October 31, 2002
AND THE RACE IS ON...:
McCain Switching Parties? (Heard on the Hill, October 31, 2002 , Roll Call)The epilogue of a new biography of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) flat out predicts that if Republicans win the Senate by one seat, the maverick will switch parties to swing control of the chamber back to Democrats.Author Paul Alexander, a political writer who hosts a popular radio show based in New York, writes in the epilogue that the Senator would then decide whether to launch a presidential campaign early next year.
Alexander writes in the book to be released Friday, "Man of the People: The Life of John McCain," that he floated the following scenario to an unnamed "McCain staffer" over lunch.
"If the control of the Senate returns to the Republicans by one seat, McCain could change parties and reclaim the power in the Senate for the Democrats,"Alexander told the McCain staffer. "That way, if he decides to run for president as a Democrat or as an Independent, he could also affect the control of the Senate at the same time."
The McCain staffer replied, "That's it exactly. Only here's the thing, McCain has no idea, really, what he's going to do."
The thing is, he'd have to decide quickly in order to beat Lincoln Chaffee to the door.
A REAL MR. MOM:
Lankan dad breast-feeds babies (AFP, October 31, 2002)A 38-year-old Sri Lankan man, whose wife died three months ago, appears to have the ability to breast feed his two infant children, doctors told a local newspaper Wednesday.B. Wijeratne from the central town of Walapone, 186 kilometres from the capital Colombo lost his wife when she died giving birth to their second child.
"My eldest daughter refused to be fed on powdered milk liquid in the feeding bottle," he said according to the Sinhalese-language daily Lankadeepa.
"I was so moved one evening and to stop her crying I offered my breast. I then realised that I was capable of breast feeding her," Wijeratne said.
Lucky so-and-so. If I could lactate the wife could never get me to go back to work again.
HIDING BEHIND HER OWN SKIRT:
Camps spar over Romney word choice: Gender issue raised on 'unbecoming' (Stephanie Ebbert and Yvonne Abraham, 10/31/2002, Boston Globe)It means unsuitable, indecorous, and it's viewed by many as an archaic, ill-fitting corset of a word. When Mitt Romney described Shannon O'Brien's attacks on him in Tuesday night's debate as ''unbecoming,'' he raised the ire of her female supporters, who used the description to rally their cause yesterday.Teresa Heinz, a philanthropist and wife of US Senator John F. Kerry, told a crowd of some 750 women at an O'Brien fund-raiser yesterday that Romney would be surprised at how many ''unbecoming women'' were gathered for the event at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel.
US Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a New York Democrat, told the crowd that years ago the ambitions of women who wanted to vote or run for public office were described as ''unbecoming.'' Clinton drew roaring applause when she said she found Romney's comments ''unbecoming.''
That single word opened a new front in the campaign as O'Brien's supporters seized upon it to reintroduce the question of gender in the final days of the race. Romney, campaigning with US Senator John McCain, defended his word choice as gender-neutral.
Romney denied the word carried any special significance.
So when this coven of supposedly smart and capable women takes such hysterical umbrage at a word with no known gender connotation is it because they are ignorant or because of the kind of extreme sensitivity that their very careers are supposed to disprove?
VRWC MEETS VLWC (via Paul Cella):
How I Was Smeared (Harry Stein, Autumn 2002, City Journal)It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, as a conservative of fairly recent vintage, I’ve seen how easy it is for liberals, assisted by a compliant press, to cast ideological foes as moral reprobates and thus avoid engaging their ideas. Hadn’t it happened to a slew of judicial nominees, from Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to, most recently, Thomas Pickering and Priscilla Owen—as well as to a long line of conservative politicians and social critics? Such attacks, coming as they do from those who assert their passionate tolerance, succeed because they are so hard to respond to. They are like the classic below-the-belt question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” But today’s underhanded question—“When did you become a sexist or a homophobe or (worst of all) a racist?”—is even more lethal: the accusatory word cuts short any argument and puts the target on the defensive, as those whom you’d expect to stand firm for principle melt away.Again, I knew all this theoretically. But I truly didn’t know how bad it could be.
Then it happened to me.
As Mr. Stein says, he should have seen this coming when he started sleeping with the Enemy, but it's still despicable.
ON NOT GOING GENTLY:
Making of a Minnesota Debacle (Howard Kurtz, October 31, 2002, Washington Post)How badly can a political party screw up a memorial service?Just ask Minnesota's Democrats.
They staged a public farewell for Paul Wellstone that was so over the top, so blatantly partisan, that Jesse Ventura walked out.
"I feel used," the independent governor said afterward. "I feel violated and duped over the fact that it turned into a political rally. . . . I think the Democrats should hang their head in shame."
How did it come to this? It should have been a piece of cake for the DFLers to honor Wellstone in a dignified way, setting the stage for Walter Mondale to accept the nomination last night. After all, 20,000 people showed up. After all, Mondale was riding a wave of emotion without having done a single thing. After all, a new poll has Mondale up 8 points over Norm Coleman.
Instead, Ventura was booed at the service, as was Trent Lott. What sensitivity! They show up to honor a man from a different political party and they're razzed like the opposing team at a Vikings game. In effect, the service was hijacked in a small-minded way that detracted from the memory of Wellstone.
Actually, isn't it fair to assume that it was intentionally small-minded, with no hijacking required? And isn't that the necessary implication after Democrats defended it for two days (until polls showed it to be a disaster)?
COOL HAND DEMOCRATS (from Henry Hanks):
Not spooked by class warfare (Donald Lambro, October 31, 2002, Washington Times)[A] detailed memo that Messrs. Carville, Shrum and Greenberg circulated to Democratic officials said, "While the economy is creating the desire for change and impatience with the Republicans, it is not the kind of wedge or unambiguous campaign issue that should become your sole focus in the last week." Statistics from Mr. Greenberg's Oct. 22-24 poll of 1,001 likely voters delivered the bad news: Republicans have a one-point edge over the Democrats on who can best handle the economy. "Today, the country splits evenly on which party to trust on the economy," according to the memo.The poll gave voters a variety of hypothetical tests to measure what issues triggered the strongest responses for the Democrats.
The surprise finding: When voters are given a choice between "the Republican candidate with their broad message on security, taxes and pro-prescription drugs against a Democrat focused on getting the economy moving and critiquing Republican policies — the contrast produces no shift to the Democrats. The economy is what creates the mood for change, but it has not been sufficiently polarized to make this an economy election for your campaigns in the last week," the memo said.
So, they can't mention foreign policy or the economy, which leaves them election-fixing in NJ, SD, & MN; gay-bashing in MT, HI, and SC; exploiting the barely cold corpse of Paul Wellstone; and at some point this weekend we should see them trot out their Old Faithful--the race card. This is what's left of the Party of FDR.
FLAWED STANDARD:
Flawed Founders: To what degree do the attitudes of Washington and Jefferson toward slavery diminish their achievements? (Stephen E. Ambrose , November 2002, Smithsonian)Few of us entirely escape our times and places. Thomas Jefferson did not achieve greatness in his personal life. He had a slave as mistress. He lied about it. He once tried to bribe a hostile reporter. His war record was not good. He spent much of his life in intellectual pursuits in which he excelled and not enough in leading his fellow Americans toward great goals by example. Jefferson surely knew slavery was wrong, but he didn't have the courage to lead the way to emancipation. If you hate slavery and the terrible things it did to human beings, it is difficult to regard Jefferson as great. He was a spendthrift, always deeply in debt. He never freed his slaves. Thus the sting in Dr. Samuel Johnson's mortifying question, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?"Jefferson knew slavery was wrong and that he was wrong in profiting from the institution, but apparently could see no way to relinquish it in his lifetime. He thought abolition of slavery might be accomplished by the young men of the next generation. They were qualified to bring the American Revolution to its idealistic conclusion because, he said, these young Virginians had "sucked in the principles of liberty as if it were their mother's milk."
Of all the contradictions in Jefferson's contradictory life, none is greater. Of all the contradictions in America's history, none surpasses its toleration first of slavery and then of segregation.
The absurdity of applying to the Founders our own standards on an issue like slavery is most readily apparent by reference to the most similar issue of our own day: abortion. Regardless of which side of the issue you are on personally it may be seen two hundred years from now to have had a significant and negative human rights impact. Depending on how humankind develops, it may be the case that abortion opponents will be seen as having stifled women's rights, just as abolitionists impinged on property rights, or that abortion advocates will be seen to have participated in the murder of ten of millions, having adjudged fetuses no more human than slavery advocates considered blacks to be.
DEM BONES:
Ossuary was genuine, inscription was faked (Rochelle I. Altman, October 29, 2002, Israeli Insider)As an expert on scripts and an historian of writing systems, I was asked to examine this inscription and make a report. I did.The bone-box is original; the first inscription, which is in Aramaic, "Jacob son of Joseph," is authentic. The second half of the inscription, "brother of Jesus," is a poorly executed fake and a later addition. This report has already been distributed on at least two scholarly lists.
Please note that the fraud is so blatant that I did not bother to go into extreme detail on whether the faked addition is supposed to be Hebrew or Aramaic. (If that's a vav, -- then it's Hebrew, not Aramaic; if it's yod, then it's says 'my brother', not 'his brother' or 'brother of'. By no stretch of the imagination can one claim this to be in Aramaic... 'of' in Aramaic is 'di'.)
You have to be blind as a bat not to see that the second part is a fraud...
Don't ask us; our Aramaic is awful.
THE FOREST:
US may seek bilateral Latam trade deals - Zoellick (Reuters, 10.29.02)The United States has developed a short list of Latin American countries it would like to negotiate bilateral free-trade deals with if hemisphere-wide negotiations sputter, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said on Tuesday.
It was just a few months ago that the navel-gazing libertarian Right had hypnotized itself--by staring at meaningless steel tarrifs for hours on end--into believing that the Bush administration secretly opposed free trade. Now the Administration is mere months away from announcing significant expansions of NAFTA. Which shows it's not just the Left that hasn't figured W out yet.
AND YOUR POINT WAS?:
We get a morning headline mailing from canada.com, which today had the following three stories listed, in this order:WHITE MEN ONLY--NO HEAVY LIFTING REQUIRED:
Democratic tough guys (Robert Novak, October 31, 2002, townhall.com)DFL chieftains immediately decided on Mondale, and quickly talked him into it. "I wonder whether there is such a dearth of new material that we have to recycle these old men," one veteran Democratic national operative told me. There was one other possibility: Alan Page, the 57-year-old former Notre Dame and Minnesota Vikings football star who has been an associate justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court since 1993. A law-and-order liberal, Page has led the state Democratic ticket in recent elections. According to Minnesota sources, he was eager to seek the Senate seat. But the DFL apparently did not want to risk running the African-American Page in an overwhelmingly Caucasian state, and Page was swiftly discouraged.Page might have required a campaign, and that is not what the DFL wanted.
As the Psalmist said: They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of my soul....
"ALL WORTH IT":
'Hawaii Five-O' Co-Star Kam Fong Dead at 84 (October 31, 2002, Reuters)Kam Fong Chun, the man TV viewers around the world knew as Detective Chin Ho Kelly in the hit crime series "Hawaii Five-O," died in Honolulu after a long fight against cancer, his family said on Wednesday. He was 84. [...]Kam Fong Chun was a real-life Honolulu Police Department officer for 16 years before leaving the force in 1959 to put more time into acting. To help pay the bills, he ran a real estate business and talent agency before joining the CBS-TV crime drama.
His son said that adversity early in life shaped his father. In June 1944, the actor's first wife and two young children were killed when a pair of military bombers collided above Honolulu and crashed into their home below.
"Twelve people were killed and my father had to carry his daughter from the house," he said.
Kam Fong Chun said in a 1977 interview that he left the show because he felt the scripts were stale. The show's writers killed off his character. In that episode, his character's dying words were: "It was all worth it."
"We think those words sum up our father's life," Dennis Chun said. "It was a life that was worth it. A life that mattered."
There's not a straight American male between the ages of forty and dead who didn't plan his tv-viewing week around Hawaii Five-0. Godspeed, Kam Fong Chun.
NAPA BY RAIL:
The Antidote to Amtrak: The Napa Valley Wine Train (Ed Driscoll, October 31, 2002, Blogcritics)Imagine traveling in an elegant dining car, full of handsomely dressed passengers, sitting down to tables laid out with white linen, beautiful china and silverware, as you enjoy a meal of chicken prosciutto, baked and stuffed with layers of sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms and provolone cheese with sun dried tomatoes and wild mushroom sauce. Lush fields of California grapes slowly roll by at about ten miles an hour. A few cars ahead, a pair of champagne, burgundy and grapeleaf green Alco FPA-4 locomotives are cutting through the air with their classic blunt noses, with the odd belch of black smoke as a reminder of their turbocharged engines.Sound like something out of the 1950s, long since vanquished by generic Amtrak Amfleet cars that resemble airplane interiors serving "Amfood" of styrofoam hamburgers and Diet Cokes? Actually, it's a scene that's recreated everyday on the Napa Valley Wine Train.
That's almost worth violating the Time Zone Rule for...almost.
THE LAST BEST HOPE OF MAN ON EARTH:
Economy Races Ahead at 3 Pct. Pace (JEANNINE AVERSA, , Oct 31, 2002, Associated Press)The U.S. economy raced ahead at a 3.1 percent annual rate in the summer, powered by hearty consumer spending, especially on big-ticket items such as cars.
This at least takes the economy as an issue away from Democrats in the closing days of the campaign. Now if the Dow could just have three more good days...
Townhall.com has set up a special page for coverage of Election 2002.
PUMPKIN CHUCK:
Pumpkin cannon crew ready to go distance: Howell team warms up for world championship (Steve Pardo, 10/31/02, The Detroit News)The prizes are puny and the effort and expense great, but the chance to best his contemporaries and destroy perfectly good pumpkins keeps Bruce Bradford going.Bradford, the owner of S&G Erectors of Howell, will be among about 80 competitors competing this weekend in the 17th Annual Punkin Chunkin in Sussex County, Del. It is the fourth year in a row that Bradford, 55, and his team will compete in the event.
Armed with the nine-ton, 100-plus-foot long air cannon dubbed the Second Amendment, Bradford's contraption has finished third in the competition -- the world championship of pumpkin tossing -- the past two years and fifth in 1999. [...]Bradford says he'll keep entering the competition until he wins. But the real goal is to be the first team to shoot a pumpkin one mile -- a feat no one has been able to do in the competition. [...]
The competition started in 1986 with a couple of Delaware men jawing about, of all things, who could come up with a contraption that could hurl a pumpkin the farthest. That year, a pumpkin was shot 200 feet. The competition grew and now involves a host of categories including trebuchets, catapults and centrifugal force machines that spin a pumpkin before release. The machines sport names such as the Spooky Bazooky, the Jack-O-Splatter, the Gourd Thrasher and Chunkin Up. [...]
"The adage is, come rain, snow, wind or blow, the pumpkins are going to go," Shade said.
These guys are better armed than about 95% of the world's nations.
October 30, 2002
NORTH TO ALASKA:
THE GOLDEN BOUGH: Grant Hadwin got a chainsaw and did something terrible. (JOHN VAILLANT, 2002-10-28, The New Yorker)There was only one giant golden spruce in the world, and, until a man named Grant Hadwin took a chainsaw to it, in 1997, it had stood for more than three hundred years in a steadily shrinking patch of old-growth forest in Port Clements, on the banks of the Yakoun River, in the Queen Charlotte Islands. The Queen Charlottes, a blade-shaped archipelago that lies sixty miles off the northern coast of British Columbia and thirty miles south of the Alaskan coast, are one of a decreasing number of places in the Pacific Northwest where large stands of virgin coastal forest can still be found. Ecotourism is a growth industry here, and the golden spruce was a popular stop on visitors' itineraries. The tree was also sacred to the Haida Indians, two thousand of whom still live on the islands.[...]On the night of January 20, 1997, Grant Hadwin, then forty-seven, stripped off his clothes and plunged into the Yakoun River, towing a chainsaw behind him. The river was swift and the water was cold, but this was no problem for Hadwin, a self-described "extreme swimmer" who had alarmed local police in Whitehorse, Yukon, earlier that winter by spending a quarter of an hour in the Yukon River when the air temperature was thirty-five degrees below zero. The golden spruce was more than six feet in diameter, and Hadwin's chainsaw had only a twenty-five-inch bar, but Hadwin had worked in the timber industry for years, and he knew how to make falling cuts. Leaving just enough of the core intact so that the tree would stand until the next windstorm, he returned by ferry from the island to the mainland port town of Prince Rupert. Shortly afterward, copies of a letter he had drafted were received by Greenpeace, the Vancouver Sun, members of the Haida Nation, and MacMillan Bloedel, Canada's biggest lumber company, which had a timber lease on the land on which the golden spruce stood. The letter said, in part:
"I didn't enjoy butchering, this magnificent old plant, but you apparently need a message and wake-up call, that even a university trained professional, should be able to understand. . . . I mean this action, to be an expression, of my rage and hatred, towards university trained professionals and their extremist supporters, whose ideas, ethics, denials, part truths, attitudes, etc., appear to be responsible, for most of the abominations, towards amateur life on this planet."The golden spruce fell a couple of days later. Locally, the reaction was extraordinary. "It was like a drive-by shooting in a small town," one resident of the islands told me. "People were crying; they were in shock. They felt enormous guilt for not protecting the tree better." This was in part because, according to Haida legend, the golden spruce represented a person; and, later, a public memorial service for the tree, presided over by several Haida chiefs, was held "to mourn one of our ancestors." But beyond the mourning, some Haida, as well as residents of the mostly white logging community of Port Clements (where the tree had stood), wanted revenge.
Hadwin was located quickly by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and, after being charged and ordered to appear at the courthouse in Masset, which is close to the Queen Charlottes' two remaining Haida communities, he was released on his own recognizance. Hadwin, who was already known to-and suspicious of-the police, was offered no protection and did not request it. "They're making it as nasty as they possibly can," he told a reporter at the time. "They'll want me over there so the natives will have a shot. It would probably be suicide to go over there real quick."
Hadwin could have flown or taken a ferry from the mainland to Masset, but he chose instead to travel to court by kayak, leading people to believe that he was going to attempt a sixty-mile midwinter crossing of the notoriously dangerous Hecate Strait. In fact, Hadwin was last seen paddling north-bound, it seemed, for Alaska.
One would hope the Haida planted him.
THE WORLD OF QUENTIN:
Tarantino Behind the Camera in Beijing (RICK LYMAN, September 5, 2002, NY Times)Yohei Taneda, the production designer for the film's Asian sequences, tried to explain the look of the film and the experience of working with Mr. Tarantino. "There is a reality to 'Kill Bill,' but it is not the reality of the world," he said. "It is the reality of Quentin's world, and that is a somewhat different place. We are in Tokyo, we are in Okinawa, we are in a Chinese temple, but at all times, really we are in the world of Quentin."Essentially, "Kill Bill," which is being made by Miramax Films, is a revenge story--set in a pop-cultural blend of samurai movies, urban action flicks and spaghetti westerns. Ms. Thurman plays The Bride, awakening from a five-year coma to track down the man who put her there, Bill (David Carradine, star of the television series "Kung Fu"), her former boss and lover, and the band of female assassins who work for him (played by Lucy Liu, Viveca Fox and Darryl Hannah, among others).
Few movie-going experiences can possibly match seeing Reservoir Dogs at the Biograph in Chicago, the theater where Dillinger was gunned down in the midst of a gangster flick.
JERUSALEM AND ATHENS (continued):
The Dignity of Difference: Avoiding the Clash of Civilizations: The 2002 Templeton Lecture on Religion and World Affairs (Rabbi Professor Jonathan Sacks, May 21, 2002, FPRI Wire)
The Bible begins with two universal, fundamental statements. First, in Genesis 1, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness." In the ancient world it was not unknown for human beings to be in the image of God: that's what Mesopotamian kings and the Egyptian pharaoh were. The Bible was revolutionary for saying that every human being is in the image of God.The second epic statement is in Genesis 9, the covenant with Noah, the first covenant with all mankind, the first statement that God asks all humanity to construct societies based on the rule of law, the sovereignty of justice and the non-negotiable dignity of human life.
It is surely those two passages that inspire the words "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. . . ." The irony is that these truths are anything but self-evident. Plato or Aristotle wouldn't know what the words meant. Plato believed profoundly that human beings are created unequal, and Aristotle believed that some people are born to be free, other to be slaves.
These words are self-evident only in a culture saturated in the universal vision of the Bible. However, that vision is only the foundation. From then on, starting with Babel and the confusion of languages and God's call to Abraham, the Bible moves from the universal to the particular, from all mankind to one family. The Hebrew Bible is the first document in civilization to proclaim monotheism, that God is not only the God of this people and that place but of all people and every place. Why then does the Bible deliver an anti-Platonic, particularistic message from Genesis 12 onwards? The paradox is that the God of Abraham is the God of all mankind, but the faith of Abraham is not the faith of all mankind. [...]
My reading is this: that after the collapse of Babel, the first global project, God calls on one person, Abraham, one woman, Sarah, and says "Be different." In fact, the word "holy" in the Hebrew Bible, kadosh, actually means "different, distinctive, set apart." Why did God tell Abraham and Sarah to be different? To teach all of us the dignity of difference. That God is to be found in someone who is different from us. As the great rabbis observed some 1,800 years ago, when a human being makes many coins in the same mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same mint, in the same image, his own, and yet we all come out differently. The religious challenge is to find God's image in someone who is not in our image, in someone whose color is different, whose culture is different, who speaks a different language, tells a different story, and worships God in a different way.
This is a paradigm shift in understanding monotheism.[...]
[B]y turning to the Bible we arrive at a new paradigm, one that is neither universalism nor tribalism, but a third option, which I call the dignity of difference. This option values our shared humanity as the image of God, and creates that shared humanity in terms like the American Declaration of Independence or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it also values our differences, just as loving parents love all their children not for what makes them the same but for what makes each of them unique. That is what the Bible means when it calls God a parent. [...]
Nothing has proved harder in civilization than seeing God or good or dignity in those unlike ourselves. There are surely many ways of arriving at that generosity of spirit, and each faith may need to find its own way. I propose that the truth at the heart of monotheism is that God is greater than religion, that he is only partially comprehended by any one faith. He is my God, but he is also your God. That is not to say that there are many gods: that is polytheism. And it is not to say that God endorses every act done in his name: a God of yours and mine must be a God of justice standing above both of us, teaching us to make space for one another, to hear one another's claims, and to resolve them equitably. Only such a God would be truly transcendent. Only such a God could teach mankind to make peace other than by conquest or conversion and as something nobler than practical necessity.
What would such a faith be like? It would be like being secure in my own home and yet moved by the beauty of a foreign place knowing that while it is not my home, it is still part of the glory of the world that is ours. It would be knowing that we are sentences in the story of our people but that there are other stories, each written by God out of the letters of lives bound together in community. Those who are confident of their faith are not threatened but enlarged by the different faiths of others. In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need now the confidence to recognize the irreducible, glorious dignity of difference.
The power of Mr. Kraynak's critique is likewise evident when applied to this lecture, as Rabbi Sacks lets his own argument slip away from him and devolve into nonsense. Having noted that the Declaration is a function of Judeo-Christian universalism, he then makes the mistake of arguing that the principles of the latter are accessible to everyone without being saturated in the former. He is asking that every human being treat every other in the political sphere as though they were created in the image of God, without their first accepting the religious belief that leads to this point. This dilemma is what Mr. Kraynak means when he says that modern liberal democracy requires God. And if this correct, as I believe it to be, then conversion, conflict, or some kind of massive reformation of the non-Judeo-Christian religions is precisely what is required before Man can realize the kind of universalist political state that the Rabbi desires.
FROM MERCURY AND MARS:
Orson Welles's Hoax of the Century: The Halloween Broadcast of 1938 (Mr. Beres, 10-28-02, History News Network)Today, photos sent back to earth by space probes show Mars to be a lifeless, benign planet. Back in '38, Americans, not yet weaned from comic strips like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, were emerging from the Great Depression with a high anxiety level. There also were rumblings that a Herr Hitler in Germany was plotting world conquest. It was a time ripe for paranoia. A five-year-old, I saw those fears emerge in adults around me as The War of the Worlds, a book by H.G. Wells, was dramatized by Orson Welles on a popular weekly radio program, "The Mercury Theatre."At our home in Illinois, Mom had tuned in on our Zenith radio set. She either had not paid attention when the announcer gave early disclaimers that "this is fiction," or like many others, had tuned in too late to hear them. I can't remember the broadcast. What I do remember is Mom suddenly leaving her chair to go to the radio, which she clutched with both hands. Then she swooped me up, and ran to the phone.
We seem to be living in an environment today where an updated version of this kind of hoax would find fertile emotional soil.
THE DOG THAT DIDN'T BARK:
Fresh Air (Terry Gross, October 28, 2002, NPR)Novelist Tim LahayeNovelist Tim Lahaye is the co-author of the popular Left Behind series. The books are apocalyptic Christian thrillers. The tenth and latest book is The Remnant, which debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Lahaye is also the former co-chairman of Jack Kemp's presidential campaign, was on the original board of directors of the Moral Majority and was an organizer of the Council for National Policy which has been called "the most powerful conservative organization in America you've never heard of."
Journalist Gershom Gorenberg
Journalist Gershom Gorenberg is an associate editor and columnist for The Jerusalem Report and a regular contributor to The New Republic. He's the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount
This was a fascinating, though odd, hour of radio, well worth your listening. In the first half hour, Ms Gross could barely contain her skepticism, even contempt, while Mr. LaHaye politely and earnestly answered her every bewildered question. Towards the end of the interview there's a hiilarious moment when Mr. LaHaye tells her about stopping the Dalai Lama in a hallway and asking him if he knows the story of Jesus Christ. You can as easily imagine the look of horror on her face as you can imagine her Volvo with the "Free Tibet" bumper sticker.
JERUSALEM AND ATHENS:
Faith and Reason: Father Ernest Fortin, 1923-2002 (Werner J. Dannhauser, 11/04/2002, Weekly Standard)
At the Sorbonne, he met a fellow student and fellow American, Allan Bloom, "the guy who made things come to life for me." (Back in the 1960s, Bloom told me about Fortin, describing him as a "man to whom you can talk about everything" and introducing us, so that I was blessed with Ernest Fortin's friendship for almost forty years.) In the course of their friendship, Bloom, in his typical fashion, asked, "Ernest, how come you know so little about politics?" The question hit home and spurred Fortin on to become a deep student of politics and political philosophy. Perhaps the greatest good Bloom conferred was to tell Fortin about Leo Strauss and then introduce the men to each other. Strauss later called Fortin "the most educated priest he had ever met." Fortin, in turn, studied at Chicago and became a self-described Straussian.A Straussian theologian may seem a contradiction, but the example of Ernest Fortin demands that one deal with the phenomenon rather than dismiss it. Fortin identified four themes that form the "warp and woof" of his own work. They are (1) the "Jerusalem and Athens" tension between revealed religion and philosophy; (2) the centrality of political philosophy to philosophy and ultimately to human life; (3) the practice of "esoteric writing" or noble lies among philosophers; and (4) the distinction between ancient and modern philosophy, the latter being inaugurated by Machiavelli. These four themes are, and not by chance, also the main themes of the work of Leo Strauss. [...]
Fortin was a Straussian--which means, among other things, that he took "Jerusalem and Athens" as one of the themes of his work, and that no possibility of a synthesis exists. Well, then, which side was he on? Fortin thought of the argument between faith and reason as a standoff, and of the tension between Jerusalem and Athens as being a fruitful source of Western civilization's extraordinary vitality. Affirming the tension, and embodying it, he would seem to be on both sides. Alas, that tempting answer to the question raises further questions. If one internalizes the tension between faith and reason, then what happens to the Christian ideal of peace of soul? I am not sure, but I surmise that on the deepest level, in the last analysis, Ernest Fortin was a practicing and believing Christian, a man of faith. The man of reason doubts what he can and believes what he must. The man of faith believes what he can and doubts what he must. The gap between them is as deep as it is narrow
Mike Daley sent us a link to that essay, about the recently deceased Father Fortin, who I confess I'd not previously heard of. But in doing some more research on him I found a very nice statement by Harry Jaffa about Straussianism. It seems to have some bearing on the Boy Scouts, Atheism, and Morality discussion we were having below:
In my lecture I had taken my bearings in part from Strauss's assertions concerning the insolubility of the opposition between revelation and reason--Jerusalem and Athens--as to the highest principle of human life. I had also taken my bearings from Strauss's assertion that, according to Aristotle, the ends of the city--that is, of political life as such--are the ends of the moral virtues.And I had noted Strauss's pronouncement that notwithstanding their theoretical disagreement as to the end or ends served by the moral virtues, revelation and reason had agreed substantially on what in practice morality was. And I had taken my bearings further from Strauss's assertion that the very life of western civilization depended upon the continuing dialogue--the eternal dialogue--between revelation and reason.
But both the continuity and the beneficence of this dialogue depended upon it remaining theoretical, with neither side demanding--or being entrusted with - political power with respect to the conduct of the dialogue between them. In the post-classical world, government by sectarian religious authority - or by sectarian philosophic authority (as in the case of Marxist-Leninist regimes) - were equally tyrannical and equally abhorrent.
From this perspective, the intention of the American Founding, with its separation of church and state, its guarantee of the free exercise of religion, and of freedom of speech and of the press, could be seen, not as a lowering of the goals of political life, but as an emancipation of man's highest aspirations for truth, from the tyranny of the political passions. In this sense it could be seen as the best regime of western civilization. However, this regime was endangered from the outset (notably in the slavery controversy), and continues to be endangered, by the moral relativism, culminating in nihilism, of modern philosophy.
Strauss's critique of modern philosophy, as it seemed to me, was directed above all towards overcoming what he often called the self-destruction of reason, so that the authority equally of classical philosophy and the Bible, with respect to virtue and morality, might be restored. This restoration, I am convinced, is also nothing less than the restoration of the perspective of the American Founding.
Regular readers will please forgive me for citing once again my favorite professor, Robert Kraynak, who, though he apparently studied with the Straussians, offers the most coherent and devastating statement of the inadequacy of democracy and of philosophy for creating a decent society that you're ever likely to find in his terrific book: Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World.
MORE:
OBIT: Rev. Ernest Fortin, BC philosophy professor (Emma Stickgold, 10/25/2002, Boston Globe)
Father Fortin (Aric Anderson)
ESSAY: FROM RERUM NOVARUM TO CENTESIMUS ANNUS: CONTINUITY OR DISCONTINUITY? (Ernest L. Fortin, EWTN)
LECTURE: Saint Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition (Ernest L. Fortin, The Saint Augustine Lecture 1971, Villanova University)
LETTER: The Homosexual Movement (A Response by the Ramsey Colloquium, March 1994, First Things)
LETTER: The Inhuman Use of Human Beings: A Statement on Embryo Research by the Ramsey Colloquium (First Things, January 1995)
ESSAY: Ernest Fortin's Teaching for Catholics (Walter J Nicgorski, Claremont Institute)
ESSAY: What Does Ernest Fortin Have to Say to Political Philosophers? (Douglas Kries, August 26, 2002, The Claremont Institute)
Rethinking the Foundations of Religious Freedom: Fr. Fortin, The Bible, and the Separation of Church and State in America (V. Phillip Muñoz, August 26, 2002, The Claremont Institute)
ESSAY: Leo Strauss, the Bible, and Political Philosophy (Harry V. Jaffa, February 13, 1998, The Claremont Institute)
REVIEW: of Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays. Edited by J. Brian Benestad (Patrick G. D. Riley, First Things)
REVIEW: of Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays. Edited by J. Brian Benestad (Patrick G. D. Riley, Thomist)
HAIL TO THE CHIEF?:
If elected, Mondale will benefit from rules change (The Hill, 10/30/02)If former Vice President Walter Mondale is elected to succeed the late Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.), he won’t come back as just another senator.Even though he would still be junior to his former aide, freshman Democrat Mark Dayton, Mondale would benefit from a change in Senate rules ordered by the Senate in 1977 to honor his political mentor, the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey (D).
Under a standing order of the Senate, Mondale would become deputy president pro tem.
That would put Mr. Mondale four heartbeats away from the presidency, assuming Robert Byrd were to pass on to his reward prior to a terrorist attack that took out President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Speaker Hastert. Such an eventuality used to seem the stuff of Fletcher Knebel potboiler fiction, but these days who'd even blink?
A CASE IN POINT:
A New View of Our Universe: Only One of Many (DENNIS OVERBYE, October 29, 2002, NY Times)The prospect of this plethora of universes has brought new attention to a philosophical debate that has lurked on the edges of science for the last few decades, a debate over the role of life in the universe and whether its physical laws are unique--or, as Einstein once put it, "whether God had any choice."Sprinkled through the Standard Model, the suite of equations that describe all natural phenomena, are various mysterious constants, like the speed of light or the masses of the elementary particles, whose value is not specified by any theory now known.
In effect, the knobs on nature's console have been set to these numbers. Scientists can imagine twiddling them, but it turns out that nature is surprisingly finicky, they say, and only a narrow range of settings is suitable for the evolution of complexity or Life as We Know It.
For example, much of the carbon and oxygen needed for life is produced by the fusion of helium atoms in stars called red giants.
But a change of only half a percent in the strength of the so-called strong force that governs nuclear structure would be enough to prevent those reactions from occurring, according to recent work by Dr. Heinz Oberhummer of Vienna University of Technology. The result would be a dearth of the raw materials of biology, he said.
Similarly, a number known as the fine structure constant characterizes the strength of electromagnetic forces. If it were a little larger, astronomers say, stars could not burn, and if it were only a little smaller, molecules would never form.
In 1974, Dr. Brandon Carter, a theoretical physicist then at Cambridge, now at the Paris Observatory in Meudon, pointed out that these coincidences were not just luck, but were rather necessary preconditions for us to be looking at the universe.
After all, we are hardly likely to discover laws that are incompatible with our own existence.
That insight is the basis of what Dr. Carter called the anthropic principle, an idea that means many things to many scientists. Expressed most emphatically, it declares that the universe is somehow designed for life. Or as the physicist Freeman Dyson once put it, "The universe in some sense must have known that we were coming."
This notion horrifies some physicists, who feel it is their mission to find a mathematical explanation of nature that leaves nothing to chance or "the whim of the Creator," in Einstein's phrase.
Here's an example that nicely illustrates yesterday's quote of the day, with scientists driven less by a dispassionate and objective search for "truth" than by personal distaste for religion. At some point, their ideological mission has to warp their theories and lead others to accept them no matter how dubious.
WAVING THE BLOODY SHIRT:
Republicans decry service as partisan (Kavita Kumar, Dane Smith and Patricia Lopez, 10/30/02, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)A speech by Rick Kahn, one of Wellstone's closest friends, shifted the tone of the event from memorial service to full-throated, foot-stomping, fist-pumping political rally.He urged the crowd to "stand up for all the people he fought for . . . for working men and women . . . for all those who lack the strength to stand up on their own." His words brought thousands to their feet.
TV cameras then panned to a beaming Walter Mondale, Wellstone's likely replacement in the U.S. Senate race, which brought more cheers.
"If Paul Wellstone's legacy comes to an end, then our spirits will be crushed and we will drown in a river of tears," a clearly emotional Kahn said.
"We are begging you, do not let that happen. We are begging you to help us win this Senate election for Paul Wellstone."
In a move that brought gasps of delight from some and stony silence from a few, Kahn then began urging select Republicans to drop their partisanship and work for Wellstone's replacement.
He singled out some by name. To U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad, R-Minn., Kahn said, "You know that Paul loved you. He needs you now. . . . Help us win this race."
Afterward, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, said that Kahn was swept away by emotion and that Republicans should understand and not get angry.
Out of respect for the wishes of the Wellstone family and the Democrat Party we too will abjure decency and treat the Senator's death as a purely partisan matter. In that regard, while we regret the manner of his departure, we would note that on the day he died the prospects for human freedom were improved in America and the world.
THE BEST DEFENSE:
N.Korea demands aid and apology from Tokyo (Straits Times, 10/30/02)North Korea demanded that Japan apologise and pay for its past colonial domination as the two sides met on Wednesday for a final day of talks overshadowed by Pyongyang's refusal to end its nuclear weapons programme.Signs were surfacing that tempers were becoming frayed during the first attempt in two years to normalise diplomatic ties between the historic foes, with each side pursuing a totally different agenda and North Korea warning that it was running out of patience.
Japan wants to concentrate on the nuclear issue and North Korea's abduction years ago of at least 13 Japanese citizens to help its spies perfect their cover.
Pyongyang, on the other hand, wants to talk about an apology from Tokyo for its colonisation of the Korean Peninsula from 1910-1945 and its demand for financial atonement. [...]
Roving ambassador Jong Thae Hwa said: 'Historically speaking, it is clear that Japan should apologise to the Korean people and compensate for our mental and physical suffering and damage.'
The impoverished communist state is seeking as much as US$10 billion (S$17.7 billion) from Japan.
One can hardly wait for Jimmy Carter to find a way to blame this animus on the United States.
WHEN 20% = CONSERVATIVE HEGEMONY:
Young black adults identify less with Democratic Party (Associated Press, 0/29/2002)Younger black adults are increasingly more politically independent and less likely to identify themselves as members of the Democratic Party, says a new poll that suggests overall support among blacks for Democrats over Republicans is still strong."It's different from voting preferences," said David Bositis, a pollster and senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "In terms of partisan identification, there has been a decline among younger black adults; they tend to be more independent." [...]
The shift in the numbers who consider themselves Democrats could have long-term implications, however, said Bositis.
"This is something the Democrats have to pay attention to," said Bositis. "Ten years from now, 15 years from now, they will be at the prime age for voting, if Democrats don't work to get their loyalty, they might have to worry about that in the future."
Among blacks, 39% approved of the job being done by President Bush, and just over half viewed him favorably.
George W. Bush got less than 10% of the black vote in 2000. If he could double that, which means getting just half of those who approve of the job he's doing to vote for him, it would go a long way toward recreating the conservative majority that ruled America until 1932.
DANGER, DEAR DONALD, DIVINE DOWD DULY DEFENDS DEFENSE, DEFTLY:
Rummy Runs Rampant (MAUREEN DOWD, October 30, 2002 NY Times)Donald Rumsfeld has become redolent of Donald Regan, the forceful and brusque Reagan chief of staff who had trouble remembering who was president. [...]First, he and his brainy advisers, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, set up their own State Department within the Defense Department, designing a more grandiose and aggressive foreign policy that can be summarized: "We're No. 1. We like it that way. And we're going to keep it that way."
Then they set up their own Defense Department within the Defense Department, staging a civilian coup and yanking back power from a military establishment they felt had grown too skittish about risking troops in combat.
A Maureen Dowd defense of the military's prerogatives is by definition unserious, but that last sentence is just absurd. Note the assumption that the military and not civilians should be in control of the Defense Department, an idea that would have startled the Framers, to say the least.
