I got a little behind during the ramp-up to July 4th so I'm only getting to last week's Watchers Council posts now. The nominations are listed in the main post, and I'll get to winners tomorrow.

Lots of discussion about broad cultural dynamics and how they impact policy. The Razor's post covered personal terrain and discussed the behavior of predominantly liberal charities. Turns out the bien pensants of reduce, recycle, reuse don't seem particularly interested in recycling or reusing (reducing, on the other hand - near the top of liberal priorities). The Provocateur took apart Libertarian conspiracy theories.

For the decade before the Bush administration, the cultural left condescendingly dismissed science as a social construction only tangentially related to reality. So deep did this sentiment run that there was a multi-year academic civil war over it. Then Bush came along and suddenly the reality-based community insisted that science done properly was the purest of pure pursuits. It must be shielded from even the whiff of politics. As Wolf Howling explained, not so much any more.

Bookworm Room mused that cinematic depictions of violence seem to be acclaimed precisely to the degree that they're implicitly anti-American. When the anti-woman violence of institutionalized political Islam appears on the screen, suddenly violence is indulgent and unseemly. Right Truth discussed the broader cultural dimensions of personal meaning.

The hard sciences aren't the only empirical disciplines the Obama administration is ignoring. Economic findings aren't a particularly popular source of knowledge for this crew either. My post pointed out that state controlled health insurance is an empirical disaster. That hasn't shaken the left's commitment to ObamaCare. The Glittering Eye explained the theoretical incoherence of internalizing fossil fuel externalities via permits. Cap and Trade will still hit the ground running in the Senate.

Obama's selective approach to international meddling came in for criticism. Rhymes With Right compared what the President did say on Iran to what he should have said. It's tough to know how much of a difference he could actually make in Iran. JoshuaPundit's argued that the various Iranian factions aren't all that different, putting a pretty low ceiling on how much helping Mousavi could ever matter.

But it's still interesting to see where the President is willing to "meddle." Soccer Dad relayed academics and experts who are increasingly skeptical that Obama's efforts to detonate the US-Israel alliance will pay dividends. But there's a very, very slim chance that it will make Iranian leaders pause before, say, exporting more terrorism to South America. For only a couple of minutes, of course. But we've all got to learn to ratchet down our expectations, right?

References and previously after the jump...