scientists are now looking at evidence for quantum processes at work in the macro world (previously it was believed that quantum effects only worked at the subatomic level). For example, it’s hypothesized that quantum effects may explain how birds navigate. Here’s the lead of Vedral’s piece, the only bit that’s available for free:

According to standard physics textbooks, quantum mechanics is the theory of the microscopic world. It describes particles, atoms and molecules but gives way to ordinary classical physics on the macroscopic scales of pears, people and planets. Somewhere between molecules and pears lies a boundary where the strangeness of quantum behavior ends and the familiarity of classical physics begins. The impression that quantum mechanics is limited to the microworld permeates the public understanding of science. For instance, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene writes on the first page of his hugely successful (and otherwise excellent) book The Elegant Universe that quantum mechanics “provides a theoretical framework for understanding the universe on the smallest of scales.” Classical physics, which comprises any theory that is not quantum, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, handles the largest of scales.

Yet this convenient partitioning of the world is a myth. Few modern physicists think that classical physics has equal status with quantum mechanics; it is but a useful approximation of a world that is quantum at all scales. Although quantum effects may be harder to see in the macroworld, the reason has nothing to do with size per se but with the way that quantum systems interact with one another. Until the past decade, experimentalists had not confirmed that quantum behavior persists on a macroscopic scale. Today, however, they routinely do. These effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may operate in the cells of our body.

Here’s Vedral’s Five Books interview.  Excerpt:

Does it lead you to believe that maybe people go into quantum physics to prove an idea that they’ve already had?

That’s an interesting point. It’s difficult to tell what comes prior to what, right? In a way we do have these inner feelings, all of us, as to what we think the world should be like. And we usually carry this prejudice with us into our research as well, so it’s not clear whether you come with a prejudice and then you’re trying to use this theory to confirm what you already thought the world was like prior to that. In this kind of interview it’s easy to expose these kinds of things: you can see that people started with some ideas and then maybe changed them or didn’t change them as they did research.

All these unifying theories that quantum mechanics proves, seem to have already been posited in literature or religion or whatever. 

Yes, I don’t think there is anything really distinctly novel that was brought there philosophically by quantum mechanics. The key tenet I would say is this randomness that is at the core of our interaction with the world: there is an element that you can never make more deterministic. And, of course, randomness as a way of looking at the world existed for a long time. If you go back to the ancient Greeks I think you will see a spectrum of all of these world views already present there.

What’s most interesting to me about quantum theory? The philosophical idea that consciousness is involved at some mysterious (that is, observed but not understood) level with determining outcomes in the material world — that is, that there is no bright, clean barrier between objectivity and subjectivity.

A couple of readers have drawn my attention to the video embedded above. It’s from an anti-OWS group purporting to show what really happened at UC Davis leading up to the infamous moment when the campus police officer pepper-sprayed students on the sidewalk. The video above, which is about 11 minutes long, is spliced together from a series of videos shot at the incident, and appears to show in chronological order what happened prior to the pepper-spraying. If this presentation is true and accurate, then it puts that incident in a significantly different light than I and many others thought. According to what is shown on this video, protesters trapped police on campus, and attempted to compel them to release fellow protesters they had arrested earlier — protesters who had been arrested after they refused three stated police orders — lawful orders — to clear the ground or, well, face arrest. If you fast-forward to the 7-minute mark, you will see the police officers’ exit blocked by protesters. You also see the officers going to the line of students and telling each one specifically that if they do not move, they will be subject to police action. Which, in the end, they were.

It is hard to see what realistic choice the police had here, other than to do what they did. You cannot have a mob of students trapping the police, and declaring that they will decide on what terms the police will be allowed to do their jobs, or even to leave an area. In fact, if this video above is a true account of what happened, it’s astonishing that the police were as patient as they were with these protesters. What did they expect? You trap the police on campus and tell them you won’t let them leave unless the free students they’ve arrested, and then the police tell you that if you don’t move and let them — let law-enforcement officers — pass, as they have a right to do, then you may well be subject to violence … well, you’re surprised when you get a mouthful of pepper spray?

Watch the video and tell me what you think. I was quick to believe the story told by the previous videos, so I don’t want to be too hasty to believe this one. But based on what I see here, I’m not sure at all that the police did the wrong thing at UC Davis that day, and I’m inclined to believe they did the only thing they reasonably could have done, given the situation the protesters put them in. Or at least what they did with the pepper spray was not unreasonable, though I suppose it’s possible they could have chosen a different response to clear the way so they could leave. But what? Physically assaulting the protesters and cuffing them? That would have been better? What could the cops have done in this situation aside from capitulate to the student mob refusing to let them leave without releasing the prisoners they’d arrested? Ideas?

I’m going to wait to hear what you readers have to say before I make my mind up.