THE DOG HAS FRIENDS

'Dog is dead' sparked Najaf arrests (News Interactive, September 1, 2003)

TWO Saudis arrested after the Najaf attack in Iraq that killed leading Shiite cleric Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim were picked up after sending an e-mail saying "mission accomplished: the dog is dead", The Times reported today quoting a source close to the Iraqi inquiry.

The men were grabbed by a crowd and taken to the nearest police station after being seen sending the e-mail from an Internet cafe, the source said.

Isn't this precisely the kind of attentiveness and willingness to act that we need from the Shi'ites?

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HARDLY AUDIE

Rufus Wainwright Journeys to 'Gay Hell' and Back (ANTHONY DeCURTIS, August 31, 2003, NY Times)

"I'm a bit hesitant to talk about all this," he said. "I don't know what the impact will be. But I'm only doing it because it might help
somebody -- and to say that there is no such thing as casual crystal meth use!"

Mr. Wainwright, who is gay and has been out since he was a teenager, was not always convinced of that. Methamphetamine is one of a number of drugs -- including ecstasy, cocaine, K (or ketamine, an anesthetic) and alcohol -- to which he has turned over the years to bolster his confidence and to propel his quests for anonymous sex. Despite creating a body of work whose central theme is the search for true love, he has never been in a serious relationship, a consequence, he says, of having been raped by a man he picked up in London when he was 14.

Typically in recent years, he would get high, go online to discover willing partners and arrange meetings. Eventually Mr. Wainwright found himself drawn to a subterranean world that he described in the most lurid terms as a "gay hell."

"I'm not talking about a bar in the meatpacking district," he said.

Mr. Wainwright believes that crystal meth presents specific dangers -- and specific temptations -- for homosexual men, and that its use is a menace to their community. "Years of sexual insecurity, the low-grade discrimination you suffer, the need to belong -- speed takes care of all that in one second," he said. "It was a world where people are going so crazy that they're not making sense any more. If you wanted safe sex, you were a nerd, uncool. I was one of the nerds who did have safe sex, thank God. But I'm still mentally shattered by the whole experience."

"For years, and I mean thousands of years, the gay man's mind has been treated as perverted, clandestine and dirty," he went on, "and speed reinforces and glamorizes that as an ideal. And with drugs, what's more dangerous is more sexually exciting. On that drug I had really horrible thoughts that turned me on. I had a few of those real gay lost weekends, where everything goes out the window, where you want to make pornos or you want to have sex with children. I mean, your mind is just completely ravaged."

That's one heck of a progression: gay men are attracted to the drugs because the rest of us are mean to them and then it's the drugs' fault that they degrade themselves. A more direct conclusion would be that the drug use is consistent with, in fact complimentary to, the sexual deviance.

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CONVULSIVE THERAPY

Bombing Democracy in Iraq (REUEL MARC GERECHT, 8/31/03, NY Times)

The attack, which killed scores of Iraqis, including the prominent cleric Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim--and which came less than a week after a bomb went off at the home of Mr. Hakim's uncle, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim -- has convulsed the Shiite community. That should be of vital concern to the United States, whose fortunes in Iraq will rise or fall with the political sentiments of the Shiites, who make up at least 60 percent of Iraq's population.

These bombings were undoubtedly intended to terrorize Iraq's clerical establishment and to snuff out the growing dialogue between mainstream Shiites and Americans. Both ayatollahs had been talking directly to American officials and favored democracy. Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim controlled the only effective Shiite paramilitary force, but had chosen not to direct it against the occupation. This had angered Shiite extremists, notably the young cleric Moktada al-Sadr, leader of a violent faction known as the Sadriyyin.

There is already a lot of finger-pointing, but it may never be totally clear who planned the two bombings: the Sadriyyin, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, Baath Party loyalists or agents of Iran's hard-core mullahs. Some American officials and Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, quickly blamed anti-American Sunnis.

This may well be true, but it is important to note that the Baath Party loyalists and Sunni fundamentalists, at least until now, have kept their distance from the Shiite south, killing "collaborationists" and American G.I.'s only in the Sunni regions. Killing Americans in the south wouldn't be hard ? many operate there with light security ? and could be the best way to derail the United States' post-Saddam planning. Nor, according to Pentagon officials, have the jihadists coming over the Syrian and Iranian borders tried to attack Americans in the

This seems quite wrong. Who cares if we ever find out whether it was "the Sadriyyin, fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, Baath Party loyalists or agents of Iran's hard-core mullahs" that did the bombing; is't the point here that we want the mainstream Shi'ite community to oppose all those groups and to help us get rid of them?

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JUDGE OLSON'S BITTER FRUIIT

Blind to a nightmare (SCOTT FORNEK, August 31, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

He built a court system that became a model for the nation. He wrestled with ways to prevent crime, not just punish the criminal. He was a pioneer in the field of criminal psychology.

When he died in 1935, a Chicago Daily News editorial writer predicted that "the interesting thing about Judge [Harry] Olson's life and works is that no one can now write their epilogue, because the full fruit of the man's life may be borne in the future."

Nearly 70 years later, the epilogue has been written. And unfortunately for the judge's memory, some of that fruit is clearly rotten.

A new book paints a dark view of Olson, suggesting that he and other American proponents of the now discredited pseudo-science of eugenics helped fuel one of the most horrific nightmares of modern times.

In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, award-winning investigative author Edwin Black connects the Holocaust and other Nazi war crimes to the American eugenics movement, a crusade for selective breeding that led to the forced sterilization of nearly 70,000 Americans deemed "unfit."

A best-selling writer on the Holocaust, Black does not blame Olson and his colleagues for the Nazi atrocities. But he does argue that they hatched the quest to create a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master race here in the United States.

He points the finger at top scholars of the era, political leaders, self-styled reformers and the wealthy industrialists who funded it all.

"What we have here is corporate philanthropy engaged in ethnic cleansing," Black said.

And Olson's role was to help craft a U.S. sterilization law. It would be imitated by Nazi Germany--a feat Olson viewed with pride before his death in 1935.

