Search

The term ‘precancer’ typically refers to an early stage of neoplastic development that is distinguishable from normal tissue owing to molecular and phenotypic alterations, resulting in abnormal cells that are at least partially self-sustaining and function outside of normal cellular cues that constrain cell proliferation and survival. Although such cells are often histologically distinct from both the corresponding normal and invasive cancer cells of the same tissue origin, defining precancer remains a challenge for both the research and clinical communities. Once sufficient molecular and phenotypic changes have occurred in the precancer, the tissue is identified as a ‘cancer’ by a histopathologist. While even diagnosing cancer can at times be challenging, the determination of invasive cancer is generally less ambiguous and suggests a high likelihood of and potential for metastatic disease. The ‘hallmarks of cancer’ set out the fundamental organizing principles of malignant transformation but exactly how many of these hallmarks and in what configuration they define precancer has not been clearly and consistently determined. In this Expert Recommendation, we provide a starting point for a conceptual framework for defining precancer, which is based on molecular, pathological, clinical and epidemiological criteria, with the goal of advancing our understanding of the initial changes that occur and opportunities to intervene at the earliest possible time point.

This study investigates the structural, magnetic, and magnetocaloric properties of thin films of a Heusler alloy with a composition of Ni2Mn0,7Cu0,3Ga0,8Al0,2. The films were produced by sputter deposition with thicknesses ranging from 32 to 300 nm on a Si (100) substrate with a 30 nm Ta adhesion layer. The structural transition at 260 K was observed only for the 300 nm thick film. All samples exhibit Curie temperatures around 300 K, which was also confirmed by electrical transport measurements. Hysteresis and magnetoresistance measurements revealed both antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic behavior. This behavior was associated with spin glass and corroborated by fitting the data to the phenomenological Vogel-Fulcher (VF) model. The maximum magnetic entropy change observed was −4.8 J/kg $\cdot $ K at 310 K when the magnetic field changed from 0 to 50 kOe.

Editors' note: Angelo M. Codevilla, who died on September 21, 2021, was reviewing final edits on this essay at the time of his death. Since few doubt that the increasingly [...]

Additive manufacturing (AM) was developed to cope with the demand for manufacturing goods. It ensures faster production and high waste reduction but is limited by material compatibility. One of the technologies in AM is Vat Photopolymerization (VP). It is a type of AM that uses photopolymer resin and UV light for polymerization. Various materials had been studied to improve the mechanical properties of the photopolymer resin by adding additives from indigenous sources. This study extracted cellulose from abaca and modified it by cross-linking it with Polyethylene Glycol (PEG). The cross-linked abaca cellulose (CAC) was investigated as an additive in the photopolymer resin with fiber loading of 3 wt.%, 6 wt.% and 9 wt.%. Fourier Transform-Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) shows that the presence of the oxygenated functional groups in resin and CAC can interact to form hydrogen bonds. Thermogravimetric Analysis (TGA) showed better thermal stability with the addition of 9 wt.% CAC compared to pure UDMA. Furthermore, the glass transition (Tg) decreased with the addition of CAC by 8.29 °C. The Tensile Test showed that 3 wt.% of CAC resulted in the highest value for tensile strength and toughness with an 11.27% increase for tensile strength and 133.46% for toughness. The elastic modulus increased with fiber loadings and had increased by 48.51% at 9 wt.% of CAC. Based on the results, the effect of adding abaca cellulose into a UDMA based resin had improved the thermal stability and mechanical properties of the composites.

From society's commanding heights, a ruling class of intellectuals, politicians, publicists, industrialists, and bureaucrats, as well as churchmen, has devalued the attachments to God, family, locality, and nation by which [...]

Unipotent basal and luminal stem cells maintain prostate homeostasis, with an intermediate cell population emerging during prostate inflammation or cancer. However, the identities of basal stem cell and intermediate cell population remain unclear. Here we identified a rare intermediate cell population expressing luminal markers (termed Basal-B) with enhanced organoid formation capacity, and a larger basal population (termed Basal-A). Genetic lineage tracing revealed Basal-B cells represented a transient basal stem cell state during prostate homeostasis and androgen-mediated regeneration. Activated JAK/STAT signaling was identified in Basal-B cells, and its inhibition significantly reduced Basal-B markers expression. Inflammation increased Basal-B-to-luminal cell transdifferentiation, but JAK/STAT inhibition notably attenuated this effect. Ptengene deletion increased Nkx3.1-expressing Basal-B-like cell population and led to neoplasia. In humans, h-Basal-B cells were more prevalent in benign prostate hyperplasia. This study reveals the identities of intermediate Basal-B cells and underscores the role of JAK/STAT signaling in prostate cell fate determination.

Purpose: In this paper, the horizontal response of a vertical transportation (elevator) model with 4 degrees of freedom, excited by deformations in the rail guide, is numerically investigated, introducing in the system a Non-linear Energy Sink (NES), considered as an absorber of non-linear dynamic vibration, that acts simultaneously as a vibration absorber and as a source of power generation. Methods and Results: The levels of vibration and comfort in the elevator cabin, the efficiency of using a non-linear dynamic vibration absorber to reduce cabin vibrations, and its potential for generating energy are analyzed numerically. To consider the lateral displacement of the cabin, an external disturbance that represents the deformations and misalignment of the guide rails and the increase in the elevator speed is adopted, associating the lateral acceleration levels of the elevator with the comfort levels of the passengers according to ISO 2631 and BS 6841. Conclusions: The results of the numerical simulations demonstrated that the configuration of the appropriate parameters of the NES is essential to guarantee a better level of comfort to the passengers and the production of energy and that the increase in the speed associated with the use of the absorber of non-linear dynamic vibrations can improve the comfort level by reducing accelerations in the cabin.

New technologies are being introduced into the construction field at a dizzying rate, literally forcing construction professionals to adopt or risk being outpaced by competitors. A recent On Center technology [...]

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is a T-cell malignancy characterized by cell subsets and enriched with leukemia-initiating cells (LICs). β-Catenin modulates LIC activity in T-ALL. However, its role in maintaining established leukemia stem cells remains largely unknown. To identify functionally relevant protein interactions of β-catenin in T-ALL, we performed coimmunoprecipitation followed by liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry. Here, we report that a noncanonical functional interaction of β-catenin with the Forkhead box O3 (FOXO3) transcription factor positively regulates LIC-related genes, including the cyclin-dependent kinase 4, which is a crucial modulator of cell cycle and tumor maintenance. We also confirm the relevance of these findings using stably integrated fluorescent reporters of β-catenin and FOXO3 activity in patient-derived xenografts, which identify minor subpopulations with enriched LIC activity. In addition, gene expression data at the single-cell level of leukemic cells of primary patients at the time of diagnosis and minimal residual disease (MRD) up to 30 days after the standard treatments reveal that the expression of β-catenin– and FOXO3-dependent genes is present in the CD82+CD117+ cell fraction, which is substantially enriched with LICs in MRD as well as in early T-cell precursor ALL. These findings highlight key functional roles for β-catenin and FOXO3 and suggest novel therapeutic strategies to eradicate aggressive cell subsets in T-ALL.

Board independence is central to corporate governance. Numerous theories espouse the value of the monitoring and advice provided by outside board members, and governance codes worldwide call for boards with more independent directors and for separating the roles of chief executive officer and chairman. However, neither original studies nor meta‐analyses have found a substantial link between board independence and firm performance. We adopt an institutional logic perspective to argue that the relations between board independence and firm performance is moderated by the institutions of a country. Our analyses find that the strength of the informal institutions is a more important moderator than that of formal institutions. We employ country‐level institutional moderators and apply meta‐regression to a sample of 86 articles encompassing 40 nations. We offer suggestions for future governance research. Board independence is widely considered to be a hallmark of good governance. However, prior research has been unable to connect independence with a firm's financial performance. We provide practical advice by demonstrating how national institutions shape the consequences of an independent board. Using a multi‐country sample, we show that the effectiveness of the corporate governance practices, such as board independence, depends on the strength of the local institutions and that the strength of the informal institutions is more important in explaining the effectiveness of the board than the strengths of the formal institutions. Stronger informal institutions strengthen the board independence‐ firm performance relationship. We discuss the implication of our findings.

Purpose: This note analyzes the vibrations of a non-linear piezoelectric energy harvesting device connected to a portal frame, considering the influence of fractional-order derivative damping. Methods: The identification of the behavior of the portal frame was obtained by analysis of various dynamic responses, using time histories, phase portraits, the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) using Morlet wavelet, FFT spectrum and 0–1 test for chaos. Results: The numerical analysis shows that the fractional-order damping sustains chaotic behaviors of the system. Conclusion: The average harvested power was computed for each value of fractional derivative order chosen, to demonstrate that the system response considerably affects the power harvested.

B7 homolog 3 (B7-H3; CD276), a tumor-associated antigen and possible immune checkpoint, is highly expressed in prostate cancer (PCa) and is associated with early recurrence and metastasis. Enoblituzumab is a humanized, Fc-engineered, B7-H3-targeting antibody that mediates antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity. In this phase 2, biomarker-rich neoadjuvant trial, 32 biological males with operable intermediate to high-risk localized PCa were enrolled to evaluate the safety, anti-tumor activity and immunogenicity of enoblituzumab when given before prostatectomy. The coprimary outcomes were safety and undetectable prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level (PSA0) 1 year postprostatectomy, and the aim was to obtain an estimate of PSA0with reasonable precision. The primary safety endpoint was met with no notable unexpected surgical or medical complications, or surgical delay. Overall, 12% of patients experienced grade 3 adverse events and no grade 4 events occurred. The coprimary endpoint of the PSA0rate 1 year postprostatectomy was 66% (95% confidence interval 47–81%). The use of B7-H3–targeted immunotherapy in PCa is feasible and generally safe and preliminary data suggest potential clinical activity. The present study validates B7-H3 as a rational target for therapy development in PCa with larger studies planned. The ClinicalTrials.gov identifier is NCT02923180.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) of the prostate is a rare tumor. Compared with the more common acinar adenocarcinoma (AAC) of the prostate, BCCs show features of basal cell differentiation and are thought to be biologically distinct from AAC. The spectrum of molecular alterations of BCC has not been comprehensively described, and genomic studies are lacking. Herein, whole genome sequencing was performed on archival formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded specimens of two cases with BCC. Prostatic BCCs were characterized by an overall low copy number and mutational burden. Recurrent copy number loss of chromosome 16 was observed. In addition, putative driver gene alterations in KIT, DENND3, PTPRU, MGA,and CYLDwere identified. Mechanistically, depletion of the CYLD protein resulted in increased proliferation of prostatic basal cells in vitro. Collectively, these studies show that prostatic BCC displays distinct genomic alterations from AAC and highlight a potential role for loss of chromosome 16 in the pathogenesis of this rare tumor type.

Purpose: We investigated the non-linear dynamic behavior of a system for energy production using ocean wave motion. The compound consists of a linear electromagnetic system coupled to a float to move under the action of marine waves. We define the equations of motion of the structure together and analyze the behavior of the parameters connected to the non-linear spring. Therefore, we analyzed the behavior of the average power for the parameters linked to the wave profile, the resistance of the electromechanical motor, and the non-linearity parameters related to the damping coming from a cubic spring considered to the system. Methods: The analyze of non-linear dynamic behavior through the analysis of set parameter (load resistance and non-linear spring constant) by the Maximum Lyapunov exponent, other analyses performed were employing bifurcation diagrams, phase portraits, and Poincaré maps. Results: As a result, we obtain the regions where there is a chaotic regime for load resistance and non-linear spring constant. The results also provide the behavior of energy production by the electromechanical motor system applied to an oceanic buoy. Conclusion: The investigation of the dynamics of an energy collection system by vibrations of oceanic waves corroborates the production of clean energy and thus analyzes the parametric behavior of the regions of maximum and minimum average power produced.

AS OVER-LEVERAGED INVESTMENT HOUSES began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine [...]

