We didn’t show the first picture from the Return to 1968 Festival in NYC. It kind of sums things up, however. Maybe this does too: “God bless them for their spontaneity,” Pelosi told reporters. “It’s young, it’s spontaneous, it’s focused and it’s going to be effective.” Yeah, good luck with that. How effective? Just watch this scene from Atlanta’s dramatization of Orwell’s Animal Farm:

How creepy is all that chanting in unison? Ginning this up was a terrible idea on the part of those who wanted to create an anti-tea-party. We’d say Go For It! — but there’s something a little scary about the behavior of these mind-numbed robots. HT: Powerline

We probably disagree with Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter on a variety of policy matters, but the 3000 word address he delivered from the pulpit of the Mount Carmel Baptist Church is remarkable. Rich Lowry has a précis.

Here’s a story about Edward Thomas and Robert Frost that took place near Little Iddens, Frost’s cottage in Gloucestershire. Guardian:

In late November 1914, Thomas and Frost were strolling in the woods behind Frost’s cottage when they were intercepted by the local gamekeeper, who challenged their presence and told the men bluntly to clear out. As a resident, Frost believed he was entitled to roam wherever he wished, and he told the keeper as much. The keeper was unimpressed and some sharp words were exchanged, and when the poets emerged on to the road they were challenged once more. Tempers flared and the keeper called Frost “a damned cottager” before raising his shotgun at the two men. Incensed, Frost was on the verge of striking the man, but hesitated when he saw Thomas back off. Heated words continued to be had, with the adversaries goading each other before then finally parting, the poets talking heatedly of the incident as they walked.

Thomas said that the keeper’s aggression was unacceptable and that something should be done about it. Frost’s ire peaked as he listened to Thomas: something would indeed be done and done right now, and if Thomas wanted to follow him he could see it being done. The men turned back, Frost angrily, Thomas hesitantly, but the gamekeeper was no longer on the road. His temper wild, Frost insisted on tracking the man down, which they did, to a small cottage at the edge of a coppice. Frost beat on the door, and left the startled keeper in no doubt as to what would befall him were he ever to threaten him again or bar access to the preserve. Frost repeated his warning for good measure, turned on his heels and prepared to leave. What happened next would be a defining moment in Frost and Thomas’s friendship, and would plague Thomas to his dying days.

The keeper, recovering his wits, reached above the door for his shotgun and came outside, this time heading straight for Thomas who, until then, had not been his primary target. The gun was raised again; instinctively Thomas backed off once more, and the gamekeeper forced the men off his property and back on to the path, where they retreated under the keeper’s watchful aim.

Frost contented himself with the thought that he had given a good account of himself; but not Thomas, who wished that his mettle had not been tested in the presence of his friend. He felt sure that he had shown himself to be cowardly and suspected Frost of thinking the same. Not once but twice had he failed to hold his ground, while his friend had no difficulty standing his. His courage had been found wanting, at a time when friends such as Rupert Brooke had found it in themselves to face genuine danger overseas.

The encounter would leave Thomas haunted, to relive the moment again and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost – in the week when he left for France, even in the week of his death – he recalled the feeling of fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand-off with the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and possibly even by the most important friend he had ever made, and he vowed that he would never again let himself be faced down. When the moment came he would hold his nerve and face the gunmen. “That’s why he went to war,” said Frost later…

six months after the row with the gamekeeper, Thomas had still to take his fateful decision to enlist…a poem of Frost’s had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas’s hand: a poem called “Two Roads”, soon to be rechristened “The Road Not Taken“…He broke the news to Frost…”I am going to enlist on Wednesday”…He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter 1917

Poetry kills! Ouch! Frost’s poem remains well known today, but it was M. Scott Peck who really cleaned up, using the phrase The Road Less Traveled for the title of his book, which remained on the NYT bestseller list for 694 weeks.

(BTW, Frost was already 40 years old in 1914, making him 86 when we watched him recite one of his works at JFK’s inauguration; apparently you live longer if you’re the writer, not the reader.)

We last mentioned music the other day, at the birthday of Alison Krauss. Today it’s Hot Tuna. (For fun compare this and this. And remember that you’re paying a good chunk of the bill for the former.)

