Current Affairs

by hilzoy

Having made my views on the Plame/Rove matter as clear as I can for the moment, and not feeling particularly inclined to let myself get distracted by the various charges and counter-charges against Joe Wilson, I thought I might mention instead one aspect of the whole thing that has always struck me as really funny, namely, this:

“On July 12, two days before Novak’s column, a Post reporter was told by an administration official that the White House had not paid attention to the former ambassador’s CIA-sponsored trip to Niger because it was set up as a boondoggle by his wife, an analyst with the agency working on weapons of mass destruction.”

A boondoggle. To Niger. If you know anything about Niger, these words alone should have sent you into gales of laughter. — Don’t get me wrong: I would love to go to Niger. If anyone is in the business of setting up trips to Niger, please consider me. But I’m odd. It’s not just that I love to travel, and I’m generally up for anything. It’s not even that I’m a birder, though that helps: there are not many places on earth so godforsaken that they don’t have interesting birds. The important thing about me, in this context, is that I decided long ago that caring about comfort interfered with too many interesting things, and so I just wasn’t going to do it. (Although, as time goes on, even I am beginning to draw the line at hotels with wall-to-wall carpeting that has been left to fester and rot for over, oh, forty years or so.) If I cared about comfort, I would not want to go to Niger. It’s that simple.

Getting there is no fun. Travelocity tells me that to fly from JFK to Niamey takes over 38 hours (via London and Paris), but, oddly, only a little over 20 coming back (via Ouagadougou, Casablanca, and Paris). I once took a 38 hour trip (Maputo to LA), and it was not a pleasant experience. The trip to Niamey I looked up costs $4655, but I think that in Wilson’s case, the CIA sprang for that.

What do you find when you arrive? Sand, mostly. About 80% of Niger is the Sahara desert. If you google-image Niger, you will find a lot of photos of SUVs up to their axles in sand in the middle of a trackless waste, with titles like “and this is our off-road vehicle, stuck in the sand!” It’s normally bone-dry, and getting worse because of desertification, about which the Lonely Planet Guide writes: “The ratio of desert to semi-desert is ever increasing, and there is a danger that the country may, one day, disappear under a blanket of sand.” These days they are having not only a drought but a plague of locusts. I don’t know whether Niger was having a drought when Joe Wilson went there, although, as a friend of mine asked me over dinner, in the Sahara, how could you tell?

Even without drought and locusts, Niger is desperately poor. According to the World Bank (Table 1.1), Niger’s GDP was $200/year in 2003; alarmingly, there were ten countries that were even worse off. On the Human Development Index (pdf), which measures quality of life more generally, it’s second to last, just ahead of Sierra Leone.

Second to last in the world. Think about it. According to the World Bank, life expectancy is 46.4 years (and that’s without a serious AIDS problem); more than one in seven infants die; more than one in four children die by five; and the adult literacy rate is around 18%. That’s not just poor; that’s a disaster.

Beyond the fold, I will post pictures, so that you can see where Jetsetting Joe Wilson got to go for free. (DaveC: this warning is for you.)

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by hilzoy

I have been reading the oddest thing: Scalia’s dissent in McCreary County v. ACLU (pdf). It’s very peculiar in its own right, and even more peculiar as an illustration of originalist legal theories in action. McCreary County is one of the Ten Commandments cases that were handed down on Monday; it concerns a copy of the Ten Commandments displayed in a courthouse. The majority said that the display of the Ten Commandments in this case was unconstitutional. Scalia disagrees on various grounds; the one that interests me is his claim that putting up the Ten Commandments in a courthouse does not favor one religion over another (pp. 53-55).

I could understand (though I would not agree with) an originalist who said: look, what ‘establish’ means, in the establishment clause, is: to make some religion the official religion of the government. Via the fourteenth amendment, this extends to other units of government, like counties. But putting up a display in a courthouse is not an establishment of religion in this sense. So even if McCreary County had chosen to display the Catholic catechism, the Augsburg Confession, or the Qur’an, that would have been fine. Scalia does say that “governmental invocation of God is not an establishment.” But for some reason he does not conclude that it is acceptable for a public building to display the text of some specific religion; only for such a building to display texts common to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. (Why? I don’t know about you, but I think the answer has to involve a penumbra or an emanation.)

