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David Perdue lobbied for tax break to benefit fellow Georgia senator (and WNBA owner) Kelly Loeffler
access_time November 25, 2020 personNeil deMause
If the names Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue aren't immediately familiar to you, they will be soon, as they're the two Republican U.S. Senators facing runoff elections in Georgia on January 5 that will determine which party controls the Senate. (The Democrats need to take both to reach a 50-50 tie, which would be broken in their favor by vice-president Kamala Harris.) Loeffler is also co-owner of the WNBA's Atlanta Dream, whose players have called her out for her pro-Trump and anti-Black Lives Matter stances (Loeffler wrote to the WNBA's commissioner at one point blaming BLM for "the removal of Jesus from churches and the disruption of the nuclear family structure" and promoting "violence and destruction across the country"), even taking the court during pregame warmups wearing shirts endorsing Loeffler's Senate race opponent.
So while it wasn't surprising to see Loeffler and Perdue show up together in a ProPublica story on Friday, this one was a bit unexpected:
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., privately pushed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to give wealthy sports owners a lucrative tax break last year, according to a previously unreported letter obtained by ProPublica…
The Treasury ultimately declined to adopt the revision Perdue sought. If the regulation had been altered as Perdue wanted, it would have been a boon for some of his largest donors. Perdue has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the owners of professional sports clubs, including now-fellow Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who co-owns Atlanta's WNBA team, the Dream.
The tax break in question has to do with pass-through entities, which are corporations whose net profits are declared on the tax returns of the individual owners. When the GOP's 2017 tax law cut the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20% (among lots of other changes, including double-taxing residents of high-tax states that just happened to be mostly Democratic), it allowed many pass-through business owners to deduct 20% of their business income, effectively lowering their personal income tax rate to the lower corporate one. But not all, and one of the exceptions was owners of pro sports franchises, meaning that Loeffler was set to lose a pile of money as a result of not being included.
Enter Perdue, who as ProPublica writes with eyebrow exquisitely raised, "was not on the committee that crafted the legislation, making his in-the-weeds lobbying on the arcane regulation unusual, congressional experts said." He did have another reason to be interested in the tax break, though:
A review of his campaign contributions shows that Perdue has taken more than $425,000 from the owners of professional sports teams and their relatives. Some of the top donors include the DeVos family, which owns the Orlando Magic; John Ingram, who owns the Nashville SC soccer team; Los Angeles Kings owner Philip Anschutz; and Cleveland Browns owner Jimmy Haslam.
On the same day Perdue sent Mnuchin the letter, he received $3,000 in donations from three lobbyists at GeorgiaLink Public Affairs Group, a lobbying firm that was representing the Atlanta Braves. Because of the Braves' ownership structure, it's unlikely the team would have been affected by the regulation, but around that time, MLB was lobbying on the rule, urging the Treasury to give its team owners the tax break.
Perdue also got $108,000 in donations from Loeffler, her husband, and her Dream co-owner Mary Brock.
Perdue's letter ultimately went nowhere: Mnuchin didn't direct the IRS to change the tax law to benefit sports team owners, so Loeffler's tax bill remains undiminished. But it's nice little moment to remember the next time you wonder how come so many corporate titans can duck paying taxes so easily: When you can ask the senator who sits next to you to write a letter to the IRS requesting you get a tax break, and enclose $108,000 in checks to sweeten the pot, that's going to get you a lot more consideration than the average taxpayer.
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3 comments on "David Perdue lobbied for tax break to benefit fellow Georgia senator (and WNBA owner) Kelly Loeffler"
Kamala will be able to vote as a senator, but she won't be vice president until January 20th.
Sorry! I thought you were referring to a vote scheduled to take place on Jan. 5th. Carry on!
Neil deMause says:
Right, no, Harris doesn't break the tie in the primary vote! Only Senate ties in the new term.
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By Four Winds Gallery News Sculpture Southwest Style Zuni May 17, 2022
The Zuni Pueblo, known for its beautiful jewelry and pottery, also produces Fetishes, which are small carvings made from primarily stone, but also shell, fossils, and other materials.
Within the Zuni community, fetishes were used throughout recorded history for ceremonial purposes. Fetishes are believed to hold powers and protect from various problems of mind or body. Some believe that their powers can even protect against problems of the universe. It is also believed that the care a fetish receives is directly proportional to the protection it will provide. They are given offerings of cornmeal and kept in special turquoise encrusted fetish pots or pouches, often adorned with turquoise, arrowheads, and feathers. These are offerings to the fetish for gifts received or anticipated. Zuni Indians believe in the six cardinal guardian fetishes. Each guardian fetish guards one of the six directions: Mountain lion is guardian of the North, the badger guards the South, the bear defends the west, and the wolf is the guardian of the East. The black shrew is the guardian of the inner earth, and the eagle is the guardian of the sky.
Leekya Deyuse (1889-1966), was probably the best well-known of all Zuni fetish carvers of the 20th century. Working on the excavation of the Hawikuh Pueblo Ruins in the 1920s, it is believed he channeled the history of fetishes from the carvings of his ancestors into his one-of-a-kind masterpieces. Deyuse worked for 77 years, developing his own unmistakable style, which lead to multiple collaborations with many of the top silversmiths of his day, adding another dimension to his creativity.