Glenn Reynolds comes out in favor of tax increases, specifically urging the repeal of a tax break from the fifties:

One of the things that’s been floating around the Web over the past week is a video clip from 1953. It’s a short film produced by the motion picture industry, seeking the end of a 20 percent excise tax on movie theaters’ gross revenues that had been imposed at the end of World War II as a deficit-cutting measure…In the film, figures ranging from industry big shots to humble ticket collectors talk about how the tax is hurting their industry and killing jobs…

I would be agitating to repeal the “Eisenhower tax cut” on the movie industry and restore the excise tax. I think I would also look at imposing similar taxes on sales of DVDs, pay-per-view movies, CDs, downloadable music, and related products. I’d also look at the tax and accounting treatment of these industries to see if they were taking advantage of any special “loopholes” that could be closed as a means of reducing “tax expenditures.”…

I note that FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who approved the Comcast merger, left the commission to take a lucrative job at Comcast…Because much of their value to their employers comes from their prior government service, I think that the taxpayers deserve a share of the return, say in the form of a 50 percent surtax on any earnings by political appointees in excess of their prior government salaries

Gee, maybe the media would form their own tea party. But what then would they say about themselves?

Bill Gross surveys America’s current situation, extrapolates some version of the status quo, and sees 4 “life rafts” for an economic rescue:

Balance the budget/growth –- The current Congressional compromise is but one small step for fiscal solvency. There is no giant leap for mankind anywhere on the horizon. Trillions of further spending cuts, and yes trillions of tax hikes, are necessary to stabilize our “official” debt/GDP ratio of 90% or so. One important detail to keep in mind: projected deficits in 2012 and 2013 of 7-8% of GDP rely on OMB growth estimates of 3%+ in the next few years. Recent trends give pause to these estimates as does PIMCO’s New Normal, which believes 2% not 3% is closer to reality. If so, deficits move right back up to near-double-digit percentages of GDP. Likewise, should interest rates ever rise from current 2% average levels, a 100 basis point increase raises the deficit by 1% and erases any hoped for gains. Sisyphus would be familiar with this seemingly unsolvable dilemma.

Unexpected inflation –- While markets are global these days, figures sometimes lie and policymakers often figure. Focusing investors’ attention on statistics emphasizing “core” or “chain-linked” methodologies can entice investors to stay home, or in the case of foreign nations, to “invest American.” Central bankers, not just in the U.S., but the U.K., have long been arguing for a reversion of headline 3% CPI numbers to the 2% or lower “core” standard expectation. “Patience,” they argue, but “prudence” might be the better watchword. If so, then the expected “unexpected” inflation would mimic the old Roman custom of coin shaving or its substitution with base metals instead of silver or gold. Inflation is the result no matter how you coin it, which puts more money in government coffers to pay their bills and less money in your pocket to pay yours.

Currency depreciation –- High deficits, both fiscal and trade, combined with low interest rates for extended periods of time produce declining currency valuations against more prosperous, and more policy conservative competitor nations. Few Americans are aware that the dollar’s recent 12-month depreciation of over 15% is an explicit tax on their standard of living. Uncle Sam, the government overseer, benefits enormously: one rather clever way for the U.S. to pay its bills to foreign creditors is to pay them in depreciated dollars. The Chinese and other offshore holders wind up getting not only .05% interest on their Treasury Bills, but 12 months later – voila! – their Bills are worth only 85 cents on the dollar in global purchasing power. The Chinese should be reading Shakespeare, not Confucius – especially the second half of “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” when it comes to U.S. dollars.

Financial Repression via low/negative real interest rates –- I have commented on this Carmen Reinhart, commonsensical technique in prior Outlooks. If the Treasury is borrowing money from you or PIMCO at .05% for the next six months and CPI inflation is averaging 3%, then lenders/savers are being shortchanged beyond even rather egregious historical examples. The burden of “sixteen tons” of debt á la Tennessee Ernie Ford is considerably reduced at 5 basis points of annual interest. “Loading” coal or debt in this case at near 0% yields doesn’t make the borrower another day older, nor deeper in debt. Actually it’s a shot of Botox for the borrower, but a shot of lead for the lender. Duck!