I could also understand an originalist who tried to argue that displaying the Ten Commandments did not count as establishing a religion unless the display somehow indicated which of the several religions that take the Ten Commandments to be sacred it favored. But while that argument would be understandable, it would also be stupid and unworkable, not least because it would require a clear account of what counts as ‘one religion’. (Is establishing Christianity OK so long as the government does not choose between Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy? Is establishing Pentacostalism OK so long as one does not specify which of the roughly 11,000 Pentacostal denominations now in existence one prefers? And so on.)

But Scalia does not rely explicitly on the claim that the Ten Commandments are not the province of any one religion either. Instead, he argues that because the Ten Commandments are viewed as sacred by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and because these three religions are the most popular monotheistic religions in the country, it is acceptable to display the Ten Commandments in a public building. And what I cannot understand is how on earth he manages to get this out of the text of the establishment clause in a way that even pretends to be consistent with his general views on legal interpretation.

(Note: I am not a lawyer, of course, but I am about to pretend. Be warned. It may not be pretty. Also: I started thinking about this because I was appalled by the idea that you could ‘establish’ anything on which Christianity, Judaism. and Islam all agreed; but as I thought more I ended up being more interested in the question: how did a smart guy like Scalia convince himself that what he says has anything at all to do with originalism?)

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The Iranian theocracy staged an election yesterday and declared that the new president will be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fundamentalist hardliner and onetime mayor of Tehran.

Several brief observations are made, followed by a more detailed discussion.  First, the election on June 17th and the run-off yesterday cannot be considered legitimate.  Why?  Because the regime has refused access to international elections observers, the press has no freedom and dissidents favoring freedom and real democracy have reported widespread fraud.  Election results and voter turnout are unverifiable.  Second, the election results don’t matter anyway.  The country is run by Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council, a group of hardline Islamic clerics.  All other positions of authority are subject.  Third, the message sent to the world by the ascension of Ahmadinejad, a former basiji (read religious goon squad member), is a troublesome one.  The mullahs want to crack down.  The creeping social, political and economic liberalization that took place over the past several years will stop and likely reverse.  Development of atomic bombs will continue, as will funding of terrorist groups such as Hezbollah.

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by hilzoy

From the Washington Post:

“TEHRAN, June 25 — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hard-line mayor of Tehran who has invoked Iran’s 1979 revolution and expressed doubts about rapprochement with the United States, won a runoff election Friday and was elected president of the Islamic republic in a landslide, the Interior Ministry announced early Saturday. Ahmadinejad defeated Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former two-term president who had won the first round of voting last week and was attempting to appeal to socially moderate and reform-minded voters.

Ahmadinejad’s election stands to complicate Iran’s gradual engagement with the West, including difficult negotiations over the country’s nuclear program. The apparent victory completes the domination of Iran’s elective offices by the religious fundamentalists who have long held ultimate authority in the theocracy.

“Today is the beginning of a new political era,” Ahmadinejad said as he cast his ballot in a working class neighborhood of Tehran, the capital, where he been mayor for two years.”

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by Charles

First off, I’m not lawyer but I work in the eminent domain field, and the Kelo v. New London case was a big one.  The Washington Post:

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that local governments may force property owners to sell out and make way for private economic development when officials decide it would benefit the public, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed.

The 5 to 4 ruling provided the strong affirmation that state and local governments had sought for their increasing use of eminent domain for urban revitalization, especially in the Northeast, where many city centers have decayed and the suburban land supply is dwindling.

Opponents, including property-rights activists and advocates for elderly and low-income urban residents, argued that forcibly shifting land from one private owner to another, even with fair compensation, violates the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits the taking of property by government except for "public use."

But Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, cited cases in which the court has interpreted "public use" to include not only such traditional projects as bridges or highways but also slum clearance and land redistribution. He concluded that a "public purpose" such as creating jobs in a depressed city can also satisfy the Fifth Amendment.