"It was Judge Olson who helped proliferate and propagate these bizarre theories into every jurisdiction--local, state and national . . . and overseas," Black said. "He was a major mover in some of the most far-reaching persecution, oppression and genocidal campaigns the world has ever seen."

Despite Olson's prominence in the eugenics movement, he is a minor character in Black?s book, published by Four Walls Eight Windows and due out Sept. 7.

So the Sun-Times decided to take a look at Olson, poring over yellowed newspaper clippings, moldy letters and personal papers once stored in an Indiana chicken coop and musty documents on file at the Chicago Municipal Reference Library.

Was Olson a malicious race theorist or a would-be reformer with bizarre ideas about the mentally ill, caught up in a movement that spiraled out of control?

This is somewhat unfair in several ways: first, the connection between the euthanasia movement and the Holocaust is far more
important, but we don't like to talk about that because euthanasia is politically popular, while you don't have to worry about offending the few remaining eugenicists; second, whenever you lift a man out of his times and judge him by the standards of your own you are doing him a disservice. This article ends with the following passage:

Barry Mehler, director of the Institute for the Study of Academic Racism at Ferris State University, said he believes it is pointless to try to discern Olson's true motives, arguing that they are irrelevant to what he must ultimately be judged on.

"By the damage that was done to tens of thousands of victims in the United States, who were sterilized, by the millions of victims worldwide," Mehler said. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

"You don't judge people by their intentions. You judge people by the outcomes."

But if we accept this as true then the Justices who voted in favor of Roe v. Wade and thereby paved the way for forty million abortions must be held to be evil, rather than seen to be morally blind on the issue, which seems a fairer assessment. One's actions can result in evil without one being evil. There actually is a deffirence between those who have diminished the value that we place on human life by advocating things like eugenics, abortion, euthanasia, etc., and those who then used this dimishment as an excuse to engage in systematic murder. The distinction is of no consolation to the victims but is owed to the advocates.

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WE ALWAYS RUN THE EXPERIMENT

Girls get extra school help while boys get Ritalin (USA Today, 8/28/2003)

In classrooms nationwide, girls are pulling ahead of boys academically. Recent federal testing data show that what starts out as a modest gap in elementary-level reading scores turns into a yawning divide by high school. In 12th grade, 44% of girls rate as proficient readers on federal tests, compared with 28% of boys. And while boys still score slightly higher on federal math and science exams, their advantage is slipping.

Most startling is that little is being done to correct the imbalances. All of the major players — schools, education colleges and researchers — largely ignore the gender gap. Instead of pursuing sound solutions, many educators merely advocate prescribing more attention-focusing Ritalin for the boys, who receive the drug at four to eight times the rate of girls, according to different estimates. "Too often the first reaction to an attention problem is 'Let's medicate,' " says Rockville, Md., child psychologist Neil Hoffman. "Some schools are quick to recommend solutions before they've fully evaluated the problem." [...]

One fact explains why educators are ignoring boys' needs: You can't address a problem that you don't admit exists. The U.S. Department of Education concedes that no serious research is available comparing different instructional methods that might help boys. In fact, many education researchers are hostile toward research aimed at exploring gender differences in learning.

Last April, when Kenneth Dragseth, superintendent of schools in Edina, Minn., presented a paper describing his district's gender gap at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting in Chicago, he says the reception ranged from chilly to hostile. Female education researchers in the audience questioned whether helping boys would mean hurting girls.

Their attitude follows years of lobbying by groups such as the American Association of University Women, which alerted educators to the fact that girls were being shortchanged academically in the fields of math and science. The extra attention helped focus schools on girls' difficulties, but it has made it too easy for educators to overlook the problems of boys. Among them:

--Boys and girls learn differently. The best research on boy-girl learning differences is produced more by accident than by design. The lack of data in this field can hurt girls as much as boys. For instance, as part of an ongoing 20-year dyslexia study focusing on Connecticut schools, Yale neuroscientist and pediatrician Sally Shaywitz discovered that schools were identifying four times as many dyslexic boys as girls. Yet when her team entered schools to screen children, it diagnosed just as many dyslexic girls as boys. Shaywitz found that the mostly female teaching staff was quicker to identify rambunctious boys than quiet girls.

Ritalin is in many ways the first great "success" of the age of bioengineering. Parents, teachers, schools, doctors, etc. have found a way to make boys more docile and easier to control. These are, of course, the people we'd expect to have the boys' best interests at heart, if anyone does, but they don't: they are self-interested. If there's a drug that will quiet the kids down then give it to them and the secondary effects be damned. Welcome to our future.

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Do the math: Girls tops on campuses (Kay Lazar, August 31, 2003, Boston Herald)

"I don't mind being superior, education-wise, to someone I'm dating,'' said Leann Gould, 23, a first-year law student at Northeastern, where women command a 64 percent majority of the law school's freshmen class.

"But I am concerned about finding a man who would accept this,'' she added.

For Northeastern sophomore Liz Schwartz, 19, a nation of less-educated men is not such a bad thing.

"There would be more opportunities for (women) if the guys weren't as qualified,'' she said.

Statewide, female students command a 57.5 percent majority among private and public colleges, according to the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

Even in schools that have traditionally attracted more men - males comprised 66 percent of MIT's undergrads a decade ago - women are gaining ground. Today, women make up 41 percent of MIT's undergrads, and they outnumber men in 15 of the school's 22 undergraduate majors.

Some schools with large female majorities are aggressively working to level the gender imbalance. BU, for instance, says it is "giving more weight'' in admissions to SAT scores - where men traditionally score higher - and redesigning its brochures from ones that show mostly women to images that are more mixed.

The point being that the SAT tests ability while the conferring of degrees expresses "qualification". Reducing emphasis on the former in order to achieve the latter was really a rather straightforward exercise in social engineering when you get right down to it.

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BOOKNOTES

George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century by Robert Darnton (C-SPAN, 8/31/03, 8 & 11 pm)

A master historian's excavations into the past unearth a world that is unexpected and compelling.

