“A member of TwFmXt here asked me to read the Koran, for peace and tranquility, for the essence of life.. I did..” Amitabh revealed on his Twitter page.

SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook confirmed Friday that it has added a trove of IBM patents to its arsenal on an increasingly lawsuit-strewn technology battlefield.

Reports that Facebook bought 750 software and networking patents from IBM surfaced less than two weeks after struggling Internet pioneer Yahoo! accused the thriving young firm of infringing on 10 of its patents.

"I can confirm that there was a purchase but I don't have any other details to share," Facebook spokesman Larry Yu said in response to an AFP inquiry.

IBM would not comment.

Acquisition of the patents came as California-based Facebook prepared for an initial public offering and as Internet titans increasingly battle in courts as well as in marketplaces.

Yahoo!, in a lawsuit filed in US District Court for the Northern District of California on March 12, accused Facebook of infringing on patents in several areas including advertising, privacy and messaging.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company asked the court to order Facebook to halt its alleged patent-infringing activities and to assess unspecified damages.

Facebook, which was founded in 2004, a decade after Yahoo!, expressed disappointment with the move.

"We're disappointed that Yahoo!, a longtime business partner of Facebook and a company that has substantially benefited from its association with Facebook, has decided to resort to litigation," a Facebook spokeswoman said.

In the suit, Yahoo! said that Facebook's growth to more than 850 million users "has been based in large part on Facebook's use of Yahoo!'s patented technology."

"For much of the technology upon which Facebook is based, Yahoo! got there first and was therefore granted patents by the United States Patent Office to protect those innovations," Yahoo! said.

"Yahoo!'s patents relate to cutting edge innovations in online products, including in messaging, news feed generation, social commenting, advertising display, preventing click fraud and privacy controls."

Once seen as the Internet's leading light, Yahoo! has struggled in recent years to build a strongly profitable, growing business out of its huge Web presence and global audience.

by AFP

Resources; The malay mail

RIO DE JANEIRO: Abu Dhabi's state investment fund Mubadala Development on Monday announced a US$2 billion (RM6.15 billion) investment in Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista's EBX group.

A joint statement issued by the two groups said the investment would give Mudabala a 5.63% preferred equity interest in Centennial Asset Brazilian Equity Fund., the personal investment company of Batista, Brazil's richest man who is behind the EBX Group.

The transaction also gives the Abu Dhabi fund an indirect stake in other Batista-controlled companies such as OGX (oil and gas), OSX (offshore naval industry), MMX (mining), LLX (logistics) and MPX (energy).

The statement said Mubadala would also be involved in EBX's future "investment opportunities" in the technology, cement and fertiliser sectors.

In OSX, which posted profits of US$3.8 million in 2011 after losses in 2010, the Mubadala investment is aimed at bolstering the group's structure and new business development.

"This well-structured transaction marks our first significant direct investment into one of the fastest growing markets and is an important step in Mubadala's development of strategic opportunities in Brazil and Latin America," said Mubadala chief Khaldoon Khalifa al Mubarak said in a statement.

Batista hailed the investment from the oil-rich Gulf emirate.

"We are very proud of receiving our new partner and this transaction strengthens the relationship not only between the two groups, but also between the two countries," he said.

"The investment considerably strengthens the entire group and its ability to successfully implement current and future projects.

EBX recalled that it planned to invest US$15.5 billion between 2011 and 2012 in Brazil and US$50 billion over the next 10 years.

Resources; The malay mail

TOKYO: A small Japanese city is looking to hire a trio of "ogres" -- but only if they have a driver's license and basic computer skills -- to boost its profile as part of a post-disaster tourism push.

Oga city, 450 kilometres (280 miles) north of Tokyo, said it will pay about US$2,500 (RM7,692) a month to people willing to travel around the city dressed as devilish gods known in local folklore as Namahage.

Traditionally, local men volunteered to wear ghoulish costumes as they visited homes on a usually frostbitten new year's eve, wielding butcher knives and roaring: "Are there naughty kids? Are there lazy fellows?"

The gods are said to guard against misfortune while bringing bumper crops and bountiful fish catches, but the practice has faded over the years.