WAR IN THE SHADOWS:
New Status For Embryos In Research (Rick Weiss, October 30, 2002, Washington Post)The Bush administration has revamped the charter of the federal advisory committee that addresses the safety of research volunteers, stating for the first time that embryos in experiments are "human subjects" whose welfare should be considered along with that of fetuses, children and adults.The addition of human embryos to the committee's charge -- completed at the beginning of October but not yet posted on the federal Web site that lists such committees -- marks the latest effort by the administration to bring the unborn under the umbrella of federal health protections. In September the administration enacted a new policy that extends certain health benefits to fetuses.
And so continues the groundwork for an eventual Court decision that there are two coequal, or nearly so, individuals whose rights are at stake in the abortion decision.
October 29, 2002
ON THE OTHER HAND:
STOCKS COLLAPSE IN 16,410,030-SHARE DAY, BUT RALLY AT CLOSE CHEERS BROKERS; BANKERS OPTIMISTIC, TO CONTINUE AID (NY Times, October 30, 1929)From every point of view, in the extent of losses sustained, in total turnover, in the number of speculators wiped out, the day was the most disastrous in Wall Street's history. Hysteria swept the country and stocks went overboard for just what they would bring at forced sale.
Thus began seventy awful years.
SAFER THAN WHAT?:
AIDS event had nude porn star, 2 say (Tim O'Neil, 10/29/2002, St. Louis Post-Dispatch)A gay-porn movie actor stripped and engaged in sexual contact with guests during a "safer sex" event sponsored by a local AIDS agency, which paid for his appearance with federal money, two former agency employees said Monday.The St. Louis Health Department last week acknowledged that it was investigating the spending of a federal grant by Blacks Assisting Blacks Against AIDS, known as BABAA. A lawyer for the group said it paid $500 to Edgar Gaines to speak to a gathering that was held July 20 in the downtown residence of Erise Williams Jr., its executive director.
Ah, our tax dollars at work...
DURING THE FUNERAL?:
DFL files suit over ballot questions (Michael Khoo, October 29, 2002, Minnesota Public Radio)As thousands of Minnesotans mourn the passing of DFL Sen. Paul Wellstone, legal challenges have already been filed over how to process absentee ballots bearing his name. DFL officials said Tuesday that guidelines laid out by Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer and Attorney General Mike Hatch could disenfranchise thousands of voters -- and they're asking the state Supreme Court to intervene. Hours later, state Republicans sought permission to weigh in on the legal battle.
So much for keeping the politics out of it until the bodies are buried.
HEALTHY PESSIMISM:
Bush has highest approval before his first midterm election of any president in 50 years (The Associated Press, 10/29/02)Republicans entered the last week before elections buoyed by a GOP leader with the highest job approval ratings in half a century for a president entering his first midterm elections, according to a new poll.President Bush had a job approval of 67 percent headed into the midterm elections, according to the ABC News poll, which is slightly better than the 61 percent job approval President Eisenhower had in the Gallup poll before the 1954 midterm elections.
So, that sounds great, right? Well, consider this: in that 1954 midterm the GOP, with a popular Ike, lost control of both houses of Congress, losing one Senate seat and 18 House seats. One assumes that Republicans won't lose that many House seats, but they don't have that big a margin of error and they would actually need to pick up Senate seats to take control there. Three months ago that at least seemed like a remote possibility--because Bob Torricelli (NJ) and Paul Wellstone would likely both have lost--but now it looks like the Democrats will gain a seat or two instead (AR & CO look like sure pick ups [with NH, NC, & TN in danger] whereas the GOP has no comparably likely gains). In sum, keeping the House would mark a victory of historic proportions, as would just breaking even in the Senate races.
UNINTENTIONAL (PRESUMABLY) HILARITY:
Neohawks: Leftists Who Love the War Too Much (Richard Goldstein, October 30 - November 5, 2002, Village Voice)When Osama bin Laden predicted that America would become a hell for its people, he was speaking from a deep understanding of freedom's fragility. Even a victorious war could produce the conditions that fulfill his dream. The great strength of the left is its analysis of social dynamics. To jettison this knowledge, along with the lessons of recent history, is to invite the worst possible future.This is not a brief for pacifism. There are times when war is necessary, and, in the media at least, there is a real debate about whether this is such a moment. The discussion isn't being led by chastened radicals but by mainstream liberals. The best arguments against invading Iraq can be found in The New York Times. Here you will discover an alternative to both Noam Chomsky and the Bush doctrine-a policy based on cooperative engagement and domestic defense.
It's not all as hilarious as that, but it's close. Of course, nothing could ever match Mr. Goldstein's depiction of Osama having a "deep understanding of freedom's fragility". You'd think if he understood it all he might be alive today, his gang wouldn't be in tatters, and Islamic dictators wouldn't be an endangered species.
JAPAN'S SELF-RESTRAINT:
The View From The Other Ground Zero (Doug Struck, October 28, 2002, Washington Post)The awful fireball that engulfed Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, introducing the atomic age with a mushroom cloud, has for decades propelled the leaders of that southern Japanese city to preach against nuclear weapons.Hiroshima's current mayor has taken the role a step further. At his annual speech at the anniversary of the bombing, Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba made international headlines with his biting criticism of American foreign policy and, by implication, its war on terrorism.
"The United States government has no right to force 'Pax Americana' on us, or to unilaterally determine the fate of the world," Akiba declared. The speech has brought a torrent of reaction -- most of it positive, he says -- in Japan, and a chill from the United States. [...]
His sharp critique of America is uncharacteristic of Japan's polite society, and despite the support for his remarks, the mayor says he has felt the weight of disapproval from some countrymen.
"I didn't realize that the pressure not to criticize America was so strong," he acknowledges. "In Japanese society, where restraining oneself is a virtue, there is a strong tendency to restrain from criticizing the United States."
Tell it to the people of Nanking.
DEMOCRAHOMOPHOBIA:
RUDY'S GAY ROOMIES AT ISSUE IN S.C. RACE (VINCENT MORRIS, October 29, 2002, NY Post)The Democratic Senate candidate in South Carolina has taken a swipe at Rudy Giuliani's decision to shack up with two gay men after he moved out of Gracie Mansion.Alex Sanders hit Giuliani during a debate with Republican candidate Lindsey Graham - who's been endorsed by Giuliani - as the two sparred over who's the most liberal.
"[Giuliani's] an ultra-liberal," Sanders huffed. "His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don't think so."
From Montana to Carolina, it's the Democrats vs. gays...and nary a protest is heard.
BABY, MEET BATHWATER:
Ghost of postmodernism haunts the corridors of literature yet: Pity the poor HSC students burdened with an intellectual fad (Richard Glover, October 26 2002, Sydney Morning Herald)The creators of the new HSC English course are enormously keen that students understand that art is a by-product of a particular time and place. What a shame they've never come to the same realisation about their own postmodernism.King Lear and Hamlet are still studied, but alongside Clueless, Blade Runner, a newspaper ad and a political website. A bus ticket is as valuable a text as Chaucer. And each and every one of them is a mere artefact of its time. [...]
Perhaps we need to establish more than one subject. In Practical Literacy students could study Blade Runner and Frontline, and practise writing letters to the editor and composing advertising copy.
Meanwhile, across the hall, there could be space for an obscure subject called English Literature, committed to the notion that some writers can clamber from the mud of their own time, sufficient to be heard centuries later. And that some readers - performing the same heroic struggle - can pretty much hear them. It would be a subject that understands that the play between history and human volition, between the artist and society, is more complex than intellectual fads might allow.
Since it first infected the universities, postmodernism has taken close to 30 years to finally work its way down to the school system. If the history of such movements is anything to go by, its grip on the campus must be nearly exhausted. Give it five years and it will be as daggy as positivism, Marxism, social Darwinism or any of the other trends which have swept through the academy in the past century or so.
But what's the bet the poor students, having got it 30 years late, will be left holding the corpse, years after everyone else has moved on?
While I yield to no one in my contempt for post-modernism, one wonders if Mr. Glover doesn't go too far here: Clueless and Blade Runner seem to be entirely appropriate subjects for study, provided that they aren't replacements for the classics, Emma and Frankenstein, from which they are derived. If nothing else, these modern versions show that the original authors are truly timeless and that, not only can a text communicate coherent and consistently accessible ideas in its own time, but can continue to do so for centuries. The ad and the website, on the other hand, have to go.
YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY:
Accidental fisherman reels in record-breaking salmon (Associated Press, October 28, 2002)Grant Martinsen's fish tale is a whopper.The accidental fisherman reeled in a chinook salmon that weighed 71.5 pounds, a full 8.5 pounds more than the all-time record for fly-fishers. [...]
"It rattled my rod and shook its head," he said. "I thought, 'This is a good fish."' Martinsen pulled his two small anchors into the boat and let the fish tow him around. Then the chinook breached more like a whale than a salmon.
"He jumped halfway out of the water with his face pointed toward me," Martinsen said. "You see something like that and it scares you."
Fish that size have to caused by global warming--we want more....
EVERMIND:
Kurt Cobain Meets Jesus Christ: The Lifehouse package. (Mark Joseph, October 25, 2002, National Review)It's an open secret that mainstream rock is now flooded with devout Christians. From Lenny Kravitz (who sports a tattoo that declares "My Heart Belongs To Jesus Christ") to rap-rockers P.O.D. to the crowd-pleasing Creed — as well as a new generation of artists like Sixpence None the Richer, Dashboard Confessional, Nickel Creek, Blindside, Chevelle, and Pedro the Lion — young and devout Christians who once had politely confined themselves to the Christian rock industry have now joined the cultural mainstream. (When Lifehouse's "Hanging On A Moment" became 2001's hottest single, most fans probably didn't realize they were listening to a song that had first been played at the Malibu Vineyard.)Wade is not from Seattle, but it's impossible to listen to the band's sophomore record, Stanley Climbfall, and not think of the enormous cultural impact Kurt Cobain has had. Cobain died when Wade was in his early teens; nevertheless, musically anyway, he is Cobain-haunted. Which is a nice counter-balance — since, lyrically, he is clearly Christ-haunted. One could do worse than to have one's music described as a cross between Jesus Christ and Kurt Cobain.
Wade's voice is often compared to those of Scott Stapp of Creed or Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam. But it is Cobain that truly informs his music. The growl is unmistakably Cobain, and so are the flashes of rage, which seem to leap off the record. Both certainly had things to be angry about. Cobain had had a Ritalin-ridden, rootless childhood, and faced a hopeless future. Wade had to face hypocrisy — in the form of both the divorce of his missionary parents and the reactions of fellow believers to his father's fall from grace.
Still, listening to Stanley Climbfall, one can't help wishing Cobain had tapped into the power Wade has found in his faith in God. That faith is no guarantee that bad things will never happen, of course. But listening to Lifehouse's music, one realizes that, while never fully erasing the pain of life, it nonetheless can help to soothe the wounded and allow them to go on. Yes, Stanley Climbfall is about pain — but it's a pain that has been enveloped in the kind of hope Cobain never found.
Mr. Joseph left out one of my favorites: Ben Harper.
THIRD-RATE ROMANCE, LOW-RENT RENDEZVOUS:
Man accused of having sex with chicken (Pet Abuse, 05/30/2001)After chicken feathers and blood were found all over a room at Valparaiso Motel on Monday, Valparaiso police were called to investigate.The room was found to have been rented Sunday night to Michael Bessigano, a 30-year-old Valparaiso man with a history of harming and having sex with animals. Police questioned Bessigano on Tuesday, and police said he admitted he had sex with a chicken. Bessigano was booked into Porter County Jail on a felony animal cruelty charge. Because this is the third crime against animals he's been charged with, he also is being charged as a habitual offender, said Chief Deputy Prosecutor Brian Gensel. He faces up to 7 1/2 years in prison if convicted of both charges.
Charles Murtaugh recently eschewed profanity, apparently out of deference to my delicate sensibilities, so, to repay the kindness and demonstrate a similar flexibility, I thought I'd tell a risque joke that a story similar to this--which they were discussing on Imus this morning on Monday--reminded me of:
A pilot is shot down over Greece in WWII and some shepherds agree to hide him overnight.So they're all sitting around the campfire and the pilot says: "I gotta ask you guys something. All my life I've heard about how you guys have sex with your sheep and how great it is, because of the lanolin or whatever. Do you really do it?"
They all laugh and tell him: "No, no, no...don't be silly."
But later on he notices that every once in a while someone will sneak away from the fire and when they come back the other shepherds joke with them. So the pilot says to himself: They are scrumping those sheep and they just don't want to share. They're making a fool of me.
So he too sneaks down to the flock, picks out a sheep and shags it.
But when he gets back to the camp the shepherds are all laughing hysterically and pointing at him. So he says: "You guys were telling the truth weren't you? You don't really have sex with sheep?"
When one of the shepherds can catch his breath he says: "Of course we have sex with them--it's awesome."
Pilot: "Then what's so funny?"
Shepherd: "You picked the ugliest one."
NO BADGE FOR ANALOGIZING:
Atheist Scout fights decision to boot him (Marsha King, October 29, 2002, Seattle Times)The Chief Seattle Council of the Boy Scouts has given Eagle Scout Darrell Lambert about a week to decide "in his heart" if he's truly an atheist. If he insists on sticking to his belief that there is no God, the Council will terminate his membership."No way" is he going to change his beliefs, says Lambert, who has been in scouting since he was 9 years old. "It'd be like me asking them to change their belief."
Actually, it's nothing like that, son. It's like them telling you that you have to share their beliefs if you want to be a member of their group.
PASS THE TURKEY:
At the gates of Europe (Adar Primor, October 29, 2002, Ha'aretz)Europe's leaders met at the end of last week for a summit focused on expanding the European Union. As expected, Turkey was left out--again. Not only wasn't the subject of Turkey's candidacy discussed by the leaders, they didn't even set a target date for opening talks about Turkey joining the EU.For more than 40 years Turkey has been knocking on Europe's gates. Conversations with Volkan Vural, Turkey's Secretary General for European Affairs and other senior officials in Ankara, as well as at the European Commission, shows just how emotional both sides have become about the matter.
This is a colossal mistake by the Europeans and the United States should take advantage of it. Turkey likely has a brighter future than Europe does and we should ask the Turks to join us, Israel, and India in a new alliance for the 21st Century.
DISHONORING HIS MEMORY:
Wellstone Family Bars Cheney from Memorial (NewsMax, Oct. 29, 2002)The family of political "nice-guy" Sen. Paul Wellstone has said they don't want Vice President Dick Cheney to attend a memorial service for the late liberal Democrat scheduled for Tuesday night, a White House spokesman confirmed late Monday, with a Wellstone campaign spokesman hinting the service will double as a campaign rally."The [Wellstone] family was appreciative [of Cheney's offer]," White House spokesman Scott Stanzel told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, confirming that Cheney's offer to attend was rebuffed in conversations with family members.
"Asked if that meant the Wellstone family did not want Cheney to come, he said that was correct," the Star-Tribune said. [...]
Wellstone campaign spokesman Allison Dobson hinted that Cheney was also disinvited because the memorial service will double as a campaign rally for former Vice President Mondale, Wellstone's chosen successor.
This is the most vile kind of politicization of the Senator's death. He was after all a United States Senator, not just a senator for the Democrats. Imagine the uproar if Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter were to be asked not to attend Ronald Reagan's memorial service?
VOLUNTARY INDENTURED SERVITUDE:
New agency to dole out doctors: Romanow-ordered report recommends national co-ordination (Mark Kennedy, October 29, 2002, The Ottawa Citizen)Canada needs a new national agency to co-ordinate how many doctors and nurses the health system should have and perhaps the type of work they should do, says a report commissioned by the Romanow commission.The proposed new agency would become a "quality council" for how medicare is staffed and provide some "focus and expertise" on key decisions that are now made by different governments throughout the country. [...]
The report adds that everyone involved in the current system will have to make compromises if the situation is to change.
"This will take leadership from governments and from the organizations representing Canada's health professionals.
Wouldn't want doctors making their own decisions would we? This should at least help to alleviate America's shortage of doctors and nurses, because the Canadians will be headed here by the truckload.
QOTD:
(Quote of the Day, 29 Oct 2002, The Philosophers' Magazine)Scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.
-Alfred North Whitehead, The Function of Reason
And it is the improbability of being truly purposeless that calls into question much that they do.
RES IPSA LOQUITOR:
WAS PAUL WELLSTONE MURDERED? (Michael I. Niman, October 28, 2002, AlterNet)There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.
When Richard Mellon Scaife, the Reverend Jerry Falwell and others raised similar concerns about the death of Clinton crony Vince Foster, who was after all shot in the head, they were portrayed as raving lunatics. But the even more ridiculous notion that Senator Wellstone was murdered--which has already gained surprising traction, as witness this article--has evoked no similar declarations of lunacy.
ON NPR OF ALL PLACES:
The Rules (Joe Wright, 10/28/02, NPR's All Things Considered)Commentator Joe Wright went to an experimental school when he was a child. At first, they had no rules, but as time went on, the instructors needed to add rules so that things didn't get out of hand. When he was older, he moved to San Francisco, where there were lots of adults who were trying to get rid of rules. But Joe found that sometimes you need rules -- not a lot, just a few. (4:00 minutes)
This is an audio file of an exceptionally good commentary by a first year Harvard Medical School student about how his experiences in a free form school and among gay men in San Francisco convinced him of the need for rules. I'm too slow to get the exact quote but towards the end he notes that Europe has tons of rules, so no one follows any, while America has fairly few, so we take them seriously. That's a striking insight, one that relates directly to the counterintuitive fact that the more government we have built up the more lawless our behavior has become.
October 28, 2002
HEY, RIDLEY:
Yeager makes last military flight during air show (Leigh Anne Bierstine, 10/28/02, Air Force Flight Test Center Public Affairs)Aviation legend and retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager gave the F-15 Eagle one last ride Oct. 26, bringing his 60-year career flying military aircraft to a close in front of thousands of fans at the open house and air show here.Yeager, with Edwards test pilot Lt. Col. Troy Fontaine in the back seat, opened the event by climbing to just over 30,000 feet and impressed the crowd with his infamous sonic boom. Yeager first broke the sound barrier at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., in October 1947 when he accelerated his rocket-powered Bell X-1 to the speed of Mach 1.06 and shattered the myth of the sound barrier forever.
The crowd hushed as Yeager landed and taxied under an archway of water gushing from two Edwards fire trucks per Air Force tradition. For his final military flight, Yeager was accompanied in the air with longtime friend and colleague retired Maj. Gen. Joe Engle flying his own F-15. The two legendary test pilots have been flying together for decades. [...]
When asked about his favorite aircraft, Yeager said it depends on what a pilot needs the aircraft to do.
"I want the one that kills the best with the least amount of risk to me," said Yeager. "That's the facts of life and that's why you wear the uniform."
The eagle has landed.
IN WHICH WE FIND THE ANSWER TO THE QUESTION:
Why is America the only industrialized nation without National Health?
Casualty patients 'wait up to three days' (Nicole Martin, 29/10/2002, Daily Telegraph)
Patients are waiting up to three-and-a-half days in casualty departments before they are admitted or discharged, despite Government claims that waits of more than 24 hours have been eliminated, say doctors' leaders.The British Medical Association yesterday said the Department of Health was deceiving taxpayers with "overly optimistic" results on waiting times. The findings in its BMA survey were "unacceptable".
Patients in one in five casualty departments were waiting more than a day and one in three reported waits of more than 12 hours, said the survey of 160 casualty consultants. The doctors represented 40 per cent of Britain's accident and emergency departments. The longest wait was 84 hours at an unnamed hospital.
FRITZ WHO?:
Washington Wrap: Minnesota Update (CBS News, 10/28/02)A Republican tracking poll done over the weekend shows a hypothetical race between Republican Norm Coleman and Democrat Walter Mondale at 43 percent for Coleman and 45 percent for Mondale.
Mondale has to be heavily favored and internal polls often tell candidates what they want to hear, but it's shocking that Mr. Mondale isn't polling over 50% either here or in another internal poll that Mort Kondracke mentioned on FOX News Special Report--I think he said it was for the Senate Republicans.
IT'S ALWAYS DARKEST BEFORE THE DAWN:
New Hampshire by the Numbers: Heartbreak Hill, or Queen of the Mountain? (Dante J. Scala, October 28, 2002, Politics NH)Six years ago, a moderate, well-funded Democrat faced off against an incumbent conservative Republican. Dick Swett managed to defeat Bob Smith among undeclareds, but by only three points, 46 percent to 43 percent. Swett lost that election by three points, 49 percent to 46 percent. (Libertarian Ken Blevens took 5 percent of the vote.)Two years ago, a moderate Democrat faced off against a conservative Republican for the presidency. Al Gore defeated George W. Bush among undeclareds, 47 percent to 43 percent ? a carbon copy, more or less, of the 1996 results. Gore lost New Hampshire by one percentage point, 48-47.
What is Shaheen’s past performance among undeclareds? In the final UNH poll prior to the 2000 election, Shaheen led Gordon Humphrey, 49 percent to 24 percent, among undeclared voters ? a gap that likely closed somewhat on Election Day, given that 9 percent of undeclared voters were still undecided in that final poll, and undecideds rarely break toward the incumbent at the end of a campaign. Assuming Shaheen carried roughly 50 percent of undeclareds on Election Day 2000, scoring 55 percent or above next week would be a remarkably good performance.
For the sake of argument, let’s assume such a swing happens over the next week: Shaheen far surpasses Swett’s and Gore’s performances among undeclareds, carrying 56 percent of their vote on Election Day. And let’s assume that a number of other things break Shaheen’s way on November 5:
1) No undecided undeclareds break Sununu’s way in the last days of the campaign, and he only manages to win 40 percent of their vote ? 3 percent worse than Smith did in 1996, or Bush in 2000.
2) Three-fifths of the remaining 5 percent of Republican undecideds decide to write in Bob Smith’s name on Election Day. Sununu only manages to win two-fifths of the remaining GOP undecideds, for a total of 85 percent. (Shaheen keeps her 12 percent of Republicans.) One percent of undeclared voters also write in Smith’s name, for a total of roughly 5,500 votes for Smith, or about 1.5 percent of the total vote.
3) All remaining undecided Democrats vote for Shaheen, raising her total to 90 percent of all Democrats.
4) Last but not least, turnout percentages among Republicans, Democrats, and undeclareds match voter registration percentages. In other words, voter turnout rates are identical among these three groups. (Typically, partisans turn out in greater numbers than unaffiliated voters in off-year elections.)
Assuming all this comes to pass, would this lead to a Shaheen victory? Not quite.
There have been nearly as many obituaries written for John Sununu as for Paul Wellstone in the past week, but this outstanding essay shows just how hard--though not impossible--a task Ms Shaheen faces in trying to defeat him. This best case scenario does not provide a sure-fire win and the more likely scenarios preclude one. Several media outlets infamously declared that Bob Smith had lost in 1996 before later returns showed him to have won. Mr. Sununu may face just as uncomfortable an election evening this year, but you'd have to say it's still his race to lose.
BUSH IS EVIL, PART TWO:
Bush's Praise for Wife Seen as Put-Downs (JENNIFER LOVEN, October 28, 2002, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS)President Bush clearly adores his wife. But his efforts to put that admiration on public display do not always hit the mark.Warming up an audience in Charlotte, N.C., the president praised Laura Bush's performance as first lady and offered an explanation for her absence. "It's been raining," Bush said, "so she needs to sweep the porch" of their Texas ranch ahead of a visit by the president of China. [...]
Recently, elaborating on what she has brought to the job, Bush cited his wife's calm, steady nature and deep caring for their two daughters. "She's got a great smile," he said in Maine. "She's a class act" was the description in Boston.
The expressions of pride strike some as more patronizing than complimentary.
Here's the second warm-up act leading in to what will likely be the main event later this week, the Bush is a racist stories that the Left closed out the 2000 campaign with too.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRIBUTE:
PAUL WELLSTONE (Sam Smith, Progressive Review)THE COVERAGE GIVEN Paul Wellstone's death illustrates that, for the corporate media, the only good progressive is a dead one. The Wellstone stories may well have exceeded the positive coverage given him during his entire political lifetime. If only official Washington could be as sincere every day as it is at a memorial service. [...]Wellstone got 83% in the Progressive Review's scorecard, along with Senators Corzine, Dayton, Kennedy, Reed and Sarbanes. By contrast Russell Feingold and Hillary Clinton got only 67%. But Wellstone was far from perfect. He voted for the obnoxious and falsely named Patriot Act and one Minnesota gay activist who voted for him said after his death, "I would have voted for Wellstone. But, sorry for my disrespect, I personally hated the man. He was grossly, openly homophobic. He was a loud advocate of the Defense of Marriage Act, and gave quotes like "what Sheila and I have is a holy thing, a covenant between each other and with god. I don't believe same sex relationships have that sanctity"
It seems safe to say you haven't heard Mr. Smith's first point put quite that way elsewhere and haven't heard his second much of anywhere.
DOLE VS. CLINTON REDUX: THE THRILLA ON THE HILLA:
Clinton Now Backs Dole for President—Hill Sources Talk About Possible Deal (Washingtonian)When the 108th Congress convenes in January, insiders say the hottest race will not be between Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. Barring an upset in the Senate race in North Carolina, there may be more political muscle in the Spouses Club of the Senate than in the main chamber.Assuming that Elizabeth Dole beats former Clinton aide Erskine Bowles, 1996 presidential contenders Bill Clinton and Bob Dole will be positioned to run against each other again—this time for the presidency of the prestigious Senate Spouses Club. The current president is Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney.
Appearing on the Larry King Live, Clinton volunteered to run Dole’s campaign for the office. Sources joke that the motive behind Clinton’s generosity could be to take advantage of Dole’s intimate relationship with the makers of Viagra.
But the potency pill may be only one of Dole’s advertising clients of interest to Clinton. The former senator from Kansas also has done TV commercials for Dunkin’ Donuts—a relationship Clinton also might exploit.
Speculation is that the ex-president might be willing to stay out of the race in exchange for access to Dole’s perks.
One of the most revealing sections of Robert Caro's brilliant biography-in-progress of Lyndon Johnson deals with how a young LBJ--he was just a congressional aide at the time--fixed an election in his own favor for the presidency of a mock legislature that Hill staffers used to have (don't know if the tradition endures).
AN UNUSUAL EMPIRE:
Business Is Growing in Kurdish Iraq (Brian Murphy, Oct 27, 2002, AP)A five-star hotel is taking shape on a block blasted by gunners during a Kurdish civil war in the mid-1990s. Crews are planting trees and building roads.For the first time in years, there are more briefcases than firearms in the halls of local bureaucracy.
It's not exactly boom times for Iraq's Kurdish region. But, thanks to U.S. and British air patrols that keep Iraqi troops out, it's a true land of opportunity compared with the rest of the country under Saddam Hussein's pervasive controls. [...]
The U.N.-administered oil-for-food program, which began in 1996, has helped jump-start the Iraqi Kurdish region, a landlocked arch of mountains and arid plains that hugs the borders of Syria, Turkey and Iran. The Kurds receive 13 percent of the total oil revenue - about $7 billion spent or earmarked so far, United Nations officials say.
Now, investment cash has started to arrive from Kurds abroad. Local entrepreneurs can turn to banks for business loans. Shops are full of goods from handmade furniture to top brands of liquor.
"We've gone through war and fighting. Now it's the time for business, God willing," said Karzan Taher Aziz, manager of a new Internet salon scheduled to open next month in the old bazaar district in Irbil, about 200 miles north of Baghdad.
"The Kurdish people have always been a persecuted people. The Internet helps us see the world and what we can become," Aziz said.
There's been a great outcry on the Left and the Far Right about how America has Imperial ambitions. But it's an odd kind of empire that exerts no political control over a region it's liberated in war.
JOHNNY BOOKSEED:
Bibliophile is on quest to give free books to all who need them (REAGAN HAYNES, October 27, 2002, Canadian Press)Bartenders know people complain at happy hour. They hear patrons chatter about co-workers, office politics, or, in the case of a group of teachers at Dougherty's Pub, the book shortage at their school. They nod and pour drinks.But Russell Wattenberg listened, and started putting aside 10 per cent of his tips. He scavenged for books at thrift shops, used bookstores and yard sales and gave them to his customers. When neighbours heard about the beefy bartender donating books to teachers, they dug out more from their attics and brought them in.
"People heard and they donated more books and it just kind of grew and grew and grew until I quit the bar to do it full-time," Wattenberg said. "Now I'm giving away about 20,000 to 25,000 books a week and there's about a thousand people coming through each weekend."
So was born the Book Thing of Baltimore, a non-profit organization that gives books away to whoever wants them. It's run by Wattenberg - a chain-smoking, wry man who said he cries whenever he reads one of his favourites, Of Mice and Men.
Who doesn't?
READING THE MAP:
A road map that leads straight back to Oslo (NATAN SHARANSKY, Oct. 24, 2002, Jerusalem Post)[T]his road map will only result in a new illusion whereby a new Palestinian dictatorship will be called upon to protect Israel's security and advance the cause of peace. Judging from this map, the Quartet believes that a Palestinian society poisoned for the last decade to hate Israel and Jews will be ready to freely choose a new leadership in a matter of months and be ready to peaceably join the community of nations in less than a year.Once again, we are told, all that is needed to make peace a reality is resumed security cooperation, some money, and a little good will.Rather than strengthening the Palestinian people and investing in their freedom, the Quartet document returns to the Oslo formula by placing its faith in a "reformed" Palestinian dictatorship. Such a dictatorship will be no more interested in the welfare of its people than any other.
Six months ago, I sent a plan to Prime Minister Sharon that I believe outlines the broad steps that must be taken to ensure that Israelis and Palestinians embark on a genuine path to peace.
It calls for a temporary administration to be established for the next two to three years so that Palestinian society can be "detoxified" and democratic institutions can be developed. Rather than call for elections at the beginning of the process of reform, elections must come only after that process is well under way.
After all, only when Palestinians are not afraid to speak freely will they have a real opportunity to freely choose a leadership that is not compromised by terror. And only with such a leadership can Israel hope to engage in constructive negotiations for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
Last summer, Bush crossed a peacemaking Rubicon in his historic speech. But alas, the Quartet's road map takes us back to the other side. Rigid timetables, confidence building measures, and new Palestinian strongmen will bring us no closer to peace today than they did for the last decade.The only hope for an Israeli-Palestinian peace remains investing in a free Palestinian society that will want to join Israel in building a common future.
While we revere Mr. Sharansky, he seems quite wrong here. Palestine will be a state, must make peace with Israel, and should evolve towards democracy, but the three are not entirely dependent on each other.
THE DARK PRINCE ON THE HAPPY WARRIOR:
Paul Wellstone, RIP (Robert Novak, October 28, 2002, TownHall)The decision by many endangered Democratic candidates this year to fudge on issues and even use the image of George W. Bush in their commercials was not for Wellstone. He was the only vulnerable Democratic senator to vote against President Bush's Iraq resolution, and he did not agonize about it.In my many television interviews and occasional private conversations with Wellstone, he never hid his concern with the pragmatic leadership of the Democratic Party. He often stated that the party was losing its soul under Bill Clinton. When I told him he was my ideal Democratic candidate, Wellstone shot back that I was looking for a loser.
Kidding aside, he was sincere about a presidential bid in 2000 and would have tried had he been able to finance it. Laid-back Bill Bradley was not exactly the passionate Wellstone's kind of Democrat, but he was better than Al Gore in Wellstone's eyes. He could not tolerate the strategizing and hedging of the Gore candidacy.
When I chided Wellstone for breaking his two-term pledge, he told me he felt he was needed not only to counter Bush conservatism but also to avert the Democratic drift. Last year, he spoke out against his party's moderation in these words: "I think Democrats are without a politics if they're not bold and honest for the things they think are right."
This is the best tribute I've seen, because honest about the Senator's limited effectiveness and appeal, but admiring about him as a person and a politician. You have to wonder, if all the folks, like Tom Daschle, who are saying that the Democrats lost their soul in that plane crash may not be all too right.
IT'S ALL TURNOUT NOW:
Absentee voters absent for Dickerson Center balloting (RAY WEISS, October 28, 2002, Daytona News Journal)There was a "get-out-the-vote" rapper, a sidewalk full of campaign workers handing out pamphlets and a gymnasium packed with election volunteers and staff.All that was missing at the Dickerson Center Sunday were voters. Just 82 showed up.
Up to 3,000 were expected to cram the 50 small booths and fill out absentee ballots. The pre-election vote was sponsored by the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Volusia County Elections Office. Both sides agreed to the event after settling a lawsuit that stemmed from the botched 2000 election.
The NAACP had argued that black voters in several Florida counties, including Volusia, had encountered a disproportionate number of problems.
"It's not what we had hoped for. But maybe those people would not have voted otherwise," said Deanie Lowe, Volusia County Supervisor of Elections, right after the four hours of voting that began at 1 p.m. ended. "And 82 votes can make a difference, given how close some recent elections have been."
At this point, the GOP's best hope next Tuesday is that the post-9/11 George W. Bush has depolarized black opinion enough that it depresses black turnout, so something like this is a hopeful sign. But if black voters (or their ballots, at any rate) turn out in the proportions they did in '98, when Bill Clinton needed them, or in 2000, when the NAACP had scared them into hating George Bush, then it'll be a very long night for Republicans.
THE COED ADVANTAGE:
In New Hampshire, It's Closing Time: Shaheen Catches Up With Sununu (Helen Dewar, October 27, 2002, Washington Post)Republicans say Shaheen has closed the gap by "nasty" attacks on Sununu and his record, diverting attention, they say, from her troubled experience as governor -- especially the protracted fight over school funding that dominated most of her six years in office. Never in his 15 years in New Hampshire politics has he seen so much spent on negative advertising, said Pat Griffin, Sununu's media consultant."Every campaign that Jeanne Shaheen has been in has been run this way," Sununu said in an interview. "She knows only one way: to attack, attack, attack her opponents."
Not so, Democrats say. They contend that Shaheen took the offensive only after months of being tarred as a failed governor by GOP-financed ads during the primary season. Sununu's smooth blend of conservative philosophy and moderate style, they say, looks different when compared to Shaheen rather than the aggressively conservative Smith, who sealed his fate when he angrily left the GOP to make a brief independent bid for president in 1999.
"I think a lot of his [Sununu's] positions are positions that people didn't know he had and he didn't want them to know," Shaheen said in an interview. All she has done, she said, is point them out.
This is the great advantage that women candidates always have, that no matter how nasty a campaign they run they are still viewed as sweet and demur personally, while when their male opponents attack, it's no way to treat a lady.
October 27, 2002
HE'S A CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK:
Woman carries fetus for 46 years (The Ottawa Citizen, October 27, 2002)RABAT, Morocco -- A 75-year-old woman who complained of stomach pains was found to have been carrying a calcified fetus -- a "stone baby" -- for 46 years, doctors said.The doctors said they removed a 3.5-kilogram fetus they believe had been lodged in the woman's abdomen since an ectopic pregnancy in 1956.
Jeez--and ten months always seemed like an eternity.
SO THE QUESTION IS:
Act on Iran: Why do the mad mullahs still rule? Blame Jimmy Carter. (MICHAEL A. LEDEEN, October 27, 2002, Wall Street Journal)Jimmy Carter, the pacific man of the moment, may soon find a difficult period of his presidency under scrutiny. The Bush administration's national security team has been embroiled in a heated debate over Iran policy, and it revolves around a promise Mr. Carter made to Ayatollah Khomeini. The policy issue is immense: to what extent can and should we support the rebellion of the Iranians against the theocracy in power in Tehran? [...]It would be proper for us to help the freedom seekers in Iran even if we were not under assault from a terror network which has Tehran at its center. But thus far the administration has shied away from giving even the modest support the U.S. has provided freedom fighters in Central and Eastern Europe in the Cold War, in Yugoslavia against Milosevic, and in the Philippines against Marcos.
Instead it seems that Mr. Carter's ghost roams the White House, insisting that we appease Khomeini's successors. Opponents of a more vigorous Iran policy--notably Colin Powell and Richard Armitage--have invoked a clause in Mr. Carter's 1981 deal that produced the release of the American hostages a few minutes before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated: "It is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran's internal affairs." [...]
This triumph of legalism over common sense is a fitting legacy for Mr. Carter, who famously viewed Khomeini's 1979 revolution as an improvement over the shah, at least until the hostage crisis doomed his political career.
What did Vice President Mondale know about this blatant act of appeasing terrorism and when did he know it?
BEFORE GAME 7:
BOOKNOTES: Noble Obsession: Charles Goodyear, Thomas Hancock, and the Race to Unlock the Greatest Industrial Secret of the Nineteenth Century by Charles Slack (C-SPAN, October 27, 2002, 8 & 11pm)ANNALS OF TECHNOBIA (continued):
Military tests digital bugle for funerals (ROBERT BURNS, October 27, 2002, AP)The Pentagon, chronically short of musicians to play taps at military funerals, is going to test a new ''push button'' bugle that can be operated by an honor guard member.A small digital audio device inserted into the bell of the bugle plays a rendition of taps that the Pentagon says is ''virtually indistinguishable'' from a live bugler. The person using the bugle merely pushes a button and holds the bugle to his or her lips.
''In addition to the very high-quality sound, it provides a dignified 'visual' of a bugler playing taps, something families tell us they want,'' said John M. Molino, a deputy assistant defense secretary who announced the innovation. [...]
With the bugler shortage in mind, Congress passed a law that took effect in January 2000 and allows a recorded version of taps using audio equipment if a live horn player is not available. Molino said the push-button bugle is a ''dignified alternative'' to recorded taps.
It's the freakin' military--order some guys to learn how to play.
EXCEPT THAT THE GREEKS WERE THE WEST:
Herodotus' Histories & David Horowitz: Tales of Hubris, Ancient & Modern (Jimmy Cantrell, Texas Mercury)Back when the elder Bush (a common moderate cultural-liberal Yankee Imperial Conservative badly playing at Texan) was leading us into the First Gulf War, I had a typical college student (more interested in beer and sluts than any academic subject and concerned ultimately only with a job paying enough to maintain his party lifestyle) assert that my belief that the Classics provided instruction applicable to every life and set of circumstances was a bunch of nonsense. The contemporary problems of tyrants in the Middle East and savage customs of the region served as proof indisputable to this prototypical (save for his being a Republican) TV trained Gen X undergraduate that we must have education focused on what's happening now.Contrary to my student (and the vast majority of his peers-and of two generations of academics who eliminated both many of the dead-white-men from the curriculum and most of the live ones who would teach the dead ones properly, eliminations required to secure pedagogic prominence for various non-whites and non-Christians), some unmentionable racist-sexist dead-white-man was correct in asserting that to remain ignorant of what transpired before you were born is to remain forever a child. Thanks especially to the liberalizing educrats and their legal system creations, the intellectually lazy, tantrum-tossing, short-attention-span, Western Christian Civilization denigrating children of diverse hues, religions, and sexual preferences are now in charge. If you think MTV is the extent of the problem, spend time with the National Review according to Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg.