The most famous character in eighteenth-century Paris, apart from the public hangman, was "Le Grand Thomas," a tooth puller who operated on the Pont-Neuf. A gigantic man seated high above the surrounding supplicants, he commanded instructions to his assistants and the "toothaches seemed to expire at his feet."

George Washington was not so lucky. He was
inaugurated as president in 1789 with one tooth in his mouth, a lower left bicuspid. The Father of His Country had sets of false teeth that were made of everything but wood, from elephant ivory and walrus tusk to the teeth of a fellow human.

With characteristic learning and bracing insight, Robert Darnton shows us that the Enlightenment had false teeth too?that it was not the Father of Our Modern World, responsible for all its advances and transgressions. In restoring the Enlightenment to human scale, Darnton locates its real significance as a movement, a cause, a campaign to change minds and reform institutions. So too with the French Revolution, another icon of the eighteenth century: Darnton explores its origins in the gossip, songs, and broadsides that formed the political nervous system of Paris in the Old Regime.

Figures that we think we know--Voltaire, Franklin, Jefferson, Rousseau, Condorcet--emerge here afresh, their vitality (if not their teeth) intact. Was the leader of the Girondists, Jacques-Pierre Brissot, a dedicated revolutionary or a police spy? Darnton shows the past to be an unruly place, sometimes confounding to the present, always unexpected, compelling, and rewarding.

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PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE.

The Unbearable Complexity of Being (Joshua Green, Boston Globe, 8/31/03)

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a professor issues a public apology to his students for leading them astray intellectually. But in his most recent book, "The Moment of Complexity" (Chicago), Mark C. Taylor, a distinguished professor of humanities at Williams College, does just that.

Nearly 20 years ago, Taylor established himself as a preeminent American practitioner of deconstruction with his book "Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology." But in "The Moment of Complexity," which appears this week in paperback, he claims he will no longer teach students the paralyzing deconstructive conceit that "all they have to look forward to is the endless struggle to undo systems and structures that cannot be undone." Deconstruction, an unregenerate product of the Cold War, is addicted to futility, Taylor writes.

Here is Richard Posner on deconstruction:

Orthodox language theory regards all these impediments to perfect conceptual transfer, or "intersubjectivity," as impurities or corruptions that nomally, if not always, can be overcome. And this is the point against which decontruction mounts its theoretical assault: it insists that to regard those properties of signifiers that impede communication as secondary is arbitrary and culture-bound rather than, as the orthodox theorists suppose, logical or "natural." It is just as logical, just as natural, deconstruction insists, to subordinate the communicative function of discourse to the communication-impeding effects of the signifiers that the speaker or writer uses, and thus to attend to the "play of the signifiers," which is to say to the relations between the signifiers and other concepts besides the one intended to be signified. The practitioner of deconstruction may take an ostensibly serious prose passage and immediately get hiung up on the first word, which may be an unintended pun or a homonym or a false cognate or may contain a subordinate meaning (perhaps deeply buried in its root) at war with the surface meaning. Or he may become fascinated with the shape of the letters or the visual pattern that they make on the page. Or he may juxtapose passages that are unrelated at the level of commuication, in order to jar the reader out of his conventional response and into attending to the play of the signifiers. Or he may treat an earlier writing as a commentary on a later one. Moreover, consistent with his program of forcing attention to the noncommunicative aspect of language, the deconstructionist will insist on the problematic character of regarding an author as "present" in his text in the same way tat we suppose a speaker to be present in his utterance. He will point out that writing, by its permanence (relative to speech), can outlive the communicative occasion that brought it forth by outliving the author, the readers whom the author intended to address, and its original linguistic and cultural context. [Emphasis added.]

Posner, Richard, Law and Literature, A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1988), at 212-213.

I would ordinarily make some snide comment about it taking Taylor twenty years to figure out that deconstructionism is not constructive, but to absolve him of any blame if any of his students were so far gone as to take this seriously. But Posner goes on to note "Cain's mordant comment on Derrida's contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism, . . . 'for readers with a lifetime to spare, there is also a 100-page essay by Jacques Derrida, dealing with a subject yet to be determined'" (Ibid., at 215 n.5 (citation omitted)), which makes me wonder if Taylor hasn't crammed a lifetime of learning into twenty short years.

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THE LIGHT SLOWLY DAWNS

Worried Democrats See Daunting '04 Hurdles (ADAM NAGOURNEY, 8/31/03, NY Times)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the strength of their field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election.

Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that built on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed to survive a complicated nominating fight that was pulling their party to the left.

This is not an election that the Democrats can win. If there's any question about that, consider this: if the election had been held any time over the past two months--while the daily killings of GI's in Iraq have been going on and while the economy has been flat--Mr. Bush would have gotten 54+% of the vote. In other words, given the conditions that Democrats hope for, the President would have been re-elected easily.

But it gets worse: Democrats are now counting on the economy staying in the doldrums and the Iraq situation being the same (and our primary foreign policy concern) a year from now. Those are absurd expectations and do not comprise an election strategy. They are a hope against history and against the interests of the nation. Add in the inevitability of a New Englander liberal as the nominee and you've the recipe for not just a Bush victory but an epic one. The only safe state for the Democrats at this point isn't even a state but the District of Columbia. George Bush will not only be competitive but could win everywhere else, including the home states of both Dr. Dean (when did that start?) and John Kerry--which both elected Republican governors just this past November.

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LATE, BUT WELCOME

U.S. and the Iraqis Discuss Creating Big Militia Force (DEXTER FILKINS, August 31, 2003, NY Times)

Iraqis involved in the talks said the force could consist of thousands of Iraqis already screened by the various political parties for prior affiliations with Saddam Hussein's government. Iraqi officials said such a militia could ultimately take control of Iraqi cities from American soldiers.

Some Iraqi leaders said a force of several thousand men, most of them with military experience, could be ready in little more than a month.

"The situation has changed, and there is a new receptiveness to the idea," said Mudhar Shahkawt, a prominent Iraqi exile who took part in the discussions today. "This force could move inside the cities and allow coalition forces to withdraw to places outside." [...]