While Leekya Deyuse is the best known and highly collectible Zuni fetish carver, other notable Zuni fetish carvers are highly sought after as well. Those included in the list are Teddy Weahkee (1890-1965); Leo Poblano (1905-1959); and Sarah Leekya (1930 – 2017), daughter of Leekya Deyuse, who was taught by her father. She developed a technique and style reminiscent of her father's work, while working alongside him.
Fetishes are believed to hold powers and protect from various problems of mind or body.
Zuni Mudhead Doll Fetish Carving by Teddy Weahkee
Zuni Fetish Carving by Leo Poblano
Zuni Bird Fetish Carving by Leo Poblano
Zuni Bird Fetish Carving by Sarah Leekya
Four Winds Gallery / About Author
Established in 1974 in Pittsburgh, PA Four Winds Gallery is regarded as one of the foremost Native American art galleries. We are dedicated to the presentation of rare historic material as well as to the art of innovative, contemporary talents in both our gallery in Pittsburgh, PA and our online gallery www.fourwindsgallery.com.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Home > World > Utah boy arrested after shooting 4 killed, wounded 1 in family, police say
Utah boy arrested after shooting 4 killed, wounded 1 in family, police say
NewsLinda January 19, 2020 World No Comments
A young male in Utah is accused of shooting and killing three children and a woman in Grantsville on Friday and injuring a fifth victim who is now in the hospital, officials said on Saturday.
All the victims are believed to be members of the sniper's family, and the victims are all related, according for Deseret News. Initial reports said the accused is a teenager, but police have not released his name because he is being accused of being a minor.
The suspected sniper is facing 10 criminal charges, including aggravated homicide.
Grantsville Mayor Brent Marshall visited the site to offer his condolences and said the police are still trying to find out what happened.
"It is an unfortunate tragedy that occurred here tonight," he said on Friday. "And I'm sure it will take days or more to try to understand what brought it all up and why it happened, if we ever know why it happened. It is disturbing. Usually, this is a very quiet neighborhood and whenever you have children involved , it becomes very emotional, very fast ".
"We appreciate everyone's thoughts and support," added Marshall. "We ask that you continue to pray for the family and for these policemen who are trying to find out what happened."
MINNESOTA MAN CHARGED FOR MURDER ATTEMPTED TO SHOOT THIS CRITICAL OFFICER
Governor Gary Herbert also offered his condolences on Twitter, just after midnight on Saturday. He asked citizens to keep firearms and said that only love can help heal the wounds created by the shooting.
"Our hearts are broken by the horrible news that leaves Grantsville tonight. We regret the loss of innocent lives," he wrote. "Parents and grandparents, protect your firearms! Everyone, hug your loved ones tightly. And remember that love, not hate, will heal broken individuals and families."
Grantsville Police Rhonda Fields said The Associated Press says the authorities are lost when it comes to the reason and are still investigating.
"We are trying to ensure that we check people's relationship between the deceased and the survivor," she said. "As for the reason, we have none of that."
Fields also said the fifth victim, who was shot, is stable and must survive.
The unidentified suspect was arrested at the hospital and is currently in a juvenile detention center.
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Thermochemical Conversion of Biomass research group at the Department of Biosystems Engineering, Ghent University.
The mission of the Thermochemical Conversion of Biomass research group is the development and optimisation of thermochemical conversion technologies to renewable fuels, chemicals and energy from biomass.
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text:
E-Discovery Update: Separating E-Discovery Myths from Realities
By Conrad J. Jacoby, 18 Mar 2007
As the legal community continues to puzzle through the impact that digital information is having on the practice of law, many practitioners are guided by long-standing misconceptions and misunderstandings about electronic discovery. Whatever seed of truth exists in these platitudes, taking them at face value can lead to poor strategic decisions that limit the effectiveness of otherwise competent legal advice. Several particular "rules of thumb" seem particularly common in the legal community, even with extensive education efforts.
Myth: E-Discovery Is Now Required In Every Case
Reality: False. Since December 1, 2006, discovery of electronically stored information ("ESI") has been a mandatory topic of conversation in every federal case and in an increasing number of state court matters. However, simply discussing e-discovery doesn't materially change the basis for a legal claim or the factual evidence that supports or disproves the case. While individuals and businesses alike rely on computers for many reasons, e-discovery comes into play only when relevant information is stored digitally.
In some situations, even though electronic evidence is available, it may be possible to resolve a dispute based on other evidence. Such an analysis is necessarily case specific, and the outcome is never a foregone conclusion, because so much useful information is often found in electronic evidence. However, situations can occur in which electronic evidence is strategically less important than other evidence. For example, in a breach of contract case, voluminous electronic information may pertain to how a business contract was negotiated. Typical electronic evidence would include e-mail messages, draft documents, and spreadsheets of estimated profitability. However, the corporate decision that legally bound to specific guarantees and covenants took place at meetings of its board of directors. The handwritten notes of board members, along with annotations they made on printouts of electronically-prepared documents that were distributed at each of their meetings, may contain the most relevant and probative evidence in the entire case. It may be possible to resolve the case on the basis of only those traditional hardcopy materials.