Though those children will pay no attention, save possibly the attention required to feel the need to silence me, a few others-the remnant-will take heed. And so I write.
One can't help but feel that Mr. Cantrell has gotten rather confused when he compares us to the Persians and the Islamists to the Greeks, but those opening paragraphs are well worth the price of admission.
DEMS +2?:
A tip sheet on the Senate battle (Mugger, 10/21/02, NY Press)New Jersey: Businessman Doug Forrester's had the best television advertisements of the entire campaign-a little kid's flunking a test and tells his teacher that Frank Lautenberg ought to complete it, just as he bailed out Bob Torricelli-and this is another election where an upset could occur. That depends on whether Democratic New Jersey is finally fed up with its tradition of crooked politicians and doesn't want to send the 78-year-old Lautenberg, who makes Robert Byrd look cogent, back to the Senate. Having spent a year in Princeton, growing tomatoes that are the best in the nation, and sick of turnpike jokes, I'm counting on the people to do the right thing and give Jersey's Supreme Court a black eye for allowing the Torch switcheroo.Lautenberg's refusal to debate Forrester might be his undoing. An Oct. 17 Philadelphia Inquirer editorial said: "New Jersey Democrats are perfectly happy treating the bizarre as ordinary-when it suits their purposes. They've been touting former Sen. Frank Lautenberg for the U.S. Senate as if he'd always been on the Nov. 5 ballot. The candidate is traveling around the state, pumping hands at senior-citizen centers, marching in holiday parades, phoning for dollars. But when it comes to debating Republican Douglas Forrester, Democrats suddenly view this election as a special circumstance. They claim Mr. Lautenberg can't possibly be expected to step so suddenly on the debate stage in place of former candidate Robert Torricelli, who tearfully dropped out of the race just 17 days ago... Publicly, Mr. Lautenberg says, `Sure, I'll debate anytime, anywhere,' but his campaign has only declined dates... The Lautenberg camp should stop stalling as it monitors opinion polls. This race has been sullied enough by questionable political tactics."
Colorado: Incumbent Wayne Allard has the charisma and campaign skills of a Microsoft technician; he loses to Democrat Tom Strickland. By a sizable margin.
North Carolina: Elizabeth Dole, who ought to have this contest in the bag, given her local roots and impressive resume, is going to blow it against Clinton buddy Erskine Bowles. I can smell it from here.
New Hampshire: Blowhard Sen. Bob Smith, the conservative who temporarily bolted from the GOP in 2000, and earlier this year lost a bitter primary race to Rep. John Sununu, will have his revenge on Election Day. Democratic Gov. Jean Shaheen, a decent if unformidable opponent, will reap the rewards of Smith's tacitly encouraging his hardcore supporters to sit out the election, giving the Dems another Senate pick-up. Sununu hasn't done himself any favors with his gloves-off race against Shaheen. He's a smart guy but apparently his father's brass balls skipped a generation.
South Dakota: Another grudge match, this time between Tom Daschle and President Bush. The Majority Leader's protege, Sen. Tim Johnson, is slowly going down the tubes, as voter fraud on Indian reservations is crowding the front pages of local newspapers, and Rep. John Thune, the White House-picked candidate, finally gets his campaign on track. Daschle's prestige is on the line here-the equivalent of Bush's personal stake in his brother's race in Florida-and if Johnson is defeated, the senior Senator can kiss his longshot presidential hopes goodbye.
Missouri: Jean Carnahan, who was appointed senator after her deceased husband defeated John Ashcroft two years ago in a fishy election, is imploding right now and doesn't look to right her campaign by Nov. 5. Not only is GOP challenger Jim Talent a better and more experienced politician, but Carnahan's recent dumb remark-"I'm the No. 1 target of the White House. Since they can't get Osama bin Laden, they're going to get me"-was the capper in a badly run race.
Texas: A sweep for the GOP, with Gov. Rick Perry besting multimillionaire Tony Sanchez and John Cornyn defeating Ron Kirk, the once-moderate Democrat and former mayor of Dallas who fell under the spell of Clintonite liberals and swung to the left in the past two months. I think Kirk's chances were always exaggerated-he was a Beltway media pet, a vehicle for embarrassing President Bush on his home turf-but the chances of a black winning statewide in Texas always seemed like a reach.
Arkansas: It's ironic that Sen. Tim Hutchinson is likely to lose because of a messy divorce in the state where Bill Clinton is now officially a Negro and perfected the art of Dogpatch politics, but opponent Mark Pryor, son of the popular former Sen. David Pryor, nails down the seat. It's testament to Pryor's quick instincts, citing "scheduling conflicts," that he didn't appear with Clinton when the speaker-for-hire recently visited the state on a campaign swing.
Given the current storyline this looks depressingly close to what might happen, but the story's changed so often this year that maybe something worthwhile will occur in the next 9 days.
THE LOW COST OF TREASON:
Lest We Forget: The Case Against Jane Fonda (Mr. Renehan Jr., 10-21-02, History News Network)As one former-POW later recalled: "I was informed ... to get ready to leave. We were put on a bus, blindfolded and driven away. Others were loaded on the bus at another stop and the bus left again. We were unloaded, lined up and had the blindfolds removed. We were then taken into a room and seated. The next thing that occurred was the appearance of Hanoi Jane and she began to speak." He remembers that "Fonda ... was doing a script. At one point she got lost in what she was saying, went back and used exactly the same words again for about two sentences to get back on track. I never got a chance (nor did I want to) say anything. It was a listen and be on display thing ... anything else would have brought on problems."Problems, of course, is a euphemism for physical punishment. [...]
Some names, in the course of history, have become linked forever with the idea of treason. As the Holzers explain: "Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr escaped legal punishment as contemptible traitors, yet their names were, appropriately, sullied for all time. The names Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose remain synonymous with betrayal of their country. Apart from legal guilt, these four names have become generic descriptions of persons whose conduct was morally reprehensible at times when their country was at risk."
Admirably, Aid and Comfort goes a long way toward making sure "Hanoi Jane" makes it on to that short but indelible list.
As Ms Fonda's subsequent career and the recent ravings of those Democrat congressmen in Baghdad demonstrate, there's really no cost associated with treason in America today.
DEMETRIUSES:
Gladiators: A New Order of Insect: A mystery in amber is solved on a desert mountain with a discovery that has stunned entomologists (Joachim Adis, Oliver Zompro, Esther Moombolah-Goagoses and Eugène Marais, October 14, 2002, Scientific American)Imagine being the very first person ever to see a butterfly, a beetle or a wasp. Imagine the sense of wonder at a world so wide that it contains not just undiscovered species, genera or families but entire orders of life yet to be named. Carl Linnaeus must have had such a feeling 250 years ago as he was sorting recently discovered plants and animals into the taxonomy he had invented. So probably did E. M. Walker, who in 1914 was the first to describe rock crawlers (Grylloblattodea), bringing the number of orders in the insect class to 30.Most entomologists thought that was the final total: although there may be millions of insect species still to identify (about 1.2 million have been named so far), for nearly a century we have assumed that every newfound species will fall into just those 30 basic categories. To biologists, the natural world no longer seemed as wide and as wild as it once did. But in June 2001 one of us (Zompro) received bits of amber that would change the way we look at the insect world, giving us a taste of the old joy of discovery--and renewing our awe at the variety of life. [...]
We settled on the scientific name Mantophasmatodea because the animals look like a bizarre cross between a mantis (order Mantodea) and a walkingstick (order Phasmatodea). But among ourselves we took to calling the beasts "gladiators," inspired by their fearsome appearance and the armor that covers them as nymphs.
Cool bugs.
ACES OF BASE:
CA Voter turnout may be the worst ever: Current mark of 57.6 percent set in November 1998 general election (Steve Geissinger, 10/27/02, Tri-Valley Herald)Though described as everything from dull to dismal, Election Day will still likely be historic -- for the lowest general election voter turnout ever in California, experts say."People are saying, 'I just want this thing to be over,'" said Barbara O'Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media in Sacramento.
A new landmark low -- something below the turnout of 57.6 percent of registered voters for the November 1998 general election -- would come in the wake of a troubled election earlier this year. The March primary inspired the fewest voters to cast ballots of any primary election in California history.
There was a time when low turnout was automatically assumed to benefit Republicans, because they turned out to vote as a civic duty. But in recent years the Democrats have developed an extraordinarily effective system for turning out the Union and black vote and you'd have to say that low turnout generally benefits them now. That could be the decisive factor in races like that for the MO Senate seat--one reason that the GOP shouldn't get too giddy about its prospects.
BLAIR VS. LABOUR:
No 10 snubs Meacher 'anti-capitalism' claim (Francis Elliott, 27/10/2002, Daily Telegraph)Michael Meacher, the environment minister, was left isolated by Downing Street last night after it refused to endorse his claims that the Government does not agree with capitalism.Mr Meacher told BBC Radio 4's Any Questions: "We do not believe in capitalism. Capitalism is something that threatens inequality across the whole of society."
A Number 10 spokesman, however, refused to comment on the remarks, referring inquiries to the Labour Party, whose spokesman said: "Socialism or capitalism is a sterile argument. The world has moved on."
The remarks, however, delighted Left-wing MPs. "The party is moving away from New Labour back to its roots and I think Michael's remarks reflect that," said Paul Flynn, the Labour MP for Newport West.
One of the useful things about war is that, as the Marxists would say, it forces the contradictions. In Britain this means it is opening the divide that naturally exists between Tony Blair, who truly believes in the Third Way/New Democrat ideas that Bill Clinton dallied with, and the ideologically unreconstructed Socialists of the Labour Party. It's awfully hard to see him finishing 2003 as the head of the Party and then the opportunity exists for him to either switch to the Tories or, here's your even longer longshot, take on some role--official or unofficial--in the Bush administration, focussed on the war on terror.
MISTY WATER COLOR MEMORIES:
Speculation builds that Mondale will be on ballot (Dane Smith, Greg Gordon and Mark Brunswick, Oct. 27, 2002, Minneapolis Star Tribune)Speculation was building Saturday that former Vice President Walter Mondale will be asked by DFL Party leaders or surviving family members of the late U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone to replace him on the Nov. 5 ballot.DFL officials, citing their grief and the unseemliness of replacement talk on the day after his death, mostly refused to comment on any Mondale prospects. [...]
Mondale was first appointed to the Senate by Gov. Karl Rolvaag in 1964, when Hubert H. Humphrey was elected vice president. Mondale was reelected in 1966 and 1972, ending his second term early to assume the vice presidency under President Carter. During the Clinton years, Mondale served as ambassador to Japan.
If he were elected, his 12 years in the Senate would give him seniority, including becoming Minnesota's senior senator. But Democratic officials in Washington said that, based on the treatment of former New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg's sudden candidacy in New Jersey, Mondale probably would not receive seniority in committee assignments. Rather, he would likely be viewed as an elder statesman.
Oh yeah, it'll be helpful to have someone around to tell us about how the 1960s and 70s Democrats drove the economy into the ground--double digit inflation, interest rates, and unemployment by the time he, Jimmy Carter, and the Democrat Congress were done--and how they drove one of the only pro-western governments in Middle East history out of power--Iran--and how while he was in office it was the Soviets who were "liberating" Afghanistan...
AYE, THERE'S THE NUB:
Global rally against war on Iraq (AP, October 27, 2002)"Saddam Hussein is one of the absolutely worst dictators in the world today... but that doesn't justify the U.S.A.'s war plans," Gudrun Schyman, leader of Sweden's former communist Left Party, told the crowd in Stockholm."You don't disarm a regime by conducting an armed war."
That's really the nub of the question here: do the world's democracies have a right to topple its dictatorships?
LET'S BE CONTENT:
"The World Turned Upside Down": A Yorktown March, or Music to Surrender By. (Arthur Schrader, Summer 1998, American Music)The Parson Weems stories about George Washington's childhood have long been ridiculed out of our country's school books by historians in search of a more realistic, if less romantic, American past. The cherry tree and the hatchet are now part of a never-never land to be dismissed by young people as well as adults (except for advertisers of "Washington's Birthday Week Auto Sales").There is another "Weemish" story, about music in the revolutionary era, first published in 1828, which nineteenth-century historians largely ignored, but which twentieth-century novelists, folk-song enthusiasts, and a good many professional historians have largely embraced to add an ironically dramatic fillip to their accounts of the British surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Now, thanks to many serious as well as "pop" histories and novels, the story is one of the best known bits of trivia concerning the Revolution. Briefly, the story as usually told is that when the British surrendered at Yorktown, their "band" or "bands" played a march named "The World Turned Upside Down" (hereafter sometimes WTUD). A curious mistake in one standard American history has the Americans, instead of the British, playing WTUD at Yorktown. Oddly enough, this typographical error fits the historical event rather better than the usual form of the story. If anyone was to have played WTUD at Yorktown it ought to have been the Americans.
This WTUD story is trivial, really, no more than a "sound bite." On the other hand, WTUD is the only music that professional historians have ever asked me about when they learned of my concern with music in early American history. It may well be that WTUD is the only tune name (other than "Yankee Doodle") that professional historians associate with the American Revolution. Simon Schama, a distinguished American historian of the French Revolution, recently described "The World Turned Upside Down" as "the popular anthem of the American Revolution."
This suggests that the trivial idea of WTUD as a tune played ironically at Yorktown has transcended its triviality to become a music catch-all for some historians. In fact so many historians have repeated this story that it has thereby become a proper subject for the following account. But did it happen? We don't know. If it did happen what was the tune? We don't know. If it did happen what did it mean to the British? We don't know.
You know, some legends are just so true to the temper of their times that it's hard to care whether they are "true" or not. Ant the image of the surrendering Brits playing the following is perfect:
The World Turned Upside Down
To the Tune of, When the King enioys his own again.Listen to me and you shall hear, news hath not been this thousand year:
Since Herod, Caesar, and many more, you never heard the like before.
Holy-dayes are despis'd, new fashions are devis'd.
Old Christmas is kickt out of Town.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
The wise men did rejoyce to see our Savior Christs Nativity:
The Angels did good tidings bring, the Sheepheards did rejoyce and sing.
Let all honest men, take example by them.
Why should we from good Laws be bound?
Yet let's be content, &c.
Command is given, we must obey, and quite forget old Christmas day:
Kill a thousand men, or a Town regain, we will give thanks and praise amain.
The wine pot shall clinke, we will feast and drinke.
And then strange motions will abound.
Yet let's be content, &c.
Our Lords and Knights, and Gentry too, doe mean old fashions to forgoe:
They set a porter at the gate, that none must enter in thereat.
They count it a sin, when poor people come in.
Hospitality it selfe is drown'd.
Yet let's be content, &c.
The serving men doe sit and whine, and thinke it long ere dinner time:
The Butler's still out of the way, or else my Lady keeps the key,
The poor old cook, in the larder doth look,
Where is no goodnesse to be found,
Yet let's be content, &c.
To conclude, I'le tell you news that's right, Christmas was kil'd at Naseby fight:
Charity was slain at that same time, Jack Tell troth too, a friend of mine,
Likewise then did die, rost beef and shred pie,
Pig, Goose and Capon no quarter found.
Yet let's be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn'd upside down.
AFTER THE TERROR:
Nudge-Winking: a review of The 'Criterion': Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain by Jason Harding (Terry Eagleton, 19 September 2002, London Review of Books)It was Fascism, in short, which helped to close down the Criterion, a point overlooked by those for whom Eliot and his magazine were themselves of this persuasion. In fact, Eliot was not a Fascist but a reactionary, a distinction lost on those of his critics who, in the words of Edmund Burke, know nothing of politics but the passions they incite. Ideologically speaking, Fascism is as double-visaged as the Modernism with which it was sometimes involved, casting a backward glance to the primitive and primordial while steaming dynamically ahead into the gleaming technological future. Like Modernism, it is both archaic and avant-garde, sifting pre-modern mythologies for precious seeds of the post-modern future. Politically speaking, however, Fascism, like all nationalism, is a thoroughly modern invention. Its aim is to crush beneath its boot the traditions of high civility that Eliot revered, placing an outsized granite model of a spade and sten gun in the spaces where Virgil and Milton once stood.Fascism is statist rather than royalist, revolutionary rather than traditionalist, petty-bourgeois rather than patrician, pagan rather than Christian (though Iberian Fascism proved an exception). In its brutal cult of power and contempt for pedigree and civility, it has little in common with Eliot's benignly landowning, regionalist, Morris-dancing, church-centred social ideal. Even so, there are affinities as well as contrasts between Fascism and conservative reaction. If the former touts a demonic version of blood and soil, the latter promotes an angelic one. Both are elitist, authoritarian creeds that sacrifice freedom to organic order; both are hostile to liberal democracy and unbridled market-place economics; both invoke myth and symbol, elevating intuition over analytical reason. The Idea of Europe, as Eliot dubbed it, is in its own civilised way quite as exclusivist as the Nazi state which in Eliot's eyes helped to spell its ruin. It represented, as Thomas Mann understood, a disabling sublimation of the spirit that left actual human life perilously open to the assaults of barbarism. Moreover, though racism and anti-semitism are not essential components of right-wing Tory belief, as they are of most Fascist doctrine, they flourish robustly in that soil.
It is not surprising, then, that Eliot, like W.B. Yeats, should at times be found looking on Fascism with qualified approval, or that he should have made some deplorably anti-semitic comments. The problem with all such political strictures, however, is that conservatives do not regard their beliefs as political. Politics is the sphere of utility, and therefore inimical to conservative values. It is what other people rattle on about, whereas one's own commitments are a matter of custom, instinct, practicality, common sense. The Criterion was thus embarrassed from the outset by having to address an urgent political crisis while apparently not believing in politics. Eliot writes that a literary review must be perpetually changing with the contemporary world; but how can the idea of a Tory periodical not have a smack of the oxymoronic about it, given that the principles it embraces are timeless and immutable? 'Times change, values don't,' as an advertisement for the Daily Telegraph used to proclaim, written perhaps by a hack who enjoyed burning witches. Nor can it be a question of 'applying' these unchanging principles to altering conditions, since the application of universal precepts to the particular, with its resonance of left-rationalism, is part of what conservatism rejects.
These criticisms of conservatism, from one of the last (hopefully) great Marxist theorists, seem pretty fair, except for one thing. Conservatism can hardly be blamed when, having lost the struggle to limit the expansion of the state and the extension of the political into every aspect of human life, it is now somewhat schizophrenic about how to react to these phenomena.
BIG DOINGS IN THE OTHER BROTHER'S HOMETOWN:
Oh my gourd, that's a pumpkin (HUNTER McGEE, October 27, 2002, NH Sunday News)Cancer patient Charles Houghton didn't worry about his disease but cultivated a positive outlook over the summer while he grew a pumpkin for the ages.Houghton, who suffers from bladder cancer, grows pumpkins in his spare time from his New Boston garden.
He was lying in an Elliot Hospital bed in Manchester on Oct. 5, days after cancer surgery, when his wife, Kathleen, phoned to tell him the pumpkin he grew had won the Topsfield, Mass., Fair contest. The fair represents the biggest pumpkin-growing competition in New England.
"With all the screaming I couldn't hear her at first," Houghton said of the call that came from the fair where about 700 people were attending. "I figured it would weigh about 1,300 (pounds), then she said 1,337 (pounds) - I was in a daze . . ."
Not only did the giant gourd win the fair, at 1,337.6 pounds, but it captured the unofficial world record, Houghton said. His family members have started the process to have the winning entry listed in the Guinness World Records book. The official recordholder weighed about 1,262 pounds and was grown in Washington State, Houghton said.
But in less joyful news:
Keene fails to smash pumpkin record (STEPHEN SEITZ, October 27, 2002, NH Sunday News)
Despite valiant efforts in a rain-filled day, organizers of Keene's annual pumpkin festival said they failed to break the record yesterday for the most pumpkins gathered in one location.When the final pumpkin was counted, Keene had 18,882 pumpkins on display last night. The record was 23,727 pumpkins gathered together two years ago.
Officials estimated that between 25,000 and 30,000 people came to Keene to participate in the festival, despite the rain.
Ah, Red State fun...
GREEN ONION:
The Onion - How the Web's Most Beloved Humor Site Stays Profitable (ContentBiz, 10/23/2002)The site itself gets 1.3 million visitors accounting for 5.3 million pageviews per week (yes, that's week, not month.) In contrast, The Onion's print editions reach 300,000 readers who pick up f*ree local copies, and 20,000 who pay a token subscription fee to have it mailed to them.Other ancillary sales are small slice of the pie compared to ad dollars. Cranmer notes that store sales always peak for two- three days after she puts new products in each month (note: continually freshen your inventory to keep sales high) and also during the gift-giving season.
You may have noticed one format The Onion doesn't publish in-- email. Cranmer notes she's cracking under reader and advertiser pressure to launch an email edition soon. "We want it to be good. We don't just want to rush in and dump headlines into it and say, go check these out. We wanted something a little different. We're still knocking around what that difference will be."
Which pretty much sums of The Onion's whole philosophy of getting ahead in business ... by really, really trying.
It helps to maintain the high quality of the product too.
DEMOCRACY FROM THE TOP DOWN:
There Is Hope (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, October 27, 2002, NY Times)It's true that Bahrain's young king has been planning this transition to a constitutional monarchy for several years, as part of a move to spur economic growth and overcome Bahrain's legacy of Sunni-Shiite tension. He prepared the way by releasing all political prisoners, inviting exiles home, loosening reins on the press and repealing laws permitting arbitrary arrests. Nevertheless, this election is about something larger than Bahrain. It is about how the Arab world confronts the forces that produced 9/11 - and all of Bahrain's neighbors, like Saudi Arabia, are watching. [...]The Bush team needs to pay attention to the Bahrain experiment, because it is a mini-version of what nation-building in Iraq would require. Like Iraq, Bahrain is a country with a Shiite majority, which has been economically deprived, and a Sunni Muslim minority, which has always controlled the levers of power. Historically in this part of the world, democracy never worked because of the feeling that if your tribe or religious community was not in power, it would lose everything - so no rotation in power could be tolerated.
By electing one house of parliament and appointing another, the Bahraini king is taking the first tentative steps to both share decision-making and nurture a political culture in which the country will not be able to move forward without the new lawmakers' building coalitions across ethnic lines. The same would be needed in Iraq, only on a much larger scale.
The West has a fairly spotty record as far as maintaining consistent support for such experiments--where autocrats devolve power downwards. Jimmy Carter, our recent Nobel Laureate, after all undercut just such an experiment in Iran. And while Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, and Attaturk's Turkey all offer textbook examples of how authoritarian regimes can lay the necessary groundwork for democratic transition, we've had a tendency to be tougher on such leaders and their countries than we have on our true enemies. It's a hopeful sign that Mr. Friedman, who is kind of the unofficial Secretary of State for the establishment, seems supportive of at least this one model of gradual transition.
TO FEED OR NOT TO FEED? AND WHAT TO FEED:
The Winter Banquet: Is backyard bird feeding helping or hurting? New research answers this and many other questions. Plus, five feeders every yard should have. (Stephen W. Kress, Audubon)There is surprisingly little research on the effects of feeders on individual species, but the limited studies so far suggest that backyard feeders are not creating a population of dependent wintering birds. For example, researchers Margaret Brittingham and Stanley Temple from the University of Wisconsin compared winter flocks of black-capped chickadees in two similar woodlands in Wisconsin-one left natural and one equipped with feeders stocked with sunflower seeds. After three years of study, they found that winter survival rates were highest in the woods with the feeders -but only during winters with prolonged periods of extreme cold. This suggests that in milder climates, feeders may have little effect on the winter survival of chickadees. The study also found that nesting populations in both woods were similar the following spring.Other research by Brittingham and Temple allays the concern that birds may lose their natural talent for finding food and become dependent on the easy life of taking food at feeders. [...]
What's on the Menu
1. Sunflower seed: Black-oil seed is the preferred seed of many small feeder birds, especially in northern latitudes. Striped sunflower seed is also readily eaten, especially by large-beaked birds. Hulled sunflower seed is consumed by the greatest variety of birds; it attracts jays, red-bellied woodpeckers, finches, goldfinches, northern cardinals, evening grosbeaks, pine grosbeaks, chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, and grackles.
2. Millet: White millet is the favorite food of most small-beaked ground-feeding birds; red millet is also readily eaten. Millet attracts quail, doves, juncos, sparrows, towhees, cowbirds, and red-winged blackbirds.3. Cracked corn: Medium cracked corn is about as popular with ground-feeding birds as millet, but it is vulnerable to rot, since the interior of the kernel readily soaks up moisture. Feed small amounts, mixed with millet, on feeding tables or from watertight hopper feeders. Avoid fine cracked corn, since it quickly turns to mush; coarse cracked corn is too large for small-beaked birds. Cracked corn attracts pheasants, quail, doves, crows, jays, sparrows, juncos, and towhees.
4. Milo, wheat, oats: These agricultural products are frequently mixed into low-priced birdseed blends. Most birds discard them in favor of other food, which leaves them to accumulate under feeders, where they attract rodents. Milo is more often eaten by ground-feeding birds in the Southwest. It attracts pheasants, quail, and doves.
5. Thistle (a.k.a. niger): A preferred food of American goldfinches, lesser goldfinches, house finches, and common redpolls, niger is sometimes called "black gold," because it costs about $1.50 per pound. Do not confuse it with prickly thistle, a pink-flowered weed used by goldfinches to line their nests. Niger works best in special thistle-seed feeders with small holes that restrict the flow of the tiny black seeds. The best feeders have holes below the purchase to permit feeding by goldfinches, which can hang upside down (and thus excludes the more common house finch).
6. Suet and bird puddings (reconstituted suet and seed): Peanut butter-cornmeal mixes (one part peanut butter, four parts cornmeal, and one part vegetable shortening; good for winter and summer feeding) or whole and crushed peanuts attract woodpeckers, jays, chickadees, titmice, bushtits, nuthatches, brown creepers, wrens, kinglets, northern mockingbirds, brown thrashers, starlings, and yellow-rumped and pine warblers.
Our yard was just filthy with robins yesterday. Presumably they were after worms, since we had a light snowfall that was melting?
October 26, 2002
THE SUNSHINE BOYS:
Dems Seek to Put Mondale on Ballot (ASHLEY H. GRANT and MIKE WILSON, 10/26/02, Associated Press)Democrats on Saturday reached out for a candidate to replace Sen. Paul Wellstone on the November ballot, with elder statesman Walter Mondale emerging as the favorite. Meanwhile, federal investigators searched the wreckage of Wellstone's plane to determine why it crashed.Mondale, the former vice president and Minnesota congressman, wasn't commenting. But one Democratic source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mondale had indicated some interest.
Two Democratic sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Sen. Patty Murray, head of the party's campaign committee, had reached out to Mondale. Democratic sources said prominent labor leaders had expressed interest in Mondale as well.
"If he says yes, it's pretty much over," said Democratic consultant Wy Spano.
Democrats aren't exactly building for the future with Lautenberg and Mondale, are they? And, once again, as with Cory Booker in NJ, the Party is passing up a well-qualified black candidate--Alan Page--who would be practically guaranteed a Senate seat.
RED STATES THROUGH BLUE GOGGLES:
Dead Parrot Society (PAUL KRUGMAN, October 25, 2002, NY Times)[T]he Bush administration is an extremely elitist clique trying to maintain a populist facade. Its domestic policies are designed to benefit a very small number of people--basically those who earn at least $300,000 a year, and really don't care about either the environment or their less fortunate compatriots. True, this base is augmented by some powerful special-interest groups, notably the Christian right and the gun lobby. But while this coalition can raise vast sums, and can mobilize operatives to stage bourgeois riots when needed, the policies themselves are inherently unpopular. Hence the need to reshape those malleable facts.What remains puzzling is the long-term strategy. Despite Mr. Bush's control of the bully pulpit, he has had little success in changing the public's fundamental views. Before Sept. 11 the nation was growing increasingly dismayed over the administration's hard right turn. Terrorism brought Mr. Bush immense personal popularity, as the public rallied around the flag; but the helium has been steadily leaking out of that balloon.
Right now the administration is playing the war card, inventing facts as necessary, and trying to use the remnants of Mr. Bush's post-Sept. 11 popularity to gain control of all three branches of government. But then what? There is, after all, no indication that Mr. Bush ever intends to move to the center.
So the administration's inner circle must think that full control of the government can be used to lock in a permanent political advantage, even though the more the public learns about their policies, the less it likes them. The big question is whether the press, which is beginning to find its voice, will lose it again in the face of one-party government.
It sometimes seems fair to question whether the NY Times is even competent to cover Red State America. Note the breath-taking ease with which Mr. Krugman dismisses as unpopular and marginal both conservative Christians and gun owners, who between them (even allowing for presumably significant overlap) must make up between them if not quite a majority of Americans then at least one of the largest pluralities you can manufacture out of constituency groups.
UNWOBBLING:
Bush Says He Will Lead Coalition Against Iraq (Ron Fournier, Oct 26, 2002, The Associated Press)Increasing pressure on skeptical allies, President Bush said Saturday the United States will lead a coalition against Iraq if the United Nations does not pass a strong resolution to disarm Saddam Hussein.The White House said it would be "not very hard at all" to assemble an alliance without U.N. help, a clear signal that Bush's patience with the international organizations is reaching its limits as France, Russia, Mexico and other allies seek to water down his zero-tolerance approach to Iraq.
"If the U.N. does not pass a resolution which holds him to account and that has consequences, then, as I have said in speech after speech after speech, if the U.N. won't act - if Saddam Hussein won't disarm - we will lead a coalition to disarm him," Bush said.
I'll bet a box of donuts that if you check the conservative rags (Weekly Standard, National Review, etc.) today you'll find at least one essay from this week whining about how George W. Bush is wavering dangerously on the issue of removing Saddam from power.
THE SOPRANO:
Postal plot (Washington Whispers, US News)A Democratic executive of the U.S. Postal Service abruptly quit last Friday amid allegations that she used the federal mail budget to hurt the re-election chances of Arkansas Republican Sen. Tim Hutchinson. Sources allege that Deborah Willhite, the Postal Service's top lobbyist, pushed to have the budget for Arkansas post offices cut–and Hutchinson blamed. The money was to be transferred to Georgia's post offices, allowing supporters there to credit Democratic Sen. Max Cleland, who's in his own tough re-election battle. Senate Republican leader Trent Lott caught wind of the deal making and demanded the resignation of Willhite, an Arkansan who has donated to Hutchinson's opponent and to Cleland. Willhite, however, says "it's all a plot" to discredit her and that she planned to resign anyway. "It spins a good story," she says, "but it's just not the case." Postmaster General John Potter is scouring all recent budget moves for other political hanky-panky.
Another episode in the continuing criminal conspiracy that is the Democrat Party.
MEETING THE LORD OF THE FLIES:
Bush's Armageddon Obsession (Michael Ortiz Hill, October 23, 2002, AlterNet)I'd become accustomed to George W. Bush's use of the word "evil" until he told the nation this last spring, "The evil one is among us."Anyone with a passing understanding of the evangelical world of Bush' faith knows he was referring to the Antichrist. The implications of this are grave beyond telling and yet scarcely ever noted in the public discourse. On the eve of a misguided war the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in human history has located American foreign policy within a Biblical narrative that leads inexorably towards the plains of Megiddo, roughly fifty five miles northwest of Jerusalem: the battle of Armageddon. Two essential questions, as impertinent as they are imperative, need to be asked: Mr. President, as a born-again Christian is it not true that you regard this as the end times prophesied in the Bible? In what way does your religious understanding of apocalypse inform American policy in the Mideast?
It's not all clear that Mr. Bush was referring to the Evil One; he may well have just been referring to Osama bin Laden as "the evil one". But even assuming that the President was referring to Satan, it would hardly be as apocalyptic a reference as M. Hill seems to think. Here's a pretty good discussion of Satan, evil, and 9-11 from two unlikely sources--Bill Moyers and Andrew Delbanco--speaking on September 12th, 2001:
BM: Do you believe in evil?AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even indirectly as you and I sitting here have the events of the last day and not take seriously the existence of evil. One of the things that a number of writers have said about the devil--some people believe in him as a literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor or an image or a representation of these dark, human capacities--one thing that a number of writers have said is that the cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people that he does not exist. We saw evil yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face it.
BM: Evil is defined as?
AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able to do with that question is to try to recognize and come to terms with the reality of the fact that there are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there's some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.
BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability to see what the consequences of your actions are to someone else?
AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human beings. To think of them as instruments or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human beings.
BM: You have written about your concern that Americans have lost the sense of evil. Is what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring us back or is it too deep for that, our absence, our loss of memory.
AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us. We don't want to acknowledge it. We want to explain it away. We want to find [an explanation] for it. In a modern world we mostly live in a place where the terrible suffering of the world seems far away-abstract and unreal and we can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do with us. It came home yesterday. I think a lot of people in this city and in this country are searching their souls.
What's interesting about this from our perspective today is how it ties in to the post below on equality. Part of the reason that modern liberalism has to deny the existence of evil--beyond just its hostility to Judeo-Christianity--is because if we recognize that evil exists and that people are evil to greater and lesser degrees (we all, of course, have evil within us) that strikes at the very heart of the egalitarian project. After all, how can one justify redistributing wealth to the evil as well as to the "good"? And if we are to have affirmative action programs to "level the playing field" for every classification of folks known to man, should the evil too have jobs and college admissions reserved for them? That seems like it would be a tough sell to the voters. Any such gradation of human beings, implying as it does that we can, and should, make judgments about people based on their character must be anathema to the Left. And so they are stuck denying evil. Instead, an Osama bin Laden has to have been created and motivated by our own actions, so that if only we tweak this knob or punch this button he can be brought back around to being a perfectly decent chap.
A POEM AS LOVELY:
Champions Among Trees (Joseph Monninger, 10/26/02, Valley News)[A] state champion honey locust (Glenditsia triacanthos) has stood since 1886 at the Saint-Gaudens museum in Cornish, New Hampshire. Although not nearly as large as the New England champion from Coventry, Rhode Island, I knew it was nevertheless a sizeable tree. I packed a picnic lunch, checked the location on the map, and headed off.One thing about a championship tree, whether it is a state or regional champ: you can't miss it. As soon as you step inside the gate at Saint-Gaudens -- the home and studio of the famous sculptor who helped to establish an artist colony in the area around the turn of the last century -- the honey locust commands your complete attention. Set on the south side of a house called by Saint-Gaudens Aspet, a former inn, the tree is rigged with lightning rods. Otherwise, Chief of Park Interpretation, Greg Schwarz had told me on the phone, "The tree probably wouldn't be here." The hurricane of 1938 took down many of the largest trees in the park, but it left the locust standing. To the best of anyone's knowledge, the tree is in excellent health and can look forward to a continued long life. It is, however, the tallest fixture in the acreage. Its size has made it susceptible to lightning and heavy winds.
"We think the tree came from the Mt. Hope Nurseries in New York State," Ranger Schwarz told me. "Saint-Gaudens planted it himself. He also planted some birches near the Pan garden. Many of the birches are over a century old, and that's quite old as birches go. He was intimately involved in the landscaping. We have hemlock bushes that are quite ancient and form wonderful glades. We don't know too much more about this particular tree, the state champion. As a locust, it is one of the last trees to lose its leaves each fall and one of the last to `leaf-out' in the spring."
The tree is a hybrid and, as such, initially resisted grafting. But the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard has grafted it successfully, and a few small locusts grow on the Saint-Gaudens' grounds. Colonial woodsmen used the thorns of honey locusts for pins, arrow points, and animal traps. The wood, a heavy, dense lumber, was later used for agricultural implements, fence posts, and even railroad ties. As a hybrid, the thorn-less honey locust at Saint-Gaudens may have been favored at the end of the 19th century as an ornamental, much like certain hawthorns today. The tree originally belonged to the Mississippi Valley before migrating, over time, to the east.
By any reckoning, the Saint-Gauden honey locust is an immense and powerful tree. When last measured in 1998, the tree recorded a circumference of 561/2 inches and was approximately 100 feet tall. That puts it well behind the Rhode Island Locust in bulk, which has a remarkable 179-inch circumference, but the Saint-Gaudens' honey locust is as tall as the Rhode Island entry.
Which naturally puts one in mind of the poet so great he has a rest area on the NJ Turnpike named for him:
Trees (Joyce Kilmer):I think that I shall never see
A poem as lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks to God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
You know, growing up in NJ we must have read that in at least four different grades, but I'd never noticed that the first seven lines all start with "A".
OH, THE HOURS WASTED...:
The trouble with Tetris (BBC, 26 October, 2002)Anyone who has played computer games over the last 15 years is likely to have encountered Tetris in one form or another. Many people first played it on the Nintendo Gameboy handheld console. [...]Now Erik Demaine, Susan Hohenberger and David Liben-Nowell from the Laboratory of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have analysed the game to determine its computational complexity.
The trio discovered that, subject to certain conditions, Tetris has much in common with some of the knottiest mathematical conundrums such as the Travelling Salesman Problem. [...]
The researchers found that Tetris was an NP-Hard problem, i.e. there was no easy way to maximise a score at the game, even when the sequence of blocks was known in advance.
We could have told them it was hard.
THE AYATOLLAHS VS. THE IDIOT BOX:
Lights, Cameras, Revolution (CBS, Oct. 23, 2002)The West has a secret weapon against Iran. It's a balding Iranian rock star, a Persian actor who can't get a role and a one-eyed talk show host who speaks in Farsi, all working in a small television studio on the wrong side of Hollywood.It's called NITV, and if the Bush Administration hasn't realized its potential as a weapon, Iran's ruling ayatollahs certainly have, reports 60 Minutes II correspondent Bob Simon.
National Iranian Television sounds like the government?s official network, but it is anything but that. Watched by millions of Iranians with satellite dishes, NITV uses humor to attack the ruling Islamic regime.
NITV is the brainchild of Zia Atabay, a rock star who was known as the "Tom Jones of Iran" until the ayatollahs forced him to flee to America. Twenty years and one toupee later, he took some money from his wife's plastic surgery business and bought a former porn studio in North Hollywood.
And again we are told that ideas and the words that convey them matter...
EXTREME EGALITARIANISM GOES ABROAD:
Keeping U.S. No. 1: Is It Wise? Is It New? (JUDITH MILLER, October 26, 2002, NY Times)President Bush's release of an audacious new strategy last month for defending America against future foreign threats stunned Washington and even some close allies. The 33-page document, titled the "National Security Strategy of the United States," ostensibly departed from what had been the longstanding conventional wisdom about American strategy.Initially, expert scrutiny focused on the president's assertion that the United States would "not hesitate" to act alone and "pre-emptively" to thwart dangers from hostile states or terrorist groups armed with, or seeking, nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
More recently, however, analysts have been centering on the Bush doctrine's last chapter. America, it states, is the world's strongest nation, enjoying "unparalleled military strength," and will never again allow its military supremacy to be challenged as it was during the cold war.