Now, with a national tourism push after last year's quake-tsunami disaster, Oga city is looking to the tradition as a selling point.

Tourism officials and their friends have occasionally been donning horned masks and straw coats for special events. However, it has not been deemed enough especially since the full-time job requires that ghouls produce post-event reports.

Authorities now want to appoint three people to full-time positions.

"We had so far managed to get by ourselves," said Yutaka Sato of the Oga tourism office.

"But to really promote our tourism, we want to efficiently dispatch Namahage as the face of Oga city."

Resources: The malay mail

from Soup to Dessert: Los Camotes

One of the most interesting aspects of writing about Mexican food is its history, which spans at least five centuries and reflects the cultural and social influences of both the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican people and those who came later from other continents. While researching Mexican cuisine is rewarding, once in a while the reader comes upon a statement that prompts further investigation. One of these turned up recently in an otherwise reliable source.

The author stated that "there is practically no use made of sweet potatoes in Mexico today, with the exception of camotes de Santa Clara, a soft candy made in the city of Puebla." Upon reading this, several dishes made with sweet potatoes in various regions of Mexico came to mind. And thus began the investigation of how this tasty tuber is used here and its place in the country's culinary history.

The plant in question is Ipomoea batatus, the true sweet potato, as distinguished from the yam, another species completely, called dioscorea. The sweet potato is a member of the morning glory family, while the yam is related to the lily. Sweet potato plants are propagated by cuttings from the vines, and yams from sections of the tuber roots. They can be distinguished from one another by the texture of the skin, which is smooth on a sweet potato and scaly on a yam, and by the flesh itself; the sweet potato's flesh is moist, while the yam's is dry and starchy. While the yam is native to Africa and Asia, the sweet potato is indigenous to tropical America, and it is the true sweet potato, Ipomoea batatus, that has played a significant and versatile role in Mexican cooking.

The Uto-Aztecan word camotli is the root of many words for sweet potatoes, including the Spanish camote. Domestication of the sweet potato dates back to Peru in about 2800 B.C. It had spread to much of tropical America, including Mexico, by the time the Spaniards arrived. Journals from Grijalva's 1518 expedition from Cuba to the Yucatan and Cozumel describes the boiled or roasted sweet potatoes prepared by the indigenous Maya as tasting "like roasted chestnuts."

Root crops were very important in the Maya diet, and sweet potatoes were among the four most prominent, the others being manioc, jicama and macal, a plant in the philodendron family with edible tubers, shoots and leaves. Diego de Landa, named bishop of the Yucatan in 1572, tells us that the Maya used sweet potatoes to "extend" their corn-based posole and atole when the corn was scarce, usually just before the corn harvest. The sweet potatoes were cooked, mashed, and added to these gruels as a thickener and nutrient. They were also cooked in their skins and served with honey, or stewed and flavored with leaves of a fragrant native bush called musté.

The Spanish priest and chronicler Bartolomé de las Casas, who also ministered to the Maya, gives a recipe for sweet potatoes that involves washing them after the harvest, curing them in light shade for a week to ten days, then roasting them in their skins. Prepared in this way, they were said to taste "as sweet as if they had been dipped in a jar of jam."

Another region where sweet potatoes have been eaten since pre-Hispanic times is Central Mexico, where they were included on the menu for the banquet served by the emperor Moctezuma to Cortez and his men in 1519. Sweet potatoes have remained autumn market fixtures in this region, where they are sold by small farmers. Because they can grow in poor soil, they require no investment in fertilizers, and the shade from their vines prevents the growth of weeds. They are often sold pre-cooked at the outdoor markets in the State of Mexico, Puebla and Tlaxcala.

However, the Mexican region where the largest variety of sweet potatoes is found is Veracruz. In Zarela's Veracruz, cookbook author and restaurateur Zarela Martinez tells us that "In Veracruzan markets, sweet potatoes come in several colors, including a startling purple, deep orange, pale orange-yellow and nearly white." The same book mentions the garnachas made with corn and sweet potato dough that we enjoyed at Hotel Doña Lala in Tlacotalpan. Sweeter than plain corn masa, the dough is fried into golden "boats" about the size of chalupas and topped with refried beans, cubed potatoes, shredded meat, cheese, salsa and crema.

