U.S. Releases Its Last Stockpile of Tamiflu for Children

Health

U.S. Releases Its Stockpile of Tamiflu for Children

• • o! Buzz

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.

Published: October 30, 2009

Swine flu is sickening so many children across the country, some of them fatally, that federal health officials decided Friday to release the last of the national stockpile of children’s Tamiflu.

Swine flu is sickening so many children across the country, some of them fatally, that federal health officials decided Friday to release the last of the national stockpile of children’s Tamiflu.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Ibrahim Usta/Associated Press

On Friday, workers in Istanbul disinfectanted a primary school classroom as a precaution against swine flu.

Related

Times Topics: Swine Flu (H1N1 Virus)

Enlarge This Image

Barbara Lewis/Humco Holding Group

Bottles of Humco Cherry Syrup on the production line in Texas. It is a flavoring agent used for oral Tamiflu.

Even though the winter flu season has yet to begin, flu has now killed 114 children and teenagers in the United States since April, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Since the C.D.C. began tracking children’s flu deaths five years ago, the highest toll was 88, in the winter of 2007-8; many more children died in the pandemics of 1918, 1957 and 1968, but there are no accurate counts.

Dr. Frieden’s figures were for deaths confirmed by laboratories. On Thursday, the C.D.C. estimated that in the swine flu’s spring wave there were 2.7 deaths for each confirmed one, so the actual number of children’s deaths may be closer to 300.

On Oct. 1, anticipating shortages of liquid Tamiflu for children, the government released 300,000 doses from the national stockpile. On Friday, it released the last 234,000 doses.

It has ordered more from Roche, its Swiss manufacturer, but that is not expected to arrive before January, Dr. Frieden said.

In the meantime, federal officials are encouraging pharmacies to empty powder from adult capsules and dilute it with syrup into children’s doses. Some large pharmacy chains are already doing so. Presumably, the same could be done with the 37 million adult doses still in the stockpile. (The Strategic National Stockpile has many more adult doses because they are lighter and easier to manage, and because it was created in anticipation of a pandemic of avian flu, which was not known to disproportionately affect children.)

Terence Hurley, a spokesman for Roche, said Friday that the company would have more of the liquid version to send to private pharmacies in December.

In addition, Dr. Frieden said he would consider importing generic Tamiflu if it could win Food and Drug Administration approval. The generic name is oseltamivir.

Yusuf Hamied, the chairman of Cipla Ltd., an Indian company that makes the only oseltamivir other than Roche’s to be approved by the World Health Organization, said he could supply the United States with about one million children’s doses in four to six weeks.

“Cipla is more than willing to cooperate in any way possible,” Mr. Hamied said. “I’ll work my factories night and day if necessary.”

His price, he said, would be 20 to 30 percent below Roche’s.

Roche has vastly increased its Tamiflu production in the last few years, in part to keep governments from canceling its patents or buying generic rivals during pandemic emergencies. Of the 114 children who have died, more than two-thirds had some kind of underlying health problem, Dr. Frieden said.

Local newspaper reports of deaths around the country have included children with cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and other illnesses. But they have also included children who were healthy and athletic and yet died quickly and unexpectedly.

One disturbing trend, Dr. Frieden said, was that a C.D.C. survey showed that only about half of all people with flu symptoms who also had other potentially dangerous medical problems like diabetes, asthma or lung and heart disease sought care from a doctor.

“People with underlying conditions who have a fever or cough should see their provider promptly,” he said.

Deaths are expected to keep rising, he said. Flu activity is now widespread in 48 states, up from 46 last week. Hospitalizations start to go up about a week after people start falling ill in any community, and deaths tend to lag two to three weeks behind that, Dr. Frieden said.

People are usually ill for a few days before they are hospitalized, and dangerously ill people are usually on ventilators for at least a week before they recover or die. Laboratory reports and autopsies create further delays in reporting deaths.

There are now nearly 27 million doses of swine flu vaccine available, Dr. Frieden said, up from 16 million a week ago. The clamor for the shots continues to rise, however, and even some cities that had many cases in the spring, like Boston, are seeing a second wave.

Dr. Frieden singled out Maine as having done a particularly good job of vaccinating schoolchildren by creating teams that pulled them out of classes briefly for shots.

Maine had a serious flu outbreak in its summer camps; it also has a small population.

Dr. Frieden said he was “encouraged” when any school could vaccinate half its student body.

“We don’t expect to see anything like 80 or 90 percent of kids being vaccinated,” he said, “though if that happened, it would be great.”

Also on Friday, the World Health Organization said it would soon start shipping swine flu vaccine to 95 poor and middle-income countries.