"Our forces will be strong enough," the document says, "to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States."
That is strong stuff, even by swashbuckling Texas standards. Containing rather than vanquishing enemies and maintaining a balance of power has been a mainstay of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. It is not surprising, then, that much of the reaction to what has been dubbed the "Hertz doctrine" ("We're No. 1") has been negative.
The answer to Ms Miller's first question is more readily apparent if you reverse it: Would it be wise for America to allow an adversary to become our military superior?
SILENCING OUR CONSCIENCES:
It's Joe vs. abortionists (THOMAS ROESER, October 26, 2002, Chicago Sun-Times)My friend Joe Scheidler is a racketeer. At least that's what Fay Clayton says. But he is a peaceable man, a devout Catholic who protests abortion. Scheidler a racketeer? Yes, says Clayton and the National Organization for Women. The Supreme Court will hear the case beginning in December. So to get all of us up to speed, a timeline is in order.Thus the nation's top jurists will only consider whether the law allows nonviolent, political protest to be equated with racketeering and extortion. If the high court agrees with Clayton, all protests--for civil rights, peace and other forms of redress--will be severely changed. Were RICO in effect in the 1960s, Martin Luther King and any subsequent civil rights protesters would be tried as potential federal felons.
May it please the court: Every time I've marched with Joe, there was praying and singing, no violence. But he's undeniably a man of action. We were passing an empty playground while one TV crew watched idly. Joe moved in and started the swings swaying gracefully, a tribute to the unborn who will never play. It made for eloquent TV on the 5 p.m. news.
I've know him for 30 years, and Joe's no racketeer. Merely a saint.
We used to kill our saints, now we just treat them like criminals.
THE "K" IN KOUFAX:
REVIEW: of Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy by Jane Leavy (J. Bottum, October 2002, October 2002)THE PROBLEM is not to figure out why Sandy Koufax was a great pitcher. The problem is tofigure out why he was Sandy Koufax-the stuff of myth, the Achilles of Dodger Stadium, the pitcher who from 1963 to 1966 redefined baseball, the Jewish Phenomenon, the most talked-about athlete of the 1960's, and the man who is remembered by everyone who saw him pitch as the most exciting player ever to take the mound.Even during his early years, Koufax always had something: some promise of things to come, some flash of brilliance that kept the Dodgers from unloading him as a failed prospect. The fans who remember his almost perfect final years tend to forget just how mediocre he was in the beginning of his career, and how long that beginning lasted. His combined record from 1955 to 1960 was 42 wins and 53 losses-on pennant-winning teams. The earned runs he allowed barely matched the league's average, and his unearned runs were atrocious. He walked enormous numbers of batters and threw wild pitches. He hit so many batters in spring training that one Dodger complained, "Taking batting practice against him is like playing Russian roulette with five bullets."
None of this is what a baseball team wants in a star pitcher. Signed to a big bonus-which, under the rules of the 1950's, prohibited the Dodgers from sending him back to the minor leagues for seasoning-Koufax was promoted as baseball's latest wunderkind, the teenaged lefthander, the golden-armed Jewish boy from Brooklyn who was going to make everyone forget Lefty Grove. But he was really little more than a one-dimensional player.
He was done by the time I started watching baseball, but, oddly enough, one of his games remains lodged firmly in memory, or at least the last inning of it. Read this verbatim transcript of Vin Scully's call of Koufax's perfect game or listen to it here. It is literature--maybe even poetry--of the highest order, though spoken spontaneously.
THE GENERAL THEORY OF POETRY'S RELATIVITY:
Can Poetry Matter?: Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more. (Dana Gioia, May 1991, The Atlantic Monthly)In art, of course, everyone agrees that quality and not quantity matters. Some authors survive on the basis of a single unforgettable poem--Edmund Waller's "Go, Lovely Rose," for example, or Edwin Markham's "The Man With the Hoe," which was made famous by being reprinted in hundreds of newspapers--an unthinkable occurrence today. But bureaucracies, by their very nature, have difficulty measuring something as intangible as literary quality. When institutions evaluate creative artists for employment or promotion, they still must find some seemingly objective means to do so. As the critic Bruce Bawer has observed,"A poem is, after all, a fragile thing, and its intrinsic worth or lack thereof, is a frighteningly subjective consideration; but fellowship grants, degrees, appointments, and publications are objective facts. They are quantifiable; they can be listed on a resume."
Poets serious about making careers in institutions understand that the criteria for success are primarily quantitative. They must publish as much as possible as quickly as possible. The slow maturation of genuine creativity looks like laziness to a committee. Wallace Stevens was forty-three when his first book appeared. Robert Frost was thirty-nine. Today these sluggards would be unemployable.
The proliferation of literary journals and presses over the past thirty years has been a response less to an increased appetite for poetry among the public than to the desperate need of writing teachers for professional validation. Like subsidized farming that grows food no one wants, a poetry industry has been created to serve the interests of the producers and not the consumers. And in the process the integrity of the art has been betrayed. Of course, no poet is allowed to admit this in public. The cultural credibility of the professional poetry establishment depends on maintaining a polite hypocrisy. Millions of dollars in public and private funding are at stake. Luckily, no one outside the subculture cares enough to press the point very far. No Woodward and Bernstein will ever investigate a cover-up by members of the Associated Writing Programs.
The new poet makes a living not by publishing literary work but by providing specialized educational services. Most likely he or she either works for or aspires to work for a large institution--usually a state-run enterprise, such as a school district, a college, or a university (or lately even a hospital or prison)--teaching others how to write poetry or, on the highest levels, how to teach others how to write poetry.
To look at the issue in strictly economic terms, most contemporary poets have been alienated from their original cultural function. As Marx maintained and few economists have disputed, changes in a class's economic function eventually transform its values and behavior. In poetry's case, the socioeconomic changes have led to a divided literary culture: the superabundance of poetry within a small class and the impoverishment outside it. One might even say that outside the classroom--where society demands that the two groups interact--poets and the common reader are no longer on speaking terms.
We mentioned earlier in the week that Mr. Gioia was being nominated for chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He's best known for this essay which is terrific.
THE YARN OF THE "NANCY BELL" (W.S. Gilbert)
`Twas on the shores that round our coast
From Deal to Ramsgate span,
That I found alone, on a piece of stone,
An elderly naval man.His hair was weedy, his beard was long,
And weedy and long was he;
And I heard this wight on the shore recite,
In a singular minor key:"Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."And he shook his fists and he tore his hair,
Till I really felt afraid,
For I couldn't help thinking the man had been drinking,
And so I simply said:"Oh, elderly man, it's little I know
Of the duties of men of the sea,
And I'll eat my hand if I understand
How you can possibly be"At once a cook and a captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."Then he gave a hitch to his trousers, which
Is a trick all seamen larn,
And having got rid of a thumping quid,
He spun this painful yarn:"'Twas in the good ship Nancy Bell
That we sailed to the Indian sea,
And there on a reef we come to grief,
Which has often occurred to me."And pretty nigh all o' the crew was drowned
(There was seventy-seven o' soul),
And only ten of the Nancy's men
Said `Here' to the muster-roll."There was me, and the cook, and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And the bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig."For a month we'd neither wittles nor drink,
Till a-hungry we did feel,
So we drawed a lot, and accordin' shot
The captain for our meal."The next lot fell to the Nancy's mate,
And a delicate dish he made;
Then our appetite with the midshipmite
We seven survivors stayed."And then we murdered the bo'sun tight,
And he much resembled pig;
Then we wittled free, did the cook and me,
On the crew of the captain's gig."Then only the cook and me was left,
And the delicate question, `Which
Of us two goes to the kettle?' arose,
And we argued it out as sich."For I loved that cook as brother, I did,
And the cook he worshipped me,
But we'd both be blowed if we'd either be stowed
In the other chap's hold, you see."`I'll be eat if you dines off me,' says Tom.
`Yes, that,' says I, `you'll be,'--
`I'm boiled if I die, my friend,' quoth I,
And `Exactly so,' quoth he."Says he: `Dear JAMES, to murder me
Were a foolish thing to do,
For don't you see that you can't cook me,
While I can--and will--cook you?'"So he boils the water, and takes the salt
And the pepper in portions true
(Which he never forgot), and some chopped shallot,
And some sage and parsley too."`Come here,' says he, with a proper pride,
Which his smiling features tell,
`'Twill soothing be if I let you see
How extremely nice you'll smell.'"And he stirred it round and round and round,
And he sniffed at the foaming froth;
When I ups with his heels, and smothers his squeals
In the scum of the boiling broth."And I eat that cook in a week or less,
And--as I eating be
The last of his chops, why, I almost drops,
For a wessel in sight I see."And I never grin, and I never smile,
And I never larf nor play,
But I sit and croak, and a single joke
I have--which is to say."Oh, I am a cook and a captain bold
And the mate of the Nancy brig,
And a bo'sun tight, and a midshipmite,
And the crew of the captain's gig!"
GILBERT OBIT:
The Passing of Gilbert (1836-1911) (H. L. Mencken, May 30, 1911, The Baltimore Evening Sun)How THE COMMON American conception of the English, as a stodgy and humorless folk, could so long withstand the fact of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas must ever remain one of the mysteries of international misunderstanding. Here, indeed, was wit that Aristophanes might have fathered; here was humor that Rabelais might have been proud to own. And yet it was the work of a thorough and unmitigated Englishman -- of William Schwenck Gilbert, to wit -- a man born in the heart of London, and one who seldom passed, in all his 75 years, out of hearing of Bow Bells.Gilbert died yesterday -- perhaps 15 years too late. His career really ended in 1896, when he and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote "The Grand Duke", their last joint work. They had quarreled before -- and made up. Now they quarreled for good. Sullivan, searching about for a new partner, found that there was but one Gilbert. Basil Hood, Comyns Carr and Arthur Wing Pinero tried their hands and failed. And Gilbert himself, seeking a new Sullivan, learned that a new Sullivan was not be found. Edward German came nearest -- but "The Emerald Isle" was still miles from "The Mikado."
The Gilbert and Sullivan partnership, in truth, was absolutely unique. One looks in vain for parallels. Beaumont and Fletcher, Meilhac and Halevy, the Goncourts -- these come to mind, but differences at once appear. Sullivan, without Gilbert, seemed to lose the gift of melody, and Gilbert, without Sullivan was parted from that exquisite humor which made him, even above Mark Twain, the merrymaker of his generation. The two men, working together for 15 years, found it impossible, after their separation, to work alone. Sullivan, cast adrift, took to the writing of oratorios and presently died. Gilbert settled down as a London magistrate and convulsed the world no longer.
The great quality of Gilbert's humor was its undying freshness, an apparent spontaneity which familiarity could not stale . . . "The Mikado" was given in Baltimore last year without the change of a line. Not one of Gilbert's jests of 1885 was omitted; not a single "local hit" was inserted to help out the comedians. And yet, after a quarter of a century, how delightfully brisk and breezy it seemed! How the crowds laughed once more at Pooh Bah's grotesque speeches and at the Mikado's incomparable song! And how Sullivan's tripping music tickled the ear!
The world will be a long while forgetting Gilbert and Sullivan. Every spring their great works will be revived. At this very moment "Pinafore", now 23 years old, is under way in New York. They made enormous contributions to the pleasure of the race. They left the world merrier than they found it. They were men whose lives were rich with honest striving and high achievement and useful service.
It's like when MacLean Stevenson and Wayne Rogers left M*A*S*H, ruining the show and ending their own careers.
THE ESSENTIAL MENCKEN:
Mencken and Orwell, Social Critics With Little (and Much) in Common (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, October 26, 2002, NY Times)
Mr. Teachout shows that Mencken's influential assault on the genteel tradition included opposition to the very idea of democracy - not just to democratic taste but to the notion of equality itself. This was accompanied by racist comments and Mencken's allegiance to his family's Teutonic origins. Before World War I, Mencken wrote about the "race-efficiency" and "superbly efficient ruling caste" in Germany. During World War II, Mr. Teachout shows, an eerie silence was more the rule than Mencken's half-hearted declarations that Hitler was a boob.But Mencken was reacting to a tension latent in democratic life - the fear that it can level cultural life instead of allowing it to flourish, that it can even turn majority rule into tyranny. And yet as Mencken did not realize or did not care to, tyranny also looms in the act of rebelling against democracy.
Orwell, like Mencken, was not all that keen on American life, but the tyranny trap worried him. A tension between the claims of democratic liberty and socialist equality may have haunted him, as well as those who followed him on the left. Could state power be used to bring an ideal society into being without leading to the oppressive regime of "1984" (which he called INGSOC - English Socialism)? And if the Soviet Union had already become such a regime, as Orwell believed, how was it to be opposed and what forces could be marshaled against it? Orwell was torn, uncertain; his novels were clearer that his essays. But the need to confront that regime was what the cold war was all about.
Now the issue returns in a slightly different way as new forms of tyranny are faced. That is why Orwell still matters and why Mencken may not.
This is, I believe, quite wrong. Mr. Mencken continues to matter precisely because even so great a critic of society as George Orwell could not in the end face the truth that Mr. Mencken never ceased speaking, that democratic freedom contains within it the seeds of its own destruction, chiefly in the ease with which it can be turned into an egalitarian leveling force. Woe are we if we ever forget the warning that has echoed from Burke to de Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset to Mencken to Willmoore Kendall to...ah, but who will say it now?...that equality is the enemy of freedom.
The fundamental tension within democratic conservatism is, has been, and will be the recognition that democracy is necessary but at the same time dubious, even dangerous. As Mencken put it:
I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing. Does it exalt dunderheads, cowards, trimmers, frauds, cads? Then the pain of seeing them go up is balanced and obliterated by the joy of seeing them come down. Is it inordinately wasteful, extravagant, dishonest? Then so is every other form of government: all alike are enemies to laborious and virtuous men. Is rascality at the very heart of it? Well, we have borne that rascality since 1776, and continue to survive. In the long run, it may turn out that rascality is necessary to human government, and even to civilization itself - that civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle. I do not know: I report only that when the suckers are running well the spectacle is infinitely exhilarating. But I am, it may be, a somewhat malicious man: my sympathies, when it comes to suckers, tend to be coy. What I can't make out is how any man can believe in democracy who feels for and with them, and is pained when they are debauched and made a show of. How can any man be a democrat who is sincerely a democrat?
Conservatism's predicament is that it refutes utterly the idea that men are all equal in fact but espouses a political philosophy that demands that all be treated and listened to as if they were equal.
Now we are all familiar with the ringing statement in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal", and this was fine so long as it was understood to mean that men are equal at birth, each free to make himself into a greater or lesser man. But in what Mr. Kendall scorned and Garry Wills hails as a "giant, if benign swindle", Abraham Lincoln elevated the doctrine of equality in the Gettysburg Address and performed , again in Mr. Wills's words, a "daring act of intellectual
sleight-of-hand" which has ever since made actual equality of station an end, if not the end, of government.
It is then the solemn and often unpleasant duty of conservatism to constantly remind the masses that they are not all equal, that, as Russell Kirk declared in one of his canons of conservative thought:
[C]ivilized society requires orders and classes. The only true equality is moral equality; all other attempts at leveling lead to despair, if enforced by positive legislation.
The danger of allowing all men to think themselves equal and of allowing them to create legislation to impose this equality--the very need for which would seem to put paid to the idea that they are equal in the first place--was expressed by Mr. Ortega y Gasset, looking out across a Europe which had already succumbed to the dangerous notion:
European history reveals itself, for the first time, as handed over to the decisions of the ordinary man as such. Or to turn it into the active voice: the ordinary man, hitherto guided by others, has resolved to govern the world himself. This decision to advance to the social foreground has been brought about in him automatically, when the new type of man he represents had barely arrived at maturity. If from the view-point of what concerns public life, the psychological structure of this new type of mass-man be studied, what we find is as follows: (1) An inborn, root-impression that life is easy, plentiful, without any grave limitations; consequently, each average man finds within himself a sensation of power and triumph which, (2) invites him to stand up for himself as he is, to look upon his moral and intellectual endowment as excellent, complete. This contentment with himself leads him to shut himself off from any external court of appeal; not to listen, not to submit his opinions to judgment, not to consider others' existence. His intimate feeling of power urges him always to exercise predominance. He will act then as if he and his like were the only beings existing in the world and, consequently, (3) will intervene in all matters, imposing his own vulgar views without respect or regard for others, without limit or reserve...
Conservatism, having recognized the potential for tyranny in government by the elite, counterbalanced the elite institutions by shifting power to the hoi polloi. But this sets up an inherently dangerous situation, for who will stop the masses once they get a wind in their sails? Thus, we need the Menckens--despite their irascibility and their bigotry--to whisper in our ears, like the slaves who followed Roman Emperors, that: Thou art mortal. It takes a Mencken to keep us humble, to try to constrain what will otherwise be a natural tendency to exchange an unequal freedom for an imposed equality. The Menckens help to keep us free men of the sort that Eric Hoffer described:
Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.
This is an unpopular message and one inevitably makes oneself unpopular in enunciating it--as witness Mencken--but it is vital nonetheless. It ensures that conservatism will always be a minority philosophy: but, just perhaps, if it's conveyed often enough, loudly enough, and as wittily as it was conveyed by Mr. Mencken, it may serve to preserve us as free men. But you wouldn't bet on it...
MORE:
The Virginia Declaration of Rights (Paul Cella,
10/23/02)
REVIEW: of H.L. Mencken on American Literature Edited by S. T. Joshi (Christopher Orlet, 9/20/02, American Prowler)
TONY THE TORY, PART XVI:
Britain attacks France over EU subsidies (David Charter and Rory Watson, October 26, 2002 , Times of London)TONY BLAIR launched a ferocious attack on French President Jacques Chirac yesterday for jeopardising the successful enlargement of the European Union to 25 members by putting the narrow self-interest of French farmers first.The Prime Minister's personal attack overshadowed an historic agreement by the European Union to pave the way for the entry of eight former Communist countries in 2004, and marked a further cooling in Britain's strained relationship with France.
Mr Blair left Brussels in a fury with M Chirac as the latest EU summit agreed a multi-billion pound package to cover the costs of the first three years of an expanded Union.
The Prime Minister, so often at the centre of EU decisions, found himself at the margins as President Chirac sought to reassert his authority on the European stage.
The foundations of yesterday's deal had been laid the previous day when the French President and Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, caught Mr Blair and fellow EU leaders by complete surprise with a joint proposal to freeze farm subsidies.
The one stumbling block to Tony Blair becoming the Tory leader when his own party chucks him has been his unfortunate belief in the EU. But luckily he's just gotten a brutal glimpse of Britain's future in a Franco-Prussian dominated Europe. The question for Mr. Blair and Britain generally is pretty basic: having defeated Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler at the cost of hundreds of thousands of British lives, is Britain now content to be France and Germany's jailhouse bitch?
GOOD ON YA, MATE:
Australia to scale back trade tariffs (BBC, 25 October, 2002)Australian prime minister John Howard has said his country plans to eliminate all trade tariffs on imports from 50 poor nations. [...]"I am pleased to announce today that Australia will grant tariff and quota free access for 49 least developed countries as well as East Timor," he said.
Mr Howard attacked industrialised nations' failure to open their markets to agricultural products exported by the developing countries.
"The levels of protection in agriculture maintained by the United States, by Japan and by the European Union have an extremely adverse effect on many developing countries.
"Export earnings of the world's poorest countries are depressed by at least 10% because they are shut out of the world's biggest agricultural markets: The United States, the European Union, and Japan," he said.
We should at least match this, though I'd do away with them all except for barriers against states like Cuba, China, Iraq, etc..
IT'S FRITZ:
Democrats See Mondale as Best Hope for Victory (ALISON MITCHELL, October 26, 2002, NY Times)Even as Democrats in Washington mourned the death of Senator Paul Wellstone today, they scrambled behind the scenes to press former Vice President Walter F. Mondale to enter the race as their best hope for salvaging the Senate seat from Minnesota. [...]People close to Mr. Mondale said he was not ready to rule out running but considered it unseemly to speak out so soon after Mr. Wellstone's death. But Mr. Mondale, who was a senator from 1964 to 1976, when he resigned to be Jimmy Carter's vice president, seemed to invite speculation about his intentions today when he appeared at a news conference in Minnesota beside Senator Edward M. Kennedy and promised that Mr. Wellstone's cause would live on.
"I think if Paul were here, he would want us to think about one thing - to carry on the fight he led with such courage and vigilance for all these years," Mr. Mondale said. "We intend to do that."
This race now has to be considered "Safe--Democrat". Here's how it will play out. Mr. Mondale will try to get the Party to agree to nominate his son Ted. They'll demur and he'll accept.
ON THE OTHER HAND, A VERY BAD MOMENT:
Bush says does not support independence for Taiwan (Reuters, 26 October, 2002)U.S. President George W. Bush said on Friday the United States would use its influence to ensure China and Taiwan settle their differences peacefully and promised to make it clear to Taipei that Washington does not support independence.In a news conference with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Bush said the United States stood by the "one China" policy, which acknowledges that Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China.
"The 'one China' policy means that the issue ought to be resolved peacefully," Bush said.
"We've got influence with some in the region. We intend to make sure that the issue is resolved peacefully, and that includes making it clear that we do not support independence," Bush added.
No matter the demands of realpolitik, Mr. Bush should never speak so favorably of an enemy at the expense of a friend. But even what he said would have been okay had he added one fairly simple thing: "The 'one China' of which I speak will be a free nation like Taiwan, not a dictatorship like the PRC. And until the mainland is free, democratic and pluralistic, we will continue to help our friends in Taiwan defend themselves."
October 25, 2002
LET THE MOUNTAIN COME TO MOHAMMED:
Election 2002: Bush changes the debate (Nicholas M. Horrock, 10/21/02, UPI)For several months, the war hawks in the Bush administration had been leaking different versions of battle plans against Iraq to the news media. Democratic Sen. Joe Biden held hearings on the issue in the Senate Foreign Relations committee that revealed that the notion of an unprovoked attack on Iraq, particularly without allies, would sharply split the very core of the Democrats. The administration had sent no witnesses to those hearings and whatever the president's real plan was, he was holding it close to his chest -- but the White House had learned a lot.The president's political advisers had seen daylight. When Bush returned from vacation in September, the White House issued a new national security doctrine for the United States, dredging up an address he had made to the West Point graduating class in June. The United States, he said, would reserve the right to strike an enemy that it feared would attack America or its allies.
"Preemption" became the catchword of the news broadcasts and talk shows. Wouldn't it have been right if the United States had learned about the Sept. 11 attacks for it to preempt them Cheney would ask rhetorically? Maybe Pearl Harbor could have been prevented? Or Hitler stopped by a French Army invasion? [...]
Bush's tactic was certainly not new. He had used it successfully to back out of Kyoto, end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and to push Star Wars missile defense. Take the hard position and make the debate come to you.
The GOP probably won't come out of this election as well as they hope to, but one very important thing may be changing: the press and Democrats may finally be realizing that George W. Bush is a man to be reckoned with, rather than ridiculed. If such an impression were to actually take hold with the electorate too, it would make the President a genuinely formidable figure. Ronald Reagan, despite all he achieved, never shook the air of clownishness that the Left stuck him with. (He got a nice bump in popularity after he was shot, but it was of the "Who'd wanna shoot the sweet old guy" sort, not the "My what a courageous leader we have" sort.) This has made it possible, even after a Reagan-led victory in the Cold War, to minimize his presidency and to dismiss him as lucky and likeable, but not responsible for any of the good things that happened in the 80s.
SUV OR R.I.P.:
If it bleeds, it leads. (Ed Wallace, Oct. 24, 2002, Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram)[T]he number of deaths from Firestone tires' separating and a subsequent loss of vehicle control was more likely in the neighborhood of 120-130, not 281, the figure still reported in the ongoing stories. (Certain factors in the other 150-odd deaths effectively made each not solely a Ford or Firestone problem.) Put another way, the database showed that Explorer owners were statistically safer riding on Firestone tires than the average driver on the road was. They had fewer deaths per 100,000 miles than did the driving public at large.
You only have to hit one deer or moose before you decide an SUV is plenty safe enough.
STRAIGHT TALK BACK:
Attacks Escalate In Depositions (Amy Keller, October 21, 2002, Roll Call)The battle over campaign finance reform has degenerated into a downright slugfest, with Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) trading harsh personal jabs and punches in depositions and cross-examinations in the ongoing court case.The war of words first erupted during a deposition last month when McCain repeated charges that McConnell, as chairman of the National Republican
Senatorial Committee in 1998, encouraged Senators to support the tobacco industry on a legislative matter in return for soft money- financed issue
ads.It escalated when McCain reiterated the charges Oct. 10 in a cross-examination, calling McConnell's actions the "most egregious incident" demonstrating the appearance of corruption he has ever seen in his Senate career.
Last week, McConnell struck back at his nemesis during a brief cross-examination in which he defended himself and yanked some of McCain's skeletons out of the closet.
"This smear has now been repeated by Senator McCain and I want to make a point that I've never been the subject of an Ethics Committee investigation, such as he was during the Keating Five scandal," McConnell stated Oct. 11, according to a transcript.
"In addition to that," McConnell added in his sworn testimony, "it seems that my colleague has a rather active imagination when it comes to the subject of corruption, since he finds no corruption in a book party being sponsored by a FedEx chairman but does find the issuing of regulations by the Federal Election Commission corrupt."
Whatever else you may feel about John McCain, the evisceration of our First Amendment rights to speak about politics seems a high price to pay to cleanse his Keating-tainted soul.
HIS WONDERS TO PERFORM:
Study Finds Storm Cycles Etched in Lake Beds (ANDREW C. REVKIN, October 25, 2002, NY Times)Four times since the last ice age, at intervals roughly 3,000 years apart, the Northeast has been struck by cycles of storms far more powerful than any in recent times, according to a new study. The region appears to have entered a fifth era in which such superstorms are more likely, the researchers say.No one should necessarily start building dikes right away, say the researchers, who reported their work yesterday in the journal Nature. The stormy periods they identified each lasted a millennium or more, and giant floods occurred only sporadically in those stretches.
Still, the work illustrates that natural extremes of weather - what one researcher, Paul R. Bierman, a geologist at the University of Vermont, called a "drumbeat of storminess" - are many times greater than those experienced in the modern era. [...]
"This shows that in human experience, at least historical human experience, we don't know what this climate system is capable of," Dr. Steig said.
While revealing the rising potential for epic storms, the new findings are likely to confound efforts to discern whether human alterations of the atmosphere, particularly a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, are increasing the frequency of severe downpours, as many climate experts have predicted.
What are the odds that the editorial page writers of the Times even read the Science pages and will ever shut up about greenhouse gases?
BR'ER RABBIT HE AIN'T:
Sniper's odd 'duck in noose' from fable? (UPI, 10/25/02)The story "The Rabbit, the Otter, and Duck Hunting" revolves around a boastful little rabbit that lassos a hapless duck, but the duck eventually triumphantly escapes from the snare and gets the best of his foe, and the rabbit ends up eating his own fur for perpetuity. [...]The image of a duck trapped in a noose may have come from a story that is posted at various Internet sites. The story's origins are not clear, however it could be interpreted as the sniper, in the metaphoric form of the duck, escaping from the proverbial police noose.
In one version of the fable, the rabbit stealthily wades out into a river to capture a duck for dinner.
"He quickly fastened his noose around the neck of the closest duck," the story goes. "Startled, the duck began to struggle to get away and finally took off on his wings and dragged the rabbit out of the water after him."
"Now it was the rabbits turn to be startled. And boy was he. He held on to the noose and was taken high into the air. Higher and higher he went. All of a sudden, he lost his grip on the noose and down he fell into the middle of an old hollow Sycamore tree without a hole in the bottom to get out."
Some versions of the story end with the rabbit eventually getting out of the Sycamore stump while others leave him trapped in it. All, however, concede that the rabbit was reduced to consuming his own fur in order to survive.
"He stayed in there so long that he had to start eating his own fur," the story says, "as rabbits still do to this day when they are starved."
Apropos of nothing, there was an old movie, I can't remember the title, where an old man (Edward Arnold or Lionel Barrymore) or his profoundly annoying grandson tricks Death into staying in a sycamore tree when he comes to claim his next victim.
NOT QUITE PAN:
Arab League opposes Libya pull-out (BBC, 25 October, 2002)The secretary-general of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, is to fly to Libya to try to prevent it pulling out of the pan-Arab bodyLibyan officials are being reported as saying that the Arab League's inefficiency in dealing with the crises over Iraq and the Palestinians is behind their desire to leave.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has made no secret of his disappointment in his fellow Arabs, and has threatened to pull out of the 22 member body before. [...]
In September, Colonel Gaddafi was reported to have raised the issue of leaving the Arab League again in protest at "official Arab cowardice" in confronting Israel and the United States.
Why isn't he on the axis?
WHO GETS TO BE THEIR LAUTENBERG?:
Our MN source, with ties to the Wellstone camp, is reporting that the hot names being bandied about are Ted Mondale, son of Walter, who it is awfully hard to see the National Party okaying, and Alan Page, the Hall of Fame Viking lineman and current MN Supreme Court Justice. Between those two, Mr. Page seems the better bet, particularly since he'd give them a much needed black Senator. But Walter Mondale's seniority, experience, and fund-raising ability would seem to make him the safest bet to retain the seat.
UPDATE:
Democrats to decide who will replace Wellstone on ballot (Associated Press, Oct. 25, 2002)
Shaken Minnesota Democrats have less than a week to come up with a replacement for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone in a race that could decide control of the Senate.Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer said state law allows the party to pick someone to run in Wellstone's spot - and it allows the governor to appoint a temporary replacement. She declined to address other details, including how absentee ballots already filled out would be handled. [...]
Potential candidates include Walter Mondale, the former vice president and senator who is now an attorney in Minneapolis, and Alan Page, the former Minnesota Viking football player now on the state Supreme Court.
RICHARD HARRIS (1930-2002):
Actor Richard Harris dies (BBC, 25 October, 2002)Actor Richard Harris has died at University College Hospital in London, according to a family spokesman.The Irish screen veteran, 72, had been undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin's disease, after falling ill two months ago.
Just saw Mr. Harris in the very good recent version of The Count of Monte Cristo--a good rental for the weekend.
LEFT WING BIGOTRY:
Saudis in Bikinis (NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, 10/25/02, NY Times)If most Saudi women want to wear a tent, if they don't want to drive, then that's fine. But why not give them the choice? Why ban women drivers and why empower the religious police, the mutawwa, to scold those loose hussies who choose to show a patch of hair?If Saudi Arabians choose to kill their economic development and sacrifice international respect by clinging to the 15th century, if the women prefer to remain second-class citizens, then I suppose that's their choice. But if anyone chooses to behave so foolishly, is it any surprise that outsiders point and jeer?
Imagine the reaction if Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh belittled the abaya that way.
WELLSTONE DEAD:
Plane Chartered by Sen. Wellstone Crashes; 8 Dead (Fox News, October 25, 2002)A plane chartered by Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., crashed Friday and all eight aboard died, a Transportation Department official said.
Rush Limbaugh just reported that Wellstone is confirmed dead, along with his wife and daughter, three staffers and two crew members. We'd no use for his politics but respect his service to his country: though often wrong, he was at least in the arena fighting for what he believed.
ANYONE ELSE WANT TO SUBMIT THEIR PICKS?:
Seesaw Races Grip the Senate Of 34 seats on ballots this fall, the GOP is defending 20; the Democrats, 14. A handful may decide control of the chamber. (Ronald Brownstein, October 21 2002, LA Times)In the seven races considered the most competitive, five remain too close to call: Republican-held seats in Colorado and New Hampshire, and Democrat-held seats in Missouri, Minnesota and South Dakota. Democrats are slightly favored to hold on to a seat in New Jersey and capture a GOP seat in Arkansas.Republicans need a net gain of only one seat to win control of the Senate. With so many races so tight, small changes in the national environment could loom large. Over the last six weeks, Republicans benefited from an increased focus on national security issues generated by the debate over a possible war with Iraq. But that advantage may have peaked too soon.
Even some GOP strategists worry that the campaign focus over the final two weeks may revert toward the economy -- and trigger the traditional voter inclination to punish the party holding the White House for hard times. "It would be better if the election was this Tuesday," one top GOP strategist said.
Here are the seats that seem at least mildly competitive:
Republican Seats (*denotes incumbent)
NH: Shaheen (D) vs. Sununu (R)CO: Strickland (D) vs. *Allard (R)
TX: Kirk (D) vs. Cornyn (R)
NC: Bowles (D) vs. Dole (R)
SC: Sanders (D) vs. Graham (R)
AR: Pryor (D) vs. *Hutchinson (R)
Democrat Seats
NJ: Lautenberg (D) vs. Forrester (R)GA: *Cleland (D) vs. Chambliss (R)
IA: *Harkin (D) vs. Ganske (R)
MO: *Carnahan (D) vs. Talent (R)
LA: *Landrieu (D) vs. the field (R)
MN: *Wellstone (D) vs. Coleman (R)
SD: *Johnson (D) vs. Thune (R)
Here are my predictions:
THE WINNING TEAM:
Ripken's moment tops Aaron's record-breaking HR (Associated Press, October 23, 2002)Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig's consecutive games streak was voted baseball's most memorable moment in fan balloting.The milestone by the Baltimore Orioles' shortstop in 1995 received 282,821 votes, out of more than 1.1 million cast.
This is just silly: everyone knows baseball's greatest moment was Ronald Wilson Reagan striking out Tony Lazzeri.
BLACK POWER!:
Republicans Try New Strategy: GOP Operatives Seek Percentage of Black Vote (Terry M. Neal, October 24, 2002, washingtonpost.com)The Post's David Broder wrote last week that "across the South, all elections depend on the Democrats' ability to reduce white voters' propensity to back Republicans," Broder wrote. But the flipside of that point is true as well: Republican candidates who expect to win must reduce the propensity of black voters to support Democrats. So in statewide races in Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina, among others, GOP candidates are crafting strategies to appeal to black voters.The idea is not that they'll get a lot of votes. They just need some.
"It makes a dramatic difference whether a Republican gets 5 percent or 15 percent of the black vote in southern races," said pollster Whit Ayres, who is working for Riley and Tennessee Senate candidate Lamar Alexander this year. "If a Republican can get no more than 5 percent of the African American vote, then they're put in the position of having to win 68 to 70 percent of the white vote. It's not impossible to do, but it is tough.
"For every percent over 5 percent of the black vote that a Republican gets, it helps his chances all that much more."
Democrats such as Siegelman and Jim Hodges in South Carolina won their gubernatorial races in 1998 by focusing almost solely on education and skimming off of the overwhelming white majorities that typically vote Republican in the South, while maintaining 90 percent-plus black majorities. This year, their opponents are trying to chip into their percentages of the black vote while holding onto large majorities of white voters.
That strategy can be seen this year around the South and in states with large black population states such as Maryland, where Republican gubernatorial candidate Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. picked an African American running mate and held his first televised debate against Democrat Kathleen Kennedy Townsend before the NAACP.
The strategy could also be seen in last Sunday's debate between Alexander and Democrat Bob Clement. Alexander tried to make an issue of Clement's failure to back then-Gov. Alexander's appointment of the state's first black Supreme Court nominee, George H. Brown, 22 years ago. Alexander pointed out that some black Democrats, including former Rep. Harold Ford, crossed party lines to support Brown, who was a Republican. Why should black voters support Clement, Alexander pressed, if he couldn't support Brown all those years ago?
Black leaders, especially clergy and businessmen, do themselves and their people a terrible disservice by not exploiting this power. Of course, the reason they don't utilize it is because it would require them to support Republicans once in awhile. But consider this: so long as blacks vote for Democrats in lockstep, there is no reason for the Democrats to give them anything in return. You know the old adage about how no one buys the cow when they're getting the milk for free.
APPLE GRENADES:
Fresh pomegranates are poetic, colorful and juicy (AP, 10/25/02)Fresh pomegranates are available only September through December. Use the seeds and juice fresh during the fall and early winter, and freeze them for later use.The sweet-tart seeds and juice are packed inside the fruit's leathery outer skin. To remove them easily, cut the crown end off the pomegranate, then lightly score the rind from top to bottom five or six times around the fruit. Immerse the fruit in a bowl of water and soak 5 minutes. Hold the fruit under water, to prevent splattering, and break the sections apart.
Next, separate seeds from rind and membrane. Seeds will sink to the bottom of the bowl; rind and membranes will float--skim them off and discard them.
Drain seeds, pat them dry, and they're ready to use.
Never could figure out how to eat the dang things. Here are a few recipes.
IN THE MEANTIME:
Christians and Jews are both part of the Divine Plan (Bruce T. Forbes October 22, 2002, Israel Insider)When I was eight years old I made a childhood promise to visit Israel - to walk the paths of the great Patriarchs and Kings; to see the places Jesus taught; to see the country built up by a modern people led by my childhood heroes David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir. My father's advice was to read and learn the history of each place so I would know what I was looking at when I got there.Thirty-five years later, as a member of the U.S. Air Force, I twice found myself working alongside members of the Israeli Defense Force in joint military exercises - and touring the country on our off-duty time. My father's advice served me well as I was even able to teach some of the Israelis about the places we saw. One of the most sacred moments was looking up at the Mount of Olives while reading the words of the prophet Zechariah concerning the coming of the Messiah. There was no arguing; only a friendly challenge to meet when the Messiah came to see who was right all along.
I am a Christian who loves and respects a Book, a People, and a Country--something taught to me from birth. I know I will always be an outsider, but I will still be there--writing letters to the leaders of my country and chastising them when they aren't good to Israel; publicly defending Israel in political debates and Judaism in religious debates; and taking my place in public rallies in the defense of Israel and my friends. And standing guard if a neighboring rabbi's home is threatened.
And this is more than many American Jews are willing to do! This is more than some Israelis are willing to do!
So imagine my surprise when I read the writings of a rising star in the Israeli political sky, only to discover I am no better than a Nazi because the Almighty chose to have me born into a Christian home. Imagine my shock to discover how many people agree with this man!
If Zionism requires a racial Judaism, then it's awfully hard to imagine Israel enduring for more than another generation or two. It seems more healthy for Israelis to recognize that their state is part of an emerging coalition of like-minded liberal democracies that are Jewish (Israel), Muslim (Turkey), Hindu (India), Buddhist (Taiwan), and Christian (America) and that they are bound by political ideals even as they celebrate different religions.
October 24, 2002
VIGILANTE JUSTICE--AMEN:
Alert trucker: 'I'm no hero' (CNN, October 24, 2002)The truck driver who called police early Thursday after spotting a Chevrolet Caprice wanted in connection with the Washington-area sniper slayings said he's "no hero," and plans to share any reward money he receives with victims of the attacks.Ron Lantz said he noticed the car, which matched the description given in news coverage, after pulling in to a rest area near Frederick. He discussed what to do with another driver, and then decided to call 9-1-1.
"They told me 'We'll be there as soon as possible,'" he said. "They said, 'You stay right where you're at.'"