By using these four life rafts available to U.S. and other AAA sovereign borrowers, one can almost imagine a half century from now, that they remain solvent

VDH has a somewhat complementary piece focusing on cultural gloom. Our view is a little different. The status quo is unacceptable. The country has no time for the utopian fantasies of the left and the media, rubbish like global warming, green jobs and so forth. Save that stuff for when we’re rich again.

The economy needs fixing, no doubt. To do so, this country needs three things: (1) a weed-wacker; (2) a drill; and (3) the willingness to use them.

(1) The weed-wacker cuts government red tape so that businesses create jobs in the US, not the BRIC countries, etc (maybe we’d put Bernie Marcus and Paul Otellini in charge); (2) the drill exploits every energy resource in the US, which will create a million jobs and cut half a trillion dollars from the balance of payments deficit; (3) the will to do these things — ah, yes, that’s the hard part. But with the insane policies emanating from Washington, maybe even that is getting a little easier to muster.

Would you see this. HT: IHTM

Anyone familiar with the collected works of Messrs. Cee Lo Green and Enrique Iglesias knows the utterly debased state of much of American popular music today compared to the past.

It is genuinely hard for us to imagine the moral universe that these men inhabit — and not just them, but all the businessmen around them, the producers and record company executives, the companies buying product placement in such music, etc. How long can such a downward spiral continue? Perhaps that’s the subject for a different day; let’s move on to more pleasant things.

We’re writing this because Scott Johnson just took note of the birthday of Alison Krauss, a happy occasion for American music. We’ll also pause to remember that the wunderkind Bob Dylan will turn 70(!) this year, and that Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert is 36 years old now. Ebb and flow.

From Omaha, Nebraska:

The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive…The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.” The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities…

The book that OPS bought, “The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change,” includes a worksheet for teachers to score themselves on a continuum of cultural sensitivity. The continuum ranges from “cultural destructiveness,” as evidenced by genocide and ethnocide, to “cultural proficiency,” depicted as the highest level of awareness. Only those educators who acknowledge the existence of white privilege in America, that “white” is a culture in America and that race “is a definer for social and economic status” can reach proficiency, the authors contend. Those who score poorly on the worksheet are asked in the book what they will do “to align yourself with the values expressed.”

No wonder the teachers and administrators have to cheat on their students’ tests. With all this rubbish, there’s no time for the three R’s. HT: BOTW

Consider the remarkable changes of the last 130 years:

Some signal facts of our progress in the last century. If you were born in 1900, your life expectancy was in the forties, and GNP per capita was about $4000. If you are born today, your life expectancy in about eighty, and statistically, as an average American, you are ten times richer. In reality you are a hundred or a thousand times richer, if you factor in your ability to be in Paris tomorrow for $500, your ability to watch events from fifty years ago as they actually happened, etc. – not to mention that your toddler’s severe pneumonia can be reliably cured in 48 hours or so. Only a little of this has to do with government.

Mostly it is because perhaps more than 50% of everything ever invented in the history of humanity was invented in the last 130 years, and perhaps 50% of that was invented by Americans. Milton Hershey invented the candy bar, Carrier invented the air conditioner for a tire plant, Sears invented catalogue distribution, Henry Ford invented cheap cars, some guys from Texas Instruments invented the transistor. It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the invention and wide use of brand names, which communicate the quality and dependability of every product we buy. This alone deserves the Nobel Prize. And it was a large and growing market, the availability of risk capital, the development of standardized accounting principles, and protection of intellectual and personal property by the courts that made this possible.

We are at the end of an era; soon, there will be no one in America who remembers what life was like without telephones, running water, indoor plumbing, cars, airplanes, central heating, or electric lights; for our purposes here, we’ll include the children and grandchildren of these men and women as participating in a chain of continuity to those old days. One of our favorite quotes from Henry Adams is apt: “The American boy of 1854 stood closer to the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Soon, almost no one in America will have a visceral understanding of what 1854 was like, and what the heck Adams was talking about.

It is even worse than that. The transistor was invented in 1947 and patented shortly after, and since that time devices of all sorts have been getting smaller, smarter and less mechanical. There is another loss happening because of this, and Americans — including us — have no idea what it means for the future, though we think it is, on balance, bad:

A typical boy of 1854 knew what farming was like and may well have worked on a farm, knew horses and other animals, and learned how to maintain and fix things, from houses to wagons to furniture. A typical young man of 1947 had been in the army, knew people who lived on farms, could tune and maintain his own car, and could change the fan belt on the refrigerator and refill it with Freon. Both the boy and the young man had some feel for the technologies that were developing and changing around them, since the technologies were often sized on a human scale and involved mechanical processes that they had some acquaintance with.