By redefining and broadening the term "public use", interchanging the phrase with "public purpose", the Supreme Court in effect snatched a chunk of property rights from private owners and handed them to cities and other local governments.  This ruling can’t help but favor governments and corporations and developers, all at the expense of the little guy, loosening by another few notches yet again the constraints on governmental power.  Even with a good economy in the Puget Sound area, I know of too many cities strapped for cash.  This case will likely open the door to mischief.  McQ:

In essence the court found for collectivism and government and against individuals and their property rights. It found the needs of the group outweighed the rights of the individual to the point that the collective, through the monopoly force of government, could take the private property of an individual almost at their whim.

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by Charles

BBC has some disturbing before and after pictures of Robert Mugabe’s Operation Drive Out Trash (the Swahili Shona word is Murambatsvina).

Update IV:  Despite the overwhelming case that president Robert Mugabe is precipitating a humanitarian meltdown in Zimbabwe (noted also here), the African Union turned its back. The BBC:

An AU spokesman told the BBC that it had many more serious problems to consider than Zimbabwe.

The UN says that 275,000 people have been made homeless. At least three children have been crushed to death.

[…]

"If the government that they elected say they are restoring order by their actions, I don’t think it would be proper for us to go interfering in their internal legislation," AU spokesman Desmond Orjiako told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.

His comments were backed up by South Africa, Zimbabwe’s giant neighbour, which some see as the key to solving Zimbabwe’s problems.

Presidential spokesman Bheki Khumalo said he was "irritated" by calls from UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw to do more to end the "horrors" in Zimbabwe.

"South Africa refuses to accept the notion that because suddenly we’re going to a G8 summit, we must be reminded that we must look good and appease the G8 leaders," he said.

"We will do things because we believe they are correct and right."

If the African Union cannot see the goodness and rightness of standing up to democide, then this group lacks any semblance of moral authority or legitimacy. They are now part of the problem, not the solution.

(Other updates below the fold)

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by Edward

The story of "Zach" is getting lots of play around the blogosphere. He’s allegedly a 16-year-old blogger whose parents sent him to the Christian rehabilitation center called the Refuge because he told them he was gay. The Refuge is run by a larger organization called "Love in Action" (btw, dig the almost pink triangle logo…way to appropriate!).

Supposedly (I’ll keep qualifying the reports because a leading gay news site notes they were unable to confirm his identity, although other online sources aren’t being so tentative) Zach saw an email from the camp to his parents that "clients" aren’t supposed to see. It included the rules (some secret) for the Refuge, and those are stirring up quite some controversy. Among my favorites are

• The clients may not wear Abercrombie and Fitch or Calvin Klein brand clothing, undergarments, or accessories.
• Men must remove all facial hair seven days weekly, and sideburns must not fall below the top of the ear (the top of the ear is defined as where the ear meets the face below the temple). Clean business-like haircuts must be worn at all times. Hair must be long enough to be pinched between two fingers.       [actually, this is one of the rules that makes me a bit suspect of this list, see this "success story" of the program…he hardly fits the enforced look.]
• LIA wants to encourage each client, male and female, by affirming his/her gender identity. LIA also wants each client to pursue integrity in all of his/her actions and appearances. Therefore, any belongings, appearances, clothing, actions, or humor that might connect a client to an inappropriate past are excluded from the program. These hindrances are called False Images (FI¹s). FI behavior may include hyper-masculinity, seductive clothing, mannish/boyish attire (on women), excessive jewelry (on men), mascoting, and "campy" or gay/lesbian behavior and talk.
• Clients may have no contact with anyone who has left the program prior to graduating without the blessing of the staff to do so. Clients may address off-limit persons they inadvertently encounter with a polite "hello" only.
• [Here’s where it gets really scary] All new Refuge clients will be placed into Safekeeping for the initial two to three days of their program. A client on safekeeping may not communicate verbally, or by using hand gestures or eye contact, with any other clients, staff members, or his/her parents or guardians. In case of a practical need, Safekeeping clients may write down their question or request and show it to another client, staff member, or their parent or guardian. Writing may only be used when absolutely necessary. Parents and guardians must enforce their child¹s safekeeping status at home or in their temporary lodging. [and…] Any client may be placed into Safekeeping at any time, at a staffworker¹s discretion.
• Encourage women to accept the more comfortable seats in a room. Men should consider offering a woman their chair when there are none left in the room.
• Clients are expected to maintain a committed pursuit of a positive and thankful attitude.
• [And here are a few doozies from the astronomically frightening "Group Norms" behaviors expected] 1. Be honest, authentic, and real. […]9. Say "I love you _____" after each person is finished relating. […and my favorite…] 5. Maintain strict confidentiality of everything discussed in group. "What is seen here, what is heard here, remains here!" [Oh, so, it’s just like Las Vegas….sign me up!]