The Afro-Caribbean influence on Veracruz' cuisine is a strong one, and sweet potatoes are used in a variety of both candied and savory dishes. Conaculta's Recetario Afro-Mestizo de Veracruz explains that the word camote is often replaced by buniato, the Africanized version of boniato, and ñame, or nyame, which comes from the Fulani word "to eat." (This last word is so close to "yam" that the African people brought to the Americas may have introduced "yam" in the southern part of the United States as a word for the orange-fleshed variety of sweet potato. This vegetable arrived in the U.S. in 1648 and sustained people through the American Revolution and the Civil War.)

The sweet potato was eagerly embraced by the Spaniards, and brought back to Spain as early as the late 1400s by Columbus. A century later, the conquerors of Mexico were bringing them from New Spain's Pacific coast to the Philippines on the Manila galleons that set out from Acapulco. From there, they spread to India, China and Malaysia. (China is now the world's largest producer of sweet potatoes, a sustenance crop for the poor.)

In Puebla during this period, the nuns in the Convento de Santa Clara were busy inventing one of Mexico's most popular confections, the aforementioned sweet potato candy called camotes de Santa Clara. These haven't changed much in the last five hundred years and are sold today along Puebla's Calle de los Dulces, or "Sweet Street." The chicken and fruit stew with pineapples and sweet potatoes called manchamanteles (for which a recipe was given in the August 2000 issue of Mexico Connect) is also Poblano in origin, though Oaxaca, too, claims it as its own.

The sweet potato plant is attractive as well as highly nutritious, and the flowers of this perennial vine resemble morning glories. The skin of the tuber can be red, purple, brown or orange, and was used by the Maya to make artists' colors. The flesh varies from white to yellow-orange to purple, and in 1992 was named the most nutritious vegetable by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. A complex carbohydrate food source, it contains significant amounts of fiber, vitamins A, C and B6, plus iron and calcium. The orange-fleshed variety also contains the antioxidant beta-carotene.

When buying sweet potatoes, select firm roots, handle them carefully to avoid bruising, and store in a cool, dry place. Sweet potatoes, like bananas, are considered tropical produce and should not be refrigerated before cooking. They can be baked, boiled, broiled and fried. Cooked sweet potatoes can be canned or frozen. They are fine microwaved, pricked with a fork first, as for regular white potatoes.

To add a quick Mexican touch to microwaved or oven baked sweet potatoes, blend softened butter with lime zest, chopped cilantro, cumin, salt and pepper and serve melted atop the hot sweet potatoes cut in half. For another easy and flavorful butter topping for this vegetable, blend softened butter with the adobo sauce, to taste, from canned chipotles in adobo. The cooked sweet potatoes can also be peeled and mashed, with a yield of 1 ¼ cups mashed vegetable from two medium sweet potatoes. And try the recipes below, tasty Mexican ways with one of autumn's most popular vegetables.

Resources: Mexconnect

You don’t have to believe in God to see this higher capacity as part of our nature. You just have to believe in evolution. Evolution itself has evolved: as humans became increasingly social, the struggle for survival, mating and progeny depended less on physical abilities and more on social abilities. In this way, a faculty produced by evolution — sociality — became the new engine of evolution. Why can’t reason do the same thing? Why can’t it emerge from its evolutionary origins as a spin doctor to become the new medium in which humans compete, cooperate and advance the fitness of their communities? Isn’t that what we see all around us? Look at the global spread of media, debate and democracy.       

Haidt is part of this process. He thinks he’s just articulating evolution. But in effect, he’s also trying to fix it. Traits we evolved in a dispersed world, like tribalism and righteousness, have become dangerously maladaptive in an era of rapid globalization. A pure scientist would let us purge these traits from the gene pool by fighting and killing one another. But Haidt wants to spare us this fate. He seeks a world in which “fewer people believe that righteous ends justify violent means.” To achieve this goal, he asks us to understand and overcome our instincts. He appeals to a power capable of circumspection, reflection and reform.