About 200 million doses have been donated by from various countries and vaccine makers.

That will cover only 2 to 3 percent of the need, but the W.H.O.’s eventual goal is to provide enough vaccine for 10 percent of those countries’ populations.

The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

The Myth of the Rational Voter:
Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
Bryan Caplan

Winner of the 2008 Silver Independent Publisher Book Medal, Current Events Category

"This engaging and provocative volume describes why democracy gives us far less than its promise."

The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book. Caplan argues that voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand.

Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.

The Myth of the Rational Voter takes an unflinching look at how people who vote under the influence of false beliefs ultimately end up with government that delivers lousy results. With the upcoming presidential election season drawing nearer, this thought-provoking book is sure to spark a long-overdue reappraisal of our elective system.

Bryan Caplan is Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He and Arnold Kling edit the Weblog EconLog.

Reviews:

"The best political book this year."--Nicholas D. Kristof, New York Times

"Caplan thinks that democracy as it is now practiced cannot be salvaged, and his position is based on a simple observation: 'Democracy is a commons, not a market.'"--Louis Menand, The New Yorker

"One of the two or three best books on public choice in the last twenty years."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

"Like a few recent best sellers--Freakonomics, The Tipping Point, The Wisdom of Crowds--The Myth of the Rational Voter unwraps economic theories and applies them to everyday life. Mr. Caplan's thesis, though, lacks any semblance of a compliment: The 'unwisdom of crowds' is closer to his point. He believes that the American public is biased against sensible, empirically proved economic policies about which nearly all economists agree. Voters, he says, are not just ignorant in the sense of having insufficient information. They actually hold wrong-headed and damaging beliefs about how the economy works."--Daniel Casse, The Wall Street Journal

"The Myth of the Rational Voter usefully extends the discussion [about democracy] by linking it with 'public choice' theory. . . . Public choice theory faces a dilemma. A rational and self-interested person has no incentive to study political issues, as the chances of his or her determining the outcome are negligible. This has become known as 'rational ignorance'. Caplan maintains that the reality is much worse. He shows that voters are not just ignorant but systematically biased in favor of mistaken views."--Samuel Brittan, Financial Times

"Caplan is right to detect a stubborn irrationality in ordinary voters and he correctly points out to his rational choice colleagues that their models are hopelessly unrealistic."--Martin Leet, Australian Review of Public Affairs

More reviews

ADDITIONAL REVIEWS:

"Caplan argues convincingly that irrational behaviour is pervasive among many of us today....Caplan's point, however, is that most voters are irrational. And that is worse than being ignorant....Their irrationality comes with a host of misconceptions that drive policy choices."--Fazil Mihlar, The Vancouver Sun

"This engaging and provocative volume describes why democracy gives us far less than its promise. Countering existing theories of rationally ignorant voters, Caplan argues persuasively that voters are irrational, registering systematically biased beliefs--and consequently votes--against markets and other sound economy policy metrics...[T]his is a compelling book, offering readers a well-written and well-argued competing theory for why democracy fails and why we should limit what is done through the political process."--M. Steckbeck, Choice

"[Caplan] argues that voters' own irrational biases, rather than flaws in the democratic process, compel voters to support policies that are not in their interest. While one may quibble with his specifics, the overall argument is convincing and applicable across a variety of fields...Forces the reader to take a second look at our nation's unshakable faith in the wisdom of the electorate."--Pio Szamel, Harvard Political Review

"A brilliant and disturbing analysis of decision making by electorates that--[Caplan] documents--are perversely ignorant and woefully misinformed."--Neil Reynolds, The Globe and Mail

ADDITIONAL ENDORSEMENTS:

"Caplan offers readers a delightful mixture of economics, political science, psychology, philosophy, and history to resolve a puzzle that, at one time or another, has intrigued every student of public policy."--N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University, former chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers

"Why democracies so often make a hash out of economic policy is one of the great questions of political economy. Bryan Caplan suggests some provocative, and highly original, answers. This book may make you smile or it may make you scowl, but it will definitely not make you bored."--Alan S. Blinder, Princeton University

"The Myth of the Rational Voter discredits the fashionable view that democratic politics necessarily prevents socially harmful policies. Voters lack incentives to become well informed about political controversies, Bryan Caplan shows, and their policy choices tend to be based on deeply, persistently, and systematically mistaken models of reality. Caplan's findings lead inexorably to the conclusion that democratic governance can be improved only through reforms based on realistic assumptions about human cognition. Anyone concerned about political efficiency should read this elegant book carefully."--Timur Kuran, author of Islam and Mammon