The discussions about an all-Iraqi security force followed the devastating car bombing in the holy city of Najaf on Friday, when 82 people were killed and 95 were listed as wounded. Prominent among the dead was Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr al-Hakim, one of the most revered leaders of the world's 120 millions Shiite Muslims and a political moderate who had showed himself willing to deal with the American occupiers.

The attack, coupled with the repeated assaults on Americans and Iraqis here, has prompted leaders of several political parties to declare that they have lost confidence in the ability of the Americans to protect their leaders and sacred places.

Today, they began to demand that Iraqis become more involved in security. Indeed, some political leaders said they might be unable to keep their own followers from moving against their enemies, especially if the attacks continued.

"The knife is at our neck," Said Nael Musawi, a Shiite religious leader, told a group of American soldiers guarding the gate of the Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters in Baghdad, as thousands of demonstrators swirled about them. "I don't know how much longer I can control my people."

It';s an obvious failure of American policy that such a force wasn't put together immediately and power turned over more quickly, but this looks promising. One troublesome note: the Shi'ites should be encouraged to move against their enemies, not restrained from doing so. Reprisals for actions that occurred under Saddamite rule are a healthy thing.

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HUMANITARIANISM IS ITS OWN PENALTY

Condi's Phony History - Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq. (Daniel Benjamin, Slate, 8/29/03)

In practice, Werwolf amounted to next to nothing. The mayor of Aachen was assassinated on March 25, 1945, on Himmler's orders. This was not a nice thing to do, but it happened before the May 7 Nazi surrender at Reims. It's hardly surprising that Berlin sought to undermine the American occupation before the war was over. And as the U.S. Army's official history, The U.S. Army in the Occupation of Germany 1944-1946, points out, the killing was 'probably the Werwolf's most sensational achievement.'

Indeed, the organization merits but two passing mentions in Occupation of Germany, which dwells far more on how docile the Germans were once the Americans rolled in—and fraternization between former enemies was a bigger problem for the military than confrontation. Although Gen. Eisenhower had been worrying about guerrilla warfare as early as August 1944, little materialized. There was no major campaign of sabotage. There was no destruction of water mains or energy plants worth noting. In fact, the far greater problem for the occupying forces was the misbehavior of desperate displaced persons, who accounted for much of the crime in the American zone.

I've seen and heard accounts of the German Werwolves, trained to resist the occupation, that are more sympathetic to the Administration's account, including a story on NPR yesterday, but frankly I don't care. The lesson I take from this is that, in this limited area, there is a price to pay for not bombing your enemy to the edge of existence, in not decimating his army and in not executing the top officials of his government. In not, that is, making it evident to the meanest intelligence and the most fanatical believer, that he has been beaten. I agree with the Administration in making this trade off, which, among other things, certainly lowered our combat deaths. But now the bill is due and we're going to be paying it for a while.

MORE:
On the history of the Werwolves, see: here and here, but see here. If Biddiscombe can be trusted, it looks like the Werwolves had successes, but mostly in occupied territory before the war was over. After the war, although they tried to continue to resist, they were opposed by the general population and didn't accomplish much. There is some indication that the Werwolves were more successful in the Russian sectors, where the population was much more eager to slow down the occupation and may even have killed a Russian general.

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OH, SO HE DOES KNOW THAT

Thrown aside: Pettitte, Yankees strong-arm Sox as Martinez falters (Bob Hohler, Boston Globe, 8/31/03).

Running baseball teams for nearly a quarter-century has convinced Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino to emblazon one overriding principle in his formula for success.

'You need pitching, pitching, and more pitching,' Lucchino has said from Day 1 of spring training.

What he got yesterday was something else altogether. While his widely feared offense continued to rip apart opposing pitchers like so much confetti, several of Lucchino's hurlers, including the pep-less Pedro Martinez, served as little more than party favors for the Yankees, who romped to a 10-7 victory before 34,350 at Fenway Park.

Despite the triumph of evil, this was a great game to be at. Being at the Park was as much fun as ever, my son gets more and more from the game with each one he attends and the Sox kept it close until the end. This was a particularly good game for Boston's favorite sport, second guessing the manager. Arroyo looked good and should have been kept in. Pedro should have been yanked earlier. Embree makes you nervous just walking to the mound.

Grady Little has two bad habits. First, he makes things too complicated, pinch hitting and trying for tactical pitching changes. These don't work that well at the best of times and are dangerous when facing Joe Torre. Second, and a little contradictorily, he always waits a little too long -- one or two batters too long -- before yanking a tiring pitcher. Having said that, Pedro was pitching nicely in the first three innings, but the Yankees (they really are a great team, damn them) chipped away at him, fouling off as many pitches as they could and running up the pitch count. By the 4th, he had thrown almost 100 pitches and was in trouble. That's the sort of small thing that adds up to a championship. The Sox, on the other hand, rarely start a rally before having two outs, the sort of small thing that adds up to 85 years of frustration.

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WHO, OH, WHO, CAN SAVE US?

Worried Democrats See Daunting '04 Hurdles (Adam Nagourney, New York Times, 8/31/03)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination shifts into a more intense phase this Labor Day weekend, with some party leaders worried about the strength of their field of candidates and fearful of what they view as President Bush's huge advantage going into next year's election.

Many prominent Democrats said that Mr. Bush might be vulnerable, given problems with the economy, and continued American fatalities in Iraq. But they said he could be unseated only by an aggressive, partisan challenge that built on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election, and by a nominee who somehow managed to survive a complicated nominating fight that was pulling their party to the left.

'It's going to be tough,' said Walter F. Mondale, the former vice president who lost his challenge to Ronald Reagan in 1984. 'You're trying to beat an incumbent who has all this money, and who has got the field all to himself, while all this infighting is going on in the Democratic Party.' . . .

"I think it is a weak field," said John Meyer, 41, an architect from Henniker, who said he was waiting to see if Gen. Wesley K. Clark would enter the race. "A lot of them are lackluster candidates." . . .

But many Democrats express reservations about both these New Englanders, and that is reflected in the failure of either to draw the institutional party support that typically rallies around a perceived winner. Some Democrats worry that Dr. Dean would prove an easy mark for Mr. Bush, given his liberal views and his lack of any experience in foreign affairs; others warn that Mr. Kerry is an awkward public figure who has run a timorous campaign. . . .