Then, somebody else at the scene suggested that Lantz move his truck to block the exit from the rest area, to prevent the car from leaving, which he did. [...]
"I'm no hero," he said. "I just want people to think what I did was what I should have done."
Authorities had posted a $500,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the sniper suspects, believed responsible for killing 10 people and wounding three others since October 2.
Lantz, who is just five runs short of retiring as a truck driver, said if any of the reward money comes his way, "I'd probably take it back and give it to the people who were shot."
"At least half of it, anyway."
He's sure as heck a hero in our book. It becomes increasingly evident that ordinary citizens will be as important, in some ways more so, to defeating terrorism as the authorities. One sure wishes he'd had a gun.
ONE FLEW OVER TOM DASCHLE'S NEST:
Bingo game spurs probe of Doyle's campaign: Republicans say event was used to snare votes (STEVE SCHULTZE and NAHAL TOOSI, Oct. 24, 2002, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel)A Columbus Day bingo game at a Kenosha facility for the mentally ill has prompted a criminal investigation and another round of scandal allegations by Republicans against Jim Doyle, the Democratic candidate for governor.Doyle's campaign used quarters paid as bingo prizes and refreshments to induce residents of the Dayton Residential Care Facility to cast absentee ballots, according to Republican Gov. Scott McCallum's campaign chief and state GOP Chairman Rick Graber.
Both accused Doyle's campaign of exploiting residents with mental disabilities at the former hotel.
Hey, c'mon, people with mental disabilities are the Democrat's base.
LAST ORDERS:
Bin Laden 'ambassador' arrested (Daniel McGrory, Richard Ford and Michael Evans, October 25, 2002, Times of London)BRITAIN'S most wanted man, Abu Qatada, described as Osama bin Laden's "ambassador" in Europe, has been seized in an armed raid on his hideout in London.David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, would say only that a suspect had been arrested on Wednesday under the antiterrorist laws. Security sources last night named the suspect as Abu Qatada.
The radical 42-year-old Muslim cleric, whose real name is Sheikh Omar Mahmood Abu Omar, has been accused by police in eight countries of being a pivotal figure in the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
He was arrested at a council house in Bermondsey, South London, in a joint operation by Scotland Yard Anti-Terrorist Branch detectives and MI5 agents. He is now in Belmarsh top security prison.
His arrest is a major success for Britain and will be welcomed by the White House and European leaders who have been shown secret intelligence on Abu Qatada's role in bin Laden's network. He is alleged to have recruited figures like Zacharias Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker" and the "shoe bomber", Richard Reid.
We're going to have to decimate the crow population if they can tie this guy to Moussaoui.
WITH US OR AGAINST US?:
Be in no doubt, war is only weeks away (William Rees-Mogg, October 21, 2002 , Times of London)In all politics, and in particular in American politics, events change attitudes. The South should not have fired on Fort Sumter in 1861; the Germans should not have sunk the Lusitania in 1915; the Japanese should not have attacked Pearl Harbour in 1941. By the same logic, Al-Qaeda should not have destroyed the Twin Towers in 2001. Before these acts of aggression, negotiation was still open; the American determination had not crystallised.After they had occurred, the destruction of the aggressor became inevitable. In each of these wars, the initial challenge came from the other side. But once Americans are convinced that they face an implacable enemy, that has a revolutionary effect. The aim of terrorists is to radicalise their own potential followers; 9-11 radicalised the American people, despite their anxieties.
Some of the opponents of the war argue that al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussain are two separate groups, but al-Qaeda is indeed an enemy of Saddam Hussain. The Americans I was meeting do not see it like that. They regard all Islamic terrorism as forming a single threat.
Americans do not know, or much care, what precise relationship exists between al-Qaeda and the Bali terrorists. They see them both as being in the same line of business, and do not doubt that some links exist between them. They see Saddam Hussain in the same light. He is the brutal dictator of an Islamic country; he had repeatedly supported terrorists and used terror himself. To allow him to develop weapons of mass destruction would, they think, be as irrational at allowing al-Qaeda to do so.
So far as most Americans are concerned, Islamic terrorists, whether they belong to the al-Qaeda network or are Palestinian suicide bombers, or plant bombs in Indonesia or Kashmir, or lead terrorist governments, all form part of the same global threat.
We are an unsubtle people and I mean that in the best sense possible. We may not know who Occam was, but we know his razor cuts fine.
THE CASE FOR PESSIMISM:
Poll Vault: HOW THE DEMOCRATS COULD WIN. (John B. Judis, 10.18.02, New Republic)At first glance the Democrats seem to have done little to merit this growing support for their domestic policies. They don't have a national program for improving education or reviving the economy. Most Democratic campaigns have been narrowly focused and uncreative: They have slammed Republican plans to privatize Social Security, they have called for including prescription-drug coverage for seniors under Medicare, and they have attacked Republicans for condoning corporate corruption.But this timid agenda may prove surprisingly effective in today's peculiar economic climate. The American economy is not in a traditional recession, as it was during the 1982 election. Most Americans are not worried about losing their jobs right now. But they do worry that a fall in the stock market is depleting their savings and could eventually send the economy into a tailspin that would threaten their jobs. They are anxious about the future rather than the present--and that gives the Democrats' issues a particular resonance that they would not have in a boom (when voters aren't very worried about the future) or a during a deep recession (when they are fixated on immediate relief). Voters are angry about corporate corruption because it has robbed workers and stockholders of their savings. They don't want the government's savings program--Social Security--to be subject to the rise and fall of the Dow Jones index. And they worry about having to pay out their savings for rising drug costs. They prefer the simple, Democratic idea of plugging prescription-drug coverage into Medicare to the more complex--and far less generous--Republican and drug company plan of forcing seniors to pay premiums to private insurance companies for drug coverage.
If Mr. Judis's premises are correct, that the American people want the current Social Security program, their taxes to pay for prescription drugs, and government to exert control over corporations then they will, and should, vote Democrat. And were Republicans not the stupid party they would eagerly seek to fight out this election on this battleground, of Socialism vs. Free Enterprise.
I, I, I, ME, ME, ME:
Muslims Fear Sniper Backlash: Muslims Fear Arrest of Muslim Man in Connection With Sniper Case Could Trigger Backlash (The Associated Press, Oct. 24, 2002)The arrest of a Muslim man on charges connected to the deadly Washington-area sniper shootings has the Islamic community bracing for another round of threats and attacks like those that followed the Sept. 11 terrorism."The whole Muslim community was praying day and night: 'God, please. There has to be no connection to Muslims,'" Faiz Rehman of the American Muslim Council said Thursday.
"We'll probably have a backlash. People in a hurry will think that this is just a Muslim thing again. The community really fears it."
No. I'm sorry, but that just won't cut it. There are ten of your fellow Americans dead, several wounded, their families shattered, and many thousands who have lived in terror for weeks now--you don't get to try and win pity out of this story. No one's in the mood for whining about how hard this makes it to be a Muslim in America. We too hope that this will not provoke unjustifiable attacks on innocent folk, but just for one minute, while the entire country is breathing a sigh of relief, put patriotism ahead of religion and express your thanks that these scum were caught, whatever their backgrounds. Pray for the victims, then yourselves.
AS THE POTEMKIN VILLAGE BURNS:
Iraq expels some foreign journalists, reportedly annoyed at stories about demonstration (DAVID BAUDER, Oct 24, 2002, Associated Press)Iraq is expelling some foreign journalists and warning of restrictive new rules for getting back into the country, news organizations said Thursday. [...]Iraqi officials claimed CNN fabricated a report that government authorities had fired one or more guns into the air to disperse demonstrators earlier this week. [Eason Jordan, CNN president of newsgathering] said CNN had footage of the gunplay.
The Iraqi government is also upset that CNN has stationed a news team in the northern part of the country, which is not controlled by Saddam Hussein, he said.
Funny how quickly you can lose control of a story you're trying to stage manage. Now if only the press would play this up the way they did the "election" last week.
THE ANEURYSM ACTING UP?:
Bush Should Take a Walk Near Home (Jimmy Breslin, October 24, 2002, Newsday)It was one thing that Bush was completely disdainful of the World Trade Center. He and his people hate New York. He barely showed for a year. And they blew the attack. They blew it because any threats to New York weren't of such vital interest. New York is filled with blacks and Jews and all kinds of Hispanics and Asians who don't vote right. We don't bother with them during an election, then why stop everything and concentrate on some threat to the place?Now we find out that Bush doesn't even like Washington. The reason is that nobody in the shooting area, in Montgomery County towns, voted for him.
Bad enough that he's actually accusing the President of ignoring the 9-11 attacks because they were aimed at a state that wouldn't vote for him--one wonders why Mr. Bush didn't at least pay attention to the two planes that were targeted at his own administration?--but even worse is the fact that Mr. Breslin, who here is worried about Mr. Bush's attitude towards Asians, notoriously referred to an Asian co-worker as a "little yellow dog" and an epithet so awful we won't even post it here. Isn't it equally plausible that this legendary journalist failed to pursue the terrorist threat to New York because of his own racism? Yes, it's equally plausible because thoroughly implausible.
THIS AIN'T GOOD:
Who let Lee Malvo loose? (Michelle Malkin, Oct. 25, 2002, Jewish World Review)The mainstream media informed us this week that Lee Malvo, the reportedly "17-year-old" youth charged as a material witness in the sniper investigation along with John Mohammed, is a "Jamaican national." As of this writing (Oct. 24), the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to comment publicly on the exact nature of Malvo's immigration status.Here are the facts the INS doesn't want you to know: Lee Malvo is an illegal alien from Jamaica who jumped ship in Miami in June 2001. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Wash., in December 2001, but was then let go by the INS district in Seattle in clear violation of federal law and contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol officers intended, according to my law enforcement sources.
GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST!:
The GOP has posted a response ad to that scurrilous Democrat ad where George W. Bush pushes a wheelchair bound Senior off a cliff. It's a shriekin' hoot.
OUR THING:
Pelosi's PAC Stirs Questions (Ethan Wallison, October 24, 2002, Roll Call)Campaign finance experts and watchdogs are questioning the legality of twin leadership PACs that have enabled Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to double up on hard-dollar contributions she has given and received this election cycle.The experts suggest that the use of the two committees, PAC to the Future and Team Majority, amounts to a probable violation of laws intended to prevent lawmakers from multiplying their leadership political action committees in order to defy contribution limits. The treasurer for the two committees, former California Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy (D), acknowledges that the PACs are identical in all but name.
"They've got a real problem here," said Trevor Potter, a former commissioner at the Federal Election Commission, citing "affiliation rules" that are intended to ensure that PACs observe the $5,000 limits on gifts.
"It sounds like a circumvention scheme to double the contribution limits. The law doesn't allow that," said Potter, who based his assessment on a verbal description of the PACs. "They're over the limits for everyone they've given money to. They're probably going to have to ask for that money back."
Thank goodness the military loathes them, because at the rate the Democrats are disregarding laws and constitutional provisions in a desperate bid to retain power, you almost expect an attempted coup next.
A PRAYER:
Phone Call Pointed Investigators To Evidence (AP, October 24, 2002)In the end, one of the men arrested in connection with the sniper shootings may have given investigators their best clue.An ominous call to the sniper task force tip line urged authorities to check out an incident in "Montgomery," triggering an investigative chain that led to the capture of two men, a law enforcement source told The Associated Press on Thursday on condition of anonymity.
The call led investigators from Montgomery, Ala., to Tacoma, Wash., to a darkened rest stop off I-70 in Frederick County, Md., where the two men were taken into custody.
Muhammad Has History of Parental Abduction (AP, October 24, 2002)
Investigators are combing through the lives of two men named in connection with the Washington, D.C.-area sniper investigation, searching for clues to what may have motivated a killing spree.John Allen Muhammad, 42, one of the men, is a Muslim convert said to be sympathetic to the Sept. 11 hijackers, according to published reports.
Let this be the shooters so that our fellow citizens can get back to living their lives without being terrified.
THE CHILDREN'S HOUR:
Good Reasons Aren't Enough for Bush (Richard Cohen, October 24, 2002, Washington Post)Appearing on the old "Dick Cavett Show" back in 1980, the writer Mary McCarthy said of her fellow writer Lillian Hellman: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' " The same cannot yet be said about George W. Bush and his administration -- but it has not been around as long as Hellman was and is not nearly as creative.The evidence is accumulating, though, that neither Bush nor his colleagues are particularly punctilious about the truth. For good reason, they sorely want a war with Iraq -- but good reasons are not, it seems, good enough for this administration.
Instead, both the president and his aides have exaggerated the Iraqi threat, creating links and evidence where they do not exist. Even before this war starts, its first victim has been truth. [...]
In speaking about Hussein last week, Bush said, "This is a man who we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army."
Maybe in his judgment -- but not really in anyone else's.
Mr. Cohen is, oddly enough, lying even as he decries lying. There may not in fact be close ties and co-operatioon between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, but no objective observer can deny that there are many credible reports that Saddam has made repeated efforts to turn al Qaeda into his forward army. The report that one sees most often, and which is detailed enough to make one believe there's some fire below the smoke, is that after Bill Clinton's desultory cruise missile attack on al Qaeda's Afghan encampments in 1998, Saddam sent Faruq al-Hijazi to Kandahar to renew an offer of asylum and assistance to Osama, specifically including the option for al Qaeda to relocate to Iraq. (It may be argued that such stories are manufactured, but why make up a series of stories that show there are no ties between Saddam and al Qaeda?) That Osama may have resisted these blandishments, because Saddam is not sufficiently an Islamicist, does not in any way diminish Saddam's desire to use al Qaeda for his own purposes.
THE WEST MOVES SOUTH:
The End of the West: The next clash of civilizations will not be between the West and the rest but between the United States and Europe—and Americans remain largely oblivious (Charles A. Kupchan, November 2002, The Atlantic Monthly)The American era appears to be alive and well. The U.S. economy is more than twice the size of the next biggest—Japan's—and the United States spends more on defense than the world's other major powers combined. China is regularly identified as America's next challenger, but it is decades away from entering the top ranks. The terrorist attacks in New York and Washington certainly punctured the sense of security that arose from the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the West, but they have done little to compromise U.S. hegemony. Indeed, they have reawakened America's appetite for global engagement. At least for the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to enjoy primacy, taking on Islamic terrorism even as it keeps a watchful eye on China.That encapsulates the conventional wisdom—and it is woefully off the mark. Not only is American primacy far less durable than it appears, but it is already beginning to diminish. And the rising challenger is not China or the Islamic world but the European Union, an emerging polity that is in the process of marshaling the impressive resources and historical ambitions of Europe's separate nation-states.
The EU's annual economic output has reached about $8 trillion, compared with America's $10 trillion, and the euro will soon threaten the dollar's global dominance. Europe is strengthening its collective consciousness and character and forging a clearer sense of interests and values that are quite distinct from those of the United States. The EU's member states are debating the adoption of a Europe-wide constitution (a move favored by two thirds of the union's population), building armed forces capable of operating independently of the U.S. military, and striving to project a single voice in the diplomatic arena.
This could not possibly be any more wrong nor come at a time that more conclusively proves its every premise to be erroneous.
October 23, 2002
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE...VOTING FOR DEMOCRATS:
Arkansas GOP charges vote fraud (Audrey Hudson, October 23, 2002, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)Arkansas Democrats are trying to steal the Senate election by registering dead people and businesses to vote, illegally allowing early voting on weekends and not requiring identification to vote, Republicans said yesterday. Top StoriesAt least six dead people tried to register to vote, including one helped by a person also listed on campaign-spending reports as having received $100 by the state Democratic party, said Marty Ryall, Republican Party chairman.
You don't need a sixth sense to know that with control of the Senate at stake and the prospect of being shut out of the Federal government until at least 2006, the Democrats are going to pull out all the stops.
REDEEMING CANAAN (via Lordmage):
Britons 'don't trust' government or EU: Only French have less faith in their rulers, survey shows (Ian Black, October 22, 2002, The Guardian)Britons have an unusually high level of distrust in their own government as well as in EU institutions - about which they are more ignorant than people in any other member state, according to a survey.The latest findings from Eurobarometer, the polling arm of the European commission, show that 33% of Britons tends to trust the government. Only France, where the figure was 30%, performs worse. Average trust in national government across the EU was 47%.
In its biannual survey of EU public opinion, Eurobarometer also found that questions about the EU generate more "don't know" answers among Britons than anyone else. "Don't know, don't understand and don't trust would appear to be the UK mantra when looking at theEU," said the report.
Unsurprisingly, a referendum on joining the single currency would produce a "no" result if it were staged now, with just 31% ready to scrap the pound for the euro.
From the day they stabbed the Iron Lady in the back the Tories have had their heads pressed against their prostates on this issue. They could retake Britain and establish an enduring identity if they'd adopt a British nationalist, Anglosphere-oriented, tax and government cutting platform and bang the thing like that gong in the old Ealing Studio movies.
SCRATCH ANOTHER PROSPECTIVE PROFESSION OFF THE LIST:
'I cut off my arm to survive' (BBC, 23 October, 2002)Doug Goodale cut off his own arm at the elbow in order to survive an accident at sea.He had become caught in a winch hauling lobster pots up from the sea floor, and could not free himself.
The power of the winch left him hanging over the side of the boat, unable to either free himself or clamber back aboard.
As the boat was rocked by stormy weather, he believes it was only a last, desperate instinct for self-preservation that kicked in to save him.
He said: "Nobody near you, no help, no radio, nobody to turn the radio off - that's it - you're going to die."
Somehow he managed to haul himself back onto the deck, dislocating his shoulder in the process.
His motivation was the image of his daughters appearing to him.
"I don't know how to explain it to people, but I swear, climbing onto the boat were my two girls."
However, he was still trapped in the winch, bleeding heavily, and with no way of getting free, his only option was to pick up a knife and cut through his right arm.
He then managed to pilot his boat back into harbour to get medical help.
He said: "When my six-year-old tells me: 'It doesn't matter that you've only got one arm - you're here'.
"Now if you heard that from your kids, wouldn't you take a knife and do the same?"
I imagine I'd think it over for a few days first.
THE STUPID VS. THE EVIL:
Naked fur protest stuns Chinese (BBC, 23 October, 2002)Two Western anti-fur protesters have been arrested after stripping off in a busy shopping street in the Chinese capital Beijing.Kayla Worden, 31, and Briton Yvonne Taylor, 29, were hauled off in a police van in their underwear minutes after casting off red robes in front of dozens of onlookers.
They had unfurled banners reading "We'd rather go naked than wear fur" in English and Chinese, in protest at a fur trade fair due to open in the city on Friday.
The two women are members of animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta), which believes that the fur trade is cruel and necessary.
These trivial dimwits did this in a country whose governing party has killed--what?--about 30 million of its own people and even now has untold numbers in prison for their religious beliefs or for political activism. The heck with the stinkin' ferrets; how about the Chinese people?
GLORY DAZE (via Ed Driscoll):
Age an Issue in N.J. Senate Race (Kathy Hennessy, October 23, 2002, Associated Press)With comments about memory loss and rambling speeches, New Jersey Republicans are indirectly raising the question: Is 78-year-old Frank Lautenberg too old to run for the Senate?GOP challenger Douglas Forrester's campaign has been saying the Democratic former senator is out of touch on the issues and is avoiding debates because his mind "wanders."
"Age is not the issue, hypocrisy is the issue," said Forrester campaign manager Bill Pascoe. "More importantly is whether he is up to the job."
Lautenberg, who joined the race this month after Sen. Robert Torricelli dropped out, leads Forrester in most polls. However, a survey released Tuesday showed New Jersey residents are learning who Forrester is and many have a favorable opinion.
In Lautenberg's first campaign, in 1982, it was he who made an issue of age with his opponent, 72-year-old Millicent Fenwick. He questioned her "capacity" to be a senator, described her as "eccentric," and wondered if she would serve long enough to develop the power that comes with seniority.
Maybe the GOP could replace Bill Simon on the ballot in CA with Ronald Reagan.
SECOND BEST OPTION:
Poet a Contender to Run Federal Arts Agency (ROBIN POGREBIN, October 23, 2002, NY Times)The poet, critic and anthologist Dana Gioia has emerged as the leading candidate to become the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, according to sources close to the process. The previous chairman of that agency, Michael P. Hammond, died in January after just a week in the post.Mr. Gioia's nomination, which must be confirmed by the Senate, is expected to be announced by President Bush in about two weeks, a government official said. Because of the endowment's history as a lightning rod for impassioned debates about the direction of culture in the country and the government's role in financing it, the chairmanship is a sensitive post that draws far more attention than other positions with influence over annual budgets far larger than the endowment's $115 million.
Reached by telephone, Mr. Gioia would confirm only that he was being considered. "Yes, I have been talking to the White House about this post," he said. "I can't say anything more than that because it would be inappropriate at this point. I am not a nominee."
Mr. Gioia (pronounced JOY-a), 51, has published three books of poetry: "Daily Horoscope" (1986), "The Gods of Winter" (1991) and "Interrogations at Noon" (2001), which won the American Book Award in May. He is well known as someone who has revived rhyme and meter, though he also writes in free verse.
He was widely recognized for his essay "Can Poetry Matter?," which appeared in The Atlantic in 1991. In the essay, Mr. Gioia argued that a clubby academic subculture that had grown up around poetry was preventing it from being widely available to the mainstream. The essay prompted considerable debate and was included in Mr. Gioia's 1992 collection of essays, "Can Poetry Matter?: Essays on Poetry and American Culture," which was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of its Best Books of 1992 and became a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.
If they aren't going to do away with it they may as well have this guy head it.
MCBRIDE LEFT AT ALTAR:
McBride lost the chance to make case (PETER WALLSTEN, Oct. 23, 2002 , Miami Herald)[T]he onus was on McBride, as a challenger who polls show remains largely unknown to nearly one in three Florida voters, to pull off a dramatic performance.At times his performance was dramatic -- dramatically abysmal.
That was particularly true during an exchange between Russert and McBride on how he would pay for his priorities, which include a proposed amendment to the state Constitution to cap class sizes in public schools.
The exchange led to a perennial losing issue for Democrats -- taxes -- and gave Bush the perfect opening to again tell voters that his Democratic foe would force them to pay more.
McBride, on the other hand, looked slippery.[...]
When Russert asked McBride if he disagreed with the state teachers union on even one issue -- the union has bankrolled much of the Democrat's efforts and its leading officials hold key campaign posts -- McBride paused and looked a bit dazed.
''I could have gone out and gotten a drink of water, and then come back in,'' joked Mike Murphy, Bush's media consultant, who was sitting in the audience.
This is just a brutal analysis.
CASTRO DELENDA EST:
U.S. works for regime change in Cuba, too (Bill Sternberg, 10/23/02, USA TODAY)James Cason, the top U.S. diplomat in Cuba, served up a surprise along with the mojito rum drinks to a group of American newspaper editors who visited his residence here last week. Three of the island nation's leading political dissidents materialized on the veranda to air grievances against Fidel Castro's government.The meeting was part of the Bush administration's relatively unpublicized effort to promote regime change in Cuba. Administration officials aren't considering a military operation like the one being planned to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein--or, for that matter, like the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion to depose Castro.
But, much to the annoyance of Cuban leaders, U.S. officials have been working inside Cuba to promote democracy and end Castro's 43-year rule. Their efforts have irritated U.S.-Cuban relations just as Castro is engaged in what has been called a ''charm offensive'' aimed at getting the United States to drop its four-decade ban on tourism and trade.
All of the stuff enumerated here is great, but as we said below, the Administration should be vocal about this and repeat it ad nauseum: Cuba Libre.
CHINA SYNDROME:
Ore. Democrat Sees Lead Dwindle: Oregon Democratic Candidate Kulongoski Finds Himself in Surprisingly Tight Governor's Race (The Associated Press, 10/23/02)When the Oregon governor's race was taking shape, a sense of inevitability surrounded Democrat Ted Kulongoski's campaign.
Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me...but maybe I'll just hold on to this for now.
HAWKISH ON HISTORY, DOVISH ON THE PRESENT:
If you've ever read any of the studies and commentaries by the Media Research Center, you'll be familiar with Peter Jennings's well-documented anti-conservative, anti-Israel, and pro-Arab biases. If not, here's a representative essay about it.
At any rate, it came as a great shock to find the following quote from Mr. Jennings, which were you to swap out Japan and replace it with Iraq would very nearly justify nuking Baghdad, (Peter Jennings's final remarks on the 40th Anniversary of Hiroshima, 8/05/85, ABC News)
The ceremonies here to mark the fortieth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb are almost over. Japan's Prime Minister Nakasone has just spoken to the crowd, telling them again, of course, to remember to keep the image of what war can cost in their minds. And not far from where we stand, a peace bell, which you may hear, which people come from all over the world to ring.Those people who died at Hiroshima and later at Nagasaki were killed by the atomic bomb, but they really died because of an evil Japanese ideology. There was scarcely a crime the Japanese had not committed in their drive to conquer the world. Today's Japanese are uncompromising in their commitment to peace. They're forever coming up and thanking Americans for setting Japan on the road to democracy. So for the Japanese, Hiroshima was a terrible lesson, but they appear to have learned it well.
It's odd how easily even the most dedicated Leftist can, in retrospect, appreciate that ridding a Germany of Hitler, a Japan of fascism, and Eastern Europe of communism were unalloyed goods, but can not imagine that ridding the Middle East of its Islamicism and other variants of totalitarian ideology will be similarly worthwhile and will, forty years from now, make us heroes in the eyes of the freed peoples.
WHAT, NO FAVA BEANS?:
State News: Montana (USA Today, October 21, 2002)Red Lodge - The historic home of Liver Eating Johnston, an early pioneer and this town's first constable, was towed through town, led by a five-piece oom-pah band and followed by a cadre of musket-toting mountain men. Johnston received his nickname for removing part of an Indian's liver during a knife fight. Johnston, whose real name was John Garrison, was also known as Jeremiah Johnson.
ROTISSERIE POLITICS:
Seesaw Races Grip the Senate Of 34 seats on ballots this fall, the GOP is defending 20; the Democrats, 14. A handful may decide control of the chamber. (Ronald Brownstein, October 21 2002, LA Times)In the seven races considered the most competitive, five remain too close to call: Republican-held seats in Colorado and New Hampshire, and Democrat-held seats in Missouri, Minnesota and South Dakota. Democrats are slightly favored to hold on to a seat in New Jersey and capture a GOP seat in Arkansas.Republicans need a net gain of only one seat to win control of the Senate. With so many races so tight, small changes in the national environment could loom large. Over the last six weeks, Republicans benefited from an increased focus on national security issues generated by the debate over a possible war with Iraq. But that advantage may have peaked too soon.
Even some GOP strategists worry that the campaign focus over the final two weeks may revert toward the economy -- and trigger the traditional
voter inclination to punish the party holding the White House for hard times. "It would be better if the election was this Tuesday," one top GOP strategist said.
Here are the seats that seem at least mildly competitive:
Republican Seats (*denotes incumbent)
NH: Shaheen (D) vs. Sununu (R)CO: Strickland (D) vs. *Allard (R)
TX: Kirk (D) vs. Cornyn (R)
NC: Bowles (D) vs. Dole (R)
SC: Sanders (D) vs. Graham (R)
AR: Pryor (D) vs. *Hutchinson (R)
Democrat Seats
NJ: Lautenberg (D) vs. Forrester (R)GA: *Cleland (D) vs. Chambliss (R)
IA: *Harkin (D) vs. Ganske (R)
MO: *Carnahan (D) vs. Talent (R)
LA: *Landrieu (D) vs. the field (R)
MN: *Wellstone (D) vs. Coleman (R)
SD: *Johnson (D) vs. Thune (R)
Here are my predictions:
LET THE SUN SHINE IN:
When Dictators Blink: By confronting the truth, Bush helps crack Iraq and North Korea. (CLAUDIA ROSETT, October 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal)In both Iraq and North Korea, what prompted the recent concessions was, at bottom, a simple thing called the truth. President Bush scrapped at least some of the soothing fictions in favor of facing facts. Last January he called these regimes "evil." Then, instead of apologizing to all the modern Neville Chamberlains who had gone faint with shock, he went about telling the world just how evil. His administration confronted Saddam and Kim Jong Il with evidence of their depredations and violations. And what do you know? Some of the world's worst bullies have begun to crack. [...]Greater safety sure wasn't the trend in the slaphappy 1990s, the decade of denial, when U.S. foreign policy consisted largely of Bill Clinton desperately seeking a legacy, Hillary kissing Suha Arafat and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright belting out karaoke and dancing the hula. The assumption in those days was that what we didn't acknowledge couldn't really hurt us. As long as we got despots to sign on the dotted line, we'd be safe--and we had lots of paperwork that said so.
That policy allowed for the monstrous growth of al Qaeda, brought us the inane 1994 Agreed Framework that had us paying protection to North Korea, and engendered the absurd U.N.-run oil-for-food program, crafted on the assumption that Saddam would respect the spirit of a set of rules administered by the world's most craven bureaucracy.
I'd add to this list the kowtowing to Beijing, in the name of "engagement." This policy led the Chinese tyrants to conclude that "the United States is a
superpower in decline, losing economic, political and military influence around the world," according to the congressionally mandated U.S.-China
Security Review Commission. This commission further noted that "Chinese analysts also believe that the United States will not and cannot sustain
casualties in pursuit of its vital interests." China was far from alone in forming this opinion. America's evident decline into politically correct weakness
served as a call to arms for monsters around the globe.
We too little notice the desperation with which even history's worst dictatorships--be they fascist, communist, or Islamicist--try to portray themselves as legitimate and democratic. Saddam does not refer to his fiefdom as the Brutal Dictatorship of Iraq; he calls it a Republic and his storm troopers the Republican Guard. What the use of clear and honest language in the West can do is strip away such legitimizing nonsense.
CASUS BELLI?:
French Soldier Missing in N. America: France Says Marksman Missing in North America, Fueling Speculation Over Link to Sniper Killings (The Associated Press, Oct. 21, 2002)France has alerted Interpol about a French army deserter who is known as a marksman and is missing in North America. A Defense Ministry spokesman said there was speculation of a link to the investigation into the Washington-area sniper.The 25-year-old second lieutenant, who was not identified, did not return to class in September at the elite military school, Saint-Cyr Coetquidan in Brittany, in western France, after going on vacation in August, officials said.
Interpol was notified of the disappearance of the officer, a normal procedure, and a judicial investigation was opened, which is also routine, said Defense Ministry spokesman Jean-Francois Bureau.
Bureau acknowledged there was some speculation of a connection with the sniper investigation, but he said that was just hypothetical at this point.
October 22, 2002
YOU DA YANN!:
Canadian Yann Martel Wins Book Prize (AP, 10/22/02)Canadian author Yann Martel won Britain's most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize, with his novel, "Life of Pi.''A jubilant Martel punched the air in delight when his name was read at a ceremony Tuesday night at the British Museum in central London.
If you've not read the book yet we strongly recommend it. Here's our interview with Mr. Martel.
SADDAM GETS GORBACHEVITIS?:
Iraqi protest over missing prisoners: Analysts say the protest was an unprecedented move (Caroline Hawley, , 22 October, 2002, BBC)In Baghdad, dozens of relatives of prisoners not released after Saddam Hussein's amnesty on Sunday have held an unauthorised demonstration.Political analysts have described the demonstration as an unprecedented display of dissent.
While it's entirely plausible that these are just staged demonstrations to convey the illusion that dissent is permitted in Iraq, it is also possible that saddam has made the same kind of miscalculation that Mikhail Gorbachev made when he initiated Glasnost: actually believing that the people are behind you. In the Soviet Union, Gorbachev decided to allow folks to criticize the Party, assuming they'd expose Stalin for the monster he was. But they went after Lenin to show that the Revolution had been corrupt from Day One and thus they destroyed the entire foundation of the State. Its rapid disintegration followed.
ANYBODY SPEAK METRIC?:
How does a pumpkin reach 1450 kph? (Canadian Press, October 18, 2002)When Jim Bristoe told his wife he wanted to build a cannon that would shoot a pumpkin a mile, she told him he wasn't all there.But he built one anyway, with a 30-foot-long barrel. It is powered by a 700-gallon air tank and is appropriately named "Ain't All There." It looks much like a mobile anti-aircraft gun.
"You don't need to cover your ears, but you're going to know I shot it," the 42-year-old electrician and mechanic said during a demonstration on Wednesday.
When Bristoe fires the cannon, a 10-pound pumpkin is hit with 11,300 pounds of force. The pumpkin projectile leaves the muzzle at about 1450 kph, he said.
During the test, the cannon fired a pumpkin through the rear of a Pontiac.
1450 kph sounds like a big number, but what is that, like 25 mph? And why does the rest of the story use feet, gallons, and pounds?
DEATH MERCHANTS:
Pro-choice or anti-catholic (Maggie Gallagher, October 21, 2002, Town Hall)Here are the facts: Most doctors do not like to perform abortions, and most abortionists like to make money. They tend to locate clinics in lucrative urban areas, leaving rural women to travel sometimes as much as a few hours in order to get abortions.For some abortion rights groups, this constitutes a grave crisis: "Eighty-four percent of counties in the United States do not have an abortion provider," announces a Maryland NARAL fact sheet.
What are people who believe in abortion doing to expand access? Are they collecting donations to build and subsidize charitable rural abortion clinics, as they are entitled to under the law? Oh, no. Instead, NARAL and other abortion advocacy groups have launched nationwide campaigns to use the courts and legislatures to force hospitals (including Catholic hospitals) to provide abortion services.
Perhaps it would be useful to provide training so that abortion advocates can do the killing themselves rather than allow them to force others to do their dirty work.
THAT HAD TO HURT...GOOD:
Ending a Drug Patent Scam (NY Times, October 22, 2002)President Bush, in a Rose Garden ceremony designed to show his concern over high drug prices as the midterm elections approach, said the Food and Drug Administration would soon propose a new rule to close the loopholes. One provision would allow only one automatic 30-month stay at most in patent infringement litigation against a generic competitor. Another provision would prohibit drug companies from listing patents with the F.D.A. on secondary issues like packaging that could be used to trigger automatic delays for frivolous reasons.These steps should help to reduce the shady maneuvering by unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies. [...]
The president's announcement was welcomed by the generic drug industry and by groups representing consumers and the elderly. In a year when Congress failed to pass prescription drug coverage under Medicare and bills designed to rein in high drug prices, this was the best they could get.
After eight years of Bill Clinton, it's a great pleasure to watch the other side get triangulated and have their issues stolen.
PUT YOUR HAND INSIDE THE PUPPET HEAD:
Simpson berates 'hysterical' US networks (Fiachra Gibbons, October 19, 2002, The Guardian)[John Simpson, the BBC correspondent] said George Bush was a man of below average intelligence and a "glovepuppet of his vice-president, Dick Cheney, and defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld".
One thing that's perplexing about this line of reasoning is that Mr. Rumsfeld in his last tour of duty in government was part of the apparatus of appeasing the Soviet Union and briefly served as an envoy to Saddam in the 80s, while Mr. Cheney was part of the administration that left Saddam in control of Iraq and then did business with him once out of office.
SUR-RURAL:
Honky-tonk Hip-hop Dreams : The Gourds defy definition by stirring in some "Gin and Juice" (Grant Britt, October 9, 2002, Durham Independent)"We don't spend a lot of time thinking about what genre we want to be a part of," says Gourds guitarist Kev Russell. Since the Austin, Texas band first got together around '95, people who do that sort of thing for a living have been trying to describe not only what the band does but where to put them in the musical scheme of things. "It's kind of a day-to-day thing with us, the kind of mood we get in," Russell said from his home in Austin. "Sometimes we're a novelty band. Sometimes we aren't. We like to try and do as many things as possible. We just don't want to get pigeonholed into any one scene or genre."Russell characterizes the Gourds' music as "a mixture of folk and country and rock and a little blues and Zydeco and Tex-Mex here and there, just a gumbo of stuff." The guitarist says he likes "sur-rural," the term that Tom Waits came up with for his music.
From what you can find on-line they sound pretty good. And what band wouldn't kill for this blurb from the review of their latest disc at Amazon (Jillian Steinberger):
The Gourds go beyond the constraints of alt-country, forging into new territory--call it country dada. Tex-Mex with a dash of Cajun, a handful of honky-tonk, and some rockin' and rollin', the 17 engaging tunes on Cow Fish Fowl or Pig crawl into your brain, lay eggs, and hatch; once they're in there, it's hard to get them out.
Don't say you haven't been warned.
KHUI YESHUA:
Stone Box May Be Oldest Link to Jesus: Scholar Believes 60 A.D. Relic Authentic (Guy Gugliotta, October 22, 2002, Washington Post)A nondescript limestone box, looted from a Jerusalem cave and held secretly in a private collection in Israel, carries an inscription that could be the earliest known archaeological reference to Jesus, according to new research released yesterday.The box, an ossuary used at the time of Jesus to hold bones of the deceased that dates to about 60 A.D., has almost no ornamentation except for a simple Aramaic inscription: Ya 'a kov bar Yosef a khui Yeshua -- "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."
Andre Lemaire, a French philologist and epigrapher who is the first scholar known to have studied the box, believes the inscription refers to Jesus of Nazareth. [...]
[L]emaire calculated that there could have been perhaps 20 people out of a contemporary Jerusalem population of 80,000 who fulfilled the requirement of being "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."
And while mentioning the father of the deceased on an ossuary is relatively common, a brother's name usually appears only if the brother paid for the funeral, "or if the brother is famous," Shanks said. "That certainly would be the case here."
Here's the Biblical Archaeology Review story.
HELP FIND IKE A HOME:
In a moment fraught with the peril of fratricide--as tense a time as we've seen since the infamous Quisp vs. Quake debacle--the Brothers find themselves divided over which is the best entry in our "How to Tell if You've Joined the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" contest. Please help us to decide among the following entries:WE HAD IT ALL:
Love story: the Reagan roses (Washington Whispers, US News)Bill Ihle is a top exec with the Jackson & Perkins rose company. His mission? Finding the next rose, one that exudes romance and love or ably commemorates a great hero-figure. You can imagine what Ihle thought after reading the collection of love letters between Nancy and Ronald Reagan. "They're like Bogie and Bacall," he says. "Their love is so celebrated. They were a team, a romantic couple that a rose would celebrate." And too big for just one rose, he reveals to Whispers. This fall, Jackson & Perkins offers the Ronald Reagan rose and the Nancy Reagan rose. It's a first-ever twofer for the corporate green thumbs who've brightened gardens with the Diana, Barbara Bush, JFK, and Abe Lincoln roses. Nancy picked them from dozens Ihle offered: hers an apricot hybrid tea with huge blooms, his with glamorous red petals dusted white underneath. Of the sales, 10
percent goes to the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation that funds his library and museum. "It's a fitting reminder," says Ihle, "of this loving couple."