If we can harness that power — wisdom — our substantive project will be to reconcile our national and international differences. Is income inequality immoral? Should government favor religion? Can we tolerate cultures of female subjugation? And how far should we trust our instincts? Should people who find homosexuality repugnant overcome that reaction?

Haidt’s faith in moral taste receptors may not survive this scrutiny. Our taste for sanctity or authority, like our taste for sugar, could turn out to be a dangerous relic. But Haidt is right that we must learn what we have been, even if our nature is to transcend it.

(Page 3 of 4)

The hardest part, Haidt finds, is getting liberals to open their minds. Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

Haidt isn’t just scolding liberals, however. He sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

Our task, then, is to organize society so that reason and intuition interact in healthy ways. Haidt’s research suggests several broad guidelines. First, we need to help citizens develop sympathetic relationships so that they seek to understand one another instead of using reason to parry opposing views. Second, we need to create time for contemplation. Research shows that two minutes of reflection on a good argument can change a person’s mind. Third, we need to break up our ideological segregation. From 1976 to 2008, the proportion of Americans living in highly partisan counties increased from 27 percent to 48 percent. The Internet exacerbates this problem by helping each user find evidence that supports his views.

How can we achieve these goals? Haidt offers a Web site, civilpolitics.org, on which he and his colleagues have listed steps that might help. One is holding open primaries so that people outside each party’s base can vote to nominate moderate candidates. Another is instant runoffs, so that candidates will benefit from broadening their appeal. A third idea is to alter redistricting so that parties are less able to gerrymander partisan congressional districts. Haidt also wants members of Congress to go back to the old practice of moving their families to Washington, so that they socialize with one another and build a friendly basis on which to cooperate.

Many of Haidt’s proposals are vague, insufficient or hard to implement. And that’s O.K. He just wants to start a conversation about integrating a better understanding of human nature — our sentiments, sociality and morality — into the ways we debate and govern ourselves. At this, he succeeds. It’s a landmark contribution to humanity’s understanding of itself.

But to whom is Haidt directing his advice? If intuitions are unreflective, and if reason is self-serving, then what part of us does he expect to regulate and orchestrate these faculties? This is the unspoken tension in Haidt’s book. As a scientist, he takes a passive, empirical view of human nature. He describes us as we have been, expecting no more. Based on evolution, he argues, universal love is implausible: “Parochial love . . . amplified by similarity” and a “sense of shared fate . . . may be the most we can accomplish.” But as an author and advocate, Haidt speaks to us rationally and universally, as though we’re capable of something greater. He seems unable to help himself, as though it’s in his nature to call on our capacity for reason and our sense of common humanity — and in our nature to understand it.

In the West, we think morality is all about harm, rights, fairness and consent. Does the guy own the chicken? Is the dog already dead? Is the sister of legal age? But step outside your neighborhood or your country, and you’ll discover that your perspective is highly anomalous. Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Alongside these principles, he has found related themes that carry moral weight: divinity, community, hierarchy, tradition, sin and degradation.       

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order. They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality.

These moral systems aren’t ignorant or backward. Haidt argues that they’re common in history and across the globe because they fit human nature. He compares them to cuisines. We acquire morality the same way we acquire food preferences: we start with what we’re given. If it tastes good, we stick with it. If it doesn’t, we reject it. People accept God, authority and karma because these ideas suit their moral taste buds. Haidt points to research showing that people punish cheaters, accept many hierarchies and don’t support equal distribution of benefits when contributions are unequal.

You don’t have to go abroad to see these ideas. You can find them in the Republican Party. Social conservatives see welfare and feminism as threats to responsibility and family stability. The Tea Party hates redistribution because it interferes with letting people reap what they earn. Faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order — these Republican themes touch all six moral foundations, whereas Democrats, in Haidt’s analysis, focus almost entirely on care and fighting oppression. This is Haidt’s startling message to the left: When it comes to morality, conservatives are more broad-minded than liberals. They serve a more varied diet.