An increasing percentage of cases already require the preservation and production of ESI. However, a legal team still has full discretion to work up a case any way that it believes will achieve best results for its client. Mandatory discussion about electronic discovery does not preclude the possibility that digital evidence will only have secondary importance in the case. However, attorneys must be prepared to analyze the extent to which it is a factor in their cases.
Myth: Electronic Discovery Substantially Raises The Cost Of Litigation
Reality: Sometimes true, sometimes false. It's impossible to deny that the electronic discovery services business has grown exponentially over the past few years. Certain costs are associated with managing electronically stored information, and the cost can be significant in large cases. However, the fact that large cases can require large budgets for processing electronic documents doesn't mean that all litigation matters require the same budget. Indeed, under the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, litigants have a number of new opportunities to discuss e-discovery issues with their opponents and negotiate ways to contain costs.
Careful preparation is the key to limiting costs. For example, a client that understands the structure of its ESI repositories can impose targeted legal hold measures that (1) frees other electronic information to be used as appropriate without fear of inadvertent spoliation; and (2) limits the amount of ESI that may have to be collected, processed, and reviewed (It should go without saying that the less that's in a discovery document collection, the lower its overall cost.). In addition, to the extent that a requesting party is not reasonable in good faith negotiations about the scope of a legal hold, a well-prepared producing party has ready access to the information needed to persuasively present its position to a court and seek affirmative relief. After all, the guiding principle of fact discovery in civil litigation is reasonable inquiry at reasonable expense, as measured by against the significance and nature of the underlying legal dispute.
Myth: People Go To Jail For Mismanaging E-Discovery
Reality: False as stated. People go to jail for intentionally tampering with or destroying relevant evidence, regardless of its format. While a number of cases suggest that lawyers have an affirmative duty to be knowledgeable about electronic discovery as a matter of professional competence (e.g., Metropolitan Opera Ass'n, Inc. v. Local 100, Hotel Employees, 212 F.R.D. 178 (S.D.N.Y. 2003)), a legal team or client that uses reasonable efforts to preserve potentially relevant ESI is unlikely to face criminal penalties, even if things to horribly wrong. On the other hand, a number of civil remedies, such as excluding evidence (United States v. Philip Morris, USA, Inc., No. CIV.A.99-2496, 2004 WL 1627252 (D.D.C. July 21 2004)), reading a jury instruction to the jury that permits them to assume that missing ESI contained information harmful to the producing party (e.g., Zubulake v. UBS Warburg LLC ("Zubulake V"), 2004 WL 1620866 (S.D.N.Y. July 20, 2004), or even striking affirmative defenses (e.g., Coleman (Parent) Holdings, Inc. v. Morgan Stanley & Co., Inc., 2005 WL 679071 (Fla. Cir. Ct. Mar. 1, 2005),) can have a huge impact on litigants and their counsel, even without orange jumpsuits and jail time.
Myth: E-Discovery Is An Exclusive, Esoteric Practice Area That Can Only Be Properly Managed By [Expensive] Specialists
Reality: False. "E-discovery" is not a monolithic subject, and many important tasks that fall within this general description can be executed very well by even the most technologically unsophisticated practitioner. For example, the most important part of civil litigation fact discovery for both requesting and producing parties is identifying where potentially relevant information is stored. An age-old but highly successful strategy for finding these materials is identifying people involved in the critical events and interviewing them about what they remember, including where relevant documents and information can be found. This isn't e-discovery; it's basic case development.
E-discovery kicks in when it's time to identify ways in which fact witnesses may have stored information electronically, but even here, crucial initial research requires only limited technical knowledge. Does the fact witness use a computer? More than one computer? Where are these computers located? Does the witness send and receive e-mail messages? Does the witness save e-mail messages after they've been read? This information provides the foundation for all subsequent (and potentially technical) preservation and collection efforts, but it doesn't take a computer scientist to have a productive conversation on these topics.
Technical expertise can be required to move beyond initial information-gathering questions and into specific issues of data retention, collection, review, and production. And indeed, current e-discovery technology is evolving so quickly that it's important to have someone on the legal team who can provide this specialized expertise. However, these subsequent tasks rely by necessity on earlier, old-fashioned, case preparation.
Myth: Lawyers Have To Understand E-Discovery
Reality: True. For a lawyer to determine whether or not e-discovery is relevant in a specific case, he or she must have some understanding of the ESI used or stored by the client and its opponent. Ignorance is not an option; a number of legal ethics opinions and published judicial opinions suggest that mismanaging e-discovery may be a breach of an attorney's duty to provide competent services to clients. An attorney may not need to understand the esoteric nuances of digital information storage, but in a world where more than 98% of all new information is created electronically, it's no longer possible for anyone to deny the importance of electronic evidence in the world in which we live and practice law.