October 21, 2002
CUT YOUR LOSSES:
Once diverse, Kashmir is now valley of Muslims (Scott Baldauf, October 22, 2002, The Christian Science Monitor)Javed's parents always talk about what Kashmir used to be - a land where Hindus and Muslims were friends, celebrated holidays and weddings together, ate each other's food.But Javed, a high school student here, says his parents might as well be describing life on the moon. He was 3 when a violent insurgency against Indian control tore apart the state, causing Hindus to flee by the hundreds of thousands. He has never had a Hindu teacher or friend, never tasted Hindu food.
"The terrorist activities have destroyed our culture," says Javed, who prefers not to give his last name. "When the Hindu Pandits left the valley, we lost a part of ourselves."
Yesterday, India announced that it will begin pulling back troops from the Pakistan border in eight to 10 days. But while politicians and diplomats search for ways to end the 13-year insurgency - considering everything from state autonomy to joint control by India and Pakistan - Kashmiris themselves are in the midst of a profound social change. The migration of most of the state's Hindus has turned a once-cosmopolitan society of Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Buddhists, into an Islamic monoculture.
Now, experts worry that an entire generation will grow up never having experienced Kashmiriyat - the thousands- year-old concept of cultural unity through diversity - and in a fundamental way, India will have already lost Kashmir.
As unpleasant as it must be for India to contemplate, they might do themselves a lot of good by just getting out now, before Kashmir becomes their Palestine or Northern Ireland. There are several advantages to acting quickly: first, you excise the cancer before it seeps into your own political system (before "Kashmir now!, Kashmir tomorrow! Kashmir forever!" becomes a rallying cry for the "Right"; second, you can use it as a bargaining chip with Pakistan, maybe even exchange it for their nukes; third, it creates a free-fire zone for when the war with Pakistan comes.
BODY, NO SOUL:
Ventura may resign early, make Schunk governor (Associated Press, Oct 22, 2002)Gov. Jesse Ventura says there is a chance, though slim, that he will resign from office a few days early to give the state its first woman governor.Lt. Gov. Mae Schunk would become governor temporarily if Ventura were to resign.
"I just thought it would be fun the last week to leave early and make Mae the first female governor of the state,'' Ventura said following a news conference called to announce a judicial appointment. "They'd have to give her her own portrait and everything else that would go with it. I just thought it would be kind of humorous. always have a sense of humor.'' [...]
Schunk, though, said in an interview following his comments that she doesn't want Ventura to step down.
"I don't want the governor to resign just to make me the first woman governor of Minnesota,'' she said. ``That's not the way Minnesota should have its first woman governor. It's not honorable that way.''
Thus does he dishonor his office and she honor it. American politics will be well rid of this nitwit.
AND 80% ARE LIARS:
20% fear spouse's driving (The Canadian Press, 10/21/02)Two Canadians in 10 are afraid to be passengers in cars driven by their spouses, suggests a survey.Men and women had the same level of apprehension, according to a Leger Marketing poll. Eighteen per cent of Canadians--17 per cent of men and 20 per cent of women--said they were scared to travel in a car driven by their spouse.
When the wife started Med School, I drove her out to Chicago in her car, even though I had no idea how to drive a standard. She woke up on the Ohio Turnpike at one point and we were headed through a toll plaza going roughly 45 mph because I couldn't downshift. Her screams are even now wafting past Alpha Centauri.
STROM'S REPLACEMENT?:
No debate in topsy-turvy New Jersey Senate race (Reuters, 10/21/02)Election Day is only two weeks away, but former Sen. Frank Lautenberg says it's too early for him to debate Republican Douglas Forrester in New Jersey's topsy-turvy Senate race.The 78-year-old Democrat, who retired in 2000 after 18 years in the Senate, returned to politics only three weeks ago, when the state's Supreme Court ruled he could replace scandal-plagued Sen. Robert Torricelli on the November 5 ballot.
"I've been out of circulation for two years," the white-haired grandfather said in an interview after a campaign stop at an Irish pub in this wealthy New York suburb.
"I really think it's important that I touch base with people in the flesh, before they see me on TV in a debate." [...]
Democrats have been selective about Lautenberg's public appearances amid questions over how much energy and stamina the political veteran has.
At a rally at Cryan's bar and restaurant in South Orange, a jovial Lautenberg pumped his fist in the air and beamed a toothy smile at a small cheering crowd. But during his remarks, the Democrat's self-assurance gave way to rambling at times, drawing distracted looks from the audience.
As Finley Peter Dunne's fictional barroom philosopher, Mr. Dooley, once observed: Politics ain't beanbag. Republicans need to drape the good Senator's apparent incompetence around his neck and tighten it like a garotte.
EUREKA!:
About five years ago, a co-worker (Bucky Tremblay) and I hatched the idea that will one day make us very rich and much beloved men. We're going to open a chain of fast food restaurants--Buck & O's--featuring a sandwich we named the Buck & O Burger, that's a variant on Elvis Presley's favorite, the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Here's the recipe they use at Elvis Presley's Memphis Restaurant:
ELVIS PRESLEY'S PEANUT BUTTER AND BANANA SANDWICH
4 oz. whole peanut butter
2 slices Texas Toast or 1/2-inch thick bread
1 whole ripe banana
4 oz. whole butterSpread peanut butter side to side, evenly on 1 side of each piece of bread. Slice banana in 3/4-inch slices and place on 1 piece of bread with peanut butter. Banana slices should be close together, and cover 1 side completely (usually 9 slices). Top with the other slice of bread.
Heat butter in saute pan on medium heat. Place sandwich in pan and brown for approximately 3 to 5 minutes or until golden brown. Add 2 ounces of butter to the pan and flip sandwich to other side and continue cooking for 2 to 5 minutes or until golden brown and peanut butter is melting. Cut into quarters and serve very hot.
Our version makes one key switch--we don't fry it--and one key addition: country gravy.
Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot of demand for country gravy in NH and we'd been unable to find any here. Equally unfortunately, neither of us are terribly ambitious, so we'd made no effort to find any elsewhere. But the other day I happened upon McCormick's Country Gravy Mix and figured here's my chance. Here's what I came up with:
Buck & O Burger, v.1.0
Jar of peanut butter
1 whole ripe banana
fajita wrap
one envelope McCormick's Country Gravy Mix
Jar of FluffPrepare gravy as per directions with one adjustment: thicken with two spoonfuls of Fluff.
Cut off one third of fajita wrap. Spread peanut butter on half of remainder. Smoosh banana into peanut butter. Roll wrap. Microwave briefly.
Ladle thickened gravy over wrap. Serve with mammoth glass of ice cold milk.
My friends, life simply does not get any better. It's like there's a party in your mouth and everyone's invited.
MAIL CALL:
Hollywood takes on White House (Jennifer Harper, October 19, 2002, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)Last month, singer Barbra Streisand faxed House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, Missouri Democrat, an indignant letter that accused President Bush of warmongering for the sake of the Republican Party."I find bringing the country to the brink of war unilaterally five weeks before an election questionable and very frightening," Miss Streisand said at a Democratic fund-raiser in Hollywood last week.
"In the words of William Shakespeare, beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into patriotic fervor," she continued. "Patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind."
The statement was mistakenly gleaned from an Internet parody of famous authors rather than a Shakespearean work. Miss Streisand also called Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein an "Iranian" on her Web site Thursday; the geographical gaffe has since been corrected.
Some fault her strident approach.
"Once again, Barbra Streisand has opened her alligator-sized mouth before her humming-bird brain has a chance to catch up," actor R. Lee Ermy told the Sunday Telegraph. "Ms. Streisand does not speak for me or many other folks in this business."
Mike Daley sent us that one and the great Mr. Ermey deserves immense credit for not taking the easy shot, leaving her tapir-like snout out of the equation. As some of you will recall, Mr. Ermey was--with all due respect to notorious Kubrick flak, Ed Driscoll--the only good thing about Full Metal Jacket and therein has one of the classic movie lines of all time. Can't find the precise quote on-line, but it goes something like this--Ermey as the Marine drill instructor (which I believe he'd been in real life) is teaching his recruits to shoot. He asks: "Do you men know what Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Whitman had in common?" To which, Matthew Modine, as the wiseguy hero of the film, responds: "They were both psychotic killers?" And Ermey barks out: "No! They were both trained to shoot in the United States Marine Corps! They are examples of what a dedicated Marine and his rifle can achieve."
SPEAKING OF RICO PROSECUTIONS:
Donors to Davis get coastal permits: State agency smiles on governor's contributors (Lance Williams, October 20, 2002, San Francisco Chronicle)David Geffen, a billionaire music mogul and world-class fund-raiser for Gov. Gray Davis, wanted a seawall on the beach in front of his Malibu estate.Children's television tycoon Haim Saban, a $642,000 Davis donor, hoped to build a palatial Malibu beachfront compound.
And investment banker Gary Winnick, whose firms have pumped $525,000 into Davis' campaigns, was backing a huge housing development in a West Los Angeles wetland, as well as a bold plan to lay fiber optic cables across the Pacific Ocean floor.
In the end, these three wealthy, politically connected donors overcame controversy and environmental concerns to obtain the permits they needed from the California Coastal Commission, a powerful agency charged with controlling development along the state's spectacular 840-mile coastline.
So did almost everyone else on a long list of heavyweight Davis donors who sought permits from the commission during the governor's first term, a Chronicle analysis of state records shows.
Davis spokesman Roger Salazar said the Democratic governor has a firewall between campaign cash and official action. Davis "in no way, shape or form" allows political donations to influence policy decisions, he said.
But the records of contested and controversial seaside developments raise serious questions about whether Davis, who was elected on a save-the-coast platform, has put the coast itself in play when it comes to political money.
Here's the problem though: does anyone doubt that the Chronicle will endorse Mr. Davis for re-election? You can't complain about dirty government and help install the crooks.
HOW ABOUT A RICO PROSECUTION?:
When Missouri seats its senator could tip balance of power (KEVIN MURPHY, 10/21/02, The Kansas City Star)There is speculation in Washington that Gov. Bob Holden, a Democrat, would hold off certifying Talent's election Nov. 5 because it immediately would shift control of the Senate to Republicans by one seat -- at least until the new Senate is sworn in in January.Holden and Secretary of State Matt Blunt, a Republican, need to sign a certification for submission to the president of the Senate, according to federal law.
"I think Senator Carnahan will be elected," Holden said. "If she's not, we'll get our attorneys (together) to see what appropriate action should be taken. We will move as expeditiously as we can with the facts that we have."
Scott Holste, spokesman for Attorney General Jay Nixon, a Democrat, declined to say what advice Nixon would give Holden.
A federal law says "it shall be the duty" of a governor to certify a candidate's election to the Senate. But it does not say how soon that must happen.
"It does not have a time frame in the statute at all," said Terry Jarrett, general counsel to Blunt. "Who really knows?" [...]
"You occupy the seat as soon as you get elected," said Don Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate.
The Democrats are truly beginning to resemble the Mafia. They are barely a political party anymore, opting instead to become a criminal enterprise based on the maintenance of power at any cost. From giving Bill Clinton a free pass during Impeachment to all the shenanigans they pulled in FL to the initial Ashcroft vs. both Carnahans mess to the replacement of Bob Torricelli to what now appears to be systemic vote fraud (for example in SD) to this new threat not to seat a duly elected Senator--Democrats display a contempt of the democratic process that is despicable.
SO MUCH DONE; SO MUCH YET TO DO:
107th Congress Sped, Then Sputtered: President Had Success on Tax Cuts, Education Before Domestic Agenda Stalled (Helen Dewar, October 20, 2002, Washington Post)Major achievements included tax cuts worth $1.35 trillion over 10 years, education reforms, legislation to expand the president's trade negotiating authority, and anti-terrorism initiatives. Among the failures or unfinished business were once-ambitious energy legislation, a variety of health care initiatives, overhaul of bankruptcy laws, retirement protections, reauthorization of the 1996 welfare reforms and creation of a Department of Homeland Security. [...]In a metaphor for the whole 107th Congress, lawmakers could not even wind up their business in a definitive fashion. Unable to pass any domestic spending bills for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, they put the government on temporary funding and straggled home last week to campaign for the midterm elections, but are subject to recall if needed for votes. [...]
Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution said that even on the major accomplishments -- including tax cuts, education, trade and the Iraq war resolution -- "the jury is still out" on whether they will lead to their desired results in terms of economic well-being, school progress, liberalized trade and a safer world.
That is not of course the true metaphor for this Congress. Instead one would look to James Jefford's bizarre decision to vote for the tax cut just before switching parties. There you saw what kind of big and much-needed changes were possible with the GOP completely in charge. But once Democrats took the Senate, things like Social Security reform, school vouchers, a partial-birth abortion ban, and a prescription drug plan became impossible.
CAST AWAY:
A Grand Strategy: President George W. Bush's national security strategy could represent the most sweeping shift in U.S. grand strategy since the beginning of the Cold War. But its success depends on the willingness of the rest of the world to welcome U.S. power with open arms. (John Lewis Gaddis, Nov/Dec 2002, Foreign Policy)Beginnings, in such documents, tell you a lot. The Bush NSS, echoing the president's speech at West Point on June 1, 2002, sets three tasks: "We will defend the peace by fighting terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. We will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." It's worth comparing these goals with the three the Clinton administration put forth in its final NSS, released in December 1999: "To enhance America's security. To bolster America's economic prosperity. To promote democracy and human rights abroad."The differences are revealing. The Bush objectives speak of defending, preserving, and extending peace; the Clinton statement seems simply to assume peace. Bush calls for cooperation among great powers; Clinton never uses that term. Bush specifies the encouragement of free and open societies on every continent; Clinton contents himself with "promoting" democracy and human rights "abroad." Even in these first few lines, then, the Bush NSS comes across as more forceful, more carefully crafted, and--unexpectedly--more multilateral than its immediate predecessor. It's a tip-off that there're interesting things going on here.
The first major innovation is Bush's equation of terrorists with tyrants as sources of danger, an obvious outgrowth of September 11. American strategy in the past, he notes, has concentrated on defense against tyrants. Those adversaries required "great armies and great industrial capabilities"--resources only states could provide--to threaten U.S. interests. But now, "shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank." The strategies that won the Cold War--containment and deterrence--won't work against such dangers, because those strategies assumed the existence of identifiable regimes led by identifiable leaders operating by identifiable means from identifiable territories. [...]
[T]he Bush strategy is right on target with respect to the new circumstances confronting the United States and its allies in the wake of September 11. It was sufficient, throughout the Cold War, to contain without seeking to reform authoritarian regimes: we left it to the Soviet Union to reform itself. The most important conclusion of the Bush NSS is that this Cold War assumption no longer holds. The intersection of radicalism with technology the world witnessed on that terrible morning means that the persistence of authoritarianism anywhere can breed resentments that can provoke terrorism that can do us grievous harm. There is a compellingly realistic reason now to complete the idealistic task Woodrow Wilson began more than eight decades ago: the world must be made safe for democracy, because otherwise democracy will not be safe in the world.
Like Tom Hanks, we are stuck with Wilson.
NONE OF THE ABOVE:
California puzzle (Robert Novak, 10/21/02, Town Hall)The nightly tracking poll taken for the California Teachers Association (CTA), made available to Republicans Friday morning, was startling. Thursday night's telephone interviews about the race for governor showed beleaguered Republican candidate Bill Simon leading DemocraticGov. Gray Davis 34.2 percent to 33.7 percent. The three-day tracking roll gave Davis a mere 2.7 percentage point lead.Those numbers collide with Democratic surveys that show a double-digit lead for Davis. They also force a decision on George W. Bush that must be made instantly. Should he pay a final one-day visit to San Diego, perhaps next Monday, to affirm Simon as the Republican Party's California standard-bearer in good standing? Or should he not risk the damage to his prestige in the Golden State that could result from association with a drubbing?
The Simon lead isn't even the real story here. What is remarkable, in fact it may be unique, is that two weeks out from election day in a major media state there are still 32% undecided. Given the vagaries of polling, "Undecided" may even be winning. Has that ever happened before?
October 20, 2002
THE PROLIFER VS. THE PROFILER:
Faith versus science? (Ellen Goodman, 10/20/2002, Boston Globe)[T]he question in the Hager flap is not whether religion is a disqualification for serving in society. It's whether belonging to the religious right is prerequisite for serving on anything to do with reproduction. Who's doing the religious profiling?In theory, the FDA advisory committee is for research wonks, not ideologues. This is supposedly the place for facts. This is where the safety and effectiveness of drugs are debated, not the morals.
At one time, Hager said, ''The fact that I'm a person of faith does not deter me from also being a person of science.'' At another time, he said it was dangerous to compartmentalize life into ''categories of Christian truth and secular truth.'' Can Hager's opponents separate his faith from his science? Can he?
Emergency contraception and RU-486 are both slated to be back before the committee. We already know that this would-be adviser opposes emergency contraception on moral grounds. Will that skew his judgment about whether it's safe to sell over the counter?
As for RU-486 or mifepristone, Hager's not just personally opposed to the ''abortion pill.'' Last August he helped the Christian Medical Association produce a ''citizens' petition'' asking the FDA to take it off the market. They cited new ''evidence'' of its dangers to women that was neither new nor evidence. Today mifepristone is not only used for early abortions and other treatments but it's on the FDA's fast track for use as an antipsychotic, especially for post-partum depression. Anyone wonder why Hager's, um, profile, is high?
''Anyone who can say RU-486 is dangerous and should be overturned is ignoring the science,'' says Pearson.
Setting aside for a moment Ms Goodman's claim that she's not profiling the religious, even though she puts quotation marks around the seemingly innocuous phrase "citizens's petition"--would an application from NOW or NARAL have earned similar implied skepticism?--it seems necessary to point out what one would have thought an obvious fact: any abortificant is dangerous, in fact deadly, by its very nature. That neither Ms Goodman nor this Pearson character even take into consideration the embryo or fetus that is destroyed by RU-486 amply demonstrates who here is blinded by ideology.
CONSERVATIVE CONSERVATION:
Wyoming doctor, 'extreme environmentalist,' recruits army in Africa to save animals from poachers (JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, Oct 19, , 2002, AP)Dr. Bruce Hayse doesn't look like a tin-pot dictator.He favors tropical shirts and Western boots, not camo fatigues and a chestful of medals. He drives a muddy truck, not an armored limousine.
So why is this middle-aged family physician living on the summit of cowboy chic in Wyoming recruiting his own army 8,000 miles (12,900 kilometers) away in the remote and wretched Central African Republic? [...]
All he's trying to do — with, he emphasizes, the written blessing of the C.A.R.'s president — is save what remains of the country's magnificent wildlife and protect its remote villages from brutal gangs of poachers. [...]
In 2001, Hayse says, President Ange-Felix Patasse ceded authority over the entire Chinko River basin — 60,000 square miles (153,600 square kilometers) — to Hayse's paramilitary forces, some of them recruited from villages that have been terrorized by poachers. [...]
An article about Hayse in the October issue of National Geographic Adventure asserts that one patrol recently captured and executed at least three poachers, and that seven more were captured and turned over to the government. Hayse said he was aware of the incidents but still is seeking details.
Romain Gary would be proud.
ABRE LOS OJOS:
Republicans Planning for Full Control Of Congress: Accelerated Tax Cuts, Tort Reform on the Agenda (Mike Allen, October 20, 2002, The Washington Post)White House officials and Republicans on Capitol Hill are so optimistic about winning control of both chambers of Congress in next month's elections that they have begun mapping how they would use their new power, including the possibility of speeding up tax cuts that were to take effect gradually. [...]White House officials said Republican control of Congress would help Bush win passage of an administration plan to subsidize prescription drugs for Medicare patients, which they said would rob Democrats of a potent issue and help the president in Florida in 2004. [...]
Conspicuously absent from the administration's plans for next year is legislation to allow people to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private retirement accounts. That was one of Bush's core campaign promises, and he had indicated he was prepared to introduce it next year. But the stock market's nosedive has made it much harder to sell. Administration officials said Bush plans to promote a national conversation about the issue next year but is unlikely to push Congress to pass a plan until 2005, if he wins reelection. [...]
Even with GOP control, Bush would have trouble winning passage of a top priority of his corporate backers: restrictions on jury awards, beginning with medical malpractice cases. Bush has proposed limiting noneconomic damages, which compensate a victim for pain and suffering, to $250,000. [...]
Whether Republicans extend their power in Congress, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill plans to send the president late this year proposals for rewriting the tax code. "Fundamental tax reform, in our minds, means scrap it all," a senior administration official said.
Sources said the possibilities are likely to include a flat income tax -- which would have a single rate for most taxpayers and would eliminate most deductions -- and a value-added tax, a levy on goods at each stage of production and distribution. Bush is not expected to propose those.
With Tim Hutchinson (R, AR) and Wayne Allard (R, CO) poised to lose, this is pie in the sky, but it's fun to dream while we can.
ELEPHANT CRUSH:
Activists Denounce Thailand's Elephant "Crushing" Ritual (Jennifer Hile, October 16, 2002, National Geographic Today)It's a sound not easily forgotten. Just before dawn in the remote highlands of northern Thailand, west of the village Mae Jaem, a four-year-old elephant bellows as seven village men stab nails into her ears and feet. She is tied up and immobilized in a small, wooden cage. Her cries are the only sounds to interrupt the otherwise quiet countryside.The cage is called a "training crush." It's the centerpiece of a centuries-old ritual in northern Thailand designed to domesticate young elephants. In addition to beatings, handlers use sleep-deprivation, hunger, and thirst to "break" the elephants' spirit and make them submissive to their owners.
"It's a ritual that exists, in varying forms and degrees of cruelty, in virtually every country in Asia that has domesticated elephants," explained Richard Lair, an American expatriate and international relations officer for Thailand's Elephant Conservation Center in Lampang. [...]
Elephant management techniques in the United States used corporal punishment and negative reinforcement to train elephants until about 30 years ago, when a new method began to emerge.
"We started changing our training methods [over the last few decades] because we had the technology and the know-how," said Carol Buckley, co-founder and executive director of the Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. "The new technique is called 'protected contact,' and it's used in more than half of accredited American zoos."
The new training depends on rewards, not punishment.
"In a nutshell, when the behavior of the animal approximates the target of behavior, you reward them," said Jeff Andrews, Animal Care Manager at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. He is in charge of training the African and Asian elephants at the San Diego Wild Animal Park.
Chailert hopes to change how the next generation of domestic elephants is trained. With a tradition so deeply engrained, it won't be easy.
The story leaves open the implication that even about half of American zoos use a more severe training method.
NEMO MORTALIUM OMNIBUS HORIS SAPIT:
'We' know who 'we' are: Edward Said is appalled at how destructive jargon has taken over thought and action in the Middle East (Edward Said, October 14, 2002, The Guardian)Lebanon was heavily bombed by Israeli warplanes on 4 June 1982. Two days later the Israeli Army breached the country's southern border. Menachem Begin was then Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon Minister of Defence. The immediate reason for the invasion was the attempted assassination of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, blamed by Begin and Sharon on the PLO, whose forces in South Lebanon had been observing a ceasefire for a year.By 13 June, Beirut was under siege, even though the Israeli Government had originally said it planned to go no further into Lebanon than the Awali River, 35 km north of the border. Later, it became all too clear that Sharon was trying to kill Yasir Arafat by bombing everything around him. There was a blockade of humanitarian aid; water and electricity were cut off, and a sustained aerial bombing campaign destroyed hundreds of buildings. By mid-August, when the siege ended, 18,000 Palestinians and Lebanese, most of them civilians, had been killed.
The civil war between right-wing Christian militias and left-wing Muslim and Arab nationalist groups had already lasted seven years. Although Israel sent its Army into Lebanon only once before 1982, it had early been sought as an ally by the Christian militias, who co-operated with Sharon's forces during the siege.
Sharon's main ally was Bashir Gemayel, leader of the Phalange Party, who was elected President by the Lebanese Parliament on 23 August. The Palestinians had unwisely entered the civil war on the side of the National Movement, a loose coalition of parties that included Amal, a forerunner of Hizbollah (which was to play the major role in finally driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in May 2000).
Faced with the prospect of Israeli vassalage after Sharon's Army had in effect brought about his election, Gemayel seems to have demurred and was assassinated on 14 September. Israeli troops occupied Beirut, supposedly to keep order, and two days later, inside a security cordon provided by the Israeli Army, Gemayel's vengeful extremists massacred two thousand Palestinian refugees at the camps of Sabra and Shatila.
Under UN and of course US supervision, French troops had entered Beirut on 21 August in the aftermath of the siege and were later joined by US and other European forces. The PLO fighters were evacuated from Lebanon; and by the beginning of September Arafat and a small band of advisers and soldiers had relocated to Tunis. The Taif Accord of 1989 prepared the way for a settlement of the civil war the following year. The old confessional system - under which different religious groups are allocated a specific number of Parliamentary seats - was more or less restored and remains in place today.
Earlier this year Sharon was quoted as regretting his failure to kill Arafat in Beirut. Not for want of trying - dozens of buildings were destroyed, hundreds of people killed. The events of 1982 hardened ordinary Arabs, I think, to the idea that Israel would use planes, missiles, tanks and helicopters to attack civilians indiscriminately, and that neither the US nor the Arab governments would do anything to stop it.
The invasion of Lebanon was the first full-scale contemporary attempt at regime change by one sovereign country against another in the Middle East.
We are still paying a terrible price for going weak in the knees after the Sabra and Shatila massacres and then cutting and running after the Marine barracks in Beirut were bombed in 1983. Ronald Reagan predicted that radical Islam would be the main threat to Western security after the Cold War; it's a shame that he didn't show the same determination in the Lebanon that he showed with the Soviets.
PASSING:
Muslim woman for a day (Andrew Marra, October 20, 2002, Palm Beach Post)The stares and the second-takes were inevitable the minute Mary Peterson stepped onto the South Fork High campus Thursday morning.They were expected. Even desired.
Peterson's dress, after all, was not the typical student fare. The 17-year-old senior of Scottish and Irish descent had put aside jeans and T-shirts for the burka, the traditional garb of Muslim women. [...]
It was a bold sociological experiment that Peterson, a student in the school's International Baccalaureate program, concocted while her Theory of Knowledge class was studying Islam last month -- quite a change of pace for the teen who teaches Sunday school at a nondenominational Christian church, takes pictures as a hobby and often spends weekends in the movie theater or at the mall with her friends.
What would it be like, she had wondered, to be a traditional Islamic woman for a day? [...]
She counted some 10 people throughout the day who were openly rude to her or gave her a negative vibe.
"They're ignorant," she said. "They're uneducated about the differences in lifestyle."
That's an excellent start towards understanding discrimination. Now dress like a Hassidim and attend a school in Pakistan, Palestine, or Saudi Arabia for a day and see how the "vibes" are.
BOOKNOTES:
The Ideas That Conquered the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Markets in the Twenty-first Century by Michael Mandelbaum (C-SPAN, October 20, 2002, 8 & 11pm)ANACONDA TIMES GOOGLEPLEX:
A Post-Saddam Scenario: Iraq could become America's primary staging ground in the Middle East. And the greatest beneficial effect could come next door, in Iran (Robert D. Kaplan, November 2002 , The Atlantic Monthly)The Iranian population is the most pro-American in the region, owing to the disastrous economic consequences of the Islamic revolution. A sea change in its leadership is a matter of when, not if. But a soft landing in Iran-rather than a violent counter-revolution, with the besieged clergy resorting to terrorism abroad-might be possible only if general amnesty is promised for those officials guilty of even the gravest human-rights violations.Achieving an altered Iranian foreign policy would be vindication enough for dismantling the regime in Iraq. This would undermine the Iranian-supported Hizbollah, in Lebanon, on Israel's northern border; would remove a strategic missile threat to Israel; and would prod Syria toward moderation. And it would allow for the creation of an informal, non-Arab alliance of the Near Eastern periphery, to include Iran, Israel, Turkey, and Eritrea. The Turks already have a military alliance with Israel. The Eritreans, whose long war with the formerly Marxist Ethiopia has inculcated in them a spirit of monastic isolation from their immediate neighbors, have also been developing strong ties to Israel. Eritrea has a secularized population and offers a strategic location with good port facilities near the Bab el Mandeb Strait. All of this would help to provide a supportive context for a gradual Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza. A problem with the peace plan envisioned by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, in the summer of 2000, was that coming so soon after Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, it was perceived by many Arabs as an act of weakness rather than of strength. That is why Israel must be seen to improve its strategic position before it can again offer such a pullback.
Of course, many Palestinians will be unsatisfied until all of Israel is conquered. But in time, when no Israeli soldiers are to be seen in their towns, the seething frustration, particularly among youths, will turn inward toward the Palestinians' own Westernized and Christianized elites, in Ramallah and similar places, and also eastward toward Amman.
Mr. Kaplan leaves India and Russia out of this equation. Add them to the mix and if you look at a map you can see that the Arab Islamic world would be completely surrounded by non-Arab and/or non-Muslim powers, all of them allied with the US, Britain, and Israel, which are pretty much the world's only significant miltary powers. Setting aside for the moment of whether this is necessarily a Clash of Civilizations that we're involved in, it's apparent that if it is one Islam is in an untenable position.
KATRINA'S DIRTY SECRET:
Running in the family (Concord Monitor, October 18, 2002)Yvonne Katrina Lantos was born to Annette and Tom Lantos, both Hungarian immigrants, on Oct. 8, 1955.She was the couple's second child. Their first daughter, Annette, was born 3 1/2 years earlier. The girls were a godsend to the Lantoses, who had lost most of their families during World War II. [...]
The sisters attended school, but they were also vigorously home-schooled, a point Swett minimizes and her mother declines to discuss, citing privacy.
It's pretty sad when the Democrats are so in thrall to the NEA that a candidate can't even talk about being home-schooled.
CUSTER DIED FOR A DEMOCRAT SENATE:
Baghdad, S.D. (Florida Times-Union, October 19, 2002)The latest poll shows Tim Johnson, the junior senator, trails Republican challenger John Thune by 5 percentage points. Daschle is a close ally of Johnson, and President Bush recruited Thune to run. Daschle's 2004 presidential aspirations will be dealt a severe blow if he cannot even win a proxy fight against Bush in his home state.Democrats have a one-seat majority in the Senate and polling data indicates there is a 50-50 chance Republicans will regain control. Daschle could lose his powerful position but Democrats no longer would be able to block Republican economic stimulus packages nor continue keeping judicial nominees tied up in committee indefinitely.
Perhaps that is why dead people have been registering to vote in South Dakota.
An FBI investigation concluded that many people who do not exist have registered there, as have minors and dead people. A woman registered to vote just a few days after she was buried.
The key suspect is a former staffer of the state's Democratic Party, who allegedly falsified registration forms.
It must give a Florida newspaper particular pleasure to run an editorial chastising the electoral practices of others.
TIMBER!!!!!!!:
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time (Tony Judt, October 20, 2002, NY Times)Today many people outside America believe that Washington has lost interest in this war, except as rhetorical cover for a retreat to more familiar territory: an old-fashioned battle against an old-fashioned kind of enemy--Iraq. We are seeking a fight we can win instead of concentrating on the war that we must win. [...]The worst thing about Mr. Bush's pre-announced war with Iraq is that it is not just a substitute for the war against terrorism; it actively impedes it. Mr. Bush has scolded President Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia for not cracking down on Islamic terrorists. But thanks to the war talk spilling out of Washington, heads of states with Islamic majorities are in an impossible position.
If they line up with the Bush administration against Saddam Hussein, they risk alienating a large and volatile domestic constituency, with unpredictable consequences. (Witness this month's elections in Pakistan, where two provinces adjacent to Afghanistan are now controlled by a coalition of religious parties sympathetic to Osama bin Laden.) But if they acknowledge popular opposition to a war with Iraq, they will incur Mr. Bush's wrath. Either way the war on terror suffers.
With all due respect to Mr. Judt, this is a classic example of failing to see the forest for the trees. The war is not against terrorism per se but against the Islamic radicalism and anti-Zionism/anti-Westernism that undergirds both states in the region and terrorist groups like al Qaeda, Hammas, Hezbollah, etc.. It matters little what we do about an organization like al Qaeda, which is fairly small, diffuse and already on the run, if the actual governments of the Islamic world are so precariously perched atop pro-radical populations that they can't even afford to support a war on someone like Saddam Hussein.
NEW NEW WORLD ORDER:
Peril of pre-emptive thinking (RAMESH THAKUR, October 20, 2002, The Japan TimesThis is the true meaning of the Bush promise that the U.S. will not allow the world's most dangerous weapons to fall into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes (and, one might add, the world's most destructive groups and individuals), as judged solely and unilaterally by Washington.Therein lies the logic of pre-emption, if necessary, well before the threat actually materializes (as with Hussein, whose acquisition of nuclear weapons does not seem imminent, all bluster to the contrary notwithstanding). There is also an underlying belief that current criticism of any U.S.-led war to take out Hussein's weapons of mass destruction will be quickly muted with the success of the operation and eventually turn into gratitude for someone's having had the necessary foresight, fortitude and resolution.
But in turn this changes the basis of world order as we know it. And that might be the most profound and long-lasting significance of 9/11. It may indeed have changed the world and tipped us into a post-Westphalian world. U.S. policy is full of contradictions within the paradigm of world order since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) wherein all states are of equal status and legitimacy.
How can the most prominent dissident against many global norms and regimes--from arms control to climate change and international criminal justice--claim to be the world's most powerful enforcer of global norms and regimes, including nonproliferation?
How can the most vocal critic of the very notion of an international community anoint itself as the international community's sheriff? For that matter, by what right do the five unelected members of the Security Council claim a permanent monopoly on nuclear weapons?
The answer lies in a conception of world order rooted outside the framework of Westphalian sovereignty. This also explains why some of today's most potent threats come not from the conquering states within the Westphalian paradigm, but from failing states outside it.
In effect, Bush is saying that the gap between the fiction of legal equality and the reality of power preponderance, between equally legitimate and democratically legitimate states, has stretched beyond the breaking point.
Washington is no longer bound by such fiction. The Bush administration insists that the U.S. will remain as fundamentally trustworthy, balanced and responsible a custodian of world order as before -- but of a post-Westphalian order centered on the United States surrounded by a wasteland of vassal states.
Though we'd come to a different conclusion about this than Mr. Thakur, his basic analysis seems correct. When George Bush the Elder proclaimed a New World Order at the time of the last Iraq War it was indeed premised on the notion of all states being equally legitimate. Thus we went to war under the auspices of the UN, with countries like Syria at our side, even though the UN is filled with regimes just as vile as Iraq and even though, by any objective standard, Syria should be considered just as dangerous as Iraq. Likewise, the justification for the war at that time was to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, even though neither meets any of the standards of Western governance--democratic pluralistic capitalistic liberalism.
GUERILLA POLITICS:
Forrester, Lautenberg stage impromptu debate at street fair (WAYNE PARRY, October 19, 2002, Associated Press)Dragging two wooden podiums into an intersection at a street fair Saturday, Republican Senate candidate Douglas Forrester challenged Democratic rival Frank Lautenberg to make good on his "any place, any time" debate pledge.The three-term former senator complied in a 10- to 15-minute exchange during which Forrester criticized his opponent's voting record and Lautenberg focused on issues such as abortion rights and gun control. [...]
Forrester has proposed more than 20 debates around the state, but Lautenberg, who retired two years ago, has agreed to just one televised joint appearance, three days before the Nov. 5 election. Tom Shea, Lautenberg's campaign manager, said the Democrat will agree to at least one other televised debate.
This is brilliant. But Forrester has to keep it up, because making Lautenberg's unwillingness to debate into the key issue of the campaign allows you to bring his age and competence into the mix too.
VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO:
The Souffle Doctrine (MAUREEN DOWD, October 20, 2002, NY Times)The Boy Emperor picked up the morning paper and, stunned, dropped his Juicy Juice box with the little straw attached."Oh, man," he wailed. "North Korea's got nukes."
It's not even worth excerpting the rest of the column. It suffices to point out the gall of these people who celebrated Bill Clinton's appeasement of North Korea and belittled the Axis of Evil but who now portray George W. Bush as the one who's surprised by this week's North Korean admission (note that he learns of North Korea's nukes from the nwspaper, rather than vice versa). But even that is barely worth mentioning. Thus is it ever with the Left, which never has to apologize for the damage it does or even acknowledge it.
October 19, 2002
THE GATHERING STORM:
U.S. study Says Indo-Israeli Invasion of Pakistan Probable (IslamOnline, 10/19/02)A new U.S. study says India could invade Pakistan (possibly with Israeli help) if Islamists gained ascendancy there. This would be to forestall Islamist control of nuclear weapons, the study said.The study, Transforming America's Military, published by America's National Defence University, said there was a "distinct prospect" for such a development in the next few years.
"The nightmare scenario of the next few years is that American and allied military operations in South or Southwest Asia end up severely destabilising the Pakistani regime," the study said.
A coup or capture of power by an Islamist faction within the military or chaotic conditions like a civil war would diminish "the reliability of central control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal," the report said. In a situation like that India and Israel could intervene to prevent nuclear weapons from falling into Islamist hands, the report said.
The report describes India as "an important nuclear-armed ally of the U.S." and Pakistan as "very fragile ally." Indo-Israeli invasion could unleash a major regional war in which "use of nuclear weapons could not be precluded."
Written by Peter Wilson, a senior political analyst at Rand Corporation, and Richard D. Sokolsky, a research fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defence University, the study echoes reports originating from America in September last year.
It matters not whether any such thing is imminent: what matters is that the Axis of Evil and its allies begin to appreciate that such previously improbable military alliances are becoming more likely as a de facto Axis of Good forms--including at least India, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Taiwan, Britain, Australia, and the U.S.. This is also precisely the kind of unilateral action that is going to become more common in our future, so folks better get used to it.
WASH YOUR HANDS AND MAKE ME A CHEESE SANDWICH:
Court OKs drug tests for people on welfare: Michigan can deny benefits to those who fail (KIM NORTH SHINE, October 19, 2002, Detroit Free Press)The state can rightfully deny benefits to welfare recipients who test positive for illegal drugs, according to a federal court decision released Friday.A three-judge panel of the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals said Michigan's use of mandatory testing to determine eligibility for public aid is neither an invasion of privacy nor an infringement on constitutional protection from unreasonable search and seizure.
The random testing is a justified technique for protecting children, the public and tax dollars from abuse, the court said. [...]
The ACLU of Michigan promised to appeal the decision and decried it as a threat to personal freedom. [...]
"Our concern is this can really open up the door to uncontrolled government surveillance in every aspect of our lives," the ACLU's Kary Moss said. "What about students who take out student loans or taxpayers who take deductions?"
This seems a fairly easy call: if you are that concerned about your privacy just forego the test and the benefits.
A GOOD TIME TO BE A REPUBLICAN IN TEXAS:
GOP leading in top two races (WAYNE SLATER, 10/20/2002, The Dallas Morning News)Gov. Rick Perry is favored by 50 percent of likely voters over Laredo businessman Tony Sanchez, backed by 35 percent in the latest poll
by The Dallas Morning News.In the Senate race, Republican John Cornyn leads former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk by 10 points. [...]