This is where Haidt diverges from other psychologists who have analyzed the left’s electoral failures. The usual argument of these psycho-­pundits is that conservative politicians manipulate voters’ neural roots — playing on our craving for authority, for example — to trick people into voting against their interests. But Haidt treats electoral success as a kind of evolutionary fitness test. He figures that if voters like Republican messages, there’s something in Republican messages worth liking. He chides psychologists who try to “explain away” conservatism, treating it as a pathology. Conservatism thrives because it fits how people think, and that’s what validates it. Workers who vote Republican aren’t fools. In Haidt’s words, they’re “voting for their moral interests.”

One of these interests is moral capital — norms, prac­tices and institutions, like religion and family values, that facilitate cooperation by constraining individualism. Toward this end, Haidt applauds the left for regulating corporate greed. But he worries that in other ways, liberals dissolve moral capital too recklessly. Welfare programs that substitute public aid for spousal and parental support undermine the ecology of the family. Education policies that let students sue teachers erode classroom authority. Multicultural education weakens the cultural glue of assimilation. Haidt agrees that old ways must sometimes be re-examined and changed. He just wants liberals to proceed with caution and protect the social pillars sustained by tradition.

Another aspect of human nature that conservatives understand better than liberals, according to Haidt, is parochial altruism, the inclination to care more about members of your group — particularly those who have made sacrifices for it —than about outsiders. Saving Darfur, submitting to the United Nations and paying taxes to educate children in another state may be noble, but they aren’t natural. What’s natural is giving to your church, helping your P.T.A. and rallying together as Americans against a foreign threat.

How far should liberals go toward incorporating these principles? Haidt says the shift has to be more than symbolic, but he doesn’t lay out a specific policy agenda. Instead, he highlights broad areas of culture and politics — family and assimilation, for example — on which liberals should consider compromise. He urges conservatives to entertain liberal ideas in the same way. The purpose of such compromises isn’t just to win elections. It’s to make society and government fit human nature.

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The Tea Party is an antigovernment, grass-roots political movement.  It began in 2009 in protest of the bank bailout and economic stimulus package. Its supporters vowed to purge the Republican Party of officials they consider not sufficiently conservative and to block the Democratic agenda on the economy, the environment and health care. Tea Party supporters tend to unite around fiscal conservatism and a belief that the federal government has overstepped its constitutional powers.

The Tea Party became a pivotal player in the Republicans’ successful bid to take control of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. In those elections, four in 10 voters expressed support for the movement in exit polls. Those figures, and victories at the polls, underscored the extent to which Republicans and Democrats alike may have underestimated the power of the party, a loosely affiliated coalition of libertarians and disaffected Republicans.

But two years later, the picture appeared quite different. The Tea Party and Sarah Palin — who helped turn the party into a powerful political force in 2010 — had so far displayed little impact on the course of the 2012 Republican presidential campaign.

Just months after Ms. Palin announced she would not run for president, her attempts to wield influence in the presidential primaries the way she did during the 2010 midterm elections had largely fizzled.

She urged voters in South Carolina and Florida to vote for Newt Gingrich as a way of striking back against the Republican establishment in Washington and against liberals.

Tea Party supporters in South Carolina did vote for Mr. Gingrich, according to exit polls. Of the 64 percent who said they supported the Tea Party, 45 percent went for Mr. Gingrich; Mr. Romney received just a quarter of Tea Party supporters.

But a week later in Florida, the establishment won decisively. Not only did Mr. Gingrich lose badly to Mitt Romney after Ms. Palin’s public pronouncement, but he even lost over all among supporters of the Tea Party, a plurality of whom apparently rejected Ms. Palin’s call to arms for the supporters of that movement.

About 65 percent of the voters in Florida’s Republican primary said they supported the Tea Party. But among those voters, 41 percent told pollsters that they cast ballots for Mr. Romney, while 37 percent said they cast ballots for Mr. Gingrich. (Though, those who said they strongly support the Tea Party favored Mr. Gingrich 45 percent to 33 percent.)

A Decline in Influence

The results could reflect in part the lack of wall-to-wall coverage of Ms. Palin these days. She continues to have a perch at Fox News and millions of followers on her Facebook page, but as the 2012 campaign has heated up, she no longer commands the kind of attention that she once did.

It may also signal that the Tea Party movement is no longer able to exert the kind of sway that it did during the primary campaigns two years ago.