THIS FALL, AS BARACK OBAMA REVELED at the UN in the adulation of governments, such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Syria, to which his administration has made so many concessions and in which it has invested so many hopes, and as these very governments stepped up their anti-American efforts, it became all too clear that his administration s approach to international affairs is based equally on the Democratic Party's now dominant ideology and on an unrealistic assessment of the world. But every one of Obama's violations of statecraft's canons--trying to propitiate enemies at the expense of friends, pursuing negotiations as ends in themselves while adversaries strengthen their positions, believing in the power of one's own words, denaturing our armed forces (especially missile defense), and mistaking the chimera of nation-building for war--is but a more extreme version of what has long passed for wisdom in Washington. Hence as we look at the ways in which the Obama administration has merited the world's contempt and contemplate the wages of which Americans will have to pay, it will not do to think, "If only we had Republicans in office!" Rather, we should take each blunder as an occasion to remind ourselves of standards of statecraft that have long lacked among Republicans as well as Democrats. Not even Obama's most characteristic and most dysfunctional acts on the international scene--apologizing for his country, or rather for Americans who differ from him and his friends--is new. Jimmy Carter just as famously began his presidency in 1977 by rejoicing that America's defeat in Vietnam had brought it back to its best values, namely his party's rule. But at least Carter spoke at Notre Dame, to a domestic audience. Bill Clinton also used the "apology bomb" in his domestic wars. But when Obama apologized to Europeans for his predecessors' failure to listen to them and learn from them, when he disclaimed a "war on Islam" that none of his countrymen had declared, when he asserted a special American responsibility for nuclear disarmament because his country used nuclear weapons to win a war before he was born, he resembled nothing so much as the Pharisee who thanked God that he was better than his fellow men. While confessing the sins of domestic opponents passes for cleverness in Obama's circles, it is dysfunctional because it leaves no doubt in foreigners' minds that he represents only one part of his country, and advertises that he is playing a partisan hand domestic support for which can only weaken. Because professionals in international affairs note that Obama's chief interest lies in marshaling foreign support in domestic quarrels, they discount whatever pressures he pretends to bring to bear on foreigners. In short, Obama diminishes America and himself. Enemies Over Friends NOR IS THERE MUCH NEW about Obama's attempt to propitiate America's enemies at its friends' expense--as Henry Kissinger used to quip, while being America's enemy may be inconvenient, being America's ally is often fatal. Kissinger knew, having traded thousands of Kurdish lives to Iran, and millions of Southeast Asian lives to North Vietnam. George H. W. Bush sold Lebanon to Syria, Jimmy Carter threw Iran's shah under Ayatollah Khomeini's bus hoping to gain favor with him thereby, and most U.S. administrations' Mideast policy has consisted of pressuring Israel to give in to Arab demands ("taking chances for peace") in exchange for a lessening of Arab terrorism against Americans. This incompetent Machiavellism has gained us nothing and ended up costing American lives. Obama's attempt to "reset" relations with Russia has consisted of seconding Vladimir Putin's paramount goal: to reconquer the Soviet empire by isolating and constraining the former parts of it. Obama has quietly withdrawn support for Georgia's claim to two of its regions that Russia occupied. As Ukraine deals with Russia's daily attempts to destabilize its central government and to exercise sovereignty over the Crimea, it can no longer rely on U.S. support. Worse, by giving in to Russian demands that the U.S. not station anti-missile equipment in Poland and the Czech Republic, Obama made it clear to all of Eastern Europe that he will not let its deepest concerns stand in the way of appeasing Russia. Make no mistake. The Poles and Czechs were eager for U.S. bases on their soil for the same reason that they have supported the U.S. with soldiers and diplomacy ever since regaining their independence: to cement America's support for that independence against Russia's constant attempts to pull them into its sphere of influence. Conversely, Russia's objection to U.S. missile defenses in these countries had nothing to do with these devices' very limited capabilities (more on this below) and everything to do with expanding its sphere of influence. Few Europeans can doubt that Obama now has effectively recognized the primacy of Russia's influence in Eastern Europe. Because Europeans now know that Obama will sacrifice their interests to the hope of Vladimir Putin's cooperation, Europe's character will change as governments and factions vie to make their deals with Moscow at our expense. The countries formerly subject to the Soviet empire now divide into three categories: The Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, and Balts are fully part of the democratic West. Belarus and the Central Asian states have already slid into Moscow's orbit. Quite a few more--Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Moldova, as well as the Balkan states--are balancing undemocratic, pro-Russian elements with Western ones. Obama's missile decision will push the undecideds toward the Russian camp and put in play the Westernized countries' orientation and character. The administration's claim that "broader geopolitical considerations about kick-starting arms reduction talks or gaining cooperation on Iranian aggression had played no part" in their decision to cancel the U.S. project in these countries is transparently insincere. But its approach to Russia has proved as vain as it is disingenuous. Russia left no doubt that it will counter any U.S. economic or diplomatic attempt to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons. Why? Because Iran is Russia's ally for the purpose of excluding America from the Old World. Yet Russia works to reduce America's role in the New World. It is selling high-tech military equipment to Venezuela's anti-American dictator Hugo Chavez and is promising Soviet-style aid to anti-American regimes that Chavez is working to establish in our hemisphere. Not only does Obama not try to counter any of this: he has imposed sanctions on Honduras for resisting a Chavez-backed attempt to establish a Chavista regime in that country. Obama's Middle East policy consists of single-minded pressure on Israel to stop building houses in the West Bank in the hope that Saudi Arabia will lead other Arab states to engage in "land for peace" negotiations. Saudi spokesman Prince Turki bin Faisal's response in the New York Times was more stark than usual: first make Israel give us land; once we have it, we'll talk about peace. As well, Obama removed any opposition to Syria's resumption of control over Lebanon through Hezbollah, and redoubled pressure on Israel to surrender the Golan Heights in the hope that Syria might substitute U.S. patronage for Iran's. But Syrian-Iranian ties have only grown. Why should any country value Iran's patronage less, since Obama is doing nothing that stands in the way of Iran's imminent acquisition of nuclear weapons? Indeed Obama made his desire to accommodate Iran's regime all too clear even as the Iranian people were rising up against it. Minimizing Missile Defense WHETHER OR NOT ISRAEL ends up bombing Iran's nuclear program, Obama's decision to cancel a system directed against Iranian missiles, leaving Poles and Czechs in the lurch, pushes the Israelis to protect themselves by striking Iran's nukes--alas starting a war that no one has thought how to finish. In short, and contrary to the view now dominant in Washington, America's neglect of missile defense is a factor for instability and war, not peace and harmony. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] But while the sentiment that Obama is diminishing and endangering us is widespread, there is precious little public understanding of why and how our government leaves Americans as well as Europeans undefended against missiles by misusing the abundant technology we have. Obama eliminated missile defense in Europe not just to please Moscow but also because opposition to defending America or anyone associated with us against missiles is part of the American left wing's DNA. How it became so, and how Republican leaders have benefited politically from loud support for missile defense while being complicit in steering U.S. missile defense programs into unproductive activities, is beyond our scope. (See Prof. Joseph Constance's Ballistic Missile Defense in American Politics.) If Obama were the problem rather than just a more visible manifestation thereof, America would be better off. Here we look at this bipartisan problem's practical results. The East European system that Obama scrapped was not terribly valuable militarily because its components, high-tech ground-based radars, computers, and optically guided interceptors, had been crippled congenitally to provide strictly marginal protection against just a few medium-range Iranian missiles. Had the radar not had its field of view restricted, and had the system used the long-range interceptors now deployed in Alaska, in meaningful numbers instead of a token 10 newly developed shorter-range ones, it would have been able to defend America as well as Europe against missiles from anywhere in Eurasia, including Iran. But because using the technology to its proper effect would have defended against Russia as well, the Bush administration crippled it at conception and Obama aborted it. For the same reason, the system that Obama proposed substituting, based on the Navy's excellent AEGIS computers and interceptors, is similarly crippled. It has always been clear that were the AEGIS interceptors programmed and launched on the basis of information from satellites, they could easily defend against warheads in late midcourse coming from anywhere. But, to make sure AEGIS cannot possibly defend America against Russia, administration after administration has restricted AEGIS interceptors to information (except for terminal homing) provided by the ship's radar. Since small surface-based radars cannot see terribly far and AEGIS interceptors are launched only after the radar sees the target, the system is limited to tail-chasing warheads in early midcourse--provided its ship can get close to the launch site, which it cannot do in most cases. And so, AEGIS ships deployed in the Persian Gulf may do a little to protect against Iran, depending on whence Iran launches its missiles and on their trajectory. But surely they cannot defend against, and thus will not offend, Russia. These are but the least examples of how the U.S. government, whose ideology is set by the left and whose practices are shaped by bureaucratic self-interest, has trumped technology by distorting its applications. Defending against ballistic missiles existing at any given time is not now and has not been a technical mystery since 1958, when the U.S. Army accompanied its first IRBM test with a mock intercept by the rudimentary Nike system. By the time Lyndon Johnson started his full term, the two-layer Nike X system based on phased array radars, IBM 360 computers, and interceptors both exo- and endo-atmospheric was ready to protect America. By the 1970s, our Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was designing optical devices that made it technically possible to transcend radars by programming ground-based interceptors with precise discrimination and targeting data from space, and launching them long before incoming warheads came into view of radars. Since the 1980s it also has been technically feasible to place interceptors and laser weapons in orbit, from which vantage point they could strike down missiles as they rise. But while technology can overcome missiles and warheads, it cannot dent the "scientific technological elite's" (recall Eisenhower's warning) self-interest in current programs. Nor can it affect the left's proclivities. And so billions of dollars plus wonders in computers, miniaturization, infrared sensors, optics, and lasers have produced only devices such as our Alaska-based radars and interceptors that apply new technology to 1950s notions of missile defense and are deployed in token quantities, or in devices conceived for exemplary impotence. For an example of technical crippling, look at something originally called THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) and later Skyguard, intended to defend northern Galilee against terrorist Katyusha rockets. Cobbled together starting in 1996 from parts of the U.S. space laser program, by 1998 the prototype was blowing up Katyushas, in flight at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico. Building the ground-based version involved far more technical complications than developing the space version in the first place: while the space version needed to move only a few degrees to track distant ICBMs, the ground version's pointer-tracker had to move fast and far to deal with nearby Katyushas, and while the space version used the negative pressures of space to turn chemical combustion into light, the ground version had to produce vacuum exhausts for each shot. It took a lot of work to turn a weapon capable of defending against ballistic missiles from anywhere to anywhere into one that serves very limited purposes. The technical challenge lay in raising the technology's capacities in order to perform a lesser mission while disabling it against the missiles that matter most. THEL makes clear how much more difficult it is to use technology sub-optimally than to use it optimally. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Air Force's Airborne Laser (ABL) is an even clearer example of the efforts the U.S. government makes to detour technology onto less productive paths. Essentially an attempt to fit the space-based laser into an airplane, the ABL uses its technology in a way that may shoot down some missiles but will surely have no chance whatever of hitting missiles coming out of the Old World's depths, including Russia, Iran, and China. But the ABL is unlikely ever to defend anyone against anything, even were it able to project energy reliably to destroy missiles a hundred miles away, which is technically impossible since its beam creates an inherently unmanageable atmospheric microenvironment. That is because to defend against missiles coming from any given location, the ABL's modified Boeing 747 would have to hover near those locations, which is operationally impossible. Adapting the space laser's elements for an airplane adds serious problems of vibration and safety to all the difficulties of reconfiguring it for ground use--all for essentially naught. According to the Government Accountability Office, ABL has wasted some $2.5 billion so far on a bad idea. But note well that this idea's main attraction is the same as that of every other U.S. anti-missile program since the 1960s: it uses new technology in a way that will have arguably something to do with missile defense, thereby satisfying Republicans in particular and the American people in general. And it spends a lot of money--which satisfies bureaucratic and industrial interest groups--while avoiding defending the United States, which satisfies so many sophisticated notions of statecraft in Washington and academe. Pretend missile defense is by no means Obama's and the Democratic Party's exclusive responsibility. The Republicans who rose to responsibility for these matters either advocated exemplarily the ideology that equates defending America with warmongering and pleasing Russia with statesmanship, as did Henry Kissinger and Brent Scowcroft; or shared it in pectore, as did Condoleezza Rice; or challenged it only rhetorically while not daring to dispute it de facto, as did the G. W. Bush administration when it withdrew officially from the 1972 U.S.-Soviet ABM Treaty while quietly observing its key provisions and above all its spirit. In the end, however, responsibility matters less than results. The chief result is that the U.S. government's pretend missile defense fits all too well with Obama's reduction in the number of high-tech conventional weapons systems and planned drastic reduction in U.S. nuclear strike forces. Reducing the U.S. armed forces' capacity to protect Americans and strike our enemies' capacity leaves them configured mostly for occupations. This is military malpractice. Military Malpractice IN AFGHANISTAN, Obama is taking the late 20th-century American Way of War to new depths of unseriousness. Since Korea, and especially beginning in Vietnam, American statesmen have sent our armed forces to kill and die for ever-hazier ends and with ever less regard for the means to achieve any end at all. With a few changes in proper nouns, the Obama administration's explanations of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan would read exactly like those of previous presidents for spending lives and treasure in Vietnam and Iraq, or Somalia and Haiti: U.S. armed forces are there to reform a state whose corruption, lack of democracy, and ancient quarrels prevent it from standing up to largely self-financed extremists whose success would endanger our security. So don't even mention that these trigger pullers serve the causes of states, and don't even think of making war on the problem's sources, whether they be in Moscow, as was the case in Vietnam, or in the Arab states. Once we have protected the villagers, instituted an impartial central government, built up its security forces and taught them human rights, once we have built schools, hospitals, roads, once we have breathed life into the economy, we will have won. We know how to build nations. In the meantime, we will not designate any set of people whose death will stop the violence, and kill them. Hence American soldiers, prohibited from making war on everyone connected with those who shoot at them, and forbidden even to think of undoing the regimes whence come the armed enemies' money and inspiration, are sentenced to strike out at whatever targets present themselves while living and dying in replenished minefields. As they bleed, they read that their generals and U.S. officials are negotiating in air-conditioned safety to empower precisely the people who are blowing them up. This reversal of ancient wisdom about war under the pretense of sophistication was criminally dumb in Vietnam, dumber in Iraq, and nuts in Afghanistan. Madness is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results. Diplomatic Malpractice THE PURSUIT OF NEGOTIATIONS as ends in themselves has brought America much grief for many years. More Americans died in Korea and Vietnam after "peace talks" began than before. More people in the Middle East (and in the U.S.) have died at the hands of terrorists since the "Middle East Peace Process" began than before. North Korea got its nuclear bombs and Iran is getting its nukes in the course of negotiations intended by American states-men to stop them. American statesmen seem ignorant of the elementary fact that governments so inclined (and there are lots of them) use negotiations to gain time, weaken the opponent's will, deceive, forestall the opponent's moves, affect third parties, etc. The Obama administration seems even less competent than its predecessors in this regard. Thus its goal in the Middle East is to restart Arab-Israeli negotiations, and it presses Israel to make preemptive concessions, effectively to pay a cover charge, to get to the table. By the same token, Obama claimed success when Iran agreed to face-to-face negotiations. But his administration took no notice that Iran's letter of acceptance rejected contemptuously any discussion of Iran's nuclear programs, and pledged that Iranians would talk only about what America must do for them. Such talks serve Iran by eliminating the chance of serious U.S. moves as it completes its nukes. But what American purpose do they serve? In sum, believing that words do anything other than represent reality is a prime example of diplomatic malpractice. Alas, there are many others. Just Words OBAMA'S WORDS, even more than his predecessors', have been both grandiloquent and instantly self-discrediting. For example, Obama's response to North Korea's launch of a missile in violation of UN resolutions and of his own warnings--"rules must be binding, violations must be punished, words must mean something"--advertised his unseriousness. He could have said nothing, or just deplored the event, or promised to announce serious consequences at a later date, perhaps calling for a conference on "regime change" in North Korea. Mere Kissingerian cleverness would have veiled (lightly) his unseriousness by separating his words from the realities that discredit them. But Obama chose to sound tough, with words that were self-evidently empty. Anyone reading them asked: What punishments does he suggest to make what rules binding? What actions does he propose to give meaning to his words? He suggested none. Worse, because his words implied referring North Korea to the UN, whose acts all sentient persons know are meaningless, they made him a laughingstock among serious people. Obama's speech to the Muslim world was his greatest rhetorical overreach. After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization trod diverging paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward the sexes and the role of work in life, after a half-century during which Muslims murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians as millions of their own cheered, suddenly Obama conjured up in words a "new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world." How? With yet other words: "This cycle of suspicion and discord must end." Must? Who will make it stop? How? He did not say. He urged his audience to "abandon violence," because "resistance through violence and killing does not succeed." But his audience knew perfectly well that Obama was speaking to them so, and that the U.S. government had given billions of dollars to the Muslim world, precisely because so many Muslims had killed so many Americans. Of course they had succeeded. Obama's words were self-discrediting. Obama is not the only president to discredit America and himself by using the word "must" promiscuously. George W. Bush famously told "the great and proud nation of Egypt" that now it must lead the Muslim world to the promised land of democracy. Must? Whether you are a Republican or a Democrat, gratuitously and impotently telling foreign countries what to do advertises your (and your country's) unseriousness. If you cannot speak seriously, better shut up. Why? BARACK OBAMA WAS NOT BORN YESTERDAY ex nihilo, without intellectual or political predecessors. He is scion, part and parcel of the left wing of the American left and identifies with its view of America at home and internationally. His theoretical foundation in foreign affairs is William Appleman Williams's The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, the point of which is that the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro were on history's correct side while the American people should be dragged there. His practical templates are Anthony Lake, who wrote Carter's celebration of American guilt and defeat in Vietnam, and Morton Halperin, who wrote that the whole world had a stake in defeating America because had the American people prevailed in Vietnam they likely would have started a nuclear war. That is why Obama, like the people with whom he spent his formative years, whose language he speaks, whose assumptions he shares, has been concerned not with making the world safe for America, but with making America safe for the world. That is why Obama apologizes for America to its enemies and favors them over its friends: because he shares their and his domestic friends' sense that the rest of us have much to apologize for, that we need to be changed, reformed, restricted. That is why he speaks as he does: because he believes that by pretending to foreigners that America is just like he and his friends are, that it shares their loves and hates, he can persuade them to be nice, at least to him. That is why he is incapable of understanding war--at least against non-American enemies. Our problems in dealing with the rest of the world, however, are far bigger than one man or one party. They even transcend the rise of an influential class of people who value America for what they might make of it but disdain it for what it is. Rather, our problems lie in the broad-based loss of a culture of seriousness in international affairs. All of us will have to pay for that. Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations emeritus at Boston University and the author of Advice to War Presidents (Basic Books, 2009).