"It's a good time to be a Republican running for office in Texas," said pollster Micheline Blum.
"What's happened in Texas is that almost half of all likely voters think of themselves now as Republicans," she said. "So you can't win anymore with just the Democrats and a chunk of the independents."
Part of the Democratic political blueprint is to boost turnout among minority voters with a historic ticket. Mr. Kirk would be the first black U.S. senator from the South since Reconstruction, and Mr. Sanchez would be the state's first Hispanic governor. [...]
Ms. Blum and colleague Julie Weprin said their survey suggests little evidence that the so-called dream team ticket has kindled sufficient enthusiasm to offset its lagging support among whites.
"That's obviously a real blow to Sanchez," Ms. Blum said. "He needs to be taking the overwhelming number of Hispanic votes. Plus he needs the enthusiasm of people getting out in droves to help him do well. And we don't see either one."
She said Mr. Kirk is doing far better among blacks than Hispanics.
"The problem is there isn't a black-Hispanic coalition," she said. "He's not getting anywhere near as much of the Hispanic vote as one might have expected or that he needs to get."
Mr. Kirk, like Bill Simon in California, is going to be unfairly criticized for the quality of the campaign he ran. And, again like Mr. Simon, he has had a few biffs along the way. But, just as California is too Democrat for Mr. Simon ever to have had a real shot, so Texas is just too Republican at this point for Mr. Kirk to have won. He probably did as well as anyone could have expected.
SO HERE'S THE QUESTION...:
Chess challenge ends in stalemate (BBC, 19 October, 2002)Man and machine have taken equal honours in the eight-match Brains in Bahrain chess duel.World champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia tied 4-4 with the chess computer Deep Fritz.
...if playing to a tie is like kissing your sister, is tying a computer like kissing your sister's E-Z-Bake oven?
DEATH THROES:
The Bali bombs may deal a fatal blow to the Islamists: After Luxor, Egyptian rule improved. Indonesia may do the same (Martin Woollacott, October 18, 2002, The Guardian)After the massacre of foreign tourists at Luxor in 1997, the shock and grief felt by Egyptians was tangible. The journalist and academic Geneive Abdo describes leaving the relatively quiet campus of the American University in Cairo to find that "all around me, Egyptians were cursing the violence. They stood in crowds in the middle of downtown, waving their hands in the air and looking past one another as they shouted in anger and frustration."The spectacular violation of Egyptian ideas of decency and hospitality by the Luxor terrorists turned the population decisively against a violent Islamism about which they already had grave doubts. The main radical Islamist movements in that country condemned the attack, went on to the defensive, and began a reconsideration of strategy.
In retrospect Luxor can be seen as the last desperate throw of the terrorist brand of Islamism in Egypt. A slow Islamisation of Egyptian society continued, which many westerners and secular Egyptians deplore, but it has nevertheless been pursued by non-violent means. Most of those who could not reconcile themselves to this course left the country, some of them to become founders and associates of what came to be known as al-Qaida.
Five years after Luxor, it looks as if al-Qaida and its local allies in Indonesia have repeated the same mistake in Bali. Just as Luxor alienated Egyptians from the path of violence, so it is likely that Bali will have the same effect on Muslim Indonesians. Extreme Islamists are far less a force in Indonesia than they once were in Egypt, and their chances of increasing their influence must be narrowed by what has happened. The operation that al-Qaida and its helpers have chosen to conduct illustrates the almost unavoidable contradiction between national political objectives and the kind of transnational war on the west and its friends which al-Qaida's leadership, whatever remains of it, wishes to conduct.
In much the same way, it might be said that December 7th, 1941, marked the beginning of the end of WWII. Once America entered the fighting the outcome was inevitable. So too with the war on radical Islam, a lot of blood remains to be spilt and some awful days await us, but the outcome is not really in doubt.
OH, THOSE PESKY LITTLE BROTHERS:
Presidential couple (dad and mom) hit trail for Jeb (Mark Silva, October 19, 2002, Orlando Sentinel)Although various polls have suggested that the governor's race is close, a new survey showing Bush with a 9-point lead over McBride gave cheer to the Republicans on Friday.The poll by McLaughlin & Associates of Alexandria, Va., done for U.S. Sugar Corp., shows Bush with 49.2 percent to McBride's 40.5 percent, with the remainder undecided. The margin of error was 4 percent. Six hundred people were surveyed by phone Wednesday and Thursday this week.
Jim McLaughlin, the pollster, said Bush was running solidly ahead in all parts of the state except South Florida. The results contrast with a Zogby International poll from last week, showing a three-point lead for the governor.
Considering how closely divided the Florida electorate showed itself to be in November 2000, it's hard to imagine that Jeb Bush could win by more than 5%, so a range of +3% to +9% seems reasonable.
MAN WITH A PLAN:
Rove's Way (MATT BAI, October 20, 2002, NY Times Magazine)Even in an exceptionally close election year, Rove's personal and forceful intervention in state races is extraordinary. In South Dakota, he leaned on Representative John Thune -- who was also planning a run for governor -- to get out of the race and take on Tim Johnson, Tom Daschle's protege in the Senate, instead. In North Carolina, he helped clear the field for Elizabeth Dole. In Missouri, he got behind the former congressman Jim Talent early, dispatching both the older and younger George Bushes, several White House aides and a couple of cabinet secretaries to help Talent raise money to take on Jean Carnahan.''He can go through nearly every race in every district,'' says Tom Rath, a Bush ally in New Hampshire. ''He can tell you more about the South Dakota Senate race than anyone in South Dakota.''
Rove's goal for the midterms was to find moderate candidates with statewide appeal. He says he has intervened only in states where there was a near-consensus among Bush's top supporters, but a lot of social conservatives were angry when their candidates got pushed aside in favor of moderates. ''What it does is it demoralizes your own party,'' a Georgia Republican says. In that state, Rove put the White House squarely behind Saxby Chambliss, a moderate congressman who is now running for the Senate against the Democrat Max Cleland.
It's not ideology that fuels Rove's crusade. He is a rightish Republican -- ''I grew up out West; I'm just a conservative'' -- but he says he believes that the only way to make the G.O.P. dominant is to reshape and expand the party, building on its base of ideological conservatives but broadening its appeal to reach traditionally Democratic voters like Latinos, African-Americans and union members. This means he has to play a political game of Twister, keeping one foot firmly planted on the far right -- pushing policies like Bush's faith-based initiative -- while reaching around to his left with popular centrist proposals on education and prescription drugs.
And so the midterm elections have become a referendum not just on the two parties, but also on Rove's particular brand of politics. If Rove wants social conservatives to continue to step aside while he builds a more inclusive party around candidates like Thune and Coleman, he has to prove that it works at the polls.
Hard to argue with the roll Mr. Rove has been on but if he gets his head handed to him in the mid-terms the Right is going to go after him. The libertarian types are still upset about steel tarrifs and what not and the social conservatives just don't much like the moderate candidates he hand-picked.
HE'S WELCOME AT OUR PLAYGROUND:
Beer-sitting service? (CP, October 19, 2002)Chynne Harley Kahnapace, 26, pleaded guilty to violating conditions of his parole after being caught pushing a baby stroller with a small keg of beer in it down the street.
MAKING THE BETTER THE ENEMY OF THE BEST:
Daschle Takes Parting Shot as Congress Breaks (ALISON MITCHELL, October 19, 2002, NY Times)With Congress leaving the capital for a last bout of campaigning, Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader, today blamed President Bush for a "very disappointing Congress" and said the nation was in worse shape than when Mr. Bush took office. [...]The sharp tone highlighted the lost promise of the 107th Congress, which came into office after the tumultuous 2000 election as the most closely divided Congress since the Eisenhower administration.
From the start, the central question was whether the split decision of the voters would lead to sharp partisan deadlock or a pragmatic period of centrist compromise.
Republicans controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly 50 years, which could have led them to seek to push through their agenda.
On the other hand their hold on power was razor-thin, and Mr. Bush had signaled on the campaign trail that he might seek accommodation. He showcased his good relations with Texas Democrats and he repeatedly pledged to "change the tone" in Washington.
The tone did change noticeably after the Sept. 11 attacks when the nation felt threatened on its own shores, and at moments Democratic leaders have made common cause with Mr. Bush on education and national security.
Moreover, the Congress did have notable achievements - and might yet have more when it reconvenes in November for a lame-duck session.
The House and Senate overhauled the nation's campaign finance and electoral systems and created new rules on corporate responsibility.
Congress gave President Bush the "fast track" authority to negotiate trade deals that can only be approved or rejected by Congress. It passed a landmark education law. It approved Mr. Bush's signature $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut.
After Sept. 11, it authorized force first in Afghanistan and, just this month, in Iraq. It gave the Justice Department new powers to fight terrorism, toughened airport security and helped the strapped airline industry.
No matter how much of that record you agree with, it is certainly one of the most productive Congresses in U.S. History. For our money, the tax cut, Fast Track, and two declarations of war make it one of the best ever.
THE FIRST DOME:
A New Synagogue in the Old City: Architecture matters. (David Gelernter, Oct. 3, 2002, Jewish World Review)Architecture is politics by other means--at least some of the time. An emerging architectural story in Jerusalem is, in part, wonderful news; in part, a tragic missed opportunity.Recently the Jerusalem Post ran a story on a project that is bound to attract plenty of attention before long: the rebuilding of the monumental Hurva synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of Old Jerusalem.
In 1948, when Israel declared independence, the Hurva was the main synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City. The Jordanians seized Old Jerusalem in '48, kicked out all the Jews, banned Israelis from entering even to visit or pray, desecrated Jewish cemeteries, vandalized Jewish buildings--and blew up the Hurva synagogue, just for the hell of it.
When the Israelis recovered Jerusalem in the Six Day War of '67, they rebuilt a single arch in the ruins of the Hurva, intending it as a temporary memorial. Now, at last, they have plans in hand to rebuild the synagogue itself.
Why should the world care? Jerusalem is full of domes; once upon a time, three domes (appropriately) stood out: the Muslim Dome of the Rock, the Christian Holy Sepulcher, the Hurva synagogue. Making decisions about Jerusalem is the exclusive right of Jerusalem residents and Israeli citizens, of all creeds. Butting in is everybody's right--Jerusalem is the quintessential world-city. Jews and Christians are especially entitled to butt in: Christians because the Gospels culminate here, Jews because they regard this city as the holiest on earth. ("Third holiest," which is how the city ranks with Muslims, is a respectable distinction as far as it goes; but when the topic is love, third place suggests a certain lack of ardor.)
Thus, cause for rejoicing: A gap is being filled in the skyline of one of the world's most important cities; ruins speaking of war and destruction are to be replaced by a reassertion of hope, peace, holiness.
If you've never read it, we recommend Mr. Gelernter's memoir Drawing a Life about surviving an attack by the Unabomber.
WAGNERITES SCORNED:
Another Wagner's Debut, Turning the Plot Around (ANNE MIDGETTE, October 15, 2002, NY Times)[Katharina] Wagner is 24. She's tall, blond and pretty, and before September she had never staged an opera. She's also the composer's great-granddaughter, and her father, Wolfgang Wagner, 83, who runs the Wagner summer festival in nearby Bayreuth, has been naming her for some time as his successor.And she has just created a huge scandal. "The Flying Dutchman" is the story of a ghostly captain doomed to sail the seas forever unless he can find a woman willing to love him and dissolve his curse. Ms. Wagner did away with the supernatural: gone were the ghost ship, the eerie undead sailors and the final redemption. This "Dutchman" is played out in the underbelly of a German port.
Senta knew the Dutchman's picture from "Wanted" posters. The natty attire of the Dutchman and his men immediately branded them as misfits: helpless, trying not to attract attention, they incensed the lowlifes through their sheer otherness, and were beaten to a pulp.
Ms. Wagner's staging is particularly provocative because she is supposed to bear the standard of the Wagner family. Her father has been running the Bayreuth Festival for more than 50 years, and the conventional wisdom is that artistic stagnation has set in. His own board voted him out in 2000 in favor of his estranged daughter from his first marriage, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, a seasoned opera administrator. Mr. Wagner, however, ignored the explicit demand for his resignation, pointed out that his contract was for life, and cited Katharina as the only family member he'd consider as a successor, an idea that seemed absurd, given her youth and lack of experience.
Conservative Wagnerites, however, adore Mr. Wagner. So it seemed that the Wurzburg chapter of the Richard Wagner Society had found a fitting way to celebrate its 20th anniversary: by donating nearly $20,000 and enabling the struggling Mainfranken Theater to mount a new Wagner production, it would offer a professional directing debut to Mr. Wagner's chosen heir. One can imagine the society members running for the exits. Storms of boos, alternating with bravos, buffeted the production team at the premiere. "The reactions were very violent," Ms. Wagner said. "One woman said to me, `I know how Richard Wagner meant it.' That would be a real sensation if she really did."
Those women are the most frightening part of going to a Wagner opera, as they reminisce about Bayreuth in '36 and how divine the Fuhrer looked.
JAZZERCISE:
Marsalis puts muscle into classic sound (Kevin Whitehead, October 15, 2002, Chicago Sun-Times)When Branford Marsalis takes a solo, he throws his whole body into motion.He rocks on his heels and toes and swings his tenor saxophone out in front of him--not too far--putting his hips and elbows behind it. That physicality makes sense: Marsalis has a drummer's instinct for rhythm. He likes punchy phrases that bear down on the beat but still roll with it. [...]
Much is made of Marsalis' love of "the tradition," as if that alone ensures good music. (It doesn't.) Marsalis makes no secret of his admiration for John Coltrane, but what really matters is that he has thoroughly digested that influence, just as earlier players incorporated Charlie Parker's signature mannerisms into their personal styles. Traces of Coltrane's haunting ballad tone, his rippling scales and soaring high notes were in there, but they never felt like self-conscious acts of tribute. They've become part of Marsalis' own expressive arsenal.
One of the more likeable things about the Marsalis brothers is their respect for the tradition.
SPRINGTIME:
Riefenstahl race-hate charges dropped (BBC, 18 October, 2002)German prosecutors have decided not to press race-hate charges against filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl because of lack of evidence.Investigators began their inquiry after Ms Riefenstahl was accused by German gypsies' association Rom of lying about the fate of more than 100 gypsies, who were taken from the Salzburg and Berlin concentration camps between 1940 and 1942 to be used as extras in her films.
Ms Riefenstahl, best known for the films she made during the Nazi era under Adolf Hitler, said in an interview that the gypsies, used in her 1942 film Tiefland, or Lowland, all survived the war.
"We saw all the gypsies that played in Lowlands again after the war," she told Frankfurt's Rundschau newspaper.
"Nothing happened to them."
However Rom said that many of them in fact were returned to the death camps, where they were subsequently killed. [...]
In total around 500,000 gypsies, in addition to six million Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Imagine the lies such people must have to tell even themselves to deal with the horrific things they did.
October 18, 2002
EVEN THE BAD TIMES ARE BETTER:
Democrats Launch 'Prosperity Index' (Dale Russakoff, October 17, 2002, Washington Post)[D]emocrats, eager to turn economic anxiety into electoral gain Nov. 5, will unveil a new economic indicator today: the Prosperity Index.The Prosperity Index combines the growth rate of the gross domestic product, the unemployment rate and, here's the catch, the size of the federal budget deficit or surplus.
The Democrats' findings? Like so many other measures, the Prosperity Index has taken a huge dive from its perch in the go-go 1990s, but all in all, it's not that bad.
By the new measure, U.S. prosperity reached an index score of 6.2 in 2000, a 34-year high, then plummeted to -1.2 this year, the lowest rate since 1993. At 5.6 percent, the unemployment rate is below the 6.3 percent average since 1970. GDP growth, expected to be about 2.3 percent this year, is anemic but not recessionary. The big hit was the sudden turn in the government's fortunes, from a $127 billion surplus in 2001 to a deficit of about $160 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.
Even with that fiscal cataclysm, the current -1.2 Prosperity Index score beats out much of the 1970s and nearly all of the 1980s. Indeed, the Democrats' tailor-made index appears to ratify precisely the point made by pollsters that Democrats hoped to refute: Voters have reason to be anxious about rapidly changing circumstances, but anyone with a memory that goes past the boom years might not be feeling panicky yet.
Believe us, if you lived through the 70s and early 80s, and were reasonably aware of what was going on, you couldn't mistake today's economic doldrums for a real recession and you don't want to find out what one is like.
CYNICISM NEVER SOUNDED SO GOOD:
The Virtue of Engineering Cynicism: By any definition, a cynic is what you want in an engineer (David Weinberger, September 25, 2002, Darwin Mag)There are two key components to cynicism. First, a cynic is a disappointed optimist, as someone said. (Google failed me! As did www.xrefer.com.) Cynics believe there is an ideal that humans choose not to live up to. [...]Second, a cynic is abstracted from her surroundings. Like a punster waiting for a chance to pounce, a cynic hears a stream of words and assumes that they are not to be taken at face value. The cynic lives in a split-level world.
Oddly enough, when explained that way, a cynic sounds an awful lot like a Judeo-Christian believer. The believer too understands Man not to be living up to the possibility latent within us--as creatures formed in God's image. Likewise, the believer too inhabits a bifurcated world, living in the imperfect here and now but imagining a Heaven to come.
TURNING AFRICA IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION:
US proposes Africa small business loans (BBC, 3 October, 2002)The World Bank should set up a fund dedicated to backing small businesses in Africa, the US Treasury has proposed.In a speech on Wednesday, Undersecretary for International Affairs John Taylor said the Bank should set aside $135m (£86m) to be distributed over the next four years, with extra money coming from the US and other countries. [...]
The initiative is the latest salvo in a long-running campaign by the Bush administration to switch World Bank funding from loans to grants.
Right-wing US politicians have been pushing for the switch for years, ostensibly to reduce the deep indebtedness of the poor countries which are the World Bank's clients.
But critics insist it is a way of handicapping the body by draining its funds.
A deal for rich countries to provide $13bn in new money over the next three years, reached in June 2002, was conditional on increasing the proportion of money that is paid out in grants.
The stress on the IFC, the critics say, is part of the same strategy of transferring development assistance to the private sector.
This sounds like a terrific initiative. How ironic would it be if the Right, longtime foes of the World Bank, succeeded in turning it into a useful institution?
RICH, THOUGH NOT REAL:
America's Richest: The Forbes Fictional Fifteen (Edited by Michael Noer and Dan Ackman, 09.13.02, Forbes)If fiction can be regarded as a culture's subconscious, then it's clear that we are a nation obsessed with the very rich. From avaricious caricatures like The Simpsons' Montgomery Burns to literary character studies like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, our culture--both high and low--is littered with images of billionaires and tycoons. Some characters are intentional riffs on real-life counterparts, most famously Orson Welles' blistering portrayal of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane.Others, like Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street, came to symbolize both a man--convicted inside trader Ivan Boesky--and an era: the go-go 1980s. To be
sure, many are pure products of the imagination. But given the legion of publicity men and image handlers surrounding the typical real-life billionaires, understanding these
fictitious characters is as close as most of us will come to grasping the minds of the very rich.In creating this list we took certain minor liberties with the stories as presented on the page or on the screen. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it!
One question though: Doesn't Charlie Bucket own the Wonka empire now?
LIE DOWN WITH DOGS...:
The red and the brown: With his new magazine, Pat Buchanan links the old right to the new left (Ronald Radosh, 10/13/2002, Boston Globe)Above all, The American Conservative is antiwar. In his own signed contribution, Buchanan complains about ''a new triumphalist America'' that is leading us into ''an imperial war on Iraq.'' As one might expect, he believes that the '' war party'' is being manipulated by the Israeli government, which hopes that war with Iraq will provide an excuse to return to Lebanon ''and settle scores with Hezbollah.'' Buchanan goes on to claim that the Israelis are ''tugging at our sleeve, reminding us not to forget Libya.'' Meanwhile, Eric S. Margolis writes that the United States ''has been buttressing autocracy and despotism'' in the Middle East for years. As for Iraq, it ''has not committed any act of war against America,'' and to invade would be ''an act of brazen aggression.'' Writing from Britain, Stuart Reid cites the acerbically conservative writer Auberon Waugh to ask how a country of 15 million impoverished ''desert dwellers'' can conceivably be viewed as a ''threat to world peace.'' America, Reid writes, should not ''make a burnt offering of innocent Arabs.'' These are, to be certain, blame-America-first conservatives.How did Buchanan come to this particular pass? The most obvious antecedents of his magazine lie in the old right of the 1930s and '40s - the pre-World War II isolationists, or ''noninterventionists,'' as they preferred to call themselves. Buchanan's ruminations over Israeli influence call to mind Charles Lindbergh's 1941 accusation that the drive to enter the war against Hitler was emanating from ''the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.'' These Jewish interventionists - neoconservatives, Buchanan might say now - were influential, Lindbergh said, because of their ''large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government.''
The American Conservative proudly roots itself in this past by publishing Justin Raimondo's ode to ''the Old Right [who] knew something about the temptations of Empire.'' Raimondo is a gay conservative activist from San Francisco whose chief claim to fame is his single appearance on ''Politically Incorrect,'' when Bill Maher made fun of him for being one of the few openly gay supporters of Buchanan. Now Raimondo runs a Web site called antiwar.com, in which he extols the good old days of the America First Movement. For a short time, he points out, that movement included not only conservatives, but socialists like Norman Thomas and, in the period before the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the Communist leader Earl Browder.
Indeed, it seems that Raimondo is now attempting to forge his own Red-Brown alliance, as Europeans refer to the coming together in post Soviet Russia of right-wing nationalists and unreconstructed Communists.
Man, who ever thought they'd see the day when Pat Buchanan would be another man's "batchelor" [expletive deleted]?
THE THIRD RAIL HAS NO JUICE::
Carnahan numbers dip in Missouri race (Donald Lambro, 10/18/02, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)Sen. Jean Carnahan of Missouri is falling in the polls, despite a barrage of Democratic TV ads against her Republican challenger for backing personal Social Security investment accounts.Mrs. Carnahan's campaign has been running the ads throughout the state for the past three weeks, charging that her opponent, Jim Talent, wants to privatize the Social Security system. But the latest polls suggest that the ads have not been helping her; the former four-term congressman has surged into the lead by 6.5 percentage points. [...]
Mr. Talent has been airing a counteroffensive ad that says, "Jean Carnahan is attacking Jim Talent and scaring seniors once again." After listing bills he co-authored to help seniors, such as a patients' bill of rights and a prescription-drug benefit plan, the ad says, "So tell Jean Carnahan: Spend less time scaring seniors and more time working for them."
Republicans really need to make this issue work for them because the Democrats are never going to stop using it.
MAKES SENSE:
OSAMA'S RIFLEMEN (NILES LATHEM and MARSHA KRANES, October 18, 2002, NY Post)An al Qaeda suspect in custody in Belgium told American investigators he saw members of the terror organization training snipers in preparation for attacks on U.S. soil, a source told The Post last night.One of the planned attacks targeted U.S. senators on a golf course.
Suspect Nizar Treblisi - questioned by U.S. agents - said a three-man sniper team trained for attacks while shooting from distances of 150 to 750 feet, the source said.
Well, that golf course would be Congressional in Maryland, right?
ETHNOIDIOTIC:
Ethnomathematics - a rich cultural diversity: Advocates of ethnomathematics say it is helping different cultures to understand each other. (Australian Academy of Science)The term "ethnomathematics" was first used in the late 1960s by a Brazilian mathematician, Ubiratan D'Ambrosio, to describe the mathematical practices of identifiable cultural groups. Some see it as the study of mathematics in different cultures, others as a way of making mathematics more relevant to different cultural or ethnic groups, yet others as a way of understanding the differences between cultures. But perhaps the most powerful claim for the new discipline has been made by D'Ambrosio himself (quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 October 2000):"Mathematics is absolutely integrated with Western civilization, which conquered and dominated the entire world. The only possibility of building up a planetary civilization depends on restoring the dignity of the losers and, together, winners and losers, moving into the new. [Ethnomathematics, then, is] a step towards peace."
This makes ethnomathematics a rather unusual discipline, because it attempts to meld science and social justice. This isn't something that sits comfortably with many scientists: science, they argue, is science, and trying to make it politically correct will only impede its progress. Some educators fret that teaching mathematics using an ethnomathematical approach reduces it to a social-studies subject that teaches students little about ?real? mathematics. Others simply ridicule the whole notion: according to one disparaging journalist, 'Unless you wish to balance your checkbook the ancient Navajo way, it's probably safe to ignore the whole thing'.
But there are also many scientists, educators and commentators who see ethnomathematics - in all its definitions - as a legitimate discipline with plenty to offer the modern world.
Western science has made so many advances precisely because the winner gets to keep going while the loser gets discarded, no matter how freighted with cultural signifigance the loser may be (i.e., the geocentric universe). True dignity lies in being able to accept that you're wrong, not in requiring others to pretend that you had a good point.
BREAKING THE FAITH:
Brent Scowcroft on Jimmy Carter: an excerpt from A World Transformed (1998) (History News Network, 5-15-02)[T]he excerpt, which concerns events leading up to the passage of UN resolution 678 on November 29, 1990. The resolution gave Iraq an ultimatum: get out of Kuwait by January 15 or face military action.In the midst of this careful diplomacy, former President Jimmy Carter wrote the members of the [UN] Security Council asking them not to support the resolution. He argued that the costs in huiman life and the economic consequences, not to mention the permanent destabilization oif the Middle East, were too high and unnecessary, "unless all peaceful resolution efforts are first exhausted." He called for the UN to mandate a "good faith" negotiation with the Iraqi leaders to consider their concerns, and to ask the Arabs to try to work out a peaceful solution, "without any restraint on their agenda." It was an unbelieveable letter, asking the other members of the council to vote against his own country. We found out about it only when one of the recipients sent us a copy. Carter later acknowledged he had sent the letter, but claimed he had told President Bush what he was doing. He did send the President a similar one, but without mentioning he had also lobbied the President's foreign colleagues. It seemed to me that if there was ever a violation of the Logan Act prohibiting diplomacy by private citizens, this was it. President Bush was furious at this interference in the conduct of his foreign policy and the deliberate attempt to undermine it, but told me just to let it drop.
And now he accepts a prize that the bestowers depict as a slap at his country? Has he no sense of patriotism and loyalty?
OUR JOHN HENRY:
Man and computer in chess cliff-hanger (BBC, 18 October, 2002)The man-versus-machine chess duel is set for a dramatic finish on Saturday with world champion Vladimir Kramnik of Russia and the computer Deep Fritz tied 3.5-3.5 after seven games. [...]Kramnik's aggressive tactics initially confounded the computer, but the machine's handlers have helped it cope with this playing style.
Deep Fritz was created using standard hardware by the German company Chess Base.
What the heck!? What kind of sissy machine is this that it needs human help during the match?
FREE AT LAST, FREE AT LAST...:
AH, RELIEF: Hanes unveils tagless T-shirt (Kim Underwood, October 17, 2002, Winston Salem Journal)Make a T-shirt with no annoying tag? In retrospect, some ideas seem so simple that people may wonder how it was possible that no one thought of them earlier. [...]Today, the people at Sara Lee Underwear in Winston-Salem are announcing that, hereafter, all their Hanes white, underwear T-shirts will no longer have the potentially uncomfortable tag that has--at one time or another--afflicted many an American.
In a Hanes survey, almost half the men reported that they routinely cut or rip the tags from their T-shirts. And two-thirds of those cutters and rippers reported that they had damaged or even ruined at least one T-shirt in the past year getting rid of the tag. [...]
Although, on the whole, tagless T-shirts will clearly be a boon to man, it is perhaps fitting to pause a moment to note that the advent of the tagless T-shirt will sound the death knell for a touching gesture of affection. No longer will a mother be able to flip the tag of her son's T-shirt back inside. No longer will a wife be able to do the same for her husband. [...]
The company is launching a Web site today (http://www.GoTagless.com) and, on it, people will be able to post suggestions for what to do with the tags, such as using them for place mats for Barbie dolls.
Hopefully I'm not the only male ever to look in the mirror and think the tag was out but instead have it turn out to be a stray tuft of backhair?
FRANCE BIDS FOR A NOBEL PRIZE:
Stone skimming formula adds new spin (Hazel Muir, 16 October 02, New Scientist)Inspired by his eight-year-old son, physicist Lydéric Bocquet of Lyon University in France wanted to find out more. So he tinkered with some simple equations describing a stone bouncing on water in terms of its radius, speed and spin, and taking account of gravity and the water's drag.The equations showed that the faster a spinning stone is travelling, the more times it will bounce. So no surprise there. To bounce at least once without sinking, Bocquet found the stone needs to be travelling at a minimum speed of about 1 kilometre per hour.
And the equations also backed his hunch that spin is important because it keeps the stone fairly flat from one bounce to the next. The spin has a gyroscopic effect, preventing the stone from tipping and falling sideways into the water.
Amelie will be so happy.
RED STAR SETTING:
In Russia, six out of every 10 pregnancies end in abortion (VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV, October 18, 2002, Associated Press)About 60 percent of all pregnancies in Russia end in abortion, and another 10 percent of pregnant women lose unborn children because of health problems, the nation's chief gynecologist said Friday.
This, even more than corruption and the lack of a legal system, is why it is a waste to invest in Russia and/or try to help it rebuild.
LIFE OF REILLY?:
Daft mistake sees Booker Prize 'winner' named (Australian Broadcasting Corp)Organisers of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for literature have been left red-faced after they accidentally named one of the short-listed candidates as the winner.An announcement on the prize's official website said Canadian writer Yann Martel had won for his book Life of Pi, even though the judges have not met and are not due to do so until next Tuesday.
The 2002 winner will be officially named on Tuesday.
The leak prompted several punters to place money on Martel with bookmakers William Hill, prompting them to halt betting on the outcome of prize.
"We were baffled by the string of bets for the Martel book, several of them stakes of 100 pounds a time, and then concerned when the book had already been announced as the winner," William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said.
"We thought it might be wise at this point to close the [wagering] book pending inquiries."
Hopefully this is a good omen for Mr. Martel, who we interviewed here, and his fine novel Life of Pi.
LIFE OF REILLY?:
Daft mistake sees Booker Prize 'winner' named (Australian Broadcasting Corp)Organisers of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for literature have been left red-faced after they accidentally named one of the short-listed candidates as the winner.An announcement on the prize's official website said Canadian writer Yann Martel had won for his book Life of Pi, even though the judges have not met and are not due to do so until next Tuesday.
The 2002 winner will be officially named on Tuesday.
The leak prompted several punters to place money on Martel with bookmakers William Hill, prompting them to halt betting on the outcome of prize.
"We were baffled by the string of bets for the Martel book, several of them stakes of 100 pounds a time, and then concerned when the book had already been announced as the winner," William Hill spokesman Graham Sharpe said.
"We thought it might be wise at this point to close the [wagering] book pending inquiries."
Hopefully this is a good omen for Mr. Martel, who we interviewed here, and his fine novel Life of Pi.
HASHING OUT THE AXIS OF EVIL:
Everybody Loves the Assassins: Set loose in the land that invented terrorism ten centuries ago, Tim Cahill finds crumbling castles, legends of hash-smoking hit men, and Iranians who won't stop being nice. You call this the axis of evil? (Tim Cahill, October 2002, Outside)SO THERE'S THIS IRANIAN farmer, a great big strapping bodybuilder guy who lives in a tiny village high in the Elburz Mountains, and he's working out in a makeshift gym, hoisting homemade weights made from five-gallon jerry cans filled with cement. I'm the first American Parviz Kiai has ever met, and he wants to shake my hand, despite the fact that my mission in Iran is to visit the castles of the Assassins, a radical Islamic sect that was, arguably, the first terrorist group in history. This is an endeavor some think unlikely to redound to Iran's acclaim or glory. No matter. Parviz motions to the wall of his gym, where there are several photos taped up on the adobe. Affixed highest is the grim and glowering countenance of the Ayatollah Khomeini, whose death in 1989 is mourned each year on an official national holiday called The Heart-Rending Departure of the Great Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Below the defunct ayatollah are dozens of photos clipped from American muscle magazines: huge, freakish steroidal monsters festooned with enormous and appalling dirigibles of muscles. It was, I thought, a wall of dueling Great Satans, an arresting graphic representation of Iran's current identity crisis. It's true that angry demonstrators in Iran's capital, Tehran, had just been out in the street chanting "Death to America." On the other hand, this is the same city that held a candlelight vigil after the September 11 attacks to express its sympathy and support for America. It's the same nation that has voted overwhelmingly for political and economic reform in the past two presidential elections. But it's also a place with a theocratic government that President Bush says is part of an "axis of evil," a place where—according to a U.S. National Security Council spokesman—"hard-line unaccountable elements...facilitated the movement of Al Qaeda terrorists escaping from Afghanistan," and where "an unelected few...have used terrorism as an instrument of policy."It was the Assassins who pioneered the concept of terrorism as an instrument of policy back between the 11th and 13th centuries. Murdering prominent officials and clerics, of course, was nothing new. People have been whacking kings and emperors since the dawn of recorded history. But early-day assassination had usually been a one-time deal: a Brutus and some conspirators taking out a Caesar. The Assassins repeatedly and systematically killed their enemies with guile and stealth, striking them inside their own strongholds, and used the threat of imminent assassination to bend officials to their will.
In fact, the English word assassin is rooted in the name of the sect, and the Assassins, or so the legends would have us believe, committed their murders under the influence of hashish. They were called hashishiyyin, the Arabic word for hash smokers. The cannabis suggestion invariably generates skepticism among the ranks of those who have inhaled. Ruthless killers, honed to razor-sharp perfection, taking big hits off the bong? Kind of hard to picture.
If you've never read the very amusing travel writer Tim Cahill, here's a topical way to get started.
THE FIRST LIBERTY--LIFE:
ACLU questions Pentagon role in sniper probe (CNN, 10/17/02)The American Civil Liberties Union said Wednesday it was examining legal questions raised by the Pentagon's decision to deploy military personnel and equipment in the Washington area sniper shootings.Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed an order Tuesday allowing Army RC7 and U21 surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft to be used in the sniper hunt.
The all-weather aircraft -- spy planes, essentially -- are small fixed-wing airplanes packed with advanced technology, including sensors.
Troops will operate the planes and equipment and point out potential targets to local law enforcement authorities, which will request their use as needed.
The ACLU said it was examining whether the order might violate parts of the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law prohibiting the military from direct involvement in civilian law enforcement. [...]
Over the years, the Posse Comitatus law has been amended to
- Allow the military to lend equipment to federal, state and local authorities;
- Assist federal agencies in drug interdiction work;
- Protect national parks;
- Execute medical quarantines and certain health laws.
Eugene Fidell, a former Coast Guard lawyer who has practiced military law for 30 years and is affiliated with the Washington-based National Institute for Military Justice, said the provisions of the Posse Comitatus Act do not support the military involvement in the sniper shootings.
"How do you get there from here? They haven't persuaded me that this is valid," Fidell said. "You have to have a disruption of civil authority before the military can perform activities such as surveillance."
These civil libertarians have become diabolically stupid. Do they really imagine the American people want the military to protect trees but not people?
BLACK LIKE ME:
Clinton Inducted into Arkansas Black Hall of Fame (Associated Press, October 17, 2002)Bill Clinton, once famously described by author Toni Morrison as "our first black president," is being inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame as an honorary member.The former president will be the first non-black recognized in the hall's 10-year history. He is expected to attend the Saturday night event.
Slated for induction into the hall this year are R&B and gospel singer Al Green of Memphis; Dr. Edith Irby Jones of Houston, the first black graduate of the College of Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences; Al Bell of North Little Rock, the driving force behind Stax Records; award-wining poet Haki Madhubuti of Chicago; Faye Clarke of Long Beach, Calif., co-founder and executive director of the Educate the Children Foundation; and the late Bishop Charles H. Mason, founder of the Church of God in Christ Inc.
Former inductees to the hall include poet Maya Angelou; Ebony and Jet magazine publisher John H. Johnson Jr. and former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who was appointed by Clinton.
We approve of the slap in the face to Ms Elders but how could you insult Al Green and Al Bell this way?
BRAGGING ABOUT APPEASEMENT:
U.S., North Korea near war in 1994: Clinton got no-nuke vow (KENNETH R. BAZINET, 10/18/02, NY DAILY News)The U.S. was on the brink of war with North Korea in 1994 before Pyongyang agreed to halt its nuclear weapons program, sources said yesterday."It went down to the wire," said a diplomatic source in the Clinton administration. "The American people will never know how close we were to war." [...]
"Had they not accepted, we had 50,000 troops on the [demilitarized zone]. We were hell-bent about stopping them," the ex-State Department source said.
Clinton also dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gallucci to Pyongyang to urge the Communist regime in 1994 and again in 1995 to accept two light-water reactors — which do not produce weapons-grade nuclear material — from South Korea in exchange for an agreement to suspend its nuclear weapons program.
"He kept us out of a ground war," the source said of Gallucci's effort.
The strange thing is that when Bill Clinton leaks these stories he thinks they make him look good. In reality, he needs to explain why he didn't go to war to prevent an enemy from developing nukes.
TOO CLOSE TO CALL:
Actor Sean Penn Lashes Bush over Iraq War Drums (Reuters, 10/18/02)Actor Sean Penn on Friday weighed in on the international debate over a possible war with Iraq, paying for a $56,000 advertisement in the Washington Post accusing President Bush of stifling debate and threatening civil liberties. [...]"I beg you, help save America before yours is a legacy of shame and horror," Penn wrote...
We need your help deciding which is the more amusing aspect of this letter: (1) that by being published in a major American newspaper it refutes its own thesis; or, (2) the spectacle of someone who made the beast with two backs with Madonna talking about someone else having a "legacy of shame and horror"?
I MADE IT THROUGH THE WILDERNESS:
We've, all of us, a tendency to think of the Right as the hard-bitten cyncical folk and the Left as the starry-eyed idealists. But in its insistence on the moral supremacy of multilateralism and U.N. authority the Left makes the Right look positively dewy and virginal. Check out this bit on the new UN resolution, France, Russia Bend on Iraq: Key Security Council members seem ready to accept a compromise with the U.S. on a resolution to back up inspections with force. (Maggie Farley, Robin Wright and Tyler Marshall, October 18 2002, LA Times):
The resolution proposed by the U.S. is a deliberately ambiguous compromise that allows its main opponent on the council, France, to take credit for keeping the U.S. from acting without the U.N. Although the United States would prefer U.N. backing, the language of the draft also ensures that it would not have to win a second Security Council resolution to authorize a strike."The United States does not need any additional authority, even now, to take action to defend ourselves," Powell said. Any resolution that emerges, he added, would preserve the right of the U.S. to act in concert with other nations "even though the U.N. would not wish to act."