"Bryan Caplan blends economics, political science, and psychology in an arresting and informative polemic that is witty, crisp, cogent, provocative, and timely. You may or may not agree with his assessment of our democracy, but you will be entertained, challenged, and perhaps angered, but also enlightened."--Scott Keeter, Pew Research Center

"The argument Caplan offers is basically right and is extremely important. I suspect this book will stir up a certain amount of controversy. The argument challenges conventional public choice in that it radically undermines the notion of substantively rational voting. At the same time, it is in the same skeptical tradition as public-choice orthodoxy, challenging the claims of democratic enthusiasts. It is a book that deserves to be taken very seriously."--Geoffrey Brennan, coauthor of The Economy of Esteem

"Poorly informed voters are a big problem in democracy, and Caplan makes the interesting argument that this is not necessarily a problem that can be easily fixed--it may be fundamental to the system. Caplan thinks that voting itself is the problem."--Andrew Gelman, Columbia University

Return to Book Description

Table of Contents:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
INTRODUCTION: The Paradox of Democracy 1
CHAPTER 1: Beyond the Miracle of Aggregation 5
CHAPTER 2: Systematically Biased Beliefs about Economics 23
CHAPTER 3: Evidence from the Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy 50
CHAPTER 4: Classical Public Choice and the Failure of Rational Ignorance 94
CHAPTER 5: Rational Irrationality 114
CHAPTER 6: From Irrationality to Policy 142
CHAPTER 7: Irrationality and the Supply Side of Politics 166
CHAPTER 8: "Market Fundamentalism" versus the Religion of Democracy 182
CONCLUSION: In Praise of the Study of Folly 205
NOTES 211
REFERENCES 237
INDEX 267

Another Princeton book by Bryan Caplan:

• The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (New Edition).

Subject Areas:

• Economics
• Political Science and International Relations
• Sociology
• Political Philosophy

CBS NEWS BLOG

October 28, 2009 11:14 AM

Chamber of Commerce Sues Yes Men

Posted by Stephanie Condon

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing the Yes Men, activist group that fooled several media outlets into reporting that the chamber had changed its position on climate change legislation. Meanwhile, pressure continues to mount against the business lobbying group for its opposition to the legislation.

The chamber filed a civil complaint this week against the Yes Men to protect its trademark and other intellectual property from unlawful use.

The activists, aiming to bring attention to the chamber's opposition to the climate bill, last week managed to dupe the media with a fake press release with the chamber's logo announcing the business group had it changed its position on the legislation and was also supporting the adoption of a carbon tax. The Yes Men also managed to lure reporters to a press conference at the National Press club where, standing at a podium adorned with the chamber's logo, a member of the activist group pretended to be a representative of the chamber.

"The defendants are not merry pranksters tweaking the establishment," said Steven Law, general counsel for the chamber, according to the Associated Press. "Instead, they deliberately broke the law in order to further commercial interest in their books, movies and other merchandise."

The Yes Men's Andy Bichlbaum told MarketWatch that the stunt was designed to call attention to the Chamber's opposition to the climate bill. He said he welcomed legal action from the business group for using its logo because "it would bring even more attention to the issue."

The chamber's opposition to climate change legislation has compelled some utility companies, as well as other businesses like Apple, to leave the group. The environmental organization Greenpeace is now asking other technology companies, including Google, Microsoft and IBM, to follow Apple's lead.

"The [information technology] industry stands to profit significantly by selling energy efficient tech solutions to reduce greenhouse gases, yet has been dramatically outspent and mostly silent in support of strong climate policies in the United States or internationally," Greenpeace said in a statement. "Instead, IT companies continue to fund the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's regressive and destructive stance on climate issues, even when unaligned with their own climate policies."

As hearings begin on Capitol Hill over the Senate's climate change legislation, the focus is currently largely on the measure's economic impact, the Washington Post reports.

Breaking News: Meat Consumption Increases Risk of Diabetes

Meat Consumption Increases Risk of Diabetes

A new review published in the journal Diabetologia adds more evidence linking meat consumption to diabetes risk. The people who ate the most meat had the highest risk of type 2 diabetes. Intakes of red meat and processed meat were associated with 21 and 41 percent increased risk, respectively. The study was a systematic review compiling data from 12 prior studies.

Aune D, Ursin G, Veierod MB. Meat consumption and the risk of type 2 diabetes: a systematic review and meta-analysis of cohort studies. Diabetologia. 2009;52:2277-2287.

For information about nutrition and health, please visit www.pcrm.org/.

Breaking Medical News is a service of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
5100 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20016.

More Vegetables for Mom Decreases Risk of Diabetes for Baby

In a new study published in Pediatric Diabetes, researchers found that women who consumed the least amount of vegetables during pregnancy were more likely to have babies who developed type 1 diabetes.

