Update: For serious comments on the Bush administration's latest trade travesty, see the posts at Marginal Revolution.

The real difficulty with Saudi Arabia is that it poses a problem with no solution, at least in the short term: The despotism, brutality and corruption of the Al-Saud has reinforced domestic Islamists, many of whom sympathize with Osama bin Laden and detest the United States; yet democratic elections could well bring these people to power. At the same time, if the Al-Saud crush Al-Qaeda in their midst, this would allow the royal family to ward off real change, generating new forms of violent opposition.

That said, the idea of domestic Saudi reform is laughable. The Saudi royal family will never transform itself into something more enlightened--not, for example, when so much state funding goes to paying lavish salaries to the kingdom's estimated 7,000-8,000 princes and princesses. (In 1995, Jean-Michel Foulquier, a pseudonym for a French diplomat who had worked in the kingdom, wrote a prescient book on Saudi Arabia's woes, where he estimated the monthly allowance at between $15,000-20,000, not including myriad other subsidies.) Nor can a nation of institutions peacefully replace a kingdom that is named for, and mostly run as a private domain, by a single family. For the near future, nothing short of enforced change, internal or external, will alter power relations in Saudi Arabia.

No doubt to the consternation of some of his U.S.-based Reason compadres, Young suggests that the answer may start with "deriving advantages from democratization in Iraq. This may be a long shot given the ambient (and utterly mistaken) perception of failure there. But as Americans consciously turn their attention away from the grand ambitions that accompanied the war in Iraq and embrace a more urgent desire to head for the country's exits, they might want to recall that one of the inherent aims of the Bush administration's campaign was to protect the U.S. against the dangerous vicissitudes of Saudi politics."

Did you know ... several mainstream publications such as The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal carry online clinical trial information? The Post carries a database run by CenterWatch that lists hundreds of trials across the country as well as information about the clinical trial process, including the risks and benefits involved with participation. The Wall Street Journal posts a list of drugs currently in the development stages for various medical conditions. This database is primarily intended to highlight drug development competition, the potential financial impact and where they are in the Food and Drug Administration approval process. Updates to this database are published every other Tuesday in Online Journal's Health Industry Edition.

The Post's list is here. The WSJ's is here.

Terms like "revolution" tend to be overused and abused by historians. They draw attention. They sell books. But do they have historical content? In economic history especially, melodramatic terms have a bad name, because the field tends to be relatively undramatic. Most of the elements that drive modern economic growth work gradually, slowly, and almost imperceptibly: the dissemination of technological ideas, the accumulation of capital, even the changes in economic institutions were rarely very spectacular. Whenever a genuinely dramatic general-purpose invention occurred, its impact on the productivity of the economy as a whole took many years to be felt. The first Industrial Revolution used to be regarded as the watershed event in the economic history of mankind since the invention of agriculture and has often been mentioned in one breath with the dream-laden contemporaneous French Revolution. It has now been shown to have had only modest effects on economic growth before 1815 and practically none on real wages and living standards before 1840, more than a century after the appearance of the first steam engine. The second Industrial Revolution, similarly, was slow in manifesting its full impact on the economies in question and took much of the twentieth century to work out its effects fully. The paragon of the putative third Industrial Revolution, the computer, has still apparently not wholly lived up to the hopes and expectations regarding productivity and output.

Few scholars nowadays think of the Industrial Revolution as a series of events that abruptly and significantly raised the rate of sustained economic growth. Most of the effects on income per capita or economic welfare were slow in coming and spread out over long periods. All the same, even though the dynamic relation between technological progress and per capita growth is hard to pin down and measure, it is the central feature of modern economic history. We are uncertain how to identify the technology-driven component of growth, but we can be reasonably sure that the unprecedented (and to a large extent unmeasured) growth in income in the twentieth century would not have taken place without technological changes. It seems therefore more useful to measure "industrial revolutions" against the technological capabilities of a society based on the knowledge it possesses and the institutional rules by which its economy operates. These technological capabilities must include the potential to produce more goods and services, but they could equally affect aspects that are poorly measured by our standard measures of economic performance, such as the ability to prevent disease, to educate the young, to move and process information, and to coordinate production in large units. By those standards, it is hard to deny that the 1990s witnessed an industrial revolution, but we need to assess it in terms of those capabilities, with the macroeconomic consequences following eventually but often much later.

