In his 29 June 2010 NY Times blog post, Ross Douthat writes, “Birthers,’ Polls and Public Ignorance.” Here are a few items that Douthat thinks should be taken with a grain of salt:

• There’s a new poll out, from Vanity Fair and 60 Minutes, showing that 24 percent of Americans don’t think that Barack Obama was born in the United States. [62 percent of Americans think Obama was born here, while 24 percent think he was not and 14 percent are unsure.]
• 6 percent of poll respondents think that Hawaii is not part of the country and 4 percent are unsure.
• 31 percent of the country couldn’t identify Dick Cheney as the vice president in 2007.
• Harris [pollsters] has made much of a survey that suggests that forty-four per cent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to judge mankind within the next fifty years. But, in 1998, a fifth of non-Christians in America told a poll for Newsweek that they, too, expected Jesus to return. What does Harris make of that? Any excuse for a party, perhaps.

Douthat says,

This is an entirely typical result: Large percentages of Americans, poll after poll suggests, don’t know what seem like basic facts about their country and the world. … [I]gnorance about public affairs cuts across party lines. And it isn’t even necessarily a devastating indictment of American culture. … [It] suggests a certain ignorance about important national issues, but also, perhaps, a healthy detachment from politics and public affairs, and a salutary focus on the private sphere instead.

He also says,

I don’t think that people who tell pollsters that Obama was born outside the United States are necessarily “dense.” Some of them are quite intelligent: Conspiracy theories are generally the province of people who are high on I.Q. and low on common sense.

-RichardH

“Why does looking at animals covered in oil make me sad, but looking at animals covered in oil and deep-fried make me hungry?” – Stephen Colbert

-RichardH

In the 1 July 2010 issue of Spiegel Online, Rory Stewart writes “The Real Reason We Are in Afghanistan,” Part 1 and Part 2. After explicating the noble motives and premises of our current counter-insurgency strategy, Stewart urges us to acknowledge our limits.

The only way in which we could move beyond the counter-insurgency theory, or the hundred other theories which buttress and justify the Afghan war, is by rejecting their most basic underlying premises and objectives. Instead of trying to produce an alternative theory (on how to defeat the Taliban, create an effective, legitimate and stable Afghan state, stabilize Pakistan and ensure that al-Qaida could never again threaten the United States) we need to understand that however desirable such things might be, they are not things that we — as foreigners — can do.

We can do other things for Afghanistan but the West — in particular its armies, development agencies and diplomats — are not as powerful, knowledgeable or popular as we pretend. Our officials cannot hope to predict and control the intricate allegiances and loyalties of Afghan communities or the Afghan approach to government. But to acknowledge these limits and their implications would require not so much an anthropology of Afghanistan, but an anthropology of ourselves.

The cures for our predicament do not lie in increasingly detailed adjustments to our current strategy. The solution is to remind ourselves that politics cannot be reduced to a general scientific theory, that we must recognize the will of other peoples and acknowledge our own limits. Most importantly, we must remind our leaders that they always have a choice.

—

That is not how it feels. European countries feel trapped by their relationship with NATO and the United States. Holbrooke and Obama feel trapped by the position of American generals. And everyone — politicians, generals, diplomats and journalist — feels trapped by our grand theories and beset by the guilt of having already lost over a thousand NATO lives, spent a hundred billion dollars and made a number of promises to Afghans and the West which we are unlikely to be able to keep.

So powerful are these cultural assumptions, these historical and economic forces and these psychological tendencies, that even if every world leader privately concluded the operation was unlikely to succeed, it is almost impossible to imagine the US or its allies halting the counter-insurgency in Afghanistan in the years to come. Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa may have been in a similar position during the Third Crusade. Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson certainly was in 1963. Europe is simply in Afghanistan because America is there. America is there just because it is. And all our policy debates are scholastic dialectics to justify this singular but not entirely comprehensible fact.

-RichardH

In the 2 July 2010 issue, the New York Times reports that, Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage.

[M]anufacturers who want to expand find that hiring is not always easy. During the recession, domestic manufacturers appear to have accelerated the long-term move toward greater automation, laying off more of their lowest-skilled workers and replacing them with cheaper labor abroad.

Now they are looking to hire people who can operate sophisticated computerized machinery, follow complex blueprints and demonstrate higher math proficiency than was previously required of the typical assembly line worker.

…

The Obama administration has advocated further stimulus measures, which the Senate rejected, and has allocated more money for training. Still, officials say more robust job creation is the real solution.

But a number of manufacturers say that even if demand surges, they will never bring back many of the lower-skilled jobs, and that training is not yet delivering the skilled employees they need.

…

Christina D. Romer, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said the skills shortages reported by employers stem largely from a long-term structural shift in manufacturing, which should not be confused with the recent downturn. “I do think that manufacturing can come back to what it was before the recession,” she said.

-RichardH