For example, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who calls herself a founding member of the Tea Party Caucus in Congress, bowed out of the presidential race after a disappointing finish in Iowa. Her Tea Party affiliation did little to help her campaign.

Herman Cain, who also claimed the mantle of the Tea Party, and Rick Perry, whose conservative views were in line with many members of the movement, both dropped out of the primary race.

That has left Mr. Gingrich as a possible candidate to be embraced by the Tea Party as conservatives seek to find an alternative to Mr. Romney.

The question for the Tea Party — and Ms. Palin — going forward is whether Mr. Gingrich fully embraces the movement, and whether he continues to remain a viable alternative to Mr. Romney for the next several months.

If Mr. Romney manages to quickly dispatch the challenge by Mr. Gingrich, it will further call into question the power of a movement to produce electoral change on the scale that many thought possible less than two years ago.

On the other hand, if Mr. Gingrich maintains an effective candidacy through the coming months, he could help to re-energize the Tea Party movement around the fear of the establishment from both parties.

Earlier Polls With Similar Results

An article in The New York Times on Nov. 29, 2011, based on an analysis of polls, said that support for the Tea Party — and with it, the Republican Party — had fallen sharply even in places considered Tea Party strongholds.

In Congressional districts represented by Tea Party lawmakers, the number of people saying they disagreed with the movement had risen significantly since it powered a Republican sweep in the 2010 midterm elections; almost as many people disagreed with it as agreed with it, according to the analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Support for the Republican Party had fallen even further in those places than it had in the country as a whole. In the 60 districts represented in Congress by a member of the House Tea Party Caucus, Republicans were viewed about as negatively as Democrats.

The analysis suggested that the Tea Party could be dragging down the Republican Party heading into a presidential election year, even as it ushered in a new Republican majority in the House of Representatives the year before.

Taking a Hard Line on the Federal Deficit

Other polls showed a connection between the decline in support for the Tea Party and the hard line it had taken during the debate over the debt ceiling and deficit reduction. In 2010, the Tea Party was more of an abstraction. In 2011, its positions had clear consequences, like Congressional stalemate.

In the House, the Tea Party contingent and its supporters played an important role as a series of fights over federal spending unfolded over the course of 2011. It was pressure from Tea Party members that led House Speaker John A. Boehner to push for deep cuts in the final months of the 2011 budget, which brought the government to the brink of a shutdown in April.

And resistance to making revenue increases part of any deal over raising the federal debt ceiling played a large role in Mr. Boehner’s decision to break off talks with Mr. Obama in late July over a so-called grand bargain to cut the deficit by $4 trillion over 10 years.

While Tea Party groups and members of the Tea Party caucus in the House loudly insisted that they would not support any increase in the debt limit, many rank-and-file Tea Party voters did support it, according to polls. They did not want to risk damaging an already-fragile economy with a potential government default. The majority of Tea Party supporters, in fact, wanted an agreement.

Looking to State and Local Elections

Since the Tea Party movement propelled Republicans to control of the House in 2010, the groups trying to shape it into an enduring force have been focused on building organized grass-roots networks, training local activists and supporting new generations of candidates for local and state offices. With none of the remaining 2012 presidential hopefuls inspiring much passion in their ranks, Tea Party groups are focusing as much on Congress and state and local elections as on the race for the White House. This could potentially deprive the eventual nominee of some of the energy that carried the party back to power in Congress in the midterm elections.

Many Tea Party supporters have said that while they would work to help any Republican defeat Mr. Obama, their real passion is for electing small-government conservatives further down the ballot and building a stable of leaders who grow up in the movement rather than trying to adapt themselves to it. If that means it takes four or eight more years for them to feel any passion for a presidential nominee, they said, it will be worth the wait.

Background

In a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April 2010, the 18 percent of Americans who identified themselves as Tea Party supporters tended to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45. They were wealthier and better-educated than the general public.

The poll showed Tea Partiers holding more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally. They were also more likely to describe themselves as “very conservative” and President Obama as “very liberal.” And while most Republicans said they were “dissatisfied” with Washington, Tea Party supporters were more likely to classify themselves as “angry.”