Posted in: Case Management, E-Discovery, E-Discovery Update, Email, Litigation Support


text:
Negative Caching of DNS Queries (DNS NCACHE)
RFC - Proposed Standard (March 1998; Errata)
Updated by RFC 4035, RFC 4034, RFC 8499, RFC 8020, RFC 6604, RFC 4033
Updates RFC 1034, RFC 1035
Was draft-ietf-dnsind-ncache (dnsind WG)
Network Working Group                                          M. Andrews
Request for Comments: 2308                                          CSIRO
Updates: 1034, 1035                                            March 1998
Category: Standards Track
[RFC1034] provided a description of how to cache negative responses.
It however had a fundamental flaw in that it did not allow a name
server to hand out those cached responses to other resolvers, thereby
greatly reducing the effect of the caching.  This document addresses
issues raise in the light of experience and replaces [RFC1034 Section
4.3.4].
Negative caching was an optional part of the DNS specification and
deals with the caching of the non-existence of an RRset [RFC2181] or
domain name.
Negative caching is useful as it reduces the response time for
negative answers.  It also reduces the number of messages that have
to be sent between resolvers and name servers hence overall network
traffic.  A large proportion of DNS traffic on the Internet could be
eliminated if all resolvers implemented negative caching.  With this
in mind negative caching should no longer be seen as an optional part
of a DNS resolver.
Andrews                     Standards Track                     [Page 1]
RFC 2308                       DNS NCACHE                     March 1998
1 - Terminology
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED",  "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].
"Negative caching" - the storage of knowledge that something does not
exist.  We can store the knowledge that a record has a particular
value.  We can also do the reverse, that is, to store the knowledge
that a record does not exist.  It is the storage of knowledge that
something does not exist, cannot or does not give an answer that we
call negative caching.
"QNAME" - the name in the query section of an answer, or where this
resolves to a CNAME, or CNAME chain, the data field of the last
CNAME.  The last CNAME in this sense is that which contains a value
which does not resolve to another CNAME.  Implementations should note
that including CNAME records in responses in order, so that the first
has the label from the query section, and then each in sequence has
the label from the data section of the previous (where more than one
CNAME is needed) allows the sequence to be processed in one pass, and
considerably eases the task of the receiver.  Other relevant records
(such as SIG RRs [RFC2065]) can be interspersed amongst the CNAMEs.
"NXDOMAIN" - an alternate expression for the "Name Error" RCODE as
described in [RFC1035 Section 4.1.1] and the two terms are used
interchangeably in this document.
"NODATA" - a pseudo RCODE which indicates that the name is valid, for
the given class, but are no records of the given type.  A NODATA
response has to be inferred from the answer.
"FORWARDER" - a nameserver used to resolve queries instead of
directly using the authoritative nameserver chain.  The forwarder
typically either has better access to the internet, or maintains a
bigger cache which may be shared amongst many resolvers.  How a
server is identified as a FORWARDER, or knows it is a FORWARDER is
outside the scope of this document.  However if you are being used as
a forwarder the query will have the recursion desired flag set.
An understanding of [RFC1034], [RFC1035] and [RFC2065] is expected
when reading this document.
2 - Negative Responses
The most common negative responses indicate that a particular RRset
does not exist in the DNS.  The first sections of this document deal
with this case.  Other negative responses can indicate failures of a
nameserver, those are dealt with in section 7 (Other Negative
Responses).
A negative response is indicated by one of the following conditions:
2.1 - Name Error
Name errors (NXDOMAIN) are indicated by the presence of "Name Error"
in the RCODE field.  In this case the domain referred to by the QNAME
does not exist.  Note: the answer section may have SIG and CNAME RRs
and the authority section may have SOA, NXT [RFC2065] and SIG RRsets.


text:
<?php

namespace TimeMachine\ICal\Tests\Parser\Builder;

use TimeMachine\ICal\Model\Property;
use TimeMachine\ICal\Model\Parameter;
use TimeMachine\ICal\Parser\Builder\PropertyBuilder;
use TimeMachine\ICal\Parser\Token;

/**
 * @author Jean-François Simon <contact@jfsimon.fr>
 */
class PropertyBuilderTest extends AbstractBuilderTest
{
    public function testWithValue()
    {
        $dstart = new Property('DSTART');
        $builder = new PropertyBuilder($this->buildDocumentBuilder(), clone $dstart);
        $dstart->setValue('19970714T170000Z');
        $tokens = array(new Token(Token::VALUE, '19970714T170000Z'));

        $this->assertEquals($dstart, $this->build($builder, $tokens));
    }

    public function testWithParameter()
    {
        $attach = new Property('ATTACH');
        $builder = new PropertyBuilder($this->buildDocumentBuilder(), clone $attach);
        $attach->add($fmtype = new Parameter('FMTTYPE'));
        $fmtype->setValue('image/jpeg:http://domain.com/images/bastille.jpg');
        $tokens = array(new Token(Token::PARAMETER, 'FMTTYPE'));

        $this->assertEquals($attach, $this->build($builder, $tokens));
    }

    public function testWithValueAndParameter()
    {
        $xprop = new Property('X-PROP');
        $builder = new PropertyBuilder($this->buildDocumentBuilder(), clone $xprop);
        $xprop->setValue('X-PROP-VAL');
        $xprop->add($xparam = new Parameter('X-PARAM'));
        $xparam->setValue('X-PARAM-VAL');
        $tokens = array(new Token(Token::VALUE, 'X-PROP-VAL'), new Token(Token::PARAMETER, 'X-PARAM'), new Token(Token::VALUE, 'X-PARAM-VAL'));

        $this->assertEquals($xprop, $this->build($builder, $tokens));
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


In early May, Niall Ferguson, the celebrity Scottish historian, looked out at a packed house seething with antagonism. He had come to Washington to deliver a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations defending his idea that the war in Iraq had not only been the right thing to do, but also ought to be the first step towards a wide-ranging American empire. It would be difficult to imagine a moment when the capital's bipartisan policy elite —Ferguson's audience—were less inclined to be receptive to his ideas. The first accounts of the torture at Abu Ghraib had just appeared, and the cause in Iraq was beginning to look more hopeless than ever. And the crowd had come to see someone answer for all of this, to see how Ferguson, whose ideas had help get us into the war, would defend himself. Ferguson didn't defend himself. He attacked.