Compared with women who ate vegetables daily, those consuming vegetables only three to five times per week had a 71 percent increased risk of having a child with diabetes.

Brekke HK, Ludvigsson J. Daily vegetable intake during pregnancy negatively associated to islet autoimmunity in the offspring – The ABIS study. Pediatr Diabetes. Advanced access published September 16, 2009. DOI: 10.1111/j.1399-5448.2009.00563.x.

For information about nutrition and health, please visit www.pcrm.org/.

Breaking Medical News is a service of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine,
5100 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Suite 400, Washington, DC 20016.

Ayn Rand and the Sick World She invented

Sunday Book Review

Ayn Rand’s Revenge

By ADAM KIRSCH

Published: October 29, 2009

A specter is haunting the Republican Party — the specter of John Galt. In Ayn Rand’s libertarian epic “Atlas Shrugged,” Galt, an inventor disgusted by creeping American collectivism, leads the country’s capitalists on a retributive strike. “We have granted you everything you demanded of us, we who had always been the givers, but have only now understood it,” Galt lectures the “looters” and “moochers” who make up the populace. “We have no demands to present you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you.”

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Allyn Baum/The New York Times

Ayn Rand in Manhattan in 1957.

AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

By Anne C. Heller

Illustrated. 567 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $35

Related

Excerpt: ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ (November 1, 2009)

Times Topics: Ayn Rand

Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ and ‘Goddess of the Market’ (October 22, 2009)

Audio

Enlarge This Image

Lester Kraus

Ayn Rand in 1964.

“Atlas Shrugged” was published 52 years ago, but in the Obama era, Rand’s angry message is more resonant than ever before. Sales of the book have reportedly spiked. At “tea parties” and other conservative protests, alongside the Obama-as-Joker signs, you will find placards reading “Atlas Shrugs” and “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Not long after the inauguration, as right-wing pundits like Glenn Beck were invoking Rand and issuing warnings of incipient socialism, Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, told a reporter that the prospect of rising taxes and government regulation meant “people are starting to feel like we’re living through the scenario that happened in ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ ”

Rand’s style of vehement individualism has never been universally popular among conservatives — back in 1957, Whittaker Chambers denounced the “wickedness” of “Atlas Shrugged” in National Review — and Rand still has her critics on the right today. But it can often seem, as Jonathan Chait, a senior editor at The New Republic recently observed, that “Rand is everywhere in this right-wing mood.” And while it’s not hard to understand Rand’s revenge-fantasy appeal to those on the right, would-be Galts ought to hear the story Anne C. Heller has to tell in her dramatic and very timely biography, “Ayn Rand and the World She Made.”

For one thing, it is far more interesting than anything in Rand’s novels. That is because Heller is dealing with a human being, and one with more than her share of human failings and contradictions — “gallant, driven, brilliant, brash, cruel . . . and ultimately self-destructive,” as Heller puts it. The characters Rand created, on the other hand — like Galt or Howard Roark, the architect hero of “The Fountainhead” — are abstract principles set to moving and talking.

This is at once the failure and the making of Rand’s fiction. The plotting and characterization in her books may be vulgar and unbelievable, just as one would expect from the middling Holly­wood screenwriter she once was; but her message, while not necessarily more sophisticated, is magnified by the power of its absolute sincerity. It is the message that turned her, from the publication of “Atlas Shrugged” in 1957 until her death in 1982, into the leader of a kind of sect. (This season, another Rand book, by the academic historian Jennifer Burns, is aptly titled “Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.”) Even today, Rand’s books sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. Heller reports that in a poll in the early ’90s, sponsored by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club, “Americans named ‘Atlas Shrugged’ the book that had most influenced their lives,” second only to the Bible.

Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.

Heller maintains an appropriately critical perspective on her subject — she writes that she is “a strong admirer, albeit one with many questions and reservations” — while allowing the reader to understand the power of Rand’s conviction and her odd charisma. Rand labored for more than two years on Galt’s radio address near the end of “Atlas Shrugged” — a long paean to capitalism, individualism and selfishness that makes Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good” sound like the Sermon on the Mount. “At one point, she stayed inside the apartment, working for 33 days in a row,” Heller writes. She kept going on amphetamines and willpower; the writing, she said, was a “drops-of-water-in-a-desert kind of torture.” Nor would Rand, sooner than any other desert prophet, allow her message to be trifled with. When Bennett Cerf, a head of Random House, begged her to cut Galt’s speech, Rand replied with what Heller calls “a comment that became publishing legend”: “Would you cut the Bible?” One can imagine what Cerf thought — he had already told Rand plainly, “I find your political philosophy abhorrent” — but the strange thing is that Rand’s grandiosity turned out to be perfectly justified.