The French have been insisting on a two-step process designed to keep the U.S. from launching a strike as soon as weapons inspectors run into trouble in Iraq. The first resolution, under the French proposal, would strengthen the inspectors' mandate and grant them immediate access to any site in Iraq. If the inspectors were impeded, the French would require a second resolution to approve war. In the last week, however, French diplomats have amended their criteria to a "second meeting, not necessarily a resolution," paving the way for compromise.
What additional moral authority can an attack on Iraq gain by allowing the French and Russians to perpetrate the illusion that they've had some influence on the course of events?
RAINES OF ERROR:
When the Clinton Administration, despite dire warnings from foreign policy realists on the Right, entered into an agreement with North Korea that gave our still declared enemies massive benefits for a pie-in-the-sky promise to curtail their nuclear program, the Times had the following to say:
Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster.The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past.
A last-minute snag, North Korea's refusal to resume its suspended talks with neighboring South Korea, was resolved to Seoul's satisfaction. If Washington and Pyongyang approve the agreement, and if the North fulfills its commitments, this negotiation could become a textbook case on how to curb the spread of nuclear arms.
Hawks, arguing that the North was simply stalling while it built more bombs, had called for economic sanctions or attacks on the North's nuclear installations. The Administration muted the war talk and pursued determined diplomacy.
Yes, not only was this a textbook illustration of successful nuclear non-proliferation, it was also, and probably more importantly to the Times, an object lesson for the Right, demonstrating the efficacy of multilateral diplomacy and that we should trust the North Koreas of the world.
When the Bush administration took office and determined to re-examine the US/N. Korea relationship, fearing that Bill Clinton had been gulled, the Times thundered about the Right's shortsightededness, the willingness to risk all that had been "achieved" up until then just to satisfy the hawks. When George W. Bush included North Korea in the "axis of evil" the Times was derisive. So the "revelation" that the hawks had been right about North Korea all along and that the Left--from Bill Clinton to Jimmy Carter to Howell Raines and Maureen Dowd--had proven itself utterly gullible once again when it comes to judging
the "good intentions" of communist dictatorships it had to have been just humiliating. We Americans are a forgiving people though, and a few mea culpas would have more than likely gotten them all off the hook.
Instead, this morning, we get this from the Times, North Korea's Nuclear Secret (NY Times, October 18, 2002):
North Korea has stunned the world by acknowledging that it has been working to produce nuclear bomb fuel despite a 1994 agreement with the United States to freeze nuclear weapons development.People on both sides of the Iraq debate will use this alarming news to prop up their views. Hawks will say this demonstrates the futility of treaties with megalomaniacal dictators, while doves will say this gives the lie to the administration's argument that Iraq is uniquely dangerous.
That's right; though the Right has been warning all along that this was precisely the case and though the Bush administration explicitly included North Korea in the axis of evil--those powers antithetical to our interests who are also pursuing weapons of mass destruction--the Times thinks the world was "stunned" by their admission. And what is the first lesson we should learn from this contretemps? Is it that the doves at the Times were wrong about the trustworthiness of a dictatorship? Is it that we should listen to the hawks more carefully? Don't be ridiculous. The primary lesson is that the hawks should not use the fact that they were right to "prop up their views". "Prop up"? Since when does the side that's correct need to "prop up" its views?
One hardly expects the Times to behave with any decency anymore, never mind with honor, but here's an idea that might be helpful in restoring its once great reputation. How about an apology? Instead of a bizarre effort to use their own errors as a whip with which to flay "hawks", how about just saying: "They were right. We were wrong. We're sorry."
VOICES OF LIGHT:
Making Medieval Music (and Marketing It, Too) (ALLAN KOZINN, October 18, 2002, NY Times)The prospect of Anonymous 4 singing 18th- and early-19th-century American music may seem odd, but it is part of the group's gradual branching out. By the mid-1990's the singers were collaborating on Renaissance programs with Lionheart, an all-male vocal sextet. And in 1997 they sang their first contemporary work, Richard Einhorn's "Voices of Light," an inviting piece written as a soundtrack for Carl Dreyer's 1928 film, "The Passion of Joan of Arc." Anonymous 4 has performed the work in concert, with showings of the film, and has recorded it for Sony Classical. (The performance is also included on the Criterion Collection DVD of the Dreyer film.)"The decision to do `Voices of Light' was unanimous," Ms. Rose said. "Richard invited us to the studio and played us the film music, and there was no question about it."
Ms. Genensky added, "The writing wasn't exactly medievalesque, but it used our kind of sound and our kind of feeling, so it felt very familiar to us."
"And," Ms. Hellauer said, "he was as easy to work with as a dead composer."
This is an interesting profile of the group. We can't overpraise the DVD of The Passion of Joan of Arc that features their performance.
October 17, 2002
CAN'T SEE THE FORRESTER FOR THE GEEZ:
Lautenberg camp sends his regrets on debate: Torricelli earlier had agreed to face Forrester on "Meet the Press." But the new Senate candidate begged off. (Tom Turcol, October 17, 2002, Philadelphia Inquirer)Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Frank R. Lautenberg, seeking to avoid debates with Republican Douglas Forrester as long as possible, has refused to participate in a nationally televised debate this Sunday.Officials at NBC's Meet the Press confirmed yesterday that Lautenberg aides, after delaying a response for two weeks, informed them Tuesday night that their candidate would not debate Forrester.
Sen. Robert G. Torricelli had agreed to the debate before he dropped out of the race and was replaced by Lautenberg as the Democratic candidate two weeks ago.
Lautenberg, a former three-term senator who did not seek reelection in 2000, has yet to debate Forrester, with less than three weeks left until the Nov. 5 election.
Tim Russert, the Meet the Press moderator, has used his show in recent weeks as a debate forum for several top Senate races in the country.
Forrester has agreed to debate at any time, but Lautenberg has shown little enthusiasm for going head-to-head against his Republican opponent in a televised setting.
The only televised debate that the Democratic camp has agreed to is scheduled for the Saturday evening before the election on WNBC-TV's New York affiliate.
Here's maybe the decisive moment in this campaign for Mr. Forrester. He has to take the kid gloves off and make Mr. Lautenberg's capacity to fulfill the duties of the job into the central issue of the campaign.
CATCH THE RERUNS:
If you watched The Ship the past few nights on the History Channel you were treated to some terrific television with some oddly painful moments. First, it turned out that they were out at sea on September 11th, 2001, so were informed by the Captain of what had happened. You could see how disorienting it was to be in the middle of the Pacific on an 18th Century sailing vessel and have the ugly 21st Century intrude. One of the most likable members of the crew throughout was a British seaman named Mickey, a big old knucklehead of a guy. The day before he'd told the interviewer how he wouldn't have wanted to be an 18th Century sailor, but after the news was delivered he found them and said he'd changed his mind.BJG DJL:
Bjork's mother on hunger strike (BBC, 17 October, 2002)Apparently she's demanding an immediate UN airlift of vowels to Iceland: "Imagine the tragedy if my daughter were to marry Kent Hrbek?"
IT ZOGGLES THE MIND:
The Devil in the Data: All Poll Numbers Are Not Created Equal (Stuart Rothenberg, October 17, 2002, Roll Call)Zogby's September poll in Tennessee found Lamar Alexander (R) leading Bob Clement (D), a reasonable conclusion. What wasn't reasonable was Zogby's finding that Clement was leading by 9 points among men, while Alexander was leading by 25 points among women.In his release, Zogby referred to the "reverse gender gap" and asked, "What's going on in Tennessee?" I know the problem, and it had nothing to do with the electorate in the Volunteer State. It was the data. Zogby's October data were more reasonable, showing Alexander with a big lead among men and running even with Clement among women. The September cross-tabs were simply wrong.
Want another example? Zogby's Sept. 16-17 New Jersey poll showed Sen. Robert Torricelli (D) leading Doug Forrester (R) 39 percent to 34 percent. Whatever you think about those numbers, it's awfully hard to swallow Zogby's finding that twice as many Republicans were planning to vote for Torricelli as were Democrats for Forrester.
Sure, once you take into account the margin of error in each of these cells, the opposite result could be (and certainly was) true. But these dopey, small-sample, sub-sample results only demonstrate that cross-tabs are of limited utility when trying to monitor Senate races.
How can you even release a poll that shows the Republican leading among women and the Democrat leading among men?
PACHYDERM PARADE:
Republicans Continue to Hold Leads in New Hampshire as US Senate Race Tightens (The New Hampshire Poll, October 17, 2002)Republicans John Sununu, Craig Benson, Jeb Bradley, and Charles Bass continue to hold their respective leads over Democrats Jeanne Shaheen, Mark Fernald, Martha Fuller Clark, and Katrina Swett with only the race for US Senate tightening according to the latest New Hampshire Poll.The results presented here are based on 600 completed telephone interviews among a statewide random sample of likely voters in New Hampshire (300 interviews were completed in each Congressional District). The interviews were conducted from October 14 through October 16, 2002. Of the 600 likely voters, 225 are registered as Republicans, 156 as Democrats, and 219 are undeclared voters. The theoretical margin of error for the statewide sample of 600 likely voters is plus or minus 4 percentage points, 95% of the time, on questions where opinion is evenly split. The theoretical margin of error for the sample of 300 likely voters in each Congressional District is plus or minus 6 percentage points, 95% of the time, on questions where opinion is evenly split.
In the race for US Senate, Sununu leads Shaheen 51% to 43%, with 7% of voters undecided (Libertarian Ken Blevens has less than one-half of one percent). Sununu has dropped 4 percentage points since the last survey and Shaheen has gained 9 percentage points.
This seems more reasonable than the recent poll that had Ms Shaheen ahead. Her big advertising buys look to be tightening the race but as anincumbent statewide office holder she should be above 50% if she were going to win.
100%?:
Has anybody seen a story on the Iraqi "election" that mentions whether the Kurds voted too? It seems surprising that no one has mentioned the improbability of their giving Saddam 100% when they are widely reputed to want their independence.
UPDATE:
Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has the entirely predictable answer.
EVEN A BLIND PIG:
REVIEW: of Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World's Toughest Post-Cold War Conflicts by Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant (Brothers Judd, 12/12/01)The biggest problem...is that if you apply the first of the authors' own core concepts (diagnosing structure) to their chosen four examples you see that the breakthrough generally occurred prior to, or at, the moment negotiations started. Thus, the actual content of the Oslo Accords was pretty much insignificant; what really mattered was the implicit admission by the parties that Israel and a Palestinian state were each realities that the other side needed to cope with. Even today, with the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians at its all time nadir, they are relatively close to a final accord. Israel will eventually declare a Palestinian state unilaterally and the Palestinians will be forced to accept the boundaries that Israel imposes. The breakthrough occurred with Oslo when the two sides, just by entering negotiations, acknowledged each others existence as a political fact.Similarly, when the United States sat down to discuss nuclear proliferation with the North Koreans, the real drama was over and North Korea had won. That this was true is revealed in a chart that the authors include which analyzes the interests of the two parties :
United States
*Preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons
*Preventing an arms race in Asia
*Undermining the DPRK (Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea)North Korea
*Ensuring security by acquiring nuclear weapons
*Bolstering a failing economy
*Winning international recognitionIt is obvious that North Korea could effectively achieve its aims regardless of what the final agreement actually required. They were bargaining with the U.S. as an equal, would certainly get some aid and would save money by not having to build nuclear weapons, and they would essentially make the U.S. the guarantor of their security, however unwitting or unwilling, because, having negotiated the agreement, there was no way the U.S. was going to turn around and topple the DPRK. And so, what did the U.S. stand to get out of the negotiation? Well, even if we realized all our goals, we'd still have strengthened one of the most loathsome regimes on the planet, left them free to pursue an unlimited conventional arms buildup, and, just as in Iraq, could have little way of knowing whether they'd truly given up their nuclear arms program. Here again, we see that the details of the negotiation didn't much matter; the structure had already determined the results.
Well, that holds up pretty well, if we say so ourselves.
GOT A STORY TO SHARE?:
Author Harvey Frommer, whose recent books A Yankee Century and Growing up Baseball we highly recommend, is looking for help with his update of Baseball's Greatest Rivalry: The New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox:
Dear Friends:An updated, expanded and revised version of my book Baseball's Greatest Rivalry is underway.
The "new" book (with my son Frederic as co-author) is scheduled for FALL 2003 publication. If you have any stories about the historic rivalry - a game at Fenway or Yankee Stadium, a particular moment, your philosophical thoughts about the "Rivalry," a favorite player and his role, please send those along. If you are a Yankee or Sox fan and have a particular dislike of the other team, writing about that might work, too. The more specific you can be - - the better.
All submissions are subject to editing. You will have to sign a simple release form. Unfortunately, we cannot offer any payment, but if what you have to say makes it into the book - - you will be "immortalized" in print. Please include your phone number and city, state with your submission.
Look forward to hearing from you very soon - - we are on a tight deadline.
Sincerely,
Harvey Frommer
He can be reached at: Harvey.Frommer@Dartmouth.EDU
NOT MORALLY JUSTIFIED?:
Boot, Falk argue ethics of Iraq war (Jessica Spradling, October 15, 2002, The Dartmouth)After listening to spirited arguments over the moral justification of pre-emptive military action against Iraq nearly 300 members of both the Dartmouth and Upper Valley communities voted overwhelmingly that such an attack was not justified.For nearly two hours, students, professors and Upper Valley residents filled the seats, the stairwells and the floor of Cook Auditorium to hear Wall Street Journal Editor Max Boot and Princeton University Professor Richard Falk present arguments for and against the war.
Of the 272 votes cast, 217 supported the statement that "The United States is not morally justified at this time in waging preemptive war against Iraq." Three were undecided, and the remainder supported military action.
Among those who identified themselves as Dartmouth students, 71 voted against war and 29 indicated they felt war was justified.
There are perfectly reasonable arguments to be made for not attacking Iraq, but to argue that there's no moral justification suggests that murderous dictators like Saddam Hussein can not be removed by external actors. This seems a dangerous concession to terror.
HOMERUN:
The Ostrich Position: European anti-Americanism reflects a deeper malaise. (PAUL JOHNSON, October 17, 2002, Wall Street Journal)Americans have been angered by the hostile attitude of some Europeans to U.S. efforts to take the war against terrorism to its countries of origin in the Middle East--a recent example of which was the suggestion, by Nobel jurors, that Jimmy Carter deserved the Peace Prize for his opposition to war with Iraq. They are puzzled by European irrationalism and weakness. They wonder, too, how the Continental economies can sustain double-digit unemployment for years on end. But the causes for all this are deep-rooted. There is no longer a "sick man of Europe." The whole of Europe is sick.We have to remember that twice in the 20th century, Europe came close to committing suicide by wars that in retrospect seem senseless. These were followed by a Cold War that imprisoned much of Europe in a cage of fear. In this process, Europe, a collection of vigorous peoples who pushed forward the frontiers of civilization for a thousand years and created the modern world, learned to opt for a safety-first existence in which comforts and short-term security became the object of policy. They sought a cozy Utopia, with risk and pain eliminated.
Fifty years ago, the drive to unite Europe was seen as a daring adventure, not only burying ancient enmities but creating a new kind of enterprise society that would bring unparalleled prosperity. The project has degenerated into a defense of cradle-to-grave social-security system whose demands take priority over the market.
Under the EU's constant demands for "social protection," European societies have become a paradise for bureaucrats, trade unionists, centrist politicians and those businessmen who prefer to work under government protection. They offer little to original minds and risk-taking entrepreneurs. The fundamental assumptions of the drive to unite the continent are now half a century out of date and the EU's rigid, ultraconservative structure makes it incapable of taking in new ideas or even dumping such manifest archaisms as the Common Agricultural Policy.
This is the best column we've seen in a long time, on the dire and largely undiscussed problems that face the West. He hits upon virtually every theme we've been discussing here--with the exception of Evolution--and ties them all together into one devastating portrait of a dying Europe.
CAN WE SKIP A STEP OR TWO?:
The Truth Inside: A plea from Tehran (Farideh Tehrani, October 15, 2002, National Review)Everyday, my peers and I sit and talk. We want only one thing: Freedom. Basic human rights. The same thing those who fled Iran 20 years ago now enjoy in the suburbs of Los Angeles and Washington. Sometimes I check the Internet for news. At other times, my friends and I watch satellite television or listen to the short-wave radio broadcasts of the freed world.We are constantly amazed, though, at how different our reality is from what some American journalists, academics, and opinion-makers portray it as. So often, we hear self-described Iran experts on CNN and reporters in America's leading newspapers explain away the dictatorship under which we suffer. We hear them talk about how young people and women still support President Khatami! No. We do not! Yes, Khatami did win elections, but those came absent any real competition. In 1997, he won the election only after his colleagues on the Guardian Council disqualified 234 other candidates. Is that a democracy? Listen to us: We no more want to be part of an Islamic Republic than did the Hungarians, Czechs, or Poles want to be part of a Communist dictatorship.
Understand we want freedom. I am still at the university, but many of my peers are in prison for nothing more than demanding freedom of speech, or waving a bloody shirt. We aspire to establish a democracy based on a modern, liberal, and, yes, the Western model of secularism.
Our reasons are quite simple and obvious: We do not follow the Arab or the Islamic model. Iranians, as a people, do not have problems with Western civilization. We are Muslims, but our sense of Iranian national identity dwarfs any religious identity we hold. We are proud heirs of a once-great civilization that brought forth the concept of tolerance and civility predating Islam. Iranians are comfortable with the simple fact that the West has the best-refined modern concepts of democracy, human rights, and individual opportunity.
The big question now isn't even really about whether Iran is on the path toward Westernization but whether each Islamic society has to go through a long period of pro-Western dictatorship and/or a tragedy like the twenty years of the Iranian Revolution before they choose Westernization for themselves.
THE WESTERN FRONT:
Lebanon begins pumping from new Wazzani water system (Daniel Sobelman and Uri Ash, 17/10/2002, Ha'aretz)Lebanon began pumping Wednesday from its new water source on the Wazzani River in southern Lebanon. Lebanese President Emile Lahoud made a surprise appearance at the inauguration ceremony for the pump. [...]The Lebanese decision in August to begin pumping from a tributary of the river sparked fresh tensions with its southern neighbor. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon slammed the move, describing it as a cause for war.
American pressure recently led to a Lebanese decision to reduce the amount of water pumped to supply drinking water for villages in the area, rather than for irrigation purposes as well.
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Wednesday that the unilateral Lebanese action was likely to bring "a great escalation" between Lebanon and Israel.
"We won't, can't agree to such unilateral actions and we reserve the right to protect our water according to law, to international law," Peres told parliament in Jerusalem.
Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah announced Tuesday evening that the organization had been put on the highest alert in anticipation of an Israeli attack during the inauguration.
Speaking Tuesday night, Nasrallah said that Hezbollah would respond to any Israeli aggression "within minutes." Whoever decides to attack the pumping project will "open up the northern front and we are prepared for that," he said. He said his gunmen had already defined their targets inside Israel. "All we need is one telephone call" to respond to any Israeli attack, he said.
Observers say these are the toughest remarks the Hezbollah leader has uttered on the subject of the Wazzani.
Hopefully yesterday's Bush/Sharon meeting included planning for the war with Lebanon/Syria.
GEE, THEY SEEMED SO TRUSTWORTHY:
U.S.: North Korea Says Has Nukes (GEORGE GEDDA, Oct 16, , 2002, Associated Press)In a startling revelation, North Korea has told the United States it has a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of an 1994 agreement with the United States, the White House said Wednesday night.Spokesman Sean McCormack said North Korea was in "material breach" of the agreement under which it promised not to develop nuclear weapons.
The commitment had raised hopes for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but that hope is dashed for the time being, and relations with the United States are back to square one. [...]
U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said North Korea told U.S. officials that it is no longer bound by the anti-nuclear agreement.
The dramatic disclosure complicates President Bush's campaign to disarm Iraq under threat of military force, coming almost nine months after Bush said North Korea was part of an "axis of evil" along with Iran and Iraq.
It seems unlikely, however, that North Korea will become a target country for the United States much as Iraq is nowadays. With war plans for Iraq already on the drawing board and a broader war on terrorism still under way, threats against North Korea could leave the United States overextended.
Until now, the United States' main concern with North Korea has been its sale of ballistic missiles to Syria, Iran and other countries. Now North Korea's nuclear program is added to the mix.
This story seems to be precisely wrong. The fact that North Korea was able to continue its program without our knowing suggests that Iraq may well have done the same. If anything, it strengthens the case for taking out the Iraqi government post haste. It also strengthens the case for adding Syria to the axis of evil.
FIGHTING THE UNDERTOW OF THE CRIMSON TIDE:
Death and the maiden (Charles Murtaugh, October 16, 2002)TOO BIG FOR HIS BRITCHES:
Mason-Dixon Poll: Edwards Could Face Tough Re-Election in 2004 (WRAL.com, October 16, 2002)While North Carolina voters are focused on this year's U.S. Senate race, results of a new poll showsthe 2004 Senate race could become just as lively if incumbent Democrat John Edwards draws a credible challenger.According to results of a Mason-Dixon Poll, statewide, only 43 percent of voters say they will definitely vote to re-elect Edwards, while 16 percent indicate they will consider voting for a Republican challenger and a significant 35 percent will definitely vote to replace Edwards with a Republican.
Voters have a long history of punishing Senators who start imagining themselves to be presidential material--the most recent example being John Ashcroft.
October 16, 2002
AN EMPIRE WITHOUT POSSESSIONS:
Terror's Aftermath in Indonesia (Sidney Jones, director of the Indonesia project of the International Crisis Group, October 16, 2002, NY Times)Extraordinary as this seems in the West, many Indonesians are convinced that the United States sponsored the Bali bombing in order to convince reluctant governments to join its war on terror and support an attack on Iraq. Hard-line Muslims like Abu Bakar Bashir--said to be the head of Jemaah Islamiyah--are not the only ones making this claim. The Bush administration's pressure on Indonesia to take action against Muslim terrorists, its policies in the Middle East and the presence of American troops in the Philippines' Muslim South have all fueled suspicions in conservative circles that Washington has an anti-Muslim agenda. Some Indonesians seem to believe that the only organization with the capacity to carry out such a devastating attack is the American government."American troops want to establish a presence in Indonesia," one commentator said on a television panel Monday night. "They'll establish a foothold by offering to help out with the investigation in Bali, and then we'll see the influx." If some in Washington think that the Bali blast will convert all skeptics to the need for more stringent antiterrorism measures, they'll need to reconsider.
Unfortunately, all you have to do is go read any "progressive" publication, European newspaper, or the editorial pages of the NY Times and you'll see people who should know better claiming much the same thing, that we are a neo-imperialist power bent on occupying the world and exploiting its resources. People seem to confuse the entirely reasonable and necessary to remain the world's dominant military power with an absurd imagined desire to actually control every nook and cranny.
WHY THE POTUS MATTERS TO A FETUS:
Court Rules Fetus Can Be Defended (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 16, 2002)In a ruling that could add new dimensions to the abortion debate, a Michigan court said a pregnant woman can use deadly force to protect a fetus from attack even if her own life is not in danger.The Michigan Court of Appeals reversed a Kalamazoo County Circuit Court's conviction of a woman for killing her boyfriend and ordered a new trial because Judge Richard Ryan Lamb had not instructed the jury about the ``defense of others'' theory.
The appeals court did not address a key issue in abortion cases: when a fetus becomes a person.
Here's why having a conservative president matters to conservatives. For one thing (though this was a state court), he gets to appoint judges who can continue to create a body of law like this, which restores human rights to the fetus. Add regulations like the recently announced one that extends health care to fetuses and you can develop a legal environment in which Roe v. Wade becomes not merely incoherent and anticonstitutional but an actual contradiction of an entire skein of other laws. You lay an even firmer groundwork for its eventual overturn.
UNNECESSARY WARS AND THE NECESSARY NATIONS:
Unnecessary Wars (Midge Decter, June 8, 2002, Hillsdale College)We are at war. Faced with those terrible Churchillian alternatives, shame or war, the President chose national honor. And those who said you cannot go to war in Afghanistan - it is too hard; the terrain there is impossible; the winter there is impossible; look what happened to the Russians - like those who made equivalently specious arguments about the Nazis, argued in vain. To be sure, we had the advantage--strange word--that Churchill and his circle did not have in the mid-30s: that of tasting the enemy's fire and brimstone on our own soil, in one of our own great cities. And at least one result is that ordinary Afghanis, the centuries-long victims of what the imperial European powers used to refer to as "The Great Game," and latterly victims at the hands of their own terror-driven government, are beginning to smile. They are beginning to smile, to listen to music, to rebuild their houses and to dream of governing themselves. Perhaps they will even accomplish this last. And who but the American Army could have--and even more important, who but the American army would have--made this possible?
This seems a pertinent question. We may decide not to help the countries of the Middle East free themselves and they may prove unableto maintain freedom even should we win them an opportunity at it, but if we don't help (and by "we", I mean Britain, Australia, America, etc.), who will? It's all well and good to say the people have to do it themselves, but we know from the Cold War--when more democratically "advanced" peoples proved unable to win their freedom, in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and elsewhere--that this is no easy task.
KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY:
JUST SAY "NOT UNTIL WE'RE MARRIED": Legislating Morality And Undermining HIV/AIDS Prevention (JOANNE MARINER, Oct. 14, 2002, Find Law)As it previously did with the abortion gag rule, the Bush Administration has taken recent steps toward imposing its restrictive abstinence-only views on a global audience. (In January 2001, during his very first week in office, President Bush issued an executive order barring U.S. financial assistance to international nongovernmental organizations that, using separate funds, engage in such activities as talking with clients about abortion, disseminating information about abortion, or advocating for the repeal of laws that restrict abortion.)Last May, at the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on Children, the U.S. delegation joined with Iran, Libya, Pakistan, Sudan and the Holy See (the axis of fundamentalism?) to press summit participants to endorse sexual abstinence "both before and during marriage" as the only way to prevent HIV/AIDS transmission.
The Child Rights Caucus, a coalition of hundreds of nongovernmental organizations from around the world, condemned the U.S. emphasis on abstinence as "both naive and inappropriate." As the caucus pointed out, "for the millions of girls who marry before age 18 or who are forced into sexual relationships, abstinence is not an option, and lack of access to appropriate education and services can be life-threatening."
The problem with Ms Mariner's objection is that abstinence obviously is the only way to prevent transmission and that the idea that these girls who are being forced into sex will be able to prevail upon their assailants to wear a condom is nearly deranged.
MUST'VE BEEN THE SURGE IN VULCANIZED RUBBER PRICES:
Canada's budget surplus C$8.9 bln for 2001/02 (Reuters, 10.15.02)The final figure for Canada's federal budget surplus for the fiscal year that ended on March 31 was a higher-than-expected C$8.9 billion ($5.6 billion).The Finance Department said on Tuesday that as usual, since the money was not spent, the surplus all went towards paying the debt, which stood at C$536.5 billion after the paydown.
The department said the ratio of debt to gross domestic product stood at 49.1 percent at the end of March. That is down from almost 71 percent in 1995-96.
That's pretty staggering debt considering that they're going to have to fund a massive health care system despite a declining worker-age population and that the U.S. doesn't have a much higher ratio despite essentially funding the entire Cold War by ourselves.
I'D RATHER BE AN OKIE:
Okla. pair wins wife-carrying contest despite tough competition from Ont. duo (Canadian Press, October 14, 2002)An Oklahoma couple emerged from a course of log hurdles and a muddy water hole as champions in this year's national wife-carrying contest, which was held during the weekend in western Maine. Warren and Wendy Straatman of Owasso, Okla., came to Maine well-prepared for the challenge. The Straatmans are two-time winners of the Oklahoma Wife Carrying Championships, and the latest event was their third annual attempt to win the elusive national title at the Sunday River ski area.
The wife's a doctor--she carries me.
AH, THOSE FREE TRADING EUROS:
Greek cheese makers welcome European Union protection of feta cheese (THEODORA TONGAS, October 15, 2002, Canadian Press)It was a good day for Greek salad.Makers of its key ingredient - feta cheese - on Tuesday hailed a European Union decision giving them exclusive rights to make the tangy white product produced from the milk of goats and sheep. The EU Commission gave European producers of feta five years Monday to find another name for their product or cease production.
"Feta ... will no longer face illegal competition from other white cheeses in brine," the Greek Dairies Association said in a statement. "Goat and sheep farmers will benefit most because the milk they produce will be sold more easily."
Feta, which can now be produced only in certain regions of Greece, joins a list of hundreds of protected gourmet products, including cheeses like Italy's gorgonzola and French brie de Meaux.
"Illegal competition"?
WHO BENEFITS FROM THE BOMBING?:
Man confesses to making bomb that destroyed club (Ellen Nakashima and Alan Sipress, October 16, 2002 , The Washington Post)A former member of the Indonesian Air Force has confessed to investigators that he assembled the bomb that destroyed the heart of Bali's nightclub district Saturday, killing at least 181 people, an Indonesian security official said Tuesday.The suspect, who is being held by Indonesian authorities, told investigators that he regretted the massive loss of life, but he has not disclosed who ordered him to make the bomb, according to the security official. The official said the suspect had learned to make explosives while serving in the air force, which later dismissed him for misconduct.
Jeffrey Winters is looking better and better.
ARE THEY TAX EXEMPT?:
ACLU Ads Will Target Bush Policies (Dan Eggen, October 16, 2002, Washington Post)The American Civil Liberties Union plans to announce today a $2.5 million media campaign aimed at the aggressive anti-terrorism policies of the Bush administration and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft -- the largest such effort in its 80-year history. [...]The campaign, launched shortly before the Nov. 5 elections...
Just in case anyone had any doubt that they're a wholly owned subsidiary of the Democrat Party...
PUSH POLLSTER?:
IS ZOGBY A FRAUD? (Patrick Ruffini, 10/16/02)It's well known that Zogby, whose brother contributes to the anti-American, anti-Israel Arab News, is an outspoken critic of war with Iraq. Lately, Zogby has fashioned himself as a spokesman for the Arab American community and as a student of Arab opinion more broadly. He's conducted polls soliciting the opinions of pawns in dictatorial regimes like Iran and Saudi Arabia on why we shouldn't go to war with Iraq, and has openly suggested a political motive behind the Administration's war preparations. The questions he asks in his domestic polling on Iraq are highly suggestive and show that he's not beyond using his surveys as a weapon to shift public discourse against the war.
Mr. Ruffini, without being sensationalistic about it, raises what seem to be some valid questions as to whether Mr. Zogby's personal politics may be filtering over into the poll numbers he's producing.
ONLY NIXON CAN GO TO CHINA:
Rumsfeld's Style, Goals Strain Ties In Pentagon: 'Transformation' Effort Spawns Issues of Control (Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks, October 16, 2002, Washington Post)early two dozen current and former top officers and civilian officials said in interviews that there is a huge discrepancy between the outside perception of Rumsfeld -- the crisp, no-nonsense defense secretary who became a media star through his briefings on the Afghan war--and the way he is seen inside the Pentagon. Many senior officers on the Joint Staff and in all branches of the military describe Rumsfeld as frequently abusive and indecisive, trusting only a tiny circle of close advisers, seemingly eager to slap down officers with decades of distinguished service. The unhappiness is so pervasive that all three service secretaries are said to be deeply frustrated by a lack of autonomy and contemplating leaving by the end of the year. [...]His disputes with parts of the top brass involve style, the conduct of military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and sharply different views about how and whether to "transform" today's armed forces. But what the fights boil down to is civilian control of a defense establishment that Rumsfeld is said to believe had become too independent and risk-averse during eight years under President Bill Clinton.
Issue? If any of these guys have an issue with civilian control they're in the wrong country's military. These are the kinds of reforms that only a bureaucratic in-fighter like Mr. Rumsfeld can even hope to accomplish and only a conservative Republican administration can even dare to attempt. The great failure of Bill Clinton's presidency was not his personal criminality but his failure to take on the Left's sacred cows, such as Social Security,
in like manner.
IT'S THE JUDICIARY, STUPID:
Bush Places Senate's Delays on Judicial Appointees at Core of Campaigning (NEIL A. LEWIS, October 16, 2002, NY Times)President Bush's ability to shape the federal bench, at stake in the November election, is heating up this year's election campaigns.Frustrated by Senate Democrats' blocking conservative judicial candidates, Mr. Bush is putting the issue at the core of his efforts on behalf of Republican candidates, hoping to use it to put the Senate back in his party's control.
"The Senate is doing a lousy job on my judge nominations," the president said on Monday at a campaign stop in Michigan in remarks that he echoes in state after state.
There are many "reasons why we need to change the Senate," he added. One was "to make sure that the federal bench represents the way you want them to serve."
[White House counsel, Alberto R.] Gonzales said the White House would not change the kind of nominees it chose. "These are the kind of judicial candidates the American people want," he said.
Conservatives have been frustrated for twenty years by the failure of even folks like Ronald Reagan to put the makeup of the judiciary at the center of electoral politics. This is yet another way in which Mr. Bush's instincts serve him well in appealing at least to the Right, and one suspects that just by listing the decisions of the 9th Circuit you could horrify voters about what anti-democratic mischief liberal judges are capable of perpetrating.
THE FUTURE IN THE PAST:
Devout whiz-kid seen as Tory saviour: Montgomerie is the face of compassionate Conservatism (Gaby Hinsliff, October 13, 2002, The Observer)An evangelical Christian who believes in polite politicians and teaching teenagers to abstain from sex is emerging as the backroom aide behind the 'compassionate' Tory revolution.Tim Montgomerie was one of a handful of insiders allowed to help write Iain Duncan Smith's speech in Bournemouth last week. And behind the scenes the 32-year-old has had a pivotal role as the bridge between senior Tories and the 'vulnerable' poor they are now supposed to be wooing. His influence, and that of the Renewing One Nation task force he heads at Conservative party headquarters, worries some senior Tory figures who mistrust his overt Christian beliefs--he is anti-abortion and an early protŽgŽ of Dr Adrian Rogers, a former Tory candidate who has described homosexuality as 'sterile and disease-ridden'. [...]
Many of Montgomerie's ideas...will alarm liberal Tories. Renewing One Nation advocates 'abstinence education' on sex, adding that 'young people who delay the onset of sexual activity have a much better prospect of sustaining relationships in later life', and that 'young people want reassurance in school that it's OK to wait'.
The task force is pushing for Duncan Smith to adopt a heavily traditional policy on sex and drug education in schools, preaching 'harm avoidance'--telling young people not to drink, smoke or have sex--rather than more neutral lessons about the risks involved.
It is also consulting on ways of making marriage more attractive, while modernising Tories want a watering down of the party's stance on marriage in order to avoid offending cohabiting couples and gays. [...]
Friends say Montgomerie, who has a passion for Star Trek and Manchester United, is a 'genuine bloke' who has spent years cultivating links with the voluntary groups the Tories now desperately need. 'Christianity is his driving force, but he is a champion of civil society and of an ethos of public service outside politics,' said David Green of the thinktank Civitas, which works closely with both Montgomerie and the Tory leader's office. Montgomerie wants to rebuild the traditional links between Tories and volunteering, he said.
This is the first I've ever heard of Mr. Montgomerie, and he may just be today's flavor, but the future of the Tory Party and of Britain itself seems to lie in this kind of politics, else it's hard to see how either has a future. This kind of emphasis on traditional morality and family structure is absolutely necessary to start boosting British birthrates and relying on community instead of government to provide social services is a key to breaking the grip of the Welfare State. The Trekkieism and Soccer-love worry us though.
TWO USEFUL SITES:
Opinion: The Debate About Iraq (Washington Post)
Iraq and the War on Terrorism (Washington Post)
MOTHRA LIVES:
A super-sized bird in Alaska (PETER PORCO, October 15, 2002, Anchorage Daily News)A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has reportedly been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks.Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say they have seen a huge bird that's much bigger than anything they have seen before.
A pilot says he spotted the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet.
Did anyone, by any chance, spot a perfect replica of Yul Brynner in full Gunfslinger regalia?
THE FURTHER SUPERFLUITY OF THE ONION:
Send A Student To Minnesota (Democratic Socialists USA)DSA’s national electoral project this year is the Minnesota Senate Election. Together with YDS, DSA’s Youth Section, we are mobilizing to bring young people to Minnesota. Minnesota is one of the few states that allow same day voter registration. We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people. Wellstone will need a high percentage of young people to register and vote for him if he is to stave off the campaign that Bush, the Republicans and the Greens are waging against him. He is the Right’s Number One electoral target.Because we are focusing on issue-based voter registration, this electoral work can be supported by tax-deductible contributions. The DSA FUND is soliciting tax-deductible contributions to support this project. Contributions are needed to underwrite the costs of transportation as well as providing a stipend for expenses; housing is being donated.
Somewhere Whittaker Chambers nods his head.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING...SOMETHING ELSE:
Fairfax Witnesses Saw Sniper: Fatal Shooting Of FBI Analyst Tied to Others (Carol Morello and Tom Jackman, October 16, 2002, Washington Post)Some witnesses caught a glimpse of the sniper, and although some detectives hoped the information would aid the investigation, one source cautioned that "the description is way too premature" to release accurate details or a composite sketch. Similarly, witnesses provided at least partial license plate numbers, although another law enforcement source said the sightings have not yielded a viable lead.More promising was the presence of the white or cream-colored Chevrolet Astro van with a silver ladder rack on top. It was the second consecutive shooting in which witnesses saw the van. This time, at least one witness said he saw the sniper get out of the vehicle, fire on Franklin, get back in and flee. Other witnesses said the vehicle's rear left taillight was not working.
Police yesterday released two composite images of a van that witnesses say they saw Friday near a Spotsylvania County gas station where a Philadelphia man was fatally shot. Although the images are of different makes -- one an Astro van and the other a Ford Econovan, each with aladder rack on the roof -- authorities said that only one vehicle was seen and that eyewitnesses gave different accounts of the brand.
It's become quite common these days for even sensible folk to complain about the loss of our civil liberties due to computerized databases and the sheer volume of information that is collected about all of us. But if innumerable government agencies can't find a pretty distinctive sounding van it suggests that the inefficiency of the bureaucracy remains one of the guarantors of our liberty.
IF WE ATTACK SADDAM, HIV WILL HAVE WON:
A puzzle for future historians: Why focus on Iraq and not AIDS? (Sebastian Mallaby, October 15, 2002, The Washington Post)Here, surely, is the puzzle for future historians. How could we Americans, a society with the technology to land a missile on Saddam Hussein's bathmat, not mobilize the science necessary to defeat the scourge? How could the United States, a nation that spends $10 billion a year on soaps and perfumes, give $1 billion in public money annually for battling the virus and regard that as enough? How is it that we have known about AIDS for two decades yet only now are starting to react? [...]The real reason for our muted reaction is that AIDS is so monotonous. The AIDS pandemic is silent, repetitive and boring. People are upset the first few times they hear about it. Then they move on.
Actually, the real reason is that we understand AIDs to be a function of behavior, a threat that we can control, at least in our own personal lives. Saddam Hussein, on the other hand, is frightening precisely because we can't control him.