Within three minutes, he'd lost the liberals in the crowd, arguing, improbably that the problems in Iraq proved that America ought to be more of an empire, not less of one. A bald-headed scholar from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace asked him whether the United States ought to be morally willing to slay thousands of Iraqis to stabilize Iraq. Ferguson retorted, "Perhaps you would wish Saddam back in power; that's the implication of what you're saying." The liberal think-tankers around me started guffawing openly, and shooting each other is-this-guy-for-real smirks.
This was too much for even the conservatives in the audience. The guffaws grew louder, the muttered protests reached the front of the room. In the row in front of me, a broad-shouldered, uniformed officer stood up. "Big disagree here, sir," he bellowed. "Big disagree with your characterization." (Fleetingly, I wondered if this was how colonels address one another in private). "The institution I have spent my life in abhors what went on in Iraq," he said. "It's not the way we treat anyone– a fresh recruit or a plebe at West Point." The crowd clapped vigorously. In less than 10 minutes, Ferguson had pulled off that rarest of Washington double plays, alienating liberals and conservatives alike.
The colonel stood there for a second, not knowing quite what to say. Eventually, he sat down. Ferguson hadn't quite satisfied the crowd, but he had displayed a mastery of just enough history to disarm them. The audience grumbled at Ferguson throughout the question-and-answer session, but no one really challenged him again. As the panel ended, they clapped grudgingly and then shuffled out of the room, vaguely dissatisfied. Ferguson had replicated his role from the lead-up to the war: In a moment of profound, and deeply felt, confusion at what our national direction ought to be, Ferguson offered extreme certainty. And his claims caught on when no one was able to make a counter-argument with such confidence and clarity.
Ferguson is, at just over 40 and a few months short of a scheduled appointment to a history professorship at Harvard, indisputably one of the world's most famous and influential historians–he was recently named one of the planet's 100 Most Influential People by Time, beating out Tony Blair. His influence comes from his dramatic, sweeping intellectual style, whose theme is, more or less, "Everything you thought you knew about history is wrong." Ferguson's genius is for counter-conventional thinking, urging radical reinterpretations of topics that everyone else had pretty much considered settled. Ferguson is out of sync with the academy in style, politics, and manner, but he has been a useful intellectual prod, the appeal of his radical theories forcing mainstream academics to refine their own thinking. Read Ferguson for any real stretch of time, and you begin to imagine what it might have been like had Andrew Sullivan chosen as his topic the entire breadth of human history.
It is unpleasant, if compelling in a train-wreck kind of way, to watch what can happen when such a dynamic mind veers dramatically off-track; he can take a lot of people crashing into an intellectual ditch with him. After September 11, Ferguson provided much of the theoretical ballast for a group of British-inflected thinkers–among them Max Boot and Marc Steyn–who urged empire on a newly expansionist American regime, acting as a transatlantic goad, the collective ghost of pith helmets past. Ferguson himself used the issue to edge into popular history; he produced and hosted a six-part program about the British empire on England's Channel Four which even London's liberal Guardian, after a great deal of public radio-style hand-wringing, credited with changing the national conversation about the empire.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Ferguson was responsible for inserting the notion of a formal American empire into the public debate. Professors of imperial history around America started turning to his texts. Washington hawks from Richard Perle to Dinesh D'Souza to Bill Kristol drew on Ferguson's ideas and arguments to help make the case not only for the war in Iraq but also for a revolutionary, if vaguely articulated, new role for America in the world. Within two weeks of arriving in the United States in the fall of 2002, to take up a teaching post at New York University, Ferguson had been summoned to Washington twice, once each by the Departments of Treasury and State, where he explained his convictions to policymakers; in Foggy Bottom, he met with Colin Powell–rarified company for a young historian.
In recent months as the invasion of Iraq has bogged down into a tough and bloody fight, Ferguson's intellectual fellow-travelers have scrambled to find the high ground. Several, like Richard Perle, continue to maintain against all evidence that things are going fine. Others, such as William Kristol, admit the failures but insist things might have worked out better had the administration put in more troops. A few, such as Fouad Ajami and David Brooks, have essentially conceded that our plans to impose an imperial order on Iraq were flawed from the beginning.