In fact, any editor certainly would cut the Bible, if an agent submitted it as a new work of fiction. But Cerf offered Rand an alternative: if she gave up 7 cents per copy in royalties, she could have the extra paper needed to print Galt’s oration. That she agreed is a sign of the great contradiction that haunts her writing and especially her life. Politically, Rand was committed to the idea that capitalism is the best form of social organization invented or conceivable. This was, perhaps, an understandable reaction against her childhood experience of Communism. Born in 1905 as Alissa Rosenbaum to a Jewish family in St. Petersburg, she was 12 when the Bolsheviks seized power, and she endured the ensuing years of civil war, hunger and oppression. By 1926, when she came to live with relatives in the United States and changed her name, she had become a relentless enemy of every variety of what she denounced as “collectivism,” from Soviet Communism to the New Deal. Even Republicans weren’t immune: after Wendell Willkie’s defeat in 1940, Rand helped to found an organization called Associated Ex-Willkie Workers Against Willkie, berating the candidate as “the guiltiest man of any for destroying America, more guilty than Roosevelt.”

Yet while Rand took to wearing a dollar-sign pin to advertise her love of capitalism, Heller makes clear that the author had no real affection for dollars themselves. Giving up her royalties to preserve her vision is something that no genuine capitalist, and few popular novelists, would have done. It is the act of an intellectual, of someone who believes that ideas matter more than lucre. In fact, as Heller shows, Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

David Hume Kennerly/Gerald R. Ford Library

At the Oval Office, 1974. From left are Rose Goldsmith, mother of Alan Greenspan; President Ford; Greenspan; Rand; and her husband, Frank O’Connor.

AYN RAND AND THE WORLD SHE MADE

By Anne C. Heller

Illustrated. 567 pp. Nan A. Talese/Doubleday. $35

Related

Excerpt: ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ (November 1, 2009)

Times Topics: Ayn Rand

Janet Maslin’s Review of ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made’ and ‘Goddess of the Market’ (October 22, 2009)

Audio

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie­tzsche “beat me to all my ideas.” But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Rand’s potent message could lead to intoxication and even to madness, as the second half of her life showed. In 1949, Rand was living with her husband, a mild-mannered former actor named Frank O’Connor, in Southern California, in a Richard Neutra house. Then she got a fan letter from a 19-year-old college freshman named Nathan Blumenthal and invited him to visit. Rand, whose books are full of masterful, sexually dominating heroes, quickly fell in love with this confused boy, whom she decided was the “intellectual heir” she had been waiting for.

The decades of psychodrama that followed read, in Heller’s excellent account, like “Phèdre” rewritten by Edward Albee. When Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Branden, moved to New York, Rand followed him; she inserted herself into her protégé’s love life, urging him to marry his girlfriend; then Rand began to sleep with Branden, insisting that both their spouses be kept fully apprised of what was going on. Heller shows how the Brandens formed the nucleus of a growing group of young Rand followers, a herd of individualists who nicknamed themselves “the Collective” — ironically, but not ironically enough, for they began to display the frightening group-think of a true cult. One journalist Heller refers to wondered how Rand “charmed so many young people into quoting John Galt as religiously as ‘clergymen quote Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.’ ”

Inevitably, it all ended in tears, when Branden fell in love with a young actress and was expelled from Rand’s circle forever. That he went on to write several best-­selling books of popular psychology “and earned the appellation ‘father of the self-esteem movement’ ” is the kind of finishing touch that makes truth stranger than fiction. For if there is one thing Rand’s life shows, it is the power, and peril, of unjustified self-esteem.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Tablet Magazine. He is the author, most recently, of “Benjamin Disraeli.”

WHO WON THE WAR? REALLY?

WHO WON THE WAR? REALLY?

HIROSHIMA - 64 YEARS LATER......... THE AFTER PICTURES ARE VISUALLY EXTRAORDINARY 1945 We all know that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed in August 1945 after being hit by the first atomic bombs. However we know little about the progress made by the people of that land during the past 64 years. Now NEXT UP......................... DETROIT - 64 YEARS AFTER NOT BEING HIT BY THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMBS.... Welcome to Detroit ... Who the hell won the war ?? image001.jpg image002.jpg image003.jpg image004.jpg image005.jpg image006.jpg image007.jpg image009.jpg image010.jpg image011.jpg image012.jpg image013.jpg image014.jpg image015.jpg image016.jpg image017.jpg image018.jpg image019.jpg image020.jpg image021