Author: Andrew Sullivan

Karl Smith agitates for open borders:

Immigration temporarily dilutes expenditures on Social Security, Medicare, and interest on the national debt. However, temporary counts for a lot. The future is inherently uncertain and so truly pushing off consequences into the future is inherently a net gain. There is a chance of catastrophe, in which case your sacrifices were useless and there is a chance of explosive growth, in which case your sacrifices were unnecessary. These are real possibilities and should not be ignored.

It also gives additional time to prepare for changes in Social Security. One possibility is that the continued shift away from physically intensive jobs will mean that in 50 years a retirement age of 70 is feasible even if in 25 years it is not.

Jim Morrison investigates the sound of the 2010 World Cup:

A study in the South African Medical Journal released earlier this year said fans subjected to the vuvuzela swarm were exposed to a deafening peak of more than 140 decibels, equivalent to standing near a jet engine. The South African Association of Audiologists has warned they can damage hearing. …

After the 2009 Confederations Cup soccer matches in South Africa, FIFA, the governing body for the World Cup, received complaints from multiple European broadcasters and a few coaches and players who wanted the vuvuzela banned. Fans on both sides argued heatedly on soccer blogs and web sites. Facebook pages both to ban the instruments and support them sprang up. One opponent in a South African newspaper suggested opening the World Cup with a vuvuzela bonfire.

The BBC is taking steps to filter out the godawful noise. An industrious German fan got there first.

Free Exchange reanimates the retirement age debate:

Keeping people in the labour force longer may mean rethinking what retirement means. Rather than a discrete and sudden exit retirement may become more gradual. Phasing people out—perhaps by offering the option of part-time work in the years leading up to retirement, may make sense. That may be easier on people who work well into old-age, as it puts them under less physical strain and it eases the mental transition into retirement. More part-time work also allows firms to pay these workers less than their full salary. The concept of retirement is relatively new and constantly evolving. Somehow it became the norm to spend up to a third of your life on holiday. This was never a good idea or particularly realistic. It puts a huge burden on the government, robs the labour force of still-productive and valuable workers, and it may even increase unemployment for younger workers. The time has come to think more creatively about what retirement means and when it will occur.

Robin Hanson compares:

While we may not hold athletes to the high of standards we hold politicians, we clearly hold them to higher standards than musicians…For our distant ancestors, athletic skill was much closer to political power. Small forager bands feared that the few most physically powerful members would attempt to dominate the band by force. Foragers had much less reason to fear domination by the few most musical folks in the band. So it made sense for foragers to hold athletes to higher moral standards than musicians.

So I suspect our tendency to hold athletes to higher standards than musicians is a holdover from our forager days…

Today on the Dish, Britain finally owned up to the war crimes of Bloody Sunday, GQ provided a harrowing account of the oil rig disaster, Tom Philpott shone a light on the use of chemical dispersants, and the St. Petersburg Times exposed the latest creepiness of Scientology. Andrew took a long look at the nature of the Tea Party.

In Iran coverage, Juan Cole kept faith with the Greens, Andrew did as well, and Joe Klein joined in. Greg Scoblete and Kevin Sullivan tackled Kristol's argument for bombing Iran and Andrew piled on. Iraq kept its title as the most dangerous country, Blackwater's big man could be getting away, and God smote a terrible sculpture. David Pollock looked at new polling out of Israel. World Cup coverage here and here.

In assorted commentary, Greenwald called for the arrest of Etheridge, Ezra Klein calculated the true cost of oil, Jonathan Bernstein addressed the deficit, and Edward Glaeser wanted to know what libertarians would have done about the Gulf disaster. Readers speculated on Trig-gate here and here, others sounded off on the Office of the Repealer, another pushed back against the idea of a terrorist watch list for guns, another continued the conversation on clocks and clouds, another reminesced about NYC, and another sent in some Fabio hathos.

Hewitt Awards here and here. MHB here, VFYW here, and FOTD here. Check out the winner of this week's VFYW contest here.

— C.B.

A Tired Ball Speaks from THE AMEN PROJECT on Vimeo.