Protests have been staged in front of the camp, prompting its leader to hold a press conference. A press statement from the organization seemed (to me at lease) to imply they don’t understand why the protesters are upset:

“LIA is calling upon the community to extend open-minded consideration and tolerance towards young people with same-sex attraction who are currently undergoing the organization’s youth program called Refuge,” according to a press statement from the organization.

(Uh, er, it’s not that they’re not open-minded toward the young people with same-sex attractions, it’s you brain washers they’re not so keen on.) You can read more about the press conference here.

Ironically, despite their name, Love in Action’s mission statement doesn’t include the word "love" once:

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by hilzoy

There’s an interesting article in tomorrow’s Washington Post about a variety of logjams that have come unstuck since John Bolton left the State Department. The most important:

“For years, a key U.S. program intended to keep Russian nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands has been frozen by an arcane legal dispute. As undersecretary of state, John R. Bolton was charged with fixing the problem, but critics complained he was the roadblock.

Now with Bolton no longer in the job, U.S. negotiators report a breakthrough with the Russians and predict a resolution will be sealed by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Scotland next month, clearing the way to eliminate enough plutonium to fuel 8,000 nuclear bombs. (…)

The nuclear dispute with Russia attracted less public attention but proved important internally. A program designed to dispose of 68 tons of weapons-grade plutonium stalled in 2003 when agreements expired and the Bush administration would not renew them unless they included stronger language holding Russia accountable for any nuclear accidents in its territory and protecting U.S. contractors building disposal facilities from liability, even in the case of premeditated actions. Russia refused, and the Bolton-led talks went nowhere for two years.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), one of the architects of the plutonium program, grew incensed that such a technical impasse could hold up a program of “global importance.” He showed up at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee last year to berate Bolton on the matter.

“I submit that Mr. John Bolton, who has been assigned to negotiate this, has a very heavy responsibility” for the impasse, Domenici said at the hearing. “And I hate to say that I am not sure to this point that he’s up to it.”

Rice pressed for the issue to be fixed, leading to a new framework that the two sides hope to ratify at the Group of Eight summit in Scotland in July. “I’m pleased,” Domenici said, “because I’m finally getting some very positive feedback.” “

This is really, really important. I wrote a post before the elections on this administration’s record on nuclear non-proliferation generally, and Russian loose nukes in particular. There are huge quantities of weapons-grade nuclear material sitting around in Russia, poorly guarded and vulnerable to theft. Osama bin Laden has said that he thinks that it is his religious duty to get nuclear weapons. Obviously, if he got them, chances are very good that he would try to use them on us, which would be devastating. Given all that, it’s truly astonishing that we actually secured less nuclear material during the two years after 9/11 than during the two years before 9/11 (Matthew Bunn and Anthony Weir, Securing the Bomb, p. 5). The idea of letting our efforts to secure plutonium stall because we wanted to make sure that US contractors were not liable even for their premeditated actions is just absurd. Apparently, it was John Bolton who held it up, and now that he’s out of the State Department, we can get back to the job of keeping plutonium out of the hands of terrorists.

The story cites several other examples:

“Without the hard-charging Bolton around, the Bush administration not only has moved to reconcile with Russia over nuclear threat reduction but also has dropped its campaign to oust the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and made common cause with European allies in offering incentives to Iran to persuade it to drop any ambitions for nuclear weapons.

Bolton had also resisted using the so-called New York channel for communications with North Korea, a one-on-one meeting used sporadically through Bush’s presidency and most recently revived in May. And fellow U.S. officials said Bolton had opposed a new strategic opening to India offering the prospect of sharing civilian nuclear technology, a move made in March.”

More communication with North Korea; a new approach to Iran: these are important things. I’m glad Bolton isn’t around to screw them up. But the Russian plutonium development is the really big news here. It’s long past time to get serious about that one.