In his just published book, Colossus, Ferguson puts forth his own defense. He fully admits how poorly the American mission in Iraq has gone but says this only proves his ultimate point. Had President Bush been willing to see the United States' role in the world as essentially imperial, Ferguson argues, he would have understood the depth of commitment, the hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of thousands of civil administrators, needed to really turn Iraq into a democracy. The failures in Iraq don't, for Ferguson, mean that the project of American empire was deeply misguided; rather, they affirm that an imperial attitude is the only one that might have done the job in Iraq.
This is quintessential Ferguson thinking–altogether new, seductive, but also almost entirely speculative. Ferguson knows just enough about empire and America to make an argument which is on its face convincing, but not nearly enough to be right. The attempt at empire-building he pushed America towards in Iraq is clearly failing. But rather than question his own thinking, he now argues that a bigger, better version of American empire would have worked and still could. In this, he resembles the American Communist Party of mid-century: The problem with Stalin's Soviets, they said, was that they weren't Communist enough.
Ferguson has sandy, undergraduate-looking hair and a long nose and a mouth that mostly hangs open, as if waiting to pounce. He is funny and charming and self-effacing in that cocky, Hugh Grant way that tells you that all kidding aside, he knows that he doesn't have much to be humble about.
And, as public intellectuals go, he doesn't. Besides his joint teaching appointments at NYU and Jesus College, Oxford, he is engaged simultaneously in a book project rethinking World War II, an adaptation for television of Colossus, a biography of the influential banker Seymour Warburg, and a popular study of the likely impact of demographics on world financial markets.
He's consequently full of fascinating statistics and anecdotes, such as "by 2050, according to the United Nations, Yemen will have more people than Russia," which even for a professional polymath is a terrific nugget. But his casual interests go even further afield: As I drove to meet him, with good music in short supply, I turned on New York's public radio station and heard a theatrical, learned Scots voice going back and forth with a caller named Paresh from Clifton, N.J., who was muttering darkly about the threats a Muslim majority would pose to the public education system. Paresh's antagonist sure sounded like Ferguson, but I couldn't for the life of me figure how a financial historian with a sideline in empire had ended up in such a forum. It turned out it was, in fact, Ferguson; he'd written a story for The New York Times' Sunday magazine that week about the growing Muslim population of Europe and was just finishing up a radio interview about it before meeting me for lunch.
Talk to Ferguson long enough about America, and you get the distinct sense that he sees himself as Margaret Thatcher to the punditry class' George H.W. Bush, imploring it not to go all wobbly. Ferguson seems to see his role as pushing America towards the realization that only by ridding itself of its isolationist and politically correct tendencies, and having the confidence of its moral convictions, can it save the world by occupying it.
In this, Ferguson is not unlike many of the leading figures in the Bush administration, hard-minded conservatives who prides themselves on seeing things more clearly than others can. It is not an uncommon sensibility among smart conservative thinkers, who mostly come out of the academy, with its decidedly liberal cast, and in many cases come to see themselves as figures of deep intellectual honesty, who can see through orthodox thought and skewer conventional thinking.
This brand of honesty is seductive and in many ways needed, helping us see through calcified thinking and can reveal hidden truths. But it also contains its own pathologies: The tendency to distrust the evidence and arguments of others, and an inclination to follow one's own theory to bewildering, and sometimes damaging, logical extremes.
There are a few American intellectuals who, half-way through their careers, stumble on to the level of ubiquity that Ferguson has now achieved, writing so much about such a wide variety of historical topics that they are no longer relying on any particular expertise but try to get by simply on reading the same things everyone else reads, but reading them better, a kind of scholarship of The New York Times. But England, which anoints its geniuses at age 22 rather than 42, seems to produce this type somewhat more regularly: Along with Ferguson, think of the theater critic Kenneth Tynan or the historian Simon Schama, who was hired as a Cambridge don on the strength of his undergraduate thesis. Like Schama, Ferguson writes what he calls a "young man's history," sweeping in scope, bold in theory, with little archival work but a lot of argumentative force. The similarity of style between these two famed historians is perhaps not entirely coincidental. It is hard to imagine that those tapped as geniuses at a young age, and called brilliant their whole adult lives, don't have a greater tendency to think that they are smarter than the rest of the academic gang, and with only a brief stretch of intensive thinking, can master topics they had not previously paid attention to, and discover profound new truths. This is, at the very least, a sensibility which has recently driven Ferguson's career.
Ferguson, who started his career as a lauded historian of German financial systems, has since written three major books–The House of Rothschild (1998), The Pity of War (1999), and Empire (2002). The first is by far the best. It is a magnificently well-told story of perhaps the most powerful non-governmental family in history, a story propelled by the argument that the bond market, as much as any other institution, predicted and shaped the rise and fall of European empires.