To an important extent, this is no longer true. You can’t fix an iPod the way you can fix a record player; indeed you can’t even easily open up an iPod to understand it, as you could unscrew the turntable cover to figure out how 33 1/3 rpm became 45 rpm. Nor can you fool around with a Toyota Prius the same way you could try to replace a 283 with a 327 in a ’57 Chevy.

We hope we are not romanticizing a world we have lost; it is common enough, as well as wrong, to excessively mythologize the past. Today’s technology provides far greater health and wealth to a vastly larger world population than existed in those other times. We love refineries, steel mills, job shops, machine tools and oil rigs, but we are not suggesting, like Mao, a steel mill in your back yard or some form of return to a isolationist’s vision of a manufacturing economy. However, we are saying that it is fit and proper to understand such things.

We hypothesize that, to some extent, the microchip culture we have now, where miraculous tiny things just somehow work, without moving parts, has produced a form of magical thinking in our country. (We also blame the Hollywood Utopians for this too — their creations often seek, not to mirror or enhance reality, but to create rather harmful alternative realities, but that is another matter.) Americans complain about gas prices, but they don’t like refineries, and they oppose oil drilling in godforsaken wastelands; yet somehow the gas is supposed to be readily available at low prices: this is but one example of a sort of magical thinking that seems to us very unlike the way Americans thought in 1854 or 1947.

We think it is urgent for our future that Americans understand and teach our young people about the enormous developments that have happened since the nineteenth century. So far, such efforts seem to us to be largely centered on self-congratulatory sociological claptrap, where the current generation, with all its diversity, change, and hope, thinks itself superior to all those who have come before. Such flummery is also as destructive as it is common.

In some small way, we think that standing on its head the thinking of Charles Eliot is what is required today. Harvard President Eliot was a great educator and thinker who changed the classical curriculum to make it more suitable for fast-developing America, through increased specialization. (Eliot began teaching at Harvard in that year of 1854, by the way.) We quote him via an unusually well-written entry in Wikipedia:

“As a people, we do not apply to mental activities the principle of division of labor; and we have but a halting faith in special training for high professional employments. The vulgar conceit that a Yankee can turn his hand to anything we insensibly carry into high places, where it is preposterous and criminal. We are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to court-room or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius. What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists? — although in great emergencies the nation has known where to turn. Only after years of the bitterest experience did we come to believe the professional training of a soldier to be of value in war. This lack of faith in the prophecy of a natural bent, and in the value of a discipline concentrated upon a single object, amounts to a national danger.”

We agree with Eliot of course that the modern world needs specialization, but it needs anew the inculcation of a general understanding of and feel for the development of our technologies and businesses and how we came so far as a people so fast. There is no argument for Americans’ being as cut off from the world of 1854 or 1947 as they are today; only harm can come from such ignorance.

Today those who style themselves the most learned among us often live in a bubble we sometimes characterize as the university/media/political complex. Their dire predictions are often downright silly. However, they hold these views not only with a fervent passion, but with the conviction that they have the right to impose their fatuous and expensive notions on the rest of us. Like the ancients, we Americans have to return ad fontes, for if we forget the past we leave the future to the fabulists and utopians. That would be a tragic outcome for both America and the world.

A report from a couple of sources on a UN document that reads like it’s from outer space:

The United Nations (UN) on Tuesday warned that humanity is coming close to breaching the sustainability of Earth, urging a greater and faster technological revolution to avoid “a major planetary catastrophe.”

The UN’s yearly report titled “The World Economic and Social Survey 2011: The Great Green Technological Transformation,” underlined the importance of scaling up clean energy technologies…”Business as usual is not an option,” the report concluded….