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by hilzoy

A brief post to note two ideas floating around the blogs that I think are wrong, and to note another which is questionable, and provide the resources for anyone who wants to check it out further. The two ideas that are wrong concern the Downing Street memos; the third concerns Thimerosal and autism.

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By Edward

Via Drum
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Who is Tamika Huston? She’s what’s been dubbed a "Damsel in Distress" or DiD by MSM critics lately. A young attractive woman who’s missing, and whose family is appealing to the media for help in finding her. Hilzoy pointed to this excellent satire on the phenomenon by the Poor Man (but that site is experiencing heavy traffic, so you might have trouble getting through).

Unlike the runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks, Laci Peterson, Elizabeth Smart, or Natalee Holloway (missing in Aruba), though, Tamika, who’s been missing over a year, did not get her beautiful face plastered all over the airwaves and tabloids. Compared to those other women, she’s barely gotten any attention at all.

Here’s a photo of Tamika:

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by hilzoy

My basic views on economics are as follows: I like markets, except in certain specific situations (e.g., health insurance) where I think they don’t work well, usually for fairly specific reasons. But I think that markets obviously require regulation. For this reason I have always found the idea that support for markets somehow implies opposition to all regulation bizarre. Markets need regulation for various reasons, including: (1) Creating the ground rules that allow markets to operate efficiently (e.g., antitrust laws, requiring transparent accounting for publicly traded companies, laws governing intellectual property, etc.) (2) Dealing with market failures. (3) Codifying a national decision that there are certain things we do not want companies to do in their quest for profits. (E.g., child labor laws.)

My views on free trade are basically similar. In general, I support it. (I supported NAFTA, though I would not have done so had I known about its Chapter 11, described below.) I am not swayed by the argument that free trade costs Americans jobs: I don’t particularly like it when Americans lose their jobs, but I do like it when people in poor countries get jobs, and I think that when free trade agreements are done right, the gains outweigh the losses. But my support for free trade agreements is conditional on their incorporating the sorts of regulatory structures just described, like strong provisions protecting labor and the environment.

Environmental laws are attempts to deal with negative externalities: costs associated with producing goods that are not borne by the producer or the consumer, but are instead foisted off on unconsenting third parties. If, for instance, a company pollutes the groundwater in a given community, everyone in that community suffers, but the company does not compensate them for the costs it imposes on them. Environmental laws deal with this either by banning certain forms of pollution or through taxes or fines, which attempt to place the burden of paying for the pollution on the company that produced it. In either case, they are attempts to rectify a market failure, and if they are well designed, they make the market fairer. Trade agreements, in my view, should not undo this by forcing our companies to compete against foreign firms that are allowed to externalize the environmental costs of producing goods, any more than they should force our companies to compete against firms that receive any other sort of subsidy.

Labor laws, if properly designed, do two things. First, they codify social decisions about the minimum conditions in which people should have to work. Absent such laws, companies would face competitive pressure not to try to ensure (for instance) worker safety. If we want people to be assured of some minimally safe environment, we should enact safety regulations to prevent this sort of “race to the bottom”, and to allow companies to provide safe working environments without placing themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Second, they provide for collective bargaining and grievance procedures, thereby helping to ameliorate what is usually a serious power imbalance between employers and labor. Protections for individual actors are a large part of free trade agreements: for instance, they always include strong protections for investors, rather than leaving those investors’ fates to the legal system in the countries they invest in. I have never seen why the same logic should not apply to workers.

I do not want our companies to have to compete against companies who trash the environment or abuse their employees, and I do want to use the leverage we have in negotiating free trade agreements to create these protections, which I believe will benefit us all. If we have the right ground rules for free trade, then it benefits people on both sides; if not, not.

That is my general view of free trade agreements. I present it so that you will know where I’m coming from. However, I also think that general views on free trade agreements are virtually useless. When it comes to free trade agreements, the devil is in the details, to a much greater extent than in most other areas of policy. And unfortunately, the details are hard for lay people to assess. I have tried to read the actual text of CAFTA, but gave up when I concluded that I was just not going to understand it. (I stopped reading Ulysses for similar reasons.) All those terms of art: what do they mean? Does CAFTA depart from established norms, and if so, how? Are there innocuous-sounding passages that would play out horribly in real life, or vice versa? I have no clue.