It is a compelling, exhaustively researched and completely novel point–and The House of Rothschild remains Ferguson's only major work to have received prizes and wide acclaim from other historians. Research restrains sweeping, absolute claims: Rothschild is the last book Ferguson wrote for which he did original archival work, and his detailed knowledge of his subject meant that his arguments for it couldn't be too grand. His claims about the importance of the bond market didn't extend to arguing that the advances in British war financing were more important than Nelson's facility with ships or Wellington's ability to marshal troops in defeating Napoleon.
Rothschild anointed Ferguson the hot young historian of the moment, his books begetting sprawling response essays in The New York Review of Books. For an encore, he turned out The Pity of War, a book written entirely from secondary sources. Like Rothschild, Pity has a bold argument: that the English entry into World War I turned a contained, regional spat that would likely have ended quickly into something that took four years and hundreds of thousands of lives. Ferguson's nimble descriptive talents were on display (his devastating reconstructions of the horrors of battle are among the best I've ever read), as was his facility for the attention-grabbing stat (it cost the Germans just $5,000 to kill an allied soldier; the much wealthier allies, meanwhile, spent $16,000 for each slaughtered Teuton).
But what was most seductive about the bestselling Pity was its ambition. I was an undergraduate history major when the book appeared, and having spent four years slogging through the work of American academic micro-historians, confined to writing the definitive history of World War I cemeteries in New England, or the experience of the 2nd Massachusetts militia in the revolutionary war, Ferguson felt urgent and crucial: By the end of the term, my three roommates and I owned four copies of Pity between us.
With Empire, a breezy, optimistic history of the British empire accompanied by a vociferous essay urging the United States to colonize the world in order to guarantee security, free trade, and development, this tendency went pathological. Empire, which was designed as a companion to a six-part series on Channel Four which Ferguson also executive produced, looks and reads like a coffee-table book, with no footnotes, great photos, and a lively text which focuses heavily on biographical sketches of key imperial figures.
But it also has a defining and forceful argument. Though England's imperial tentacles may have begun as a series of commercial relationships, Ferguson argues, it was formalized when the government in London realized that to guarantee the security of the nation's investment in overseas commerce, it would have to take direct physical control of countries overseas. This direct control, which effectively guaranteed the security of investments in everything from railroads to factories, permitted an unprecedented and unrepeated flow of capital from the First to the Third World.
Ferguson had set out to tweak conventional thinking. He told me that he had written his history partly in reaction to endless, "stultifying theories of other," an out-of-touch historical community that has condemned the British empire as an abhorrent exercise in racism and sexual exploitation, too. And certainly, the lefty theorists who have discussed the empire this way have had some purchase on the scholarly debate recently.
But the academic consensus isn't nearly as ridiculous as its loudest and brashest voices. The weight of scholarship has said that the British empire did both good and bad. It left good railroads and sound legal systems, and, if you had to be ruled by some European colonial power, the British were a good deal gentler and more liberal than the Portuguese, Spanish, or Belgians. But on balance, the scholarly consensus more or less goes, it's hard to make the case that the overall effect was positive: Natives were denied any real political rights and subjected not only to often oppressive rule by foreigners but also (in Australia, South Africa and the United States, particularly) to repeated, indiscriminate massacres by British settlers. And the British record at improving the welfare of its colonial subjects is, at best, mixed. India, the largest colony ruled by London, began the colonial period with per capita incomes as high as those in England itself, and ended it as one of the poorest countries on earth.
Ferguson says that the problem in India–and perhaps I will not be alone in detecting a pattern here–was that the British "did not colonize India fully enough." Given the unprecedented amounts of money and talent the British poured into its crown jewel over 150 years, that is a difficult case to make.
When Ferguson says the United States ought to be an empire, he meant precisely that: He wants America to use her might to exercise benign, formal control over other countries. He does not mean a cultural hegemony or a network of economically and militarily dependent regimes, like the United States worked through in the Cold War. Nor does he favor a role for the United Nations, which he regards (like a generation of writers who saw the U.N.-flubbed deterioration of Yugoslavia up close) as incapable of arranging an effective international system. If the world were made into a movie, for Ferguson, the United Nations would be played by Peter Sellers–faultlessly polite, but intolerably dithering. If an American empire is going to work, Ferguson argued, it is going to have to look as much like its British predecessor as possible.
Ferguson is awfully specific about this. America, he argues, must refit its military to undertake decades-long occupations of foreign nations. It must export settlers, who bring Western values to the rest of the world. It must add a branch of government, the equivalent of the India Civil Service, to provide civil administration to conquered territories.
A comparison this rigid doesn't make sense: The world is too greatly changed. As Ferguson documented in graphic detail in Empire, building an empire has always been rough, unsavory stuff. Native populations are massacred. Women are raped. The rebellious are burned at the stake. In the 19th century, when British goons were building their empire this way, their transgressions happened at distances of weeks-long journeys by ship and rail, in places far from the spotlight. Now, we know of the violations our troops must commit–whether firing on a wedding party or torturing prisoners or inadvertently bombing an embassy–within days, if not hours. And we are right to refuse to stomach them.