Two years ago, U.N. researchers were claiming that it would cost “as much as $600 billion a year over the next decade” to go green. Now, a new U.N. report has more than tripled that number to $1.9 trillion per year for 40 years…That works out to a grand total of $76 trillion, over 40 years — or more than five times the entire Gross Domestic Product of the United States

It’s been 50 years since the Kanamits appeared at the UN. We thought it was fiction at the time, but maybe the aliens actually took over back then.

and other oddities. Must be summer.

Mark Steyn:

the Atlanta Public Schools system has spent the last decade systemically cheating on its tests. Not the students, but the Superintendent, and the union, and 38 principals, and at least 178 teachers –- whoops, pardon me, “educators,” and some 44 of the 56 school districts. Teachers held “changing parties” at their homes at which they sat around with extra supplies of erasers correcting their students’ test answers in order to improve overall scores…its fake test scores got its leader, Beverly Hall, garlanded with the National Superintendent of the Year Award, the Administrator of the Year Award, the Distinguished Public Service Award, the Keystone Award for Leadership in Education, the Concerned Black Clergy Education Award, the American Association of School Administrators Effie H. Jones Humanitarian Award and a zillion other phony-baloney baubles with which the American edu-fraud cartel scratches its own back. In reality, Beverly Hall’s Atlanta Public Schools system was in the child-abuse business: It violated the education of its students

This abuse was hidden. Other abuse occurs in plain sight. Revolting.

Guy one:

we have Judge Douglas giving his exposition of what the Declaration of Independence means, and we have him saying…you Germans are not connected with it. Now I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments that are made, that the inferior race are to be treated with as much allowance as they are capable of enjoying; that as much is to be done for them as their condition will allow.

What are these arguments? They are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. You will find that all the arguments in favor of king-craft were of this class; they always bestrode the necks of the people, not that they wanted to do it, but because the people were better off for being ridden.

That is their argument, and this argument of the Judge is the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will — whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent

Guy two:

It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.

Sometimes there really is no improvement on the past.

Within the lifetime and personal memories of many Americans still living, most everyone knew farmers and soldiers. As late as America’s entry into World War I, over 42% of Americans still lived on farms. Your grandparents knew farmers and soldiers. It’s hard not to know a farmer or have spent time on a farm when 4 out of 10 of your countrymen lived their lives in agriculture.

Similarly, everyone knew soldiers not so long ago. WWI drafted 2.8 million Americans, when America only had 50 million men in total. WWII took 10 million draftees, and there were 3.4 million between Korea and Vietnam. One way of looking at Vietnam, for example, is that the draftees were as many as all boys in the United States who turned 18 in 1970 — a pretty large group of Baby Boomers. And none of these figures include the men who enlisted — surprisingly, perhaps, the total number of Vietnam veterans is over 2,500,000. So for a long time in America it has been true that most Americans knew something of farming and the military in a direct personal way.

No longer. As a statistical matter today, there are almost no new soldiers or farmers in America. Annual military recruits amount to 175,000 or so a year in a country of 300,000,000. And it’s even worse in agriculture. There are lilterally almost no new farmers in America today. At the time of WWII, farming still occupied 18% of the labor force – it’s less than 2% today. Every single year America loses more farmers than it creates. Many (perhaps most?) young Americans probably have not one single friend who becomes a farmer or soldier today.

Mark Steyn asks from time to time why there have been virtually no war songs during the last decade, as opposed to WWII. Part of the reason is Hollywood, of course, but another aspect of the phenomenon is this: all Americans were involved in WWII (see the PBS Soundies program, for example); very few are involved in America’s battles today. In WWII, war songs were about us; today war songs would be about them.

We sometimes hear from voices in the new media that this is the same America that won WWII. Well, this is pretty clearly not the America of WWII. The millions of farmers and soldiers of yesteryear now live in a world that seems to get a makeover twice a decade. Five years ago, for example, Facebook was arguably worth a mere billion dollars or so. And there is not much memory of that older America to boot. There are justifiable reasons to be very concerned about these collective losses of experience, memory and toughness in our very dangerous world.

This is not a piece about decline and pessimism, however. Research (see eg, Harvard Professor Dan Gilbert’s interesting lecture and book) shows time and again that the resiliency and adaptability of men and women to crisis, hardship and cruel misfortune is far above what they themselves anticipate. For the most part, the most recent generations of Americans have not been tested in the way some earlier generations have. When such tests come, it remains to be see whether these generations will perform in the manner of farmers and soldiers past, and what manner of patriotic songs will be sung.