Update: Thanks to David Young, who helped proof TSOS, for correcting my typos. If you're in need of a professional copy editor/proofreader, I recommend him. (Email me for contact info.)

The UK government has been urged to take emergency action to combat animal rights extremists after Walter Lilly, a subsidiary of the Montpellier Group, pulled out of an £18 million (USD $33.3 million) contract to build a new center for animal research at Oxford University. The decision was widely attributed to intimidation by animal rights extremists, although Montpellier would only say that the decision was reached by mutual consent with Oxford University.

Scientists were in little doubt that the decision has brought to a head the long-standing battle between the research community and the antivivisection campaign, with Oxford taking over from the Cambridge area as the focus of activity. The move by Montpellier comes 6 months after Cambridge University decided to abandon plans to build a primate research center.

Researchers consider the Oxford case to be more serious because it involves a large, broad-based animal laboratory where 98% of the work would be on rodents, rather than a specialist primate center, where antivivisectionists are more likely to gain public support. "Unlike Cambridge, where it was just a relatively small laboratory, this is the center for all animal research at Oxford," noted Mark Matfield, director of the pro-animal research Research Defence Society, in a statement.

The Montpellier decision should at last get the government to wake up and enact emergency legislation, according to Ian Gibson, chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee. "We want action now, but I've no confidence it will be taken at the moment," Gibson said. "I don't think the government realizes the severity of the situation even now." Gibson wanted action along the lines taken to combat soccer hooliganism. "If you can stop football thugs from going across to Europe, why can't they pick these people up? I can't believe they don't know who they are."

The threat posed by such extremists was not just to animal research, but to the whole UK science base, according to Simon Festing of the Association of Medical Research Charities. "Unless we see urgent action from the government, the prize of the UK staying a world leader in developing new medicines could slip through its fingers," he said in a statement.

For the rest of the link-rich article, go here. I'd like to hear what Andrew Sullivan has to say on this matter.

UPDATE: Brian L. O'Connor has been all over this story, and related issues, at Animal Crackers.

Sure enough, the NYT report contains this sentence: "Mr. Berger also put in his jacket and pants pockets handwritten notes that he had made during his review of the documents, Mr. Breuer said."

I'm an odd defender of Berger, who used to make me wince at his incompetence when he was national security adviser. He's a good argument against the return of the not-very-deep Democratic foreign policy team--but not because of purloined notes. Partisans (and reporters) make fools of themselves, and their causes, when they turn this sort of story into a Very Big Deal. Argue the issues, folks.

In related news, Lileks writes about how the evolving precision of the Berger story made his column writing hell. See, he's not just a blogger--he has editors!

The way the movie simultaneously remains faithful to and subverts Asimov's technocratic rationalism put me in mind of this essay by Greg Benford, who has done his own reworking of Asimov.

Even early sf presumed that elites should rule and that information should flow downward, enlightening the shadowed many. Sf's Shakespeare, H. G. Wells, was welcomed to speak by the Petrograd Soviet, the Reichstag, Stalin and both Roosevelt presidents. This company never doubted their managerist agendas, and Wells had his own.

Today, such mechanistic self-confidence seems quaintly smug. The genre looks to more vibrant metaphors, while cocking a wary eye at our many looming problems.

Sf writers are less interested in predicting and thus determining the future. They see themselves more as conceptual gardeners, planting for fruitful growth, rather than engineers designing eternal, gray social machines.

If the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:

"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."

These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.

In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."...

This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself--and infidels headed for hell.

No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.

Evangelicals, many of whom do not subscribe to Tim LaHaye's particular eschatology even if they read his books, will no doubt respond that Kristof's rhetoric is unfair. Evangelical Christianity does not encourage terrorism or ethnic cleansing. To the contrary, evangelism is persuasion, not coercion; conversion must be sincere and voluntary; the only evangelical crusades involve not blood but Billy Graham's preaching; there's no history of evangelical pograms. For all its militant visions of Christ, which did not start with 9/11, evangelical Christianity is a peaceful (though not pacifist) religion.

In all these ways, Kristof is indeed unfair. But his outsider's eye does raise a serious question that evangelicals seem never to ask themselves: Why would you worship such a God? What makes you think a deity who would consign righteous unbelievers (or even bad guys) to never-ending torture--a bully who makes the most vicious dictator look like a nice guy--deserves adoration and praise? Do you really believe this stuff? Would you believe it if you hadn't heard it all your life?