Although Tea Party organizers have insisted they created a nonpartisan grass-roots movement, others have argued that tea parties were largely created by the clamor of cable news and fueled by the financial and political support of current and former Republican leaders.

The movement played a significant part in several important primary fights in 2010. Along with Christine O’Donnell, who defeated Representative Michael N. Castle in Delaware, there was Joe Miller of Alaska, who beat Senator Lisa Murkowski — only to see Ms. Murkowski run a successful write-in campaign.

Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.

The overwhelming majority of supporters said Mr. Obama does not share the values most Americans live by and that he does not understand the problems of people like themselves. More than half said the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent said the administration favors blacks over whites, compared with 11 percent of the general public.

They were more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.

Political Impact

While the numbers of Tea Party-affiliated winners in the November 2010 elections was relatively small, they have exerted outsize influence, putting pressure on Republican leaders to carry out promises to significantly cut spending and taxes and to repeal health care legislation passed in 2010.

They vowed not only to permanently extend the tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush and to eliminate the estate tax, but also to replace the progressive income tax with a flat tax or a national sales tax. Several candidates advocated abolishing the Internal Revenue Service entirely.

Many called for a balanced budget amendment. They opposed newly passed financial regulation, and cap-and-trade of carbon emissions. They also promised to carry into office the Tea Party’s strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Tea Partiers like Representative Ron Paul of Texas, a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, embrace arguments that government should not provide what individuals can provide for themselves. So, police and public safety are acceptable functions of government, but government should not take from one person’s income to provide for another’s health or well-being.

And when Mr. Paul and his Tea Party supporters espouse “constitutionally limited government,” they argue that much of the New Deal, as well as social programs like Medicare that were enacted later, were a gross violation of the founding document. Those ideas may be hard to sell in a general election, even to Republicans.

Resources: The New York Times

‘The Righteous Mind

You’re smart. You’re liberal. You’re well informed. You think conservatives are narrow-minded. You can’t understand why working-class Americans vote Republican. You figure they’re being duped. You’re wrong.

This isn’t an accusation from the right. It’s a friendly warning from Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who, until 2009, considered himself a partisan liberal. In “The ­Righteous Mind,” Haidt seeks to enrich liberalism, and political discourse generally, with a deeper awareness of human nature. Like other psychologists who have ventured into political coaching, such as George Lakoff and Drew Westen, Haidt argues that people are fundamentally intuitive, not rational. If you want to persuade others, you have to appeal to their sentiments. But Haidt is looking for more than victory. He’s looking for wisdom. That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

Haidt seems to delight in mischief. Drawing on ethnography, evolutionary theory and experimental psychology, he sets out to trash the modern faith in reason. In Haidt’s retelling, all the fools, foils and villains of intellectual history are recast as heroes. David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions. Even Glaucon, the cynic in Plato’s “Republic” who told Socrates that people would behave ethically only if they thought they were being watched, was “the guy who got it right.”

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided. The funniest and most painful illustrations are Haidt’s transcripts of interviews about bizarre scenarios. Is it wrong to have sex with a dead chicken? How about with your sister? Is it O.K. to defecate in a urinal? If your dog dies, why not eat it? Under interrogation, most subjects in psychology experiments agree these things are wrong. But none can explain why.

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others. Haidt shows, for example, how subjects relentlessly marshal arguments for the incest taboo, no matter how thoroughly an interrogator demolishes these arguments.

To explain this persistence, Haidt invokes an evolutionary hypothesis: We compete for social status, and the key advantage in this struggle is the ability to influence others. Reason, in this view, evolved to help us spin, not to help us learn. So if you want to change people’s minds, Haidt concludes, don’t appeal to their reason. Appeal to reason’s boss: the underlying moral intuitions whose conclusions reason defends.

Haidt’s account of reason is a bit too simple — his whole book, after all, is a deployment of reason to advance learning — and his advice sounds cynical. But set aside those objections for now, and go with him. If you follow Haidt through the tunnel of cynicism, you’ll find that what he’s really after is enlightenment. He wants to open your mind to the moral intuitions of other people.

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