Associates of General Clark have said he has told them that he will probably join the race. But aides to most of the other candidates say he is too late to have a good shot, and they view him more as competing for a second spot on the ticket. . . .

Though the Labor Day weekend is a traditional demarcation point in American campaigns, the Democrats have spent much of the past eight months making policy speeches, raising money, nailing down supporters and traveling to states like Iowa, South Carolina, Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma and, of course, here in New Hampshire. But they are now preparing to move into a significantly more intense and higher profile part of the race. . . .

What is increasingly clear, several Democrats said, is that primary voters are not likely to choose someone who is promising to run a nuanced campaign against Mr. Bush. Dr. Dean has set the tone on that, as he made clear again today. . . .

One prominent Democrat said that while Mr. Bush was "eminently beatable," the Democratic nominating process seemed nowhere near producing someone who could do the job. "The trouble in 2004 is not that Bush is going to be strong, but rather than we are going to be weak," this official said.

There is so much here. Does anyone other than the Times, for example, still take advice from Walter Mondale, the only man ever to lose elections in all fifty states? There is also a lot that's not here. Has the Times not noticed that popular attention is being drained into California, making it even harder for the Democrats to make progress against the President and changing the traditional rule that people focus on the primary races after Labor Day? Why not mention the President's belief that August is a wasted month during which he doesn't bother to make policy speeches or counter attacks against him? Couldn't they spare a sentence for the effect on the Senate if Edwards has decided to give up a long-shot senate reelection for no shot at the presidency?

There is also less here than meets the eye. This is a column that gets written whenever a popular incumbent president is heading into reelection. Just in the nature of things, his party is solid and unified while the opposition has any number of second-tier people seeking its nomination. Because the president is popular, he looks like a giant compared to the pygmies running against him. Fighting an incumbent is always an uphill battle. The party is always split between those who think they need to draw sharp lines to show how empty the incumbent's platform is (Walter Mondale, anyone) and those who think they need to come as close as they can to the incumbent, while arguing that they will be more competent (Michael Dukakis).

The real point of this article, though, made at the beginning, the middle and the end, is that the best nominee is not running. The field is weak. Kerry is toast. Dean is muddling and too far to the right on various important issues. Gephardt will lose Iowa and drop out. Clark, who it might be thought is the kind of tough, strong candidate with a compelling story that the Democrat's need, is really only seeking the v.p. spot (true enough, as it happens). Does the New York Times know of any possible aggressive, partison candidate who could step in after Labor Day, who could rally and unify the party, who would not be wounded by vicious primary attacks, who could viciously attack the president, who could raise a lot of money, who could be strong not weak, who is not lackluster, who has a natural claim to build on Democratic anger lingering from the 2000 election and who can be presented as not too far left? Who is the New York Time's dream candidate and how do you spell Chapaqua?

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WHO AMONG US WAS NOT A RECIDIVIST?

Cyclist to stand trial for 'falling off bike' (Associated Press, 30th August 2003)

An 11-year-old boy in Greece is to stand trial after falling off his bike during a race.

The boy on the eastern Aegean Sea island of Chios has been ordered to stand trial on October 13 for allegedly violating eight articles of the penal code and one traffic violation for falling off his bicycle during an annual race. [...]

The island's prosecutor said the boy fell because he was "not driving carefully and with constant rapt attention" and ordered him to appear in juvenile court.

Lucky he wasn't trying to sell lemonade from the bike or he might get the death penalty.

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MORE CHOICE

Cole offers students new options: Kids select 'academy' best suited to individual interests (HEATHER LAKE, August 30, 2003, Antelope Valley Press)

Teachers and administrators at Cole Middle School are challenging the traditional methods of teaching by offering its student body a choice in how they learn.

When the bell rang at the start of this school year, 40% of the sixth- through eighth-grade student body were not only checking out who they would be sitting with in home room, but also who they would be sitting with in almost every class, until they graduate the eighth grade.

Beginning last December, students and parents were disseminated information about academies and asked to choose the one of three they thought was the best fit.

Two smaller academies, a Science and Technology academy and an Oral Written and Visual Arts academy, each contain 20% of the student body.

The remaining 60% of the students are in the Liberal Arts academy, so named in keeping with the "looping" theme, but basically a traditional learning option.

Looping is the name for the process that puts students with the same teacher for certain subjects year after year.

If all goes as planned, sixth-graders just starting at Cole will be the first group to graduate from the eighth grade having spent their entire middle school education not only with the same students but for the most part, with the same teachers.

This isn't necessarily the sort of school you'd choose for your kid, but imagine a system with hundreds of thousands of such experiments going on and the best ones being adopted by other schools.

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AL QAEDA IN A QUAGMIRE

Al-Qaida operative arrested in Iraq: Man allegedly planned to use missiles on troops (JOHN HENDREN, 8/30/03, Los Angeles Times)

A man believed to be an al-Qaida operative, found with 11 surface-to-air missiles, has been arrested in Iraq by U.S. troops and has acknowledged that he had been training with Ansar al-Islam fighters to use the weapons against American forces, a senior U.S. official said Friday.

The arrest marks the first time the U.S.-led coalition has apprehended someone believed to be a member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network who is operating in Iraq.

The unnamed suspect was captured during an Aug. 20 raid in Ramadi, west of Baghdad, the capital, along with two other unnamed men, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. At least one of the other two men was believed to be a member of the extremist group Ansar al-Islam, the official said.

Intelligence officials said they found the suspected al-Qaida member's account, given during interrogation, "credible."

Al Qaeda has an advantage in asymmetrical warfare, not in going face to face with our troops. Iraq may be their Vietnam.

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YOU PAID WHAT FOR WHO?

Bustamante receives $500,000 from Indians; FPPC has doubts (Alexa H. Bluth, August 30, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

A day after meeting with tribal gambling interests, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante on Friday reported receiving a $500,000 campaign donation from a tribe -- the second six-figure contribution he has taken from Indians for the Oct. 7 recall election.