Laura Freschi highlights a photo project:

In honor of the opening week of the World Cup we bring you these images of grass roots soccer from photographer Jessica Hilltout. Over nine months, Jessica made two trips through Africa—one up the south coast—South Africa, Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi—and one through a swath of West Africa—Ghana, Burkina Faso, Niger, Benin, Togo and the Ivory Coast.

During her trip she took pictures of worn shoes, tattered jerseys and hand-made balls, capturing the spirit of the sport and its players through these small, homely objects.

Many more pictures and a link to Hilltout's book here.

George Prochnik pursues silence:

There's that beautiful line from Thoreau, that silence has various depths of fertility, like soil. I felt again and again when I was traveling how each one of these different microclimates of silence, a pocket park or a monastery or a Zen garden or a neurobiology laboratory, had such a different texture to it. And with the array of silence that is out there, I think if we made a commitment to try to help people who don't have any access to any kind of silence currently, to explore something of that spectrum, that there really would be tempting silences there for almost everyone.

Jonathan Bernstein eyes the deficit:

If it's true that long-term deficits are mostly driven by health care costs (and I tend to believe that), then the same logic that drove the ACA could easily appear again in a (Democratic-majority) future, with the Dems simply shifting their interest group alliances and hitting one of the groups (doctors, hospitals, drug manufacturers) that they cut a deal with this time around.  The logic, that is, would be that Democrats and groups allied with the Democrats actually want health care (and for that matter the government) to work, and therefore are willing to take short-term political hits to make that happen.

Yeah, right. But I guess we should hope.

A reader writes:

I'm not trying to dismiss a relatively decent idea out of hand, but Kansas is facing a huge budget hole that the outgoing governor is going to the mat to try to patch. All we get out of the Brownback office is a legislative gimmick and a lack of any details on how the Senator might actually, you know, govern. Or to quote the headline in the local paper here in Lawrence, Kansas: "Brownback proposes Office of Repealer, but doesn’t have specifics on what he’d like repealed."

Another writes:

The Office of the Repealer could certainly do some good. But I beg to differ with Balko's belief that: "the media venerates politicians who propose new government programs as bold and visionary, while anyone daring to suggest perhaps there might be cause to eliminate an agency or two is depicted as some fringe draconian nut." 

Just look at the more liberal of the two major parties: the most successful Democratic politician of the last 20 years, Bill Clinton, famously declared that "the era of big government is over" and made high-profile cuts to welfare and excessive paperwork. Obama campaigned on promises to cut wasteful spending, use pay-as-you-go, and even to have a net spending cut.  As President, he's made heavy cuts to NASA, and his SecDef is serious about cutting wasteful military spending. Recently Obama proposed a Reduce Unnecessary Spending Act, and Russ Feingold introduced a version of that bill into Congress last week.

I'm not saying that the federal budget and deficits are not growing, or that Obama and other Democrats are reducing the size of government.  But it's a mistake to say that massive spending increases are good politics, or that cutting waste is taboo.  Almost everyone pays lip service to these goals, and most of our massive spending programs are things that supporters of those programs see as true necessities (see Obamacare, given the current health insurance situation; or the War on Terror).

Another:

Say what you will about Texas, but they already have this.  Every Texas agency is under review every 12 years, on a rotating cycle, by the "Sunset Commission," which then makes a recommendation to the legislature for action.  Agencies often get combined or outright removed.  Sure, it's a politicized process, but it's a process that does keep folks accountable.

Another:

What will be responsible for repealing the office of the repealer?

A reader writes:

Sure, the media play their part in the "cycle of anticipation and disappointment" with science, but scientists profit from it immensely as well. The recent New York Times article on the Human Genome Project's failure to produce miracle cures demonstrates the "disappointment" part of the cycle. But it also points out the ways in which scientists themselves were fueling the anticipation with grandiose promises of miraculous advances in medicine. Blaming the media for this cycle is totally naive.

There are two interpretations of those promises made by scientists, and they are both right. First, they are just part of the political game of science. To attract resources you need to show the potential public value of the work, even if the claims are a bit flimsy. Second, our tendency to accept those claims stems from our overriding faith in the ability of science and technology to solve our problems, no matter how complex. That is exactly what Lehrer was getting at in the first place. We may not like it, but technocratic approaches using reductionist science aren't cut out for cloud type problems, especially those with a strong social component (health, climate change, energy, etc).