OBAMA WAS NOT KIDDING. Ever since he became president the media have carried accounts of him and his closest officials meeting with "everybody," meaning executives of banks, auto makers, insurance companies, medical suppliers, energy producers, indeed of major corporations in each sector of American life. They meet for no less a purpose than to mandate new ways for Americans to go to the doctor; to change the kinds of cars we drive, the kinds of places we live, and the work we do; to decide how much we should pay for electricity; and many more things. Corporations that had grown by providing their customers ever more attractive choices now negotiate with the U.S. government and each other about how collectively to structure (read, restrict) their customers' choices in ways that will suit the government while guaranteeing their profits. To object that there is nothing in our Constitution that empowers the government to make deals with some private citizens at the expense of other private citizens or otherwise to shape citizens' lives involuntarily is to have failed to notice that a new constitution has largely superseded the one ratified in 1789. Here is a primer on it. The Obama administration develops laws and practices toward any sector of American life by holding "summit" meetings with what it calls the "stakeholders" in that sector, satisfying and modifying the stakeholders' interests into a scheme that supports its own political standing and objectives. For each sector, it appoints what it calls a "czar," who shepherds the stakeholders into line, binding both the government and the stakeholders. It expects Congress to follow, and the people to consent. Thus in July 2009 Obama argued that since "the doctors, the nurses, the hospitals" (meaning the leaders of some associations with whom he had been meeting) had agreed to his plans for restructuring America's health care system, "including even Wal-Mart" (more on this below), any wholesale objection to his plan was somehow illegitimate. Although in America this way of governing has grown gradually only over the past half-century, it is common around the world. First developed in 1920s Italy, what we are coming to know as stakeholder government is akin to the regimes of Argentina, Mexico, and the European Union. Herein I explain what should be obvious: Unelected "stakeholders" gathered by "czars" around big tables make for bodies politic very different from officials elected and removed by the general public. Recall Aristotle's lesson: Any polity's character and identity depend on who makes the rules. Stakeholder government must make America different from what it has ever been, and more in the image of the countries where it has been practiced. The Difference UNDER THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, whose form if not substance has been copied around the world, laws are made by legislators, each of whom represents voters with diverse interests and views about their own and the common good. Such legislators arbitrate conflicts within and among interests. As well, they "enlarge and refine" the public's views of the common good. The voters, for their part, may accept or reject the legislators' or executors' actions by voting them out. Crucially, this Constitution limits the extent of the government's role in people's lives. By contrast, under the constitution that is now fast waxing solid among us, decisions about what cars we will drive, how we will go to the doctor, how much and what kind of energy we will use and at what price are no longer up to individual consumers, nor even subject to our collective judgment as citizens. Rather, they are being made by stakeholders around the big table under the guidance of their czars. Crucially, no constitution limits what they may agree to impose on their fellow citizens. By governing explicitly through "summits" with "stakeholders" rather than through representative institutions, the Obama administration is leaving no doubt that, in the new American constitution, "stakeholders" are the only citizens, and that neither voting nor taxpaying qualifies as stakeholders the individuals who used to be known as citizens. Mere interest in any field does not qualify anyone or any group as a stakeholder. Thus, for example, while our government considers teachers' unions and state governments and certain nonprofit groups as stakeholders in the field of education, it does not recognize parents as stakeholders. Nor are car buyers stakeholders in the auto industry, whereas bondholders, labor unions, and management are. Whereas citizens are supposed to be created equal, stakeholders have only such status as the sovereign authority manages to give or take from them. Thus, in the auto industry, the Obama administration chose to rank the unions first, management second, and some bondholders ahead of others. The energy business's stakeholders include the various companies involved in the production of energy plus farmers and environmentalists. But not consumers. By definition, non-stakeholders have no stake. Our Not-So-New Constitution BARACK OBAMA IS BY NO MEANS the first American to believe that minimally intrusive government based on representation of individuals in localities is a barrier to doing what needs to be done to improve people's lives, and that it does not fulfill people's spiritual need to feel part of things bigger than themselves. Woodrow Wilson's 1885 book, Congressional Government, faulted the U.S. Constitution for not creating a power able to deal in detail with the reality of "modern industrial organization, including banks, corporations, joint-stock companies, financial devices, national debts, paper currency, national systems of taxation ... so that the play of the civil institutions shall not alter the play of the economic forces, [and thus accurately to regulate] the complication and delicacy of the industrial system." Wilson wrote that competent government must be like "a foreman [who] take [s] a hand in the work which he guides; and so I suppose our legislation must be likened to a poor foreman, because it stands altogether apart from that work which it is set to see well done." A competent government must also have full power "to remedy the mistakes of the legislation of the past." In short, according to Wilson, a new constitution that reaches over citizen-voters and their elected representatives should transcend the Constitution of 1789. This new constitution should run the nation's vital organs directly, with full power over details. Planted by Wilson, this Progressive dream continued to grow in the minds of America's ruling class. The version of that dream that Obama named "The New Foundation" in 2009 had been gestating since the 1930s creation of "independent" agencies endowed with powers "quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial" to govern broad areas of national life. With each passing year, Congress has given broader and less defined authority to these agencies, and ever less defined mandates. Bureaucracies with names like the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency exist on the state level as well, and take their cues from their kindred on the federal level. Almost half of state funds come from the federal government. At all levels and in each of the fields they cover, these agencies are and cannot be but the sum, the expression, the guarantors, the regulators, of the interest groups in their field. Presidents Clinton and Bush held "White House Summits" on all manner of subjects, to develop policies in concert with interest groups and then to get Congress to ratify faits accomplis. Obama means to bring these developments to their logical conclusion. Stakeholders Are Artificial WHAT EXACTLY IS A "STAKEHOLDER"? How does anyone qualify as a stakeholder? What is the difference between a society organized on the basis of stakeholders rather than of citizens, families, localities, states? Because the Constitution of 1789 (and its imitators) is based neither on socioeconomic classes nor on socioeconomic functions, it takes no position on the relative value of medicine, mining, banking, or farming, or of the individuals and corporations who perform these functions. Much less is our Constitution about arranging and rearranging functions, making some in any given field into winners and others into losers. That is because our Constitution and its imitators presuppose that government exists by the consent of the individuals who live under it, all of whom are "created equal." By sharp contrast, stakeholders are not equal individuals, but rather unequal collective entities. In the 19th century the word "stake," which had meant abet, also came to mean a share, a claim, or an interest. A 1975 British management textbook defines "stakeholders" as "the persons and groups having a direct stake in our organization: the owners, employees ... customers, suppliers, financiers, managers, the area in which the organization is established, etc." But as used currently in the U.S., the term is hardly distinguishable from "interest groups" or "corporations." Hence "stakeholder primacy" is close to what one might call in economics "producer primacy" and is diametrically opposed to "consumer primacy." Under the new constitution, privileged access to power defines any corporation's socioeconomic functions, its status as a stakeholder, and constantly readjusts that status vis-a-vis other stakeholders. Government rightly arranges and rearranges each group's roles and functions, deciding who and what are to be on top or below, because modern stakeholders, interests, or corporations have no natural or customary right to exist as they do. Indeed, when such as Obama gather "everybody around a big table," they mean in practice that they will choose those in any given function, field, or sector whom they think counts or should count. That is why everybody does not include you. Those who are chosen to be around the ruler's table will count if they had not counted before, and those whom the government chooses to leave out will not count as much afterward as they had before. Thus each automaker, health care provider, producer of various kinds of energy, etc. has enormous incentives to beat out others in their field for a seat at the table. For stakeholders, the price of privilege is to lend themselves, and their increasingly captive customers, to the rulers" agenda. The stakeholders pay in the coin of political support, and receive in return the privilege to profit from the rules they help to shape. Privilege flows down, support flows up. As stakeholders serve the rulers' agenda with the rulers' support, they function as parts of the ruling party. This is the nature of the beast, and has been so everywhere that this form of rule has manifested itself. Artificial Morality WHAT DO SUCH REGIMES OFFER to the vast majority of persons who are not around the big table, the non-rulers and non-stakeholders who are necessarily on the wrong end of the special deals? After all, even the rank-and-file members of government-connected labor unions or ordinary shareholders of favored industries get only the crumbs that fall from the big table. Somehow, such regimes must divert the many from measuring daily reality against largely unrealistic hopes of material benefit. Hence such regimes try to transcend the facts of daily life, typically by presenting themselves as agents of national enterprises--the less well-defined the better--that will raise the nation to a new, higher moral and spiritual level, as well as eventually fulfill everyone's private dreams. Cynically or not, these oligarchies live by filling voids in the non-favored masses' souls. The bigger these voids, the better. Though the Obama administration and its supporters represent disproportionately American society's most secular elements, there is no mistaking its claim to righteousness and its followers' faithful commitment to transcendent ends, including, prominently, controlling the earth's climate. Thus Michael Knox Beran wrote: "In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition" of seeking "a communitarian paradise" in which "citizens forsaking their own swinish pursuits would become happy in the pursuit of a common good" and end up loving one another. The charismatic leader would cause their sinful society to do penance and fill their spiritual emptiness. That such attitudes could support a constitution that consists of trading privilege for political support is strange to reason. But, in America as elsewhere, reason often counts less than passions, especially partisan ones. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mutatis mutandis, what is happening in America is just another variation of a well-known phenomenon with many local names. Italy THROUGHOUT THE LATE 19th and early 20th centuries, progressive critique of representative constitutions was all the rage among Western intellectuals. But it was summed up most coherently in Italy in the 1920s. Along with Joseph Schumpeter, the Italians argued that mature capitalism naturally produces large entities in capita], labor, and endeavors of all sorts. Because the most successful of these want to secure themselves from competition, they demand protection and coordination from the state. The state grants these demands ostensibly because the public good demands that producers and consumers, creditors and debtors be harmonized to their own good. Not incidentally, those who run the state draw power from their role as harmonizers. Hence, beginning in 1925 the Italian government established in each sector of public life a corporazione, and pressed the principal industries in that field to join it. It also pressed workers to join that sector's labor unions. Business and labor then worked out their modus vivendi in meetings with their senior partners in the Ministry of Corporations. As Benito Mussolini explained at the Ministry's inauguration, "The Ministry of Corporations is an institution ... where balance is achieved between interests and forces of the economic world. This is only possible within the sphere of the state, because the state alone transcends the contrasting interests of groups and individuals, co-coordinating them to achieve higher aims. The achievement of these aims is speeded up by the fact that all economic organizations [are] acknowledged, safeguarded and supported by the Corporative State...." (sic) In sum, the state nominally ratified the decisions of the workers' and of the owners' representatives. In reality, all such representatives worked under the watchful eye of the state, which mediated and shaped their decisions, and sometimes dictated them. Moreover, the participants in these arrangements of "cooperative consultation" valued their status because they knew they were privileged to have been chosen for it, and because they profited from the privilege. The core of Mussolini's party consisted of persons moved by interest, not ideology. Privilege ran the system, not force. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mussolini gave this amoral system moral cover with the general population by mocking the liberal pretense that man can find secular meaning individually. The state, he wrote, can fulfill human imagination by letting individuals feel part of things that are obviously beyond the power of any person to achieve. By hoping together, cheering together, believing together in things so big that they can only be accomplished together, through shared rituals, through faith in the truth of science of which the state is the effective arbiter, individuals are fulfilled more than through any intellection. So while Italy's regime in the 1920s and '30s empowered hundreds and enriched thousands, millions of ordinary Italians celebrated with parades, sound and light, oaths, subsidized art and literature, the myth that they were the reincarnation of glorious Romans. The regime talked a lot about "faith" and "religion." But the place that the regime allotted to the Catholic Church in the official culture was just a place; the state led the people in self-worship, and the Church was to be just another acolyte. Argentina WHEREAS IN 1890 ARGENTINA'S per capita income was 81 percent that of America's, by 1913 it was only 70 percent. As the Argentine people continued to grow relatively poorer amidst arguably the world's grandest natural resources, the presidents and congresses produced by elections under their liberal constitution increasingly became vehicles for citizens expressing mutual grievances. In 1943 the army staged a coup d'etat to stop the strife and integrate contrasting grievances into a social whole. The minister in charge of the labor movement, Col. Juan Peron, quickly dominated the government, became president, and instituted "a new human solution, a third philosophical position." This new arrangement would avoid "the extremes of proletarian domination, of social immobility, of vengeance for past wrongs, of abuse of wealth." The new order "institutionalized existing labor organizations, thus placing them within an order of social peace, converting them into a constituent of state power ... constituting one of its pillars, adding to the nation's equilibrium and harmony." Note well that while labor leaders exercised more power than ever under Peron, they now held their offices by his leave. The same was true of other social entities. Peron established an industrial bank, which engaged explicitly in preferential lending. Some sectors--e.g., agricultural export--had a harder time getting loans because they did not fit his view that Argentina should disengage from Britain as much as possible. Others, especially industrialists whose plans fit with his economic nationalism, got easy terms. Especially favored were vehicles, machinery, pharmaceuticals, plastics. Tariff policy served the same ends. Within each sector, executives who showed themselves most harmonious got preferential treatment for government contracts. In sum, the partnership of management, labor, and government yielded impressive profits to the partners while impoverishing the non-partners and disempowering all but the Peronists. The Argentine regime of the 1940s and '50s, the echoes of which endure in our time, was possible only because it was upheld by the pseudo-religious worship of Juan Peron's wife," Evita--a phenomenon all the more significant for being so unlikely. Only because millions of otherwise intelligent people were so emotionally addled as to importune the Vatican to declare Evita a saint could they overlook the ruin that her husband's regime was bringing upon them. Privilege kept the regime together at the top, while enthusiasm about Juan and veneration of Evita made the unprivileged feel good about themselves. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mexico THE INSTITUTIONAL REVOLUTIONARY PARTY (PRI) that stamped its character on Mexico from 1934 to 1990 developed out of the circumstances of the Mexican revolution of 1910, not from ideas. Nevertheless, that shape belongs to the same genus as that of the constitutions we are considering, and as such sheds further light on the nature of that genus. For more than three decades prior to the revolution, Mexico had been ruled by the technocratic dictator Porfirio Diaz, under the forms of a U.S.-style constitution. But neither Diaz, nor his technocrats, nor the figurehead congressmen really represented the country's increasingly antagonistic prominent citizens, some based on the land, some in industry, others in the army, all well armed. From start to finish, the revolution was about which of these claimants would be left standing, and what he would do with the others' retinues. After nearly 14 bloody years, the winner was Plutarco Elias Calles who, having physically eliminated his opponents' retinues, spent the next four years persecuting Christians with fire and sword. In 1934 Calles made Lazaro Cardenas president, thinking he would be his tool, but who arrested him and pacified the country by institutionalizing the ruling party. In sum, the PRI, as it was named in 1938, was all about Mexico's barons agreeing to share the loot in peace under any given president, while jockeying for a better share under the next one--including the labor and peasant leaders who kept their charges in line and passed the crumbs to them. The PRI made small farmers members of the National Peasant Confederation (CNC), and enrolled wage workers, by sector, into the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). Each of these became a "sector" of the party, along with the "military sector" and the "popular sector." The military sector was then folded into the popular one, and that effectively subdivided into interest groups both functional and geographic. That the party secured the loyalty of each group's leaders by franchising to them the power to extort from those below their level, which power subsequent levels franchised further down in ways that we characterize as corrupt, is less interesting than the fact that the PRI's essence is unremarkable in the modern world: Government power organizes society into groups that agree to be thus organized in exchange for the wealth that comes from privileged power over their subordinates, subject only to demonstrating loyalty to the system. Officially anti-Christian, the PRI tried to build an official culture for Mexico that would legitimize its rule and fulfill the people's longing for moral meaning. That culture had three components, touted on murals, in curricula, and in subsidized literature: "We are all Indians, and ours is the continuation of a glorious pre-Columbian history." "The Gringos stole our land, try to oppress us in countless ways, but we resist them heroically." "Unlike and against the Gringos, we are part of the world's progressive movement, and believe that the state exists to take care of the people." These myths, along with patronage backed by force, made modern Mexico what it is. The European Union THE EUROPEAN UNION uses the word harmony arguably more than any other to describe what it is about. The ideas of Jean Monnet and friends in the 1920s that germinated into the 1956 Treaty of Rome and eventually the EU arose out of the desire to restore some of the harmony that World War I had destroyed. It is difficult to overstate the contrast between how freely persons, goods, and ideas moved throughout Europe before 1914 and the passports and protectionism that persisted after the war. It is just as difficult to argue against the widespread sense that, prior to 1914, increased popular representation had made governments throughout Europe more bloody-minded than they had ever been. For Monnet and other heirs to the 18th-century Physiocratic tradition of Diderot, the path to peace and prosperity lay in de-emphasizing political representation. If people could be habituated to treating each other as valued suppliers and customers rather than as political adversaries, then they would live in peace and prosperity once again. World War II flattened the remaining obstacles in the way of Monnet's vision by discrediting what was left of nationalism in Europe. By the late 1940s the need to eat and to be warm had overwhelmed all political questions except whether to align with America or with Stalin--for most, not much of a question. Moreover Germany's Konrad Adenauer, France's Charles de Gaulle, and Italy's Alcide de Gasperi, the principal figures of postwar Europe, advocated both siding with America and European integration. As Catholics and patriots, they envisaged a Europe of nations governed by elected representatives. Theirs would have been a chastened, wiser version of pre-1914 Europe. They supported the Treaty of Rome's integration of European markets, sector by sector, under a European Commission, as part of a "political Europe." Their vision failed because there was little political substance left in European hearts and minds, and no sentiment for common, purposeful political existence. Hence the technocratic work of the Commission ended up being all the Europe that's there. The fact that the EU deals with people's lives technocratically does not negate the political character of the things it touches. Who is to rule over whom? Who will gain and who will lose? What kinds of activities, what sort of life do we encourage, what do we discourage, and what do we prohibit? What do we honor and what do we dishonor? What, if anything, do we kill and die to protect, or to destroy? Since 1993 the European Union's Commission, courts, and parliament have made countless decisions about such matters as well as about the length of condoms and the specifications of lawnmowers. Their decisions about energy have made scores of billionaires, while other decisions about agriculture and fishing have put thousands out of business. Their decisions about what constitutes human rights have effectively promulgated a moral code common to Europe's ruling class but alien to all of Europe's nations. Nor does anyone pretend that these decisions emanate from "the people" of Europe, since perhaps the sole item concerning European affairs on which there is unanimity is that the European Union suffers from a "democratic deficit." Lack of popular mandate notwithstanding, the EU is especially active in cultural affairs, specifically rejecting Christianity as even one among the bases for its legitimacy. The EU is very loud in affirming its own moral superiority, but this substantively empty claim moves no hearts. Our New Foundation? SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES between the New Foundation that President Obama is instituting and the regimes of the European Union, or of 1920s Italy, PRI Mexico, or Peron's Argentina are beside the fact that all are variants of one kind of rejection of liberal representative government. What does this rejection mean in America? Here is how it works among us. Arguably the main American constitutional event of 2008-09 was the passage under the Bush administration, with support from future president Obama as well as from virtually all the nation's major interest groups, of a $700 billion bill to purchase "troubled assets" from big banks. All agreed that unless the government were given this huge sum with unprecedented latitude and in a hurry, the average American would see his life's savings disappear. By 2008 the hurried demand for large, unspecified powers under the threat of imminent disaster was no longer exceptional. The Obama administration made it the rule, and used the money to build its "New Foundation." The Obama team (different from its predecessor only in degree) purchased few "troubled assets." With most of the money it bought stakes in the biggest banks, with which it leveraged them to support its political agenda, including the takeover of General Motors and Chrysler, which Obama had also made dependent on the government by lending them "troubled asset" money. Chrysler (with GM to follow) having failed financially, the Obama administration forced it to give a 55 percent stake in itself to the United Auto Workers union, a major constituent of the Democratic Party. The government took the next 30 percent, and gave the remainder to Italy's Fiat, in exchange for management and technology. In so doing and against bedrock bankruptcy law, it gave some 43 cents on the dollar to the UAW's unsecured interest in the company and only 28 cents to secured creditors. Meanwhile, part of the deal worked out with the favored stakeholders was that they would produce mainly small cars, with better fuel economy. But few believed that the American public would buy them. Doing this lent support to the administration's claim of moral authority as savior of the earth from global warming. In an event that would have been unremarkable in Europe or the Third World, the Obama administration took assets from persons independent of it, transferred them to political allies, and bolstered in the popular mind the rationale for its rule. What does it take to become a stakeholder in our new constitution, and what does it yield? Consider the Service Employees International Union. Andy Stern, its president, said, "We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama--$60.7 million to be exact-and we're proud of it." Stern claimed that he hired people who "knocked on 1.87 million doors, made 4.4 million phone calls, and sent more than 2.5 million pieces of mail in support of Obama." He had borrowed some 20 of those millions. But he is reaping fabulous returns on his investment. The union has 2 million dues-paying members whom Stern and his associates got, according to the Los Angeles Times, by forceful or fraudulent takeover of locals as well as by bribery and intimidation. But Stern is now a stakeholder in just about any matter he chooses. Most visibly, on April 15, 2009, his lawyer and lobbyist were part of an administration virtual "round table" that decided to withhold $6.8 billion of "stimulus money" appropriated for the state of California unless the state restored a $7.4 million (1.4 percent) cut it made in one of its programs, which happens to be serviced by Stern's union. Surprised, California secretary of health and human services Kim Belshe said, "The involvement of a stakeholder in this kind of state-federal deliberative process is unusual at best ... outside any norm I am familiar with." Alas, this sort of thing is becoming the new rule. One corollary of that rule is that powerful stakeholders like the SEIU can help turn former opponents into new stakeholders. Thus when President Obama said, wryly and proudly, that even Wal-Mart was supporting his health care plan--the very Wal-Mart that the Democratic Party had demonized for its resistance to unionization--he was in fact acknowledging yet another debt to the SEIU. Stern's union, along with liberal groups, had so harassed Wal-Mart that it agreed, in exchange for peace, to endorse the Obama health plan's requirement that employers provide health insurance or pay the government 8 percent of gross income. Not incidentally, if the plan became law, Wal-Mart would be insulated against potential competitors who did not offer health insurance. Whereas the big banks, GM, and Chrysler became stakeholders by accepting partnership with the Democratic Party and the United Auto Workers union, and the SEIU did it by brute force and money, even as Wal-Mart was forced into an auxiliary role, an outfit by the name of Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society did it by presenting the administration with a plan for a single electronic registry of all American health care records. The company had tried to sell its plan to Congress as a cost-saving measure. But it then realized that the plan would help the Obama administration grasp the whole of the U.S. health care system in order to impose its priorities on it. Hence, HIMSS got a $36.5 billon contract, for starters. Its money and its status as a stakeholder came from pure lobbying and networking with vendors and customers, who saw opportunity in the administration's proclivities. In sum, in America as elsewhere, stakeholder government grows by its essential internal dynamic: the more the rulers' power grows over more matters, the greater the incentives of people to do whatever they can to become stakeholders. Where does stakeholder government hit those of us who are part of the general public? Consider colonoscopies. In May 2009, after consultation with stakeholders, Medicare proposed no longer paying for the electronic, noninvasive, "virtual" kind, and only for the kind that involves insertions into your colon. The makers of the electronic equipment for the virtual ones disputed this immediately. What will and will not go up your colon depends on to which part of the industry the money will go. Under our new constitution such questions, regardless of how important to you they may be, are reserved for stakeholders. Hence it is poignant to read William Greider, an enthusiastic supporter of Obama's New Foundation, expressing shock in the Nation about its results. Greider wrote that Obama's actions had taught people such as himself "a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn't. They watched Washington rush to rescue the very financial interests that caused the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend when the right people want it. 'Where's my bailout,' became the rueful punch line at lunch counters and construction sites nationwide." Greider continued, "If the largest bank holding companies are given privileged proximity to the source of government protection, then everyone in finance and commerce will want to become a bank holding company, too. We are already seeing this happening as former investment houses like Goldman Sachs and non-bank financial firms decide to join the system. Why not General Electric and Microsoft? Where does this end? What does it mean for smaller enterprises that lack the scale and influence?" He concluded, "Government and politics would become even more responsive to big money, but also able to tamper intimately with private enterprise, picking winners and losers based on political loyalties, not on performance." Why should Greider or anyone else have expected that government, especially one made up of bankers and bank regulators, would not have plenty of money for them? Why should anyone expect that a government that has the United Auto Workers as a constituency, or that wants to harness the auto industry or the energy industry to its plans, would not pay to support and shape them according to its vision? Why should anyone expect that persons who watch government dispense privilege to its supporters and enablers would not want to pay the price to join their ranks? Why be surprised that the bigger the government, the bigger a friend it is to those connected with it, and the more indifferent to the unconnected? It would be just as unreasonable to expect water to flow uphill. Nor does it make sense, under this genus of constitutions, to rue the substitution of political loyalty for performance, because in these constitutions, political loyalty is the only kind of performance that counts. What's It to Us? THE MORAL BASIS OF OUR "New Foundation" consists of the desire that many have to support it, whatever it might be. For many, the will to affirm collective action is much less a matter of ideology than of eagerness to escape what they experience as a meaningless America. Thus in an influential 1997 Wall Street Journal article, prominent neoconservatives William Kristol and David Brooks regretted that so many Americans had chosen to elect Republicans who pledged to get government off their backs. "Wishing to be left alone is not a government doctrine," they wrote. They argued for government that would lead America to "a grand destiny," to "national greatness." What would that look like? Candidly, Brooks explained elsewhere, "It almost doesn't matter what task government sets for itself as long as it does some tangible thing with energy and effectiveness.... Energetic government is good for its own sake. It raises the sight of the individual. It strengthens common bonds. It boosts national pride. It continues the great national project." Italians, Argentineans, Mexicans, and others are familiar with such pseudo-spiritual summonses to what the French intellectual-bureaucrat Jean-Marie Guehenno calls "religions without God." Adherence to the regime's official truths and refusal to challenge their moral substance is a prerequisite for working within the system wherever political loyalty also becomes the measure of cultural, spiritual matters, whether in the European Union, in 1920s Italy, 1950s Argentina, in Obamaland, or in PRI Mexico. In practice, however, such moral bases of government are but thin cover over the raw trade of privilege for power. Moreover, in America as elsewhere, while giving lip service to official truths enhances one's self-image, actually taking them as moral authority is another matter. In this regard, the moral basis of our "New Foundation" is emptier and engages hearts less than that of Mussolini's Italy, Juan Peron's Argentina, and Mexico's PRI's dinosaurs. Encouraging people to think of themselves as saviors of Planet Earth by driving small cars is thin stuff by comparison with images of glorious Rome, of saintly Evita, of the great Montezuma. Our New Foundation requires either habituating oneself to be enraptured by empty words, or getting used to swallowing questions that naturally come to mind (e.g., how can the world be burning up when the last decade has been colder than the previous?), or uttering official lies. In sum, if you are not a stakeholder--and odds are you won't be, can't be--the Stakeholder Constitution will impoverish you morally as well as materially. Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University and the author of The Character of Nations (Basic Books).

FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, whether anybody likes it or not, the United States and Mexico are joined at the Rio Grande until the stars fall from the sky. What Geography hath joined together, let no man even think of puttng asunder. There is no comparison between living alongside neighbors and relatives who are friendly and helpful, and by folks who are troubled or who wish us ill. Canada's position is analogous. But whereas Canada's aging 30 million are comfortable in their identity, the national identity of Mexico's 110 million largely young and vigorous people is up for grabs. No foreign event will so influence our peace, prosperity, and happiness as will the development of our relationship with the Mexican people. So, self-interest as well as the Golden Rule command us to love Mexicans as we love ourselves. Historic Importance AMERICA'S MOST THOUGHTFUL STATESMEN early recognized the importance of a friendly Mexico. The Founder's conception of how America fits with the rest of the world, crystallized in John Quincy Adams's Monroe Doctrine, boils down to this: Events beyond the oceans concern us as "interested spectators." Our interest in sharing the oceans, "the common possession of mankind," is equal to that of others, but it increases as the distance to the United States decreases. As for countries in the northern and southern American continents, "All questions of policy relating to them have a bearing so direct upon the rights and interests of the United States that they cannot be left at the disposal of European powers...." In short, what is nearest is dearest. Adams thought that cultural, economic, and demographic factors would lead our neighbors to gravitate toward us, bit by bit. As President J. Q. Adams's secretary of state, Henry Clay, instructed our first envoy to Mexico, we should help that natural process by leaving Mexicans alone politically while developing mutually beneficial relationships with them. It is easy enough to imagine that natural factors would have resulted in the area between the Rio Grande and Oregon, once Mexico's northwest, looking as it did in 1900 even without the 1836 battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto or Polk's war of 1846-48. The U.S. government did not take Texas from Mexico. No one should have been surprised that the Americans whom Mexico invited to fill its nearly empty Tejas province insisted on ruling themselves as they saw fit. And while there is no doubt that President Polk made war on Mexico to conquer the area between Texas and the Pacific, it is just as clear that Mexico had refused to live in peace with the U.S. and was unable to populate a vast wilderness or to keep swarms of Americans from walking into it with their own more vigorous way of life. Twenty-first-century Americans would be well advised to keep in mind that the peaceful underlying mechanisms that ensured that this area would be Anglo are now working in the other direction, seemingly just as inexorably. William Seward, secretary of state from 1861 to 1869, was heir to John Quincy Adams's quest for peaceful hemispheric expansion. He expected that parts of Canada and Mexico would grow to be so similar to America that they would seek to join us. His most memorable diplomatic work was pressuring France to end its 1863-1867 intervention in Mexico. As Americans were volunteering for an expedition to force France out, Seward told Napoleon III with increasing urgency that his attempt to counter the Mexican people's republican and American sentiments was doomed. Thus Seward salved to some extent the wounds of 1848. Mexico was the abiding diplomatic concern of James G. Blaine, who was to Seward what Seward had been to John Quincy Adams. Baine served as secretary of state to Presidents Garfield and Harrison and personified the Republican Party for a quarter-century. Blaine hoped that progress in Mexico, then under the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, would mean de facto accession, and feared that war or revolution there would spill into the U.S. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When Mexico's 1910 revolution did spill into the U.S., Woodrow Wilson departed from historic pattern by trying to impose his view of a proper outcome. Bungling that, Wilson so alienated Mexicans that in 1917 Germany's foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, had reason to believe Mexico would be receptive to an offer of alliance against the United States. Discovery of that offer--and of the possibility that the Mexican border might become hostile--united American public opinion behind entry into World War I, surely one of history's greatest disasters. Two Bodies Commingled IN THE NEAR-CENTURY SINCE, American statesmen enthralled by prospects of recreating faraway places in their own image relegated Mexico to the back burner, imagining it as a bunch of peasants taking siestas under sombreros. This was just as Mexico's integration into American life gathered speed. Between 1910 and 1932 some 900,000 Mexicans fled their revolution, swelling the previously tiny ethnic enclaves from California to Texas. More migrated north seasonally, to work harvests and send money home. During World War II the U.S. government invited millions of Mexican braceros to replace GIs on farms and in factories. Some stayed to feed the growing American economy. But the traffic across the border remained almost evenly balanced in both directions. Mexicans would come and go to work in the U.S., typically returning home. That is why, by 1990, only some 2 percent of the U.S. population was Mexican-born. This changed rapidly. By 2008 12 million native Mexicans lived in the U.S. Together with 13 million persons of Mexican origin, Mexicans made up 9 percent of the U.S. population. By 2050, about one in five Americans will be Mexican or of Mexican ancestry. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In sum, our Mexican neighbors are also part of us. They are unique among America's constituent ethnic groups in being numerous neighbors as well as relatives. There is nothing optional about this. The only question is whether our familial relationship will be functional or dysfunctional. The relationship's economic fundamentals are sound. Mexico's status as our third-largest trade partner (after Canada and China, ahead of Japan and Germany) is the least of the story. Mainly, Mexicans are adding to the U.S. economy in quantity and quality some of the essential elements that changes in the native population (for better or worse) are subtracting from it. In a nutshell: the native U.S. population is getting older, and smaller numbers of young people are inclined to work with their hands. Whereas in 2008 41 percent of Americans were of working age, only 28 percent will be by 2050. But three-quarters of Mexican arrivals are of working age. They come physically and mentally ready for manual labor on farms, in construction, tire shops, hotels, and nursing homes, in the meat industry or in maintenance-the 42.7 percent of job openings that the U.S. Labor Department classifies as requiring only "short-term on-the-job training," the ones for which native-born Americans show less and less interest or aptitude. By the same token, American young people's avoidance of serious science and math means that if we are to have scientists and doctors, they will have to come from India or China. It should go without saying that whatever hope Americans so aging and so inclined have of sustaining any Social Security or Medicare system rests on an abundant supply of eager, industrious, friendly immigrants. Some economists have predicted that 10 years from now the U.S. government will have to open labor-recruiting offices in Mexico. Mexico is no less dependent on the American people as friendly neighbors. At any given moment in 2009 one of every seven Mexicans who is performing useful labor is doing so in the USA, being paid better than he would be in Mexico. The money he sends home builds the country's human capital. While the availability of emigration has taken some pressure off Mexico's government to provide opportunities for its people at home, millions of Mexicans' experience of a better, fairer life in the U.S. has set a standard that Mexican governments have never been able to evade. For millions of ordinary Mexicans, a certain idealized image of America is the measure of things as they should be. This is as excellent for America as it is for Mexico. This is most visible in Mexico's northern regions, which have taken to calling themselves el norte, "the north," the popular name for the U.S. This is in part because life around places like Monterrey does approximate what one finds just north of the border. Indeed, anyone traveling within 200 miles or so of that line is likely to see less and less difference between life on the two sides. A plebiscite on the southern side of this band would likely indicate a preference for joining the U.S., while on the northern side the increasing proportion of Mexicans might tip the balance in favor of accepting accession. J. Q. Adams and William Seward would smile. Three Mexicos MANY MEXICANS WOULD NOT. Mexico is a big, diverse country whose attitude toward the U.S. is always up for grabs. While millions of humble folk risk life and limb and undergo privation to go north, the country's official high culture, set by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled the country from 1932 to 1998, is deeply anti-gringo. Any number of Mexican politicians try to generate a wave of hate against the USA on which they would ride to power. Attitudes toward Americans are also divided along political and regional lines. In our time, the country is divided geographically and politically into roughly three parts. The south is predominantly Indian, and its politics are dominated by the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD)--a far-left, Third World, would-be totalitarian outfit that split from the PRI. The central area around Mexico City is still under the old PRI ruling class's sway. Its leaders are "dinosaurs" deeply entrenched in the state bureaucracy and state-connected business, paragons of corruption. Anti-Americanism is part of their DNA. Under PRI rule, the Soviet Union's embassy in Mexico City was its largest anywhere, and the USSR was negotiating the establishment of Soviet consulates in the 10 gateway cities to the U.S. This ominous trend stopped only when the PRI started being challenged by the conservative National Action Party (PAN), especially in the northern state of Nuevo Leon. The pro-U.S. PAN has won the last two presidential elections (the first free ones ever, the last by a squeaker). But its vision of the country is only one among many. Which vision prevails among Mexicans in the future, what kinds of neighbors we will have south of the border, as well as the character of our Mexican-American relatives on the north side, must depend to some extent on how we Americans handle some of our thorny problems. The beginning of wisdom about this is that they are ours. So far, the U.S. body politic has handled them in a way that seems calculated to turn Mexicans into enemies. Drugs THE DRUG TRAFFIC IS A GRIEVOUS, gratuitous hurt, a deadly injection that the American people are inflicting on Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The $25 billion that honest Mexican workers send home every year fertilize Mexican society's thriftiest, most decent grass roots. But the roughly $50 billion that American college kids, yuppies, and Hollywood types pay to Mexican drug cartels for cocaine, marijuana, and now methamphetamines enable these criminals to corrupt Mexico's police and courts, to blight decency. Increasingly, Mexicans are blaming us for this. Rightly so: U.S. drug laws are the one and only reason why the drug cartels exist. They will continue to thrive, no matter what, so long as these laws do. We are doubly at fault because we only pretend to outlaw the use of mind-bending drugs. Long ago we stopped penalizing use of marijuana and cocaine. Any college professor who points out to the dean that certain students habitually show up in class stoned is likely to be greeted with a knowing smile. How many parents does anyone know who, upon learning that their children smoked or snorted, turned them over to the police? How many mere users are serving time in the pen as prescribed by law? We classify drug use by the powerless as a "disease" and send them to "treatment programs" to words that no one takes seriously. By paying them Social Security supplemental income, we also relieve them of the responsibility of supporting themselves. Since money is fungible, Social Security pays for marijuana, cocaine, etc. Thus we enable and reward drug use. Among the powerful, drug use no longer disqualifies anyone for high responsibility. Whereas Bill Clinton mock-denied his drug use by joking that he had not inhaled, Barack Obama simply admitted using cocaine and was not blamed for it. In sum, our real laws support rather than diminish demand for drugs. But our laws also make sure, absolutely sure, that the drugs will flow exclusively through criminal channels. This ensures that drug prices will be high and that they will enrich and empower the scum of the earth. Then we, having coddled demand, empowered and enriched the criminal suppliers, blame Latin American societies for our drug problem. These are the illusions of a self-indulgent people who imagine themselves virtuous and blame others for their own corruption. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Mexico's failure lies in its decision to back up our stupid laws. Its efforts to interfere with the drug trade have boomeranged and must continue to do so. The traffickers hold all the cards. They alone can make "offers you can't refuse." They can say to any policeman, judge, prison official, or bureaucrat on both sides of the border: "This favor we ask of you, maybe just to look the other way, costs you little. Doing it will enrich you. Should you get in trouble for helping us, we can help you. The legal system has many appeals, some staffed by our people. But if you cross us, there are no appeals, just routine beheadings and torture killings. Refuse us, and you die. Your family too." Neither the Mexican nor the U.S. governments can match the attractiveness of the incentives or the terror of the threats. And if the Mexican government were to try fighting fire with fire, to terrorize the terrorists, the U.S. government would be the first to denounce its "human rights abuses." In Mexico, some unofficial organizations have set about beheading and otherwise brutalizing persons associated with narco gangs. The U.S. government has treated them the same nasty way it treated the Colombian paramilitary organizations that took the starch out of that country's narco-terrorist group, the FARC. Instead, the U.S. government's recipe is to pay for more police to be corrupted, more intelligence to be infiltrated, more technology to be evaded, more helicopters to fly around impotently, more innocent people to be push around ignorantly, while the narco cartels kill. Essentially, the U.S. government's policy is to let American society finance the drug cartels unofficially, while officially it finances the Mexican government's war against them. We are paying some Mexicans to make war on other Mexicans, principally in the fragile human ecosystem that is the U.S.-Mexico border, where some 6,000 people were killed in the last year. The benchmark of success? The price of cocaine may rise. But when the price rises, our darling college kids and yuppies pay it, and the same amount of deadly money flows south. No wonder that some Latin governments, notably Chile, have refused to cooperate with America's "war on drugs," preferring to give the traffickers free rein in their territory rather than get their police, judiciary, and army polluted to support American hypocrisy and tergiversation. In short, the drug problem's root is that lots of Americans want drugs, and that the rest of us eschew the reasonable opposites of truly penalizing consumption (a la Singapore) or of total, Darwinian legalization. So long as we keep doing this, we will guarantee to the narcotraffickers effective control of the U.S.-Mexican border and a veto on good relations between the American and Mexican people. Immigration U.S. IMMIGRATION POLICY has the same disastrous effects on relations among ourselves and our Mexican neighbors and relatives and the same criminal beneficiaries. In the 1970s the U.S. labor movement demanded "border enforcement" in support of its drive to organize farm workers. The Democratic Party backed this, and semi-serious border controls began. Ending the longstanding, informal, easy two-way traffic across the border turned workers into immigrants and created a problem which the right made worse by ignorantly characterizing them as welfare freeloaders. Men coming north to work started bringing their families along when the 1970s, wave of enforcement made clear that they could no longer go home once the picking season was over, or just to see their families for Christmas and Easter, and easily return. Crossing a guarded border with families required the services of "coyotes," who charged a fee. Thus occasional laborers became migrants, a few of whom, unable to go home when the job ran out and having to support families in high-cost America, when offered public assistance, took it. Voila, a problem created. In the 1990s the problem got worse when border security increased as part of the "war on drugs," and again after 9/11, just as the burgeoning U.S. economy demanded more labor. As illegal northward crossings became ever more difficult, they required more bribes, more intelligence, more equipment. This put small-time "coyotes" out of business and put cross-border human traffic into the hands of professional border breachers--the same people who do it daily with tons of drugs. They charge some $2,500 per person, make a handsome profit, and have no qualms about leaving human cargos to die in the desert or about holding their passengers for ransom. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] All too often, Mexican newspapers and TV carry stories about the tragic fate of young people-often the best in their communities--who had left to find work in el norte and end up dead or in some dehumanized situation. Americans' talk of the need to fence out Mexicans also gets big play in the media. Mexicans cannot help but wonder why we despise them so, and resent it. Trade INCREASING THE ECONOMIC INTEGRATION of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico makes even more sense politically than it does economically. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) treaty of 1993 proceeded from this traditional American view. But elements of the American left (because of interest), and of the right (because of ignorance), have managed to addle the treaty's benefits with yet another set of insults to Mexicans. Beginning in the 1960s Mexico let materials into the country tax free, to be turned into products by Mexican workers in maquilladora factories along the U.S. border, whose products pay lower taxes upon entering the U.S. Under NAFTA the taxes were lowered, and the number of maquilladoras rose to some 4,000, employing more than a million workers and producing almost a third of Mexico's GDP. Ninety percent of the goods are shipped to the U.S. But U.S. labor unions on the left and economic nationalists on the right blamed Mexico for stealing U.S. jobs--as if evil U.S. industrialists or Mexicans or Chinese, rather than the laws of economic comparative advantage, dictate what activities take place where. The Obama administration is unofficially but obviously-looking for ways to negate as much of the treaty as it can. But the Clinton and Bush administrations also violated provisions of the treaty, each instance inciting big, emotional headlines in Mexico. None has made bigger headlines than the U.S. barring of Mexican trucks at the behest of the Teamsters' union. Prior to 1982 Mexican trucks could make deliveries anywhere in the U.S. The Teamsters were the Reagan administration's sole support within the labor movement. To pay them off, the administration restricted Mexican trucks to the border zone, where their cargo must be shifted to U.S. trucks manned by U.S. drivers. As straightforward protectionism, this carried no insult. In 1993 NAFTA abolished that restriction--on paper. But the U.S. government maintains it, now on the insulting pretext that Mexican trucks and drivers are unsafe. In 2007 the Bush administration tried to pacify outraged Mexicans without really displeasing U.S. labor by setting up a small pilot program for Mexican trucks, with the promise that the U.S. would eventually keep its treaty promise. In 2009 the Mexican government got tired of the charade and imposed punitive tariffs on U.S. goods. The economic damage of trade wars is far smaller than adding insult upon insult that Mexicans may reasonably conclude can come only from the gringos' racial contempt. Fouling Our Own Nest NOTE WELL, HOWEVER, that current U.S. policies on trade, immigration, and drugs cannot possibly stop or even slow appreciably the integration of the U.S. and Mexico. Much less can they separate the United States' well-being from Mexico's. All they can do is continue to make the two peoples' growing interdependence into a source of trouble for both. These three sets of policies have in common that they cannot achieve their stated ends, and that they tend to make Americans and Mexicans each others' enemies. Our policy of permitting drug users to pay criminal drug suppliers is literally a supply-side drug policy. It cannot, imaginably, stop or even slow the drug traffic. It can only create, finance, and arm an attack upon our neighbors and set up a war on our border region, a war most certain to produce Mexican-American antagonism. Similarly, our policy of criminalizing the entry of Mexican labor cannot, imaginably, fill the economic needs that Mexican labor fills, or even slow the growth of our Mexican American population. All it can do is embitter the latter. Monkeying with NAFTA on pretend grounds of worry about inferior Mexican standards does the same thing. If any state deserves the label "failed," it is one that recognizes the destructiveness of what it's doing and keeps on doing it. How Russians or Chinese or Indonesians feel about Americans, or how we feel about them, makes little difference simply because such peoples are neither neighbors nor relatives. But because Mexicans are at once close neighbors and relatives, our sentiments toward them and theirs toward us are of the greatest importance. When we make enemies of Mexicans, we foul our own nest. Angelo M. Codevilla is a professor of international relations at Boston University and the author of The Character of Nations (Basic Books). He has taught in Mexico and was born in Italy.