The Christianity preached in the Left Behind books may make for rolicking, high-stakes fiction, but it's morally repulsive. And I suspect few American evangelicals truly believe it. The "salvation inflation" noted by Alan Wolfe isn't a soft-headed play for popularity. It's a deeply moral response to living among good people who don't share one's theology.

Inspired by Cathy, Electric Commentary suggests some other, equally data-based descriptions, starting with "America is a fat nation." Contribute your own in the comments section. I'm still looking for the stats, but I'm sure America is a brunette nation (though L.A. is a lot more brunette than Dallas).

HAVE you ever yearned to live in Spanish Colonial Revival splendor, rattling around a 17,000-square-foot, 14-bedroom, 13 1/2-bath baronial mansion with deliciously thick stucco walls and an impeccable provenance?

If so, Steve Jobs may have a deal for you.

In what could become America's highest-profile tear-down, Mr. Jobs, the Apple and Pixar chief executive, is seeking this town's permission to hit the delete button on the 1926 Daniel C. Jackling estate, a moldering manse designed by George Washington Smith, the architect who created the look of Montecito and Santa Barbara in the 1920's.

The house, built for Mr. Jackling, a copper magnate who died in 1956, sits on six wooded acres that Mr. Jobs, then 29, purchased in 1983. Preservationists have deemed the house historic, an important example of Spanish Colonial Revival architecture, one that currently stands empty and derelict at the end of a stone-lined cul-de-sac. Mr. Jobs, however, can't abide the place. He recently described it publicly as "one of the biggest abominations of a house I've ever seen."

An educated work force is not essential for economic growth. Neither is a high saving rate. Manufacturing is not the most influential economic sector.

These contrarian conclusions come from a new book by William W. Lewis, the founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute, a division of the McKinsey & Company consulting firm. Since 1991, the institute's researchers have conducted the most comprehensive international studies available on productivity by industry sector.

In "The Power of Productivity," published by the University of Chicago Press, Mr. Lewis pulls together some results of that decade-long research.

The book helps explain why the American economy has done better - and Europe and Japan have done worse - than most people predicted in the late 1980's. It also offers a simultaneously hopeful and depressing view of economic conditions in poor countries, focusing on Brazil, India and Russia.

Read the rest here. For even more on the book, see Dan Drezner's posts here and here. If you're willing to put up with ackward navigation and free registration, the studies on which the book is based are available on the McKinsey Global Institute site.

I moved from the U.S. to Europe in 1998, and I've been drawing comparisons ever since. Living in turn in the Netherlands, where kids come out of high school able to speak four languages, where gay marriage is a non-issue, and where book-buying levels are the world's highest, and in Norway, where a staggering percentage of people read three newspapers a day and where respect for learning is reflected even in Oslo place names ("Professor Aschehoug Square"; "Professor Birkeland Road"), I was tempted at one point to write a book lamenting Americans' anti-intellectualism--their indifference to foreign languages, ignorance of history, indifference to academic achievement, susceptibility to vulgar religion and trash TV, and so forth. On point after point, I would argue, Europe had us beat.

Yet as my weeks in the Old World stretched into months and then years, my perceptions shifted. Yes, many Europeans were book lovers--but which country's literature most engaged them? Many of them revered education--but to which country's universities did they most wish to send their children? (Answer: the same country that performs the majority of the world's scientific research and wins most of the Nobel Prizes.) Yes, American television was responsible for drivel like "The Ricki Lake Show"--but Europeans, I learned, watched this stuff just as eagerly as Americans did (only to turn around, of course, and mock it as a reflection of American boorishness). No, Europeans weren't Bible-thumpers--but the Continent's ever-growing Muslim population, I had come to realize, represented even more of a threat to pluralist democracy than fundamentalist Christians did in the U.S. And yes, more Europeans were multilingual--but then, if each of the fifty states had its own language, Americans would be multilingual, too. I'd marveled at Norwegians' newspaper consumption; but what did they actually read in those newspapers?