But it remains a matter of legal interpretation whether the $500,000 check Bustamante received Thursday from the Pechanga Band of Mission Indians and other large contributions he has received were proper donations under state campaign finance rules.

The state's Fair Political Practices Commission issued a statement late Thursday questioning the Democrat's practice of collecting large donations in an old campaign account for his recall efforts.

Seizing on what some believe is a loophole in the new Proposition 34 campaign finance laws, Bustamante has collected $1.1 million in the past week from Indian tribes and unions in his 2002 lieutenant governor's account, which he plans to transfer to the committee raising money for his recall bid.

Looks like the Indians' business sense hasn't improved any since they sold Manhattan Island for $24. At the rate they're paying they ought to be able to buy Penelope Cruz instead of Cruz Bustamante.

MORE:
Bustamante's MEChA past fuel for conservative critics (Philip J. LaVelle, 8/30/03, San Diego UNION-TRIBUNE)

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SORRY

YACCS

Friday, August 29, 2003 12:15 PM EST
Rate Your Music and YACCS are down due to a server failure.
Services are expected to return to normal in 24 - 48 hours.
Thanks,
Hossein Sharifi

We're painfully conscious of the fact that the comments here are superior to the posts and hope this situation will be rectified soon. Thank you for your patience and thank all of you who take the time to comment.

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NEGIOTIATING WITH THEMSELVES

WTO gives final approval to cheap drugs deal (AP, 8/30/03)

Following an impassioned appeal from Africa, the World Trade Organization on Saturday sealed a deal to allow poor countries to import cheap copies of patented drugs for killer diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

"All people of good will and good conscience will be very happy today with the decision that the WTO members have made," said Kenyan Ambassador Amina Chawahir Mohamed. "It's especially good news for the people of Africa who desperately need access to affordable medicine."

The United States has been trying to protect the interests of drug companies, which feared they could lose control of patent rights. U.S. concessions this week broke an eight-month deadlock on the issue.

The final breakthrough followed a meeting Friday during which representatives of many African countries pleaded with other diplomats to stop trying to win last-minute advantages for their own nations. [...]

But groups campaigning to give poor people better access to lifesaving drugs criticized the agreement.

"Today's deal was designed to offer comfort to the U.S. and the Western pharmaceutical industry," said Ellen 't Hoen of the medical aid group Doctors Without Borders. "Unfortunately it offers little comfort for poor patients. Global patent rules will continue to drive up the price of medicines."

Pretty pitiful that the developing countries had to plead with each other to stop mucking up the deal and the lobbyists who are supposedly trying to help them are still opposed.

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TWO TO TANGO

What are the roots of religious violence?: A professor travels the world for an answer a review of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill By Jessica Stern (Jason Thompson, August 24, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

Fundamentalism makes life simpler, dividing the world neatly into jihadi and infidel, homeland and axis of evil. "Religion is a kind of technology," as Jessica Stern puts it in "Terror in the Name of God." "It is terribly seductive in its ability to soothe and explain, but it is also dangerous."
Religious violence springs from a desire to find a clear purpose in the confusion of a world dominated by American capitalism. Fundamentalism fills the "God-shaped hole" (Sartre's phrase) in secular modernity. Terrorist groups emerge in response to sociopolitical grievances, using religion to enlist desperate individuals who justify murder in the guise of martyrdom. Believers sublimate feelings of rage and hopelessness in the blissful experience of a divine-sanctioned mandate to avenge the perceived oppressor. Terrorism is less a military target than a powerful idea. [...]

For all its horrors, terrorism is comprehensible. Fundamentalism provides an insidiously seductive story that gives anomie an outlet. In the view of extremists, a New World Order has "created an engine of modernity that is stealing the identity of the oppressed." Religious terror strives to attack the industrialized world both physically and psychologically. The latter is more dangerous.

"Perhaps the most truly evil aspect of religious terrorism is that it aims at destroying moral distinctions themselves," Stern concludes. "Its goal is to confuse not only its sympathizers, but those who aim to fight it." The hardest battle is against the creep of spiritual dread. In that battle, through its explanatory power and lucid insight, Stern's book provides a valuable psychic shield.

Karen Armstrong, in her unintentionally hilarious book Battle for God, makes the point that:

We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking, and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.

Myth could not be demonstrated by rational proof; its insights were more intuitive, similar to those of art, music, poetry, or sculpture. Myth only became a reality when it was embodied in cult, rituals, and ceremonies which worked aesthetically upon worshippers, evoking within them a sense of sacred significance and enabling them to apprehend the deeper currents of existence. Myth and cult were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first: the mythical narrative or the rituals attached to it. Myth was also associated with mysticism, the descent into the psyche by means of structured disciplines of focus and concentration which have been evolved in all cultures as a means of acquiring intuitive insight. Without a cult or mystical practice, the myths of religion would make no sense. They would remain abstract and seem incredible, in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us and needs to be interpreted instrumentally before we can appreciate its beauty.

In the premodern world, people had a different view of history. They were less interested than we are in what actually happened, but more concerned with the meaning of an event. Historical incidents were not seen as unique occurrences, set in a far-off time, but were thought to be external manifestations of constant, timeless realities. Hence history would tend to repeat itself, because there was nothing new under the sun. Historical narratives tried to bring out this eternal dimension. Thus, we do not know what really occurred when the ancient Israelites escaped from Egypt and passed through the Sea of Reeds. The story has been deliberately written as a myth, and linked with other stories about rites of passage, immersion in the deep, and gods splitting a sea in two to create a new reality. Jews experience this myth every year in the rituals of the Passover Seder, which brings this strange story into their own lives and helps them to make it their own. One could say that unless an historical event is mythologized in this way, and liberated from the past in an inspiring cult, it cannot be religious. To ask whether the Exodus from Egypt took place exactly as recounted in the Bible or to demand historical and scientific evidence to prove that it is factually true is to mistake the nature and purpose of this story. It is to confuse mythos with logos.

Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enabled men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective. It must work efficiently in the mundane world. We use this logical, discursive reasoning when we have to make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action. Logos is practical. Unlike myth, which looks back to the beginnings and to the foundations, logos forges ahead and tries to find something new: to elaborate on old insights, achieve a greater control over our environment, discover something fresh, and invent something novel.

In the premodern world, both mythos and logos were regarded as indispensable. Each would be impoverished without the other. Yet the two were essentially distinct, and it was held to be dangerous to confuse mythical and rational discourse. They had separate jobs to do. Myth was not reasonable; its narratives were not supposed to be demonstrated empirically. It provided the context of meaning that made our practical activities worthwhile. You were not supposed to make mythos the basis of a pragmatic policy. If you did so, the results could be disastrous, because what worked well in the inner world of the psyche was not readily applicable to the affairs of the external world. When, for example, Pope Urban II summoned the First Crusade in 1095, his plan belonged to the realm of logos. He wanted the knights of Europe to stop fighting one another and tearing the fabric of Western Christendom apart, and to expend their energies instead in a war in the Middle East and so extend the power of his church. But when this military expedition became entangled with folk mythology, biblical lore, and apocalyptic fantasies, the result was catastrophic, practically, militarily, and morally. Throughout the long crusading project, it remained true that whenever logos was ascendant, the Crusaders prospered. They performed well on the battlefield, created viable colonies in the Middle East, and learned to relate more positively with the local population. When, however, Crusaders started making a mythical or mystical vision the basis of their policies, they were usually defeated and committed terrible atrocities.

Logos had its limitations too. It could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. Logos could not answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. A scientist could make things work more efficiently and discover wonderful new facts about the physical universe, but he could not explain the meaning of life. That was the preserve of myth and cult.

By the eighteenth century, however, the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to think that logos was the only means to truth and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious. It is also true that the new world they were creating contradicted the dynamic of the old mythical spirituality. Our religious experience in the modern world has changed, and because an increasing number of people regard scientific rationalism alone as true, they have often tried to turn the mythos of their faith into logos. Fundamentalists have also made this attempt. This confusion has led to more problems.

We need to understand how our world has changed. The first part of this book will, therefore, go back to the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the people of Western Europe had begun to develop their new science. We will also examine the mythical piety of the premodern agrarian civilization, so that we can see how the old forms of faith worked. It is becoming very difficult to be conventionally religious in the brave new world. Modernization has always been a painful process. People feel alienated and lost when fundamental changes in their society make the world strange and unrecognizable. We will trace the impact of modernity upon the Christians of Europe and America, upon the Jewish people, and upon the Muslims of Egypt and Iran. We shall then be in a position to see what the fundamentalists were trying to do when they started to create this new form of faith toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Fundamentalists feel that they are battling against forces that threaten their most sacred values. During a war it is very difficult for combatants to appreciate one another's position. We shall find that modernization has led to a polarization of society, but sometimes, to prevent an escalation of the conflict, we must try to understand the pain and perceptions of the other side. Those of us--myself included--who relish the freedoms and achievements of modernity find it hard to comprehend the distress these cause religious fundamentalists. Yet modernization is often experienced not as a liberation but as an aggressive assault.

That "God-shaped hole" of Sartre's is mythos and the hole is real. Mere reason or logos can not fill our lives. It can't answer the questions that really matter to us--how should we live? why are we here?--instead it tries to answer questions that don't much matter--by what physical process did the tail become a coccyx? As Ms Armstrong says, the modernists have made the mistake of trying to make a faith out of reason and fundamentalists have made the mistake of trying to equate their faith with reason.

We've a tendency, especially the media and liberal elites who think that logos suffices, to look only at fundamentalism as the source of the problem, but to do so is to study only the reaction, not the action, that is the true precipitator of the crisis. If fundamentalism is one extreme, it's important to recognize that a thoroughly secularized and rationalized modernity lies at the other extreme. If the answer to how we should live and think about the world doesn't lie somewhere in the middle, then we'll all have to choose sides and modernity isn't as compelling a belief system as some folks would like to think.

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LIGHT FOR THE WORLD

J.R.R. Tolkien's Sanctifying Myth (Zenit, 8/30/2003)

Tolkien wrote in an oft-quoted letter to a close friend in 1953 that "The Lord of the Rings" is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. And Tolkien was a devout and practicing Catholic throughout most of his life. According to his son Michael, Roman Catholicism "pervaded all his thinking, beliefs and everything else."...

My personal favorite [Christian symbol] is the Elvish Lembas, translated as the "way bread" or "life bread." Even one piece of the bread can sustain a person for a day. Tolkien wrote that it "fed the will," and certainly without it, neither Frodo nor Sam would have made the journey across Mordor and up Mount Doom....

When Gandalf faces the Balrog, he not only accepts death, but he names his master, the Secret Fire. According to what Tolkien told a friend, the Secret Fire was the Holy Spirit....

True myth, [Tolkien held], drew its inspiration from the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. Tolkien wrote in his academic essay, "On Fairy-Stories," that to reject the Christ story is to lead to either sadness or wrath.

It seems true that the nations that have always rejected the Christ story -- Iraq, for example -- have mostly experienced sadness and wrath; while those that have accepted it, like the U.S., are happiest; and those that have increasingly rejected it, as in Europe, are experiencing life as increasingly dreary.

Christians will take this as evidence for the truth of Christian doctrine; unbelievers will argue that it may be a chance correlation. But at some point, the evidence piles up.

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INTELLECTUALS AS EPHRAIMITES

ON LANGUAGE: Bible (JEFFREY McQUAIN, August 24, 2003, NY Times Magazine)

"In religion,'' George Gray challenges a contestant on TV's ''Weakest Link'' game show, ''what is the third book in the Old Testament of the King James Bible?''

The player replies, ''Revelations.''

That's wrong on two counts. The third book of the Bible is actually Leviticus, which chronicles the laws and rituals overseen by the priestly Levites. Less obvious, however, is the mistake in saying ''Revelations,'' because the Bible contains no such book.

Instead, the final book of the New Testament is titled ''Revelation,'' without an ''s.'' This error has appeared frequently in print, from a Chicago Tribune quotation on ''the apocalyptic messages that are found in Revelations'' to Maureen Dowd's New York Times mention of ''a musical based on the Book of Revelations.''