"We will restore science to its rightful place ..." --Barack Obama UNPACKED, THIS SENTENCE MEANS: "Under my administration, Americans will have fewer choices about how they live, and fewer choices as voters because, rightfully, those choices should be made by officials who rule by the authority of science." Thus our new president intends to accelerate a trend a half-century old in America but older and further advanced in the rest of the world. There is nothing new or scientific about rulers pretending to execute the will of a god or of an oracle. It's a tool to preempt opposition. The ruler need not make a case for what he is doing. He need only reaffirm his status as the priest of a knowledge to which the people cannot accede. The argument "Do what we say because we are certified to know better" is a slight variant of "Do what we say because we are us." An Old Story THE FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY INTELLECTUALS and merchants who founded the modern state spoke of political equality. But they knew that if the masses governed, they might well have guillotined them rather than nobles and priests. And so they set up, and Napoleon perfected, a system of government that consisted of bureaucracies. In practice and in theory, the bureaucracies defined the modern state in terms of efficient administration, which they called scientific. In 19th-century France, Prussia, and their imitators, the state set standards for schools, professions, and localities. While elected assemblies might debate abstractions, they did not deal with the rules by which people lived. Political equality and self-rule were purely theoretical, while personal latitude was at the discretion of the bureaucracies. This is the continental model of the state, best explained by G. W. F. Hegel in The Philosophy of History and by Max Weber in his description of the Rechtsstaat, the "rational-legal state." Access to this ruling class is theoretically equal, typically through competitive exams, and its rules should apply equally. Just as in the ancient Chinese imperial bureaucracy, decisions should be made by those who know and care best: the examination-qualified bureaucrats. In modern governance, in addition to embodying the state, the bureaucrats are supposed to be the carriers of the developing human spirit, of progress. Only in Switzerland and America did the theory and practice of popular government survive into the modern world. But note: they survived because they were planted on older, hybrid pre-Enlightenment roots. Because the pretense of rare knowledge is the source of the modern administrative state's intellectual and moral authority, its political essence is rule of the few, by their own authority, over the many. Ancient political theory was familiar with this category, distinguishing within it the rule of the moneymakers for the purpose of wealth, of the soldiers for glory, or of the virtuous for goodness. But modern thought has reduced government by the few to the rule of the experts. Expert in what? In bringing all good things, it seems. This was so when Mexico's dictator Porfirio Diaz (1875-1911) justified his rule by claiming that he was just following the impartial advice of "los cientificos," the scientists, about economics and public administration. Never forget that the one and only intellectual basis for Communist rule over billions of people since 1917 is the claim that Karl Marx had learned the secret formula for overcoming mankind's "contradictions," especially about economics. How many millions genuflected before the priests of "dialectical materialism"! To a lesser degree, the "brain trust" and "the best and the brightest" were important sources for the authority of the Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy administrations, respectively. The scientific subject matter to which the rulers claim privileged access matters little. Three generations ago it was economics, in our time it includes everything from environmentalism to child rearing. But whether the objective be rainmaking, the avoidance of plague or falling skies, the fulfillment of fond wishes, or the affirmation of identity, the ruler's incantations establish the presumption that he and his class know things that others do not or cannot know; that hence he and his class have the right to rule, while the rest must accept whatever explanations come from on high. In our time, such knowledge is called science, and claiming ownership of it practically negates political equality, if not human equality altogether. Claiming it is a political, not a scientific, act. Knowledge and Equality THE CLAIM THAT PUBLIC AFFAIRS (and as well many matters heretofore deemed private) are beyond the capacity of citizens to understand and too complex for them to administer, and hence that only certified experts may deal with them, must be cynical, at least to the extent to which those who make it realize that only theoretically does it transfer power to "the experts." In practice, the power passes to those who certify the experts as experts. Surely, however, the polity's ordinary members cease to be citizens. Aristotle teaches that political relationships--that is, relationships among equals--depend on persuasion. Conversely, persuasion is the currency of politics only insofar as persons are equal. Whereas equals must persuade their fellows about the substance of the business at hand, despots, kings, or aristocrats exercise power over lesser beings by pointing to their status. But do those who rule on behalf of superior knowledge really know things that endow them with the right to rule? What might such things be? What subjects, what judgments, qualify as "science" meaning matters so far beyond the horizon of ordinary human beings as to disqualify commonsense judgment about them? What can any humans know that the knowledge of it rightly places them in the saddle and others under it? What are the matters on which the public may have legitimate opinions, and on what matters are their opinions illegitimate, except when expressed by leave of certified experts? Moreover, how does one accede to the rank of expert? Must one possess a degree? But neither Galileo nor Isaac Newton had any, never mind Thomas Edison. Moreover, possessors of degrees do differ among themselves. Must one be accepted by other experts? By which ones? Note also that scientists are not immune to groupthink, to interest, to dishonesty, to mutual deference or antagonism, never mind to error. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The problem is patent: Because it is as plain in our America as in all places and at all times that some men do know the public business far better than others, it follows that the people in charge should be the ones who best know what they are doing. Hence, inequality of capacity argues for political inequality. To the extent that the matters to be decided rest on expertise, any nonexperts who claim a civil or natural right to refuse to follow the experts in fact abuse those rights. At most, nonexperts may choose among competing teams of experts. But on what basis may they choose? If the questions that the experts debate among themselves are fundamentally comprehensible by attentive laymen, "science" would be about mere detail and citizens would be able to decide the big questions on the basis of equality. But if the "science" by which the polity is ruled disposes of essential questions, then citizenship in the sense of Aristotle and of the American Founders is impossible, and the masses should be mere faithful subjects. And if some voters dig in their heels or place their faith in scientists who are out of step with "what science says"--quacks, by definition--then they undermine the very basis of government that rests on expertise. Such inequality is compatible with some conceptions of citizenship, but not with the American or democratic versions thereof. Because Americans believe that "all men are created equal," they tend to identify the concept of citizenship with that of self-government; the American commitment to equality means equality in the making of laws. Even more, it presumes laws under which persons may live as they wish, that the people have the final say on any restriction of that freedom, and that even popular assent--never mind scientific decision-making--cannot alienate the rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Unlike Hegel and Napoleon, who saw nations as organisms to be organized scientifically, Americans view public life as an arena of clashing interests that must be adjusted to their general satisfaction. Hence from the American perspective, removing the polity's business from the arena of politics to the cloisters of science just restricts the competition among the polity's factions and changes its rules. Whereas previously the parties had to address the citizenry with substantive cases for their positions and interests, now translating those positions into scientific terms expressed by certified persons means that the factions must fight one another by marshaling contrasting scientific retinues, by validating their own and discrediting their opponents' experts. It follows then that the modern struggle is over control of the process of accreditation, and that the arguments the masses hear must be mostly ad hominem, seldom ad valorem--not least because the experts deem the masses incapable and unworthy of hearing anything else. Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" revolutionized the relationship between ordinary Americans and their government by introducing a new kind of legislation: thenceforth, the people's elected representatives would delegate to "independent" executive agencies the "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" power to invent and administer the rules in their field by which people would live. The citizen's recourses against these powers are mostly theoretical. The notion that they are "independent" and rule by impartial expertise is on the level of stories about tooth fairies. Scientific Pretense Comes to America AMERICA GOT ITS FIRST straight dose of scientific governance in the 1950s. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Brown v. Board of Education--whether schools segregated by race fulfilled the 14th Amendment's requirement for "equal protection of the laws" to all citizens--not by reference to any legal or political principle on which the general population might pronounce themselves (one such principle was available in Justice John Marshall Harlan's dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that Brown overturned), but rather by reference to a "study" by sociologist Kenneth Clark concluding that "separate is inherently unequal." This was a finding supposedly of fact, not of law. Whereas ordinary citizens were supposedly competent to agree or disagree with the legal and moral principles on either side of these cases, the Court decided Brown on a basis that could be contested only by sociologists as well credentialed and funded as Mr. Clark. Debates within the Court and in society at large subsequently have been focused not so much on what is lawful as on contending studies about the effects of competing policies. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The scientization of American political life was just beginning. Between the 1950s and 2000 social policy slipped away from voter control because the courts and the "independent agencies" took them over. Beginning in the 1970s, courts and agencies began to take control of economic life through the pretense of scientific environmental management. In Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), the Court agreed with what it called predominant scientific opinion that human emissions of carbon dioxide cause "global warming" and hence ordered it to regulate those emissions--essentially America's economy. The American people's elected representatives had not passed and were not about to pass any law concerning "global warming." No matter. It should be superfluous to point out that "scientific" briefs submitted to courts, as well as the innumerable contacts between expert "independent" agencies and the interest groups in the fields they regulate, are anything but impartial, bloodless, disinterested, apolitical. But in fact the power of scientific pretense rests largely on the thin veil it casts over clashes of interest and political identity. Let us look further. In his 1960 Godkin lectures at Harvard, C. P. Snow, who had been Britain's civil service commissioner, told Americans that "In any advanced industrial society...the cardinal choices have to be made by a handful of men: in secret and, at least in legal form, by men who cannot have firsthand knowledge of what these choices depend upon or what their results may be." In short, public figures must be figureheads for scientists who are formally responsible to them but whose minds are beyond common understanding and scrutiny. Snow concluded that society's greatest need was for change, and that scientists were "socially imaginative minds." While scientists should not administer, he said, they should be part of the Establishment, along with administrators. He illustrated this point by contrasting the clash in Britain between two scientists, Sir Henry Tizard, innovative, progressive, and very much a member of the administrative-scientific Establishment, and F. A. Lindemann, a scientist close to Winston Churchill but outside the Establishment. According to Snow, Lindemann polluted science and administration with politics, while Tizard's contrary scientific and administrative opinions were supra-political. Tizard's