That this was, in fact, a crucial question was brought home to me when a travel piece I wrote for the New York Times about a weekend in rural Telemark received front-page coverage in Aftenposten, Norway's newspaper of record. Not that my article's contents were remotely newsworthy; its sole news value lay in the fact that Norway had been mentioned in the New York Times. It was astonishing. And even more astonishing was what happened next: the owner of the farm hotel at which I'd stayed, irked that I'd made a point of his want of hospitality, got his revenge by telling reporters that I'd demanded McDonald's hamburgers for dinner instead of that most Norwegian of delicacies, reindeer steak. Though this was a transparent fabrication (his establishment was located atop a remote mountain, far from the nearest golden arches), the press lapped it up. The story received prominent coverage all over Norway and dragged on for days. My inhospitable host became a folk hero; my irksome weekend trip was transformed into a morality play about the threat posed by vulgar, fast-food-eating American urbanites to cherished native folk traditions. I was flabbergasted. But my erstwhile host obviously wasn't: he knew his country; he knew its media; and he'd known, accordingly, that all he needed to do to spin events to his advantage was to breathe that talismanic word, McDonald's.

Read the whole thing here.

The final shipment of orders, at least for now, will be Friday afternoon. So if you want a copy, please get your order in ASAP by clicking the button below. The books are $24.95 each, plus shipping. Please make sure to include a shipping address and to tell me to whom the book should be inscribed. Thanks.

To my wonderful husband.

Evan Thomas predicts that the media are "going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and there's going to be this glow about them, collective glow, the two of them, that's going to be worth maybe 15 points." Do you suppose he got an early peek at the cover of Newsweek? (Quote via InstaPundit. Newsweek via my mailbox.)

The WSJ link above should work for a few more days, but here's a further excerpt:

When President Bush, for example, talks about the need to "protect" the sanctity of marriage, his plea is a giant non sequitur because he does not explain what, precisely, he is protecting marriage against. No proponent of gay marriage wants to ban traditional marriage, or to burden couples who want to marry with endless tests, taxes and delays. All gay-marriage advocates want to do is to enjoy the same rights of association that are held by other people. Let the state argue that gay marriages are a health risk, and the answer is that anything that encourages monogamy has the opposite effect. Any principled burden of justification for the ban is not met.

But it is said that marriage is different because it is more than a private association; it is an institution licensed by the state. To which the answer is that any use of state monopoly power must avoid suspect grounds for discrimination. So the state must explain why it will favor some unions over others -- without resort to claims of public morals. The restraints on state power are the same as when the state uses its monopoly power to license drivers, or grant zoning permits.

The question here is not just whether the courts will impose their views on the people of the several states. It is whether they will allow a majority of the public to impose its will on a minority within its midst in the absence of any need for a collective decision. The claim for same-sex marriage is no weaker than any other claim of individual rights on personal and religious matters.

But since the state bans polygamy, some ask, why not also ban same sex marriages? Turn the question around, however: Why ban the former, especially by constitutional amendment, when agreed to by all parties? Incest is a different matter, with the high dangers from inbreeding. And people and poodles can't tie the knot because one half in the relationship (some would say the better half) lacks the capacity to enter into a contract.

The case against state prohibition of same-sex marriages becomes clearer when we ask how much further we are prepared to take the principle of democratic domination. Where is the limiting principle on majority power? Suppose that the proponents of gay rights get strong enough politically to require traditional churches to perform gay marriages, or to admit gay individuals into their clergy. Or to demand that people accept gay couples as tenants in their homes, even if they regard their relationship as sinful. Now the shoe is on the other foot. I think that the paramount claims of individual liberty should not have to yield to democratic decisions intended to impose an alternative enlightened view of public morals.

The Philippines said Wednesday it is withdrawing its small peacekeeping contingent from Iraq early to meet the demand of kidnappers threatening to kill a captive Filipino truck driver.

The announcement, which said the pullout was beginning immediately, was a dramatic turnaround by one of Washington’s biggest backers in the global war on terrorism. The Southeast Asian country earlier vowed it would not yield to pressure to move up the withdrawal, which had been scheduled for Aug. 20 when the force’s mandate ends.

Fifty-one Filipino peacekeepers can't make that big a difference, but the symbolism does. Wretchard at Belmont Club has been all over this story.

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Update: All book orders received through 2:00 p.m. Central Time on Monday, July 12, have been shipped Priority Mail and should arrive shortly. The next shipment will go out on Wednesday afternoon. Thanks for your interest.