But it is not just Americans who are confronted with these images. People in Riyadh and Karbala and Dhaka see them, too. It is difficult to argue that the war in Iraq has settled, rather than inflamed, violent anti-American feelings throughout the Islamic world. The escalating pace of terrorist attacks and plots in Saudi Arabia, Spain, Jordan, and elsewhere suggests that the images of the American occupation in Iraq have only made moderate Muslims into anti-Americans, and given broader popular support to the ideologies and organizations we are trying to defeat. There is always some kickback over empire, but technology makes that backlash come sooner, and harder.
Ferguson is certainly right–though far from unique–when he writes that to preserve its own security and economic well-being, the United States will have to shed any lasting isolationist tendencies to take an involved role in world affairs. But to argue that the British empire should provide the model now because, Ferguson says, it worked in the past just doesn't track–it gives history far too big a role in determining current policy. New realities demand new solutions. Most successful armies in human history have won on the strength of their cavalries, but we're not about to put the American military on horseback.
Ferguson's theory runs smack into the unsuccessful experience of empires over the last hundred years. Not only did the British and every other European imperial power crumble in the first half of the 20th century, but in the second half attempts to cling to imperial remnants, as the French did in Algeria, or to impose them–think Russia in Afghanistan, or us in Iraq, have also run aground on the resistance of local populations. It's worth noting that the only successful efforts at nation-building have been conducted by the international community, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, where the natives have accepted the legitimacy of rule.
Ferguson says that we shouldn't evaluate the idea of empire by the failure of imperial efforts during the last 50 years, because the would-be imperialists have lacked the will and political support to commit themselves fully to an imperial policy, to risk the needed troops and the funds. The French in Algeria lacked the will, as do the Americans in Iraq. This is the central argument of Colossus.
But America's ill-preparedness, both emotionally and structurally, to take on an imperial role was clearly evident before we invaded Iraq–and Ferguson was perfectly aware of it. He published a series of op-eds on the eve of war raising concerns that America was prepping too few troops and seemed to be planning for too short a stay. Yet those same essays were otherwise robust defenses of the nobility of the American exercise in Iraq and the American imperial project in general.
But the simple truth may be that, like many other pro-war intellectuals, Ferguson was so seduced by the boldness of his idea that he neglected to follow the logic of the evidence he saw. And the simple explanation for the failure of the imperial and quasi-imperial attempts of the last 50 years may not be that France, Russia, and the United States all went about it all wrong, but that the project of empire is just not possible in today's world, that the prevailing political tempers, on each side of the colonial equation, won't permit it.
Ferguson, like a retreating army, is now shooting his slow horses. First, in Colossus, he pulled back from the idea of American empire that has, so far, come to define his career for many Americans. In a frank, similar move, he told me that Colossus was "vulnerable to attack," and that his books on empire were "edutainment at best." There are not many authors willing to spend their publicity junkets openly denigrating the books they are ostensibly trying to sell.
Ferguson's errors have been far more consequential for the country than they appear to have been to his career. It is impossible, of course, to say precisely how much his ideas helped drive the administration towards war. But for a brief, decisive moment, in the months leading up to the war, his notion that the United States was destined to become, in Thomas Jefferson's old phrase, an "empire of liberty," one that would both protect our security and bring freedom to the oppressed of the world, captured the imaginations of a significant part of Washington's foreign policy elite. Ferguson told me that, when he looked at his publisher's sales records, he saw that Empire had sold far better in the nation's capital than anywhere else in the country.
Ferguson is in many ways characteristic of the intellectuals who have urged the Bush administration to its most important foreign policy decisions. He is brilliant, but having just started writing about empire five years ago, hardly an expert on his chosen topic. (Similarly, there are strikingly few Middle East experts among the group of prominent administration hawks who have been dictating policy in that region–though there are a fair number of Russia scholars). Then, too, he thinks of himself as a counter-conventional thinker, whose role is to discern what is hidebound about institutional thinking and then expose it, rather than build his theories from original research. He has a tendency to regard popular wisdom as necessarily fallible, and the institutions which generate it–the academy, newspapers–as corrupted by their own ideologies. In the same way in which Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith believed that the evidence provided by America's intelligence agencies about the Iraq threat was necessarily incorrect because it emerged from a corrupt bureaucracy with the wrong precepts, and that an independent intelligence body with the correct theory was needed to properly interpret the data (the Office of Special Plans), so Ferguson seems to believe that conventional academic histories are corrupt because they emerge from ideologically wrong-headed universities. Like Wolfowitz, Ferguson is a dazzling thinker, dismissive of those with greater expertise. And like OSP, the historian eschews original research; instead, he makes his career by reading up on other people's evidence and then coming to widely divergent conclusions.
Ferguson told me he was regarding his forthcoming move to Harvard as a retreat to the ivory tower, as a chance to start doing archival work once more. "The House of Rothschild was really my best book," he told me, "and it was that because I actually did dusty-fingered research in the archives–that's where the real breakthroughs always happen, anyway." Since he quit archival work, his histories have suffered; they tend to sprawl out of control, and hunt down evidence to support his guiding theories. If he does return to the stacks, it may eventually give him a way to rebuke those who think that his true talent to date has been for sloganeering and publicity, not legitimate scholarly breakthroughs. But it will not undo the damage his ideas about empire have helped to bring about.