membership in the Establishment made them that. But in the same year, President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell to the American people after eight years in the White House and a lifetime in the U.S. Army argued that government's embrace of science would corrupt itself and science. Whereas Snow had taken pains to identify science with public policy and to call true scientists only those who got along with colleagues and especially with administrators, Eisenhower pointed to these things as subversive. His oft-cited warning about the dangers of a "military-industrial complex" was part of the address's larger point: the danger that big government poses to citizenship: ... a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific technological elite. The prospect against which Eisenhower warned has become our time's reality. One accedes to the rank of expert by achieving success in getting grants, primarily from the government. Anyone who has worked in a university knows that getting government grants is the surefire way to prestige and power. And on what basis do the government's grantors make the grants that constitute the scientific credentials? Science itself?. But the grantors are not scientists, and they would not be immune to human temptations even if they were. Personal friendship, which C. P. Snow touted, is not nearly as problematic as intellectual kinship, professional and political partisanship. In sum, as Eisenhower warned, politicians are tempted to cast issues of public policy in terms of science in order to foreclose debate, to bring to the side of their interests expert witnesses whose expertise they manufactured and placed beyond challenge. Power by Pretense TESTIFYING TO A JOINT CONGRESSIONAL committee on March 21, 2007, former vice president Al Gore argued for taxing the use of energy based on the combustion of carbon, and for otherwise forcing Americans to emit much less carbon dioxide. Gore wanted to spend a substantial amount of the money thus raised to fund certain business ventures. (Incidentally or not, he himself had a large stake in those ventures.) But, he argued, his proposal was not political, and debating it was somehow illegitimate, because he was just following "science," according to which, if these things were not done, Planet Earth would overheat and suffocate. He said: "The planet has a fever. If your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the doctor says you need to intervene here, you don't say, 'Well, I read a science fiction novel that tells me it's not a problem'" But Gore's advocacy of "solutions" for "global warming" was anything but politically neutral acceptance of expertise. As vice president until 2001, and afterward, he had done much to build a veritable industry of scientists and publicists who had spent some $50 billion, mostly in government money, during the previous decade to turn out and publicize "studies" bolstering his party's efforts to regulate and tax in specific ways. Moreover, he claimed enough scientific knowledge to belittle his opposition for following "science fiction." But Gore's work was political, not scientific. Not surprisingly, some of his opponents in Congress and among scientists thought that Gore and his favorite scientists were doing well-paid science fiction. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Who was right? Gore's opponents, led by Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, argued that the substance of the two main questions, whether the Earth was being warmed by human activities, and what if anything could and should be done about it, should be debated before the grand jury of American citizens. Gore et al. countered that "the debate is over!" and indeed that nonscientific citizens had no legitimate place in the debate. Yet he and like-minded citizens claimed to know enough to declare that it had ended. They also claimed that scientists who disagreed with them, or who merely questioned the validity of the conclusions produced by countless government science commissions to which Gore and his followers had funneled government money, and which they called "mainstream science," were "deniers"--illegitimate. Equally out of place, they argued, were calls that they submit to tests of their scientific IQ. Whatever else one may call this line of argument, one may not call it scientific. It belongs to the genus "politics." But, peculiarly, it is politics that aims to take matters out of the realm of politics, where citizens may decide by persuading one another, and places them in a realm where power is exercised by capturing the commanding heights of the Establishment. Thus on July 28, 2008, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi explained to journalist David Rogers why she was right in forbidding Congress to vote on proposals by Republicans to open U.S. coastlines to oil drilling. Using fossil fuels, she explained, causes global warming. Forbidding votes that could result in more oil being used was her duty because, she said, "I'm trying to save the planet. I'm trying to save the planet." No one would vouch for her scientific expertise. But she was surely saving an item in the agenda of her party's constituencies, which rightly feared defeat in open debates and votes. In the same way, in September 2008 Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and chairman of the Federal Reserve Board Ben Bernanke told Congress and the country, backed by many in the banking business, that unless Congress authorized spending $700 billion to purchase the financial assets that the banks and investment houses considered least valuable, the entire financial system would collapse and the American people would lose their savings, jobs, homes, and so on, and that authorizing that money would avert the crisis. But none of those who proposed the expenditure explained why the failure of some large private enterprises and their subsequent sale at public auction would cause any of the above-mentioned catastrophes. There was no explanation of how the money would be spent, how the assets to be bought would be valued, or why. The arguments were simply statements by experts in government as well as finance--whose repeated mistakes had brought about the failures that were at the center of contention, and whose personal interests were involved in the plan they proposed. The strength of their arguments lay solely in the position of those making them. They were the ones who were supposed to know. And when, a month later, the same Paulson, backed by the same unanimous experts, told the country that the $700 billion would be spent otherwise, and as they committed some $8 trillion somehow to shore up the rest of the economy, the arguments continued to lie in the position of those making them, combined with the clamor of those who would benefit directly from the government's outlays. In practice, expertise--or science--has come to be defined by a government job or commission. Truth and error are incidental. The confluence of political agendas with the attempt to describe political choices as scientific rather than political, and the attempt to delegitimize opponents as out of step with science, is clear in the 2005 book by journalist Chris Mooney, The Republican War on Science. Typically, Mooney disclaims substantive scientific judgment and claims only the capacity and right to discern the "credibility" of rival scientists and their claims. Note well, however, that propositions or persons are credible--that is, worth believing--only to the extent that they are correct substantively. Arguments such as Mooney's, Paulson's, Pelosi's, and Gore's most certainly aim to convince citizens about certain substantive propositions, but--and this is key--they do so indirectly, by pretending that they find certain propositions credible and others not. Credible are the ones of which they approve, coming from persons the places of which they approve: the government bureaucracies or universities. Judgments of authoritative provenance, they argue, need not refute the opposition's arguments, or even refer to their substance because science--meaning the Establishment-supposedly has settled the arguments intellectually to its own satisfaction, the only satisfaction that matters. Mooney writes that because "American democracy ... relies heavily on scientific technical expertise to function [public officials] need to rely on the best scientific knowledge available and proceed on the basis of that knowledge to find solutions." Modern Republicans, he argues, have put themselves "in stark contrast with both scientific information and dispassionate, expert analysis in general." Caught in the confluence of corporate interests and conservative ideology, primarily religion, Republicans have "skewed science" on every important question of the day, from stem cell research to "global warming, mercury pollution, condom effectiveness, the alleged health risks of abortion, and much else." They have "cherry picked" facts and, most ominously, even cited scientists to back them up. Mooney worries: "If the American people come to believe they can find a scientist willing to say anything, they will grow increasingly disillusioned with science itself." Against the Grain THAT WORRY IS SERIOUS. Convincing people that what you may teach your children, what taxes you should pay, must be decided by the "scientific" pronouncements of members of a certain class challenges the American concept of popular government all too directly. To succeed, any attempt to impose things so contrary to American life must overcome political hurdles as well as human nature itself. Government by scientific pretense runs against the grain of politics in two ways: First, since those who would rule by scientific management eschew arguments on the substance of the things, instead relying on the cachet of the scientists whose mere servants they pretend to be, their success depends on maintaining a pretense of substantive neutrality on the issues--the pretense that if "science" were to pronounce itself in the other direction, they would follow with the same alacrity. But this position is impossible to maintain against the massive evidence that those who hawk certain kinds of social or environmental policies in the name of science are first of all partisans of those policies, indeed that these policies are part of the identity of their sociopolitical class. Second, it is inherently difficult for anyone who fancies himself a citizen to hear from another that he is not qualified to disagree with a judgment said to be scientific. Naturally, he will ask: If I as a layman don't know enough to disagree, what does that other layman know that qualifies him to agree? Could it be that his appeal to science is just another way of telling me to shut up because he is better than I, and that he is justifying his presumption by pointing to his friends in high places? The most important claims made on behalf of science often run against human nature, none more so than its central claim about the nature of humanity. On December 20, 2005, deciding the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, federal district court judge James Jones prohibited the Dover, Pennsylvania, schools from teaching the possibility that human beings are the result not of chance but of "intelligent design." To partisan applause, he ruled that science had shown, proved, that all life, including human life, is the result of chance, that it is meaningless, that entertaining the possibility of the opposite is religion, and that doing so in a public school amounts to the "establishment of religion," and hence is prohibited by the First Amendment. Leave aside the absurdity of maintaining that the authors of the U.S. Constitution entertained any part of this reasoning. Consider: since everyone knows that nobody really knows how life, particularly human life, came about (cf. the legal meaning of the word "knowledge"), any attempt to impose as official truth the counterintuitive proposition that human life is meaningless discredits itself. It is impossible to suppress the natural reaction: "How the hell do they know?" Human nature rebels especially violently against those who pretend to special knowledge but who then prove inept, whose prescriptions bring misery. When politicians lay out their reasons why something should or should not be done, when the public accepts those reasons, and then the ensuing measures bring grief, the public's anger is tempered by its own participation in the decision, and is poured out on the ideas themselves as well as on the politicians who espoused them. But when the politicians make big changes in economic and social life on the basis of "science" beyond the people's capacity to understand, when events show them to have been wrong, when those changes impoverish and degrade life, then popular anger must crash its full force only on those who made themselves solely responsible. The failed sorcerers' apprentices' excuse "science made me do it" will only add scorn to retribution. Angelo M. Codevilla is professor of international relations at Boston University. This essay is adapted from the second edition of his The Character of Nations, forthcoming from Basic Books.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) insists that Osama bin Laden is alive and remains as America's greatest security threat despite consistent accounts that he is already dead. It is believed that the CIA's insistence of Obama's role in terrorism is in line with the CIA's intelligence blunders in the past. The government and the public is advised to exercise due diligence about international affairs.