Below the fold, I am going to explain some areas of concern about CAFTA that I have unearthed. These lead me to oppose CAFTA. However, the real purpose of this post, besides providing a useful collection of links and thoughts, is to ask for help from anyone who understands any of the issues involved. (von, there’s a question about IP below.)

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by Edward

Today seems to be a day for painful confessions, so I’ll share one of mine. My first two years of high school (before I was old enough to get a job and make money of my own), my father was struggling financially (the steel mill was perpetually laying people off, he had a chunk of debt, and he was paying alimony). Because of our status, the city allowed my brothers and sisters and I to buy a subsidized lunch at school. For 25 cents we could get the same standard lunch other children paid a few dollars for, but we would have to stand in a special (highly visible) line with all the other children whose parents were struggling.

I’m nothing if not a stubbornly proud s.o.b. I took the quarter my father gave me each morning and bought my lunch in the same line and vending machines my friends did. That bought me a small milk and pack of Oreo cookies (things were cheaper back then). And that’s what I ate for lunch for over two years. I didn’t realize it at the time, but somehow the experience translated into an overall aversion to food. For me, food equaled shame.

There’s a photo of me in swim trunks in my sophomore year yearbook. I’m so frightfully emaciated in that photo, to this day I can’t stand to look at it. Imagine photos of children from famine-stricken countries, and you’ll be very close to how I looked. Someone on the yearbook staff cut it out and posted it on the bulletin board of the offices with a little speech bubble above my head reading "Feed me." I don’t recall being hungry back then (I’m still quite thin and have a fast metabolism, although love handles are settling in now), but clearly I was malnourished.

This is a long-about POV-providing introduction into this post:

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by hilzoy

I love my country. I love it first because it is my country, just as I love my family because they are my family. And while some things might make me decide to just give up on either my family or my country, it takes a lot more than it would to make me give up on some other family or country, just because they are mine.

But I also love it for the noble experiment I take it to be. We have never completely lived up to our ideals. We enslaved people, slaughtered the indigenous peoples of North America, and so on. But we also always had a set of ideals that we tried to live up to, however imperfectly, and these shine through even the darkest parts of our history, and let us see it as a still unfinished attempt to be something truly great.

I take those ideals to be: that we are a nation of laws; that we are entitled to freely choose our own government, and that that government is legitimate only in virtue of our consent; that our government should leave us free to debate political and social questions and decide them for ourselves, rather than trying to constrain debate, and that it should leave us free to choose our own faith, rather than trying to impose one on us; that we should trust one another, and our government should trust us, to act like responsible adults who can be counted on to choose responsibly, on the whole, even if Rush Limbaugh and Ward Churchill and people like them are allowed to try to convince us of idiotic things; and that the ‘we’ I speak of should encompass all competent adults, not just members of some privileged group. In other words, liberty and equality under the rule of law.

This is a glorious set of ideals, and I love my country for trying to incarnate them, especially since, when our Constitution was written, people were not at all confident that any such government could succeed. (I have spent a lot of time reading Enlightenment moral and political philosophy; democracies and republics were generally thought to require both a small territory and the cultivation of an extreme, unnatural Spartan form of civic virtue. In this context, the creation of the USA was an enormous leap of faith based on some really radical revisions of Locke and Montesquieu, revisions I don’t think either thinker would have endorsed.) It was a crazy, inspired, wonderful idea to try to build a Republic on the ideals I just mentioned, and the astonishing thing is that our founders not only had this idea, but managed to write a Constitution capable of making it work, and then lived by that Constitution consistently enough that it stood the test of time. (Think of other revolutions carried out in the name of noble ideals — France being the obvious example — and how they turned out.) As I think I said in some previous thread, I regard this as a sort of miracle.

For those of us who are American citizens, this is our inheritance. We have been born into an astonishing country, with astonishing values. And it is our job, as citizens, to help keep alive in whatever small way we can, because, like any inheritance, it can be squandered. And the only thing that will keep it intact is if we, who have been lucky enough to inherit it, try to keep faith with those who bequeathed it to us, and do our best to preserve and enhance it for those who come after us.

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