It is, however, an error to judge the fruits of affluence as irreversible symptoms of decline. We cannot know the outcome at this time.

It’s a very real question.

Here’s some of what was going on in 1940:

1. In The Mood – Glenn Miller
2. When You Wish Upon a Star – Cliff Edwards
3. I’ll Never Smile Again – Tommy Dorsey w/Frank Sinatra
4. Only Forever – Bing Crosby
5. Body & Soul – Coleman Hawkins
6. When the Swallows Come Back to Capistrano – The Ink Spots
7. The Breeze and I – Jimmy Dorsey w/Bob Eberly
8. You Are My Sunshine – Jimmie Davis
9. When You Wish Upon a Star – Glenn Miller
10. Tuxedo Junction – Glenn Miller…

one-fourth of the top hits sold or listened to by the majority of Americans in 1940 were performed by Glenn Miller…Frank Sinatra jumped ship to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra in January. Together they recorded some 40 songs during the next 12 months, the most successful of which was I’ll Never Smile Again which became one of the most important chart toppers of all time, spending almost three months at the number one spot.

A simpler time, and in the world of contemporary music and popular culture, a better time.

Telegraph:

under the dictatorship, political repression went hand in hand with social modernity. Women’s rights are among the most advanced in the Arab world. Alcohol is freely available, divorce is easier than in some parts of the EU and thousands of half-naked Western tourists line the coast every summer.

By the standards of the region, Tunisia is highly developed. With its boulevards and cafes, its trams and shopping centres, Tunis, the capital, looks like a dustier Marseille. But Ennahda draws support from the less prosperous interior…At an April 17 rally organised by Ennahda, Tunisia’s largest Islamist party, a speaker called for Bouzid to be “shot with a Kalashnikov”. The audience, which included a senior Ennahda leader, responded with cries of “Allahu Akbar”…

“People are feeling the pressure. Women come up to me and say, what about Ennahda -– they’re going to make me wear a veil,” said Maya Jribi, secretary general of the main liberal party, the PDP, Ennadha’s main rival, and one of Tunisia’s top female politicians…Mokhtar Trifi, head of the country’s human rights league, says that manifestations of Islamic radicalism -– forced veiling, forced prayer, and condemnations for apostasy -– are rising, too, all over the country.

We’re reminded of the so-called “Twitter revolution” in Egypt, where 40% of the population is illiterate and a majority lives on a few dollars a day. It is not a surprise that the allies of modernity are often autocrats, and that a plurality of the people would support “one man, one vote, one time.” In general, we’re less optimistic than Walter Russell Mead seems today on a number of these issues.

Alvie Singer was right, the universe is expanding. Space:

A census of 200,000 galaxies may confirm that the mysterious force of dark energy is what is pulling the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds…The galaxy survey, which looked at galaxies that were up to 7 billion years old, used data from NASA’s space-based Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) and the Anglo-Australian Telescope…

“The action of dark energy is as if you threw a ball up in the air, and it kept speeding upward into the sky faster and faster,” said Chris Blake of the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Blake is lead author of two papers on the study appearing in an upcoming issue of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “The results tell us that dark energy is a cosmological constant, as Einstein proposed”…

“Observations by astronomers over the last 15 years have produced one of the most startling discoveries in physical science: The expansion of the universe, triggered by the Big Bang, is speeding up,” said Jon Morse, director of the astrophysics division at NASA

t’s a good thing that dark energy actually exists. After all, it makes up about 70% of the universe. And dark matter makes up about 25% of the universe. So we’d be in a real pickle if 95% of the universe was shown to be nothing but a dream in man’s mind. Come to think of it, the remaining 5% — comprising everything we observe — isn’t doing all that well.

It’s hard to read question I — the man selling his wagon at a loss — without being reminded that this test was taken by kids in the depths of the depression. We immediately thought of that Stephen Forster song. But maybe we’re overdoing it; after all, they’re making money in questions VII and VIII. In any event, it’s worth considering that concepts related to cost, sales and profits are mentioned about a dozen times in the brief test that is in so many ways from an alien time. Care to guess how many times they would appear on an 8th grader’s math exam today? HT: Ace