Elotuzumab plus lenalidomide and dexamethasone has shown improved progression-free and overall survival versus lenalidomide and dexamethasone in patients with relapsed or refractory multiple myeloma. We aimed to assess these regimens in patients with newly diagnosed multiple myeloma who are ineligible for haematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT).

A 69-year-old man is admitted by the trauma service for observation after sustaining a ground-level fall. He was intoxicated at the time, and upon arrival at the emergency center, he [...]

Norman Podhoretz, who received the U.S.' highest civilian honor from the U.S. President George W. Bush, states that the ideals that make America great provide a model for the rest of the world. He believes that Bush's 2005 Second Inaugural Speech is just such a model. It is argued that Podhoretz misunderstood the relationship between words and deeds as well as how the world works, and even failed to understand America's Model.

The US President George W. Bush's presidency has taught the wrong lessons about war, peace and the world, where Americans are hated and insecurity has crept in due to which living down his legacy will take a long time. His incompetence and secretiveness has only made things worse for America since secrecy does not hide effective sources and methods but shoddy ones and pretense, and also he has not made an effort to explain his failures to the people.

The life and work of a scientist called Edward Teller is presented with respect to his tragedies that he faced in his pathways. Teller's involvement with missile defense in the 1960s was a logical extension of his development of nuclear weapons.

The US President George W. Bush stated that America could remain free only if all the world's other peoples were to become free, and promised that America would spread freedom and prosperity to the globe's farthest reaches. America's discourse on foreign affairs is healthier than it was in the past three generations.

TO THE EDITOR: It is not altogether pleasant to appear in my friend Norman Podhoretz's latest rogues' gallery ['The War Against World War IV,' February]. It is especially strange to [...]

Study objective: Lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a disease affecting women and causing cystic lung lesions, and, in some instances, leading to respiratory failure and death, appears to be exacerbated by estrogens. Hence, [...]

The CIA admitted to senate investigators that it had precisely zero agents in Iraq in the year prior to invasion, as it is tough to get and keep agents in such places. The U.S. government has struck terrorism on the basis of satellite reconnaissance and its bombs and missiles have destroyed empty mud huts. The CIA assumed that the 'third world' would take its advice and it would be able to retain its loyalty towards its members.

Some of the American elites think that terrorism is somehow related to the Wahabi sect of the Arabian Peninsula, as also in Islam, heresy has survived due to the moral outrage and turned into murderous political enterprise. Destruction of Saudi rule preferably by other Muslims and withdrawal of indirect support to the heretics from the west can defeat the heresy.

In this study, we investigate the nonlinear dynamics of a kinetic energy harvester featuring a single degree-of-freedom magneto-piezoelectric harvester with a double-well potential resonator. A detailed analysis of the simulation results revealed the influence of initial conditions on the average power output as we varied the frequency of the external force, noting the emergence of coexisting solutions. We identified three initial conditions corresponding to regions with distinct power outputs and analyzed the relationship between average power and system dynamics. Our findings showed that at higher excitation frequencies, inherent subharmonics emerged due to the multi-stable potential. By applying the discrete Meyer wavelet transform for signal processing, the filtered output signal retained approximately 93% of the original signal’s power with the subharmonics, closely matching the optimal frequency response. Wavelet filtering allows for a clearer identification of subharmonics, which plays a crucial role in optimizing performance.

Iraq was traditionally only of interest to Americans as exotica and history. Current problems in the Persian Gulf actually began in 1953 with the joint UK and US support of the military coup through which Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran was overthrown.

This communication proposes a preliminary simplified kinetic model for the hydrogenation of 1-phenyl-1,2-propanedione that can render up to eight compounds, involving regioselectivity and enantioselectivity. The catalytic system comprises two functionalities; the heterogeneous catalyst (Ir/TiO2) plays the role for the hydrogenation, whereas the adsorption/binding to the active site is played by a chiral molecule (cinchonidine), added to the reaction mixture. The reaction occurs at room temperature and total pressure of 40 bar. The product distribution shows competitive parallel and series pathways with up to 12 possible reactions. Despite the complexity of both reaction and catalyst system, a simplified kinetic model was able to predict the concentrations profiles. The model assumes the reactions to be apparent first order in the concentrations of reactant and intermediate products, while the kinetic constants include all other effects (partial pressure of hydrogen, solvent and catalyst effects, and the concentration of the chiral additive). The concentration profiles were well-modeled with low residual values. The errors in the kinetic constants (k-values) were small for all relevant parameters of the main reaction pathways. Two k-values are nil, which is the lower bound imposed in the model, suggesting that these reaction pathways are likely negligible. The positive outcome from this simplified model suggests that the process can be formally treated as a first-order irreversible homogeneous catalyzed reaction, despite a heterogeneous catalyst was employed (with a modifier). Despite the promising results, the model must be extended for a more general applicability, or conditions where it is applicable.

Little research has considered the importance of a person's attitude toward heavy drinking when evaluated against other well‐known predictors of alcohol use and related harm including drinking motives and drinker identity. The current study aimed to evaluate whether one's favorable attitude toward heavy drinking is a unique predictor of prospectively assessed drinking‐related outcomes when considered against descriptive and injunctive norms, drinking intentions, drinking motives, and drinker identity. Participants in the current study comprised mandated students (n= 374; 54% male) who violated a campus alcohol policy and received a brief intervention (eCHECKUP TO GO). Analyses included the use of negative binomial regression to examine baseline predictors— attitude toward heavy drinking, perceived descriptive and injunctive norms, drinking intentions, drinking motives, and drinker identity—of prospective alcohol use outcomes and alcohol‐related problems 1 month later. We found that one's attitude toward heavy drinking remains a significant predictor of binge frequency, peak drinking, and alcohol‐related problems when accounting for norms, intentions, motives, and identity. This study has important theoretical and intervention implications. Indeed, the finding that one's attitude toward heavy drinking remains a significant predictor of alcohol‐related outcomes when intentions are included in the model has implications within the theory of planned behavior. Furthermore, attitude toward heavy drinking has predictive utility when considered against descriptive and injunctive norms, drinking motives, and drinker identity. These findings contribute to a growing literature suggesting that attitudes could be an important intervention target when the goal is to change drinking behavior. One’s attitude toward heavy drinking is an important determinant of alcohol use and associated problems but more work is needed to look at the predictive utility of ones attitude toward heavy drinking in the context of other well known predictors of alcohol use and problems. This work suggests that ones attitude toward heavy drinking is a significant and positive predictor of prospective alcohol use when compared to social norms, drinking motives, and drinker identity.

Bipolar androgen therapy (BAT) is an emerging treatment strategy for men with metastatic castration resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) whereby serum testosterone is cycled from supraphysiologic to near-castrate levels each month. BAT has been shown to induce clinical responses in a significant proportion of patients, some of which are extreme. We explored the clinical and molecular characteristics of patients with mCRPC who achieved deep responses to BAT.

Q: Is new leadership needed to restore the Central Intelligence Agency? YES: Reforming the CIA means new leaders, new ways of doing business and a truckload of pink slips. To [...]

New strategies are needed to predict and overcome metastatic progression and therapy resistance in prostate cancer. One potential clinical target is the stem cell transcription factor SOX2, which has a critical role in prostate development and cancer. We thus investigated the impact of SOX2 expression on patient outcomes and its function within prostate cancer cells. Analyses of SOX2 expression among a case-control cohort of 1028 annotated tumor specimens demonstrated that SOX2 expression confers a more rapid time to metastasis and decreased patient survival after biochemical recurrence. SOX2 ChIP-Seq analyses revealed SOX2-binding sites within prostate cancer cells which differ significantly from canonical embryonic SOX2 gene targets, and prostate-specific SOX2 gene targets are associated with multiple oncogenic pathways. Interestingly, phenotypic and gene expression analyses after CRISPR-mediated deletion of SOX2in castration-resistant prostate cancer cells, as well as ectopic SOX2expression in androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cells, demonstrated that SOX2 promotes changes in multiple metabolic pathways and metabolites. SOX2 expression in prostate cancer cell lines confers increased glycolysis and glycolytic capacity, as well as increased basal and maximal oxidative respiration and increased spare respiratory capacity. Further, SOX2 expression was associated with increased quantities of mitochondria, and metabolomic analyses revealed SOX2-associated changes in the metabolism of purines, pyrimidines, amino acids and sugars, and the pentose phosphate pathway. Analyses of SOX2 gene targets with central functions metabolism (CERK, ECHS1, HS6SDT1, LPCAT4, PFKP, SLC16A3, SLC46A1, and TST)document significant expression correlation with SOX2 among RNA-Seq datasets derived from patient tumors and metastases. These data support a key role for SOX2 in metabolic reprogramming of prostate cancer cells and reveal new mechanisms to understand how SOX2 enables metastatic progression, lineage plasticity, and therapy resistance. Further, our data suggest clinical opportunities to exploit SOX2 as a biomarker for staging and imaging, as well as a potential pharmacologic target.

Supplemental digital content is available in the text.