Bible experts consider that kind of mistake a shibboleth, from a story in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) about using words as a test. In the 12th chapter of Judges, the conquering Gileadites are able to identify their enemies, the conquered Ephraimites, by making them say the word shibboleth, meaning ''ear of corn.'' Because of language differences, the Ephraimites pronounce it ''sibboleth'' and are immediately executed.

Today the penalties for mispronunciation tend to be less severe, although a shibboleth still acts to identify outsiders.

It's interesting the way George W. Bush uses nucular as a kind of shibboleth, the pronunciation alone marking him out as a good ole boy, not a wonk.

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NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Helen Mirren on sex and a life on screen (Demetrios Matheou, 03 August 2003, Sunday
Herald)

IT took a while for Britain to wake up to Helen Mirren, to afford her the respect and affection that it now does. The voracious wild child who burst on to the theatre scene with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the Sixties, then starred in such arty fare as Ken Russell's Savage Messiah (1972) or Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man! (1973), didn't enjoy the instant rapport with audiences of, say, Kate Winslet. There was something too wilfully maverick about her, something self-contained. On screen she would dare everything -- not least nudity -- but didn't belong to anyone. Helen Mirren was always her own woman.

But the first series of crime drama Prime Suspect (1991) took her into prime time and the public's consciousness in a way none of her films had. As the no-nonsense, short-tempered loner DCI Jane Tennison, she was playing her age, early-40s, without the faintest pretence to glamour or sweetness – and thereby won a legion of fans, both adoring males and women who saw her as a feminist icon. This time the critical plaudits she'd always had for her work seemed to make more waves -- not least the Oscar nominations for The Madness Of King George (1994) and Gosford Park (2001). And when, in June, she was made a Dame in the Queen's Birthday Honours List, Mirren's place as one of the country's most celebrated -- and now most loved -- actresses was assured. [...]

She was born Ilyena Lydia Mironoff, granddaughter of a White Russian general who came to England to buy arms for the Russo-Japanese war, then found himself stranded (or, as Mirren contemporises it, he and his family became asylum-seekers) when the Russian revolution started behind him. Her father was two years old.

The role in King George is pretty thankless, mostly moaning about his fate, but her work in Prime Suspect may be the best ever done for television by an actress, as she makes a difficult character quite compelling. MORE: -FILMOGRAPHY: Helen Mirren (IMDB.com) -AUDIO: Mirren Returns to PBS' 'Prime Suspect' (NPR Morning Edition, April 9, 2004)

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RECLAIMING MARRIAGE

The Next Sexual Revolution: By practicing what it preaches on marriage, the church could transform society. (Christianity Today, 08/27/2003)

First, we must admit that the church's current record is dismal. Divorce statistics inside the church are indistinguishable from those outside.

Second, we need to repent for allowing the Zeitgeist of expressive individualism to permeate the way many of our churches relate to marriage, divorce, and remarriage.

Third, we need to restore the community context of marriage. A married couple is more than the sum of its parts. It is a thread in a community fabric. Societies are built out of people who are loyal to one another and who work and sacrifice for the common good. Expressive individualism is a poor foundation for a society, and marriages so conceived do not build loyalties or give us practice in sacrificial service. Marriages and families are schools for service.

Fourth, we need to recover the sense of human limitation inherent in marriage and family life. This is the beautiful biblical picture: a two-gendered, complementary couple improving on and channeling nature, but neither conquering it nor twisting it. [...]

Fifth, churches must help their members recover the link between marriage and procreation. In the 1970s, the evangelical subculture rightly affirmed the delights of marital sex through popular books like The Total Woman and Intended for Pleasure. ("Fundies in their undies!" joked church historian Martin Marty in response.) Unfortunately, even in the church, the procreative dimension of sex has been sidelined by economic pressures, cultural ideals, and technological fixes. Churches need to celebrate the fact that every marriage is procreative by design.

Sixth, churches must continue to help their members learn the practical skills associated with all of the challenges of married life. [...]

The truth about marriage is embedded in nature, and nature has a way of reasserting itself. Inevitably, the Big Yellow Taxi factor will come into play: People will long for what once was. The challenge to the church is to be a countercultural outpost, modeling marriage as it should be for the world. Those with an impoverished understanding of marriage will be able to grasp it only when they see the real thing.

It's time to start the revolution.

When the Wife and I went to meet with the Justice of the Peace who was to marry us--made necessary by her being Jewish and me Baptist--we went over what he'd say in the vows. He read a few samples and we asked: "Where'd the 'til death bit go?"

JP: No one says that anymore.

Us: We're going to.

JP: You can't; it's not done.

Us: Put it in.

JP: It's too old-fashioned.

Us: You expecting to get paid?

Who can be surprised that in a culture where the people doing the ceremony don't take it seriously enough to make you swear the most solemn vow possible that the institution of marriage is falling apart. Bring back the death proviso and enforce it.

MORE:
-Make marriage matter more (Jim Wooten, 8/31/03, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

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5, 5, 5, 4?

20th suspect arrested in probe of terrorist cell (Stewart Bell, August 30, 2003, National Post)

A 20th person has been taken into custody in connection with an investigation into a possible al-Qaeda sleeper cell in the Toronto area, Canadian officials said yesterday.

Of course there's a 20th.

MORE:
Case of 19 terrorists unravelling (MARINA JIMENEZ, COLIN FREEZE and VICTORIA BURNETT, 8/30/03, Globe and Mail)

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ONE COLD WAR WAS ENOUGH, THANKS

Sovietizing the economy (Martin Hutchinson, 8/25/2003, UPI)

The United States economy has changed significantly since the September 11 attacks, in a thoroughly unpleasant direction. While Gross Domestic Product has risen by 4.6 percent (in real terms) from the third quarter of 2001, government consumption has risen by 8.2 percent, while private fixed asset investment has declined. As always, disaster has tended to "Sovietize" the economy, increasing the share of output absorbed by products and services that nobody wants. [...]

The September 11 attacks brought a major re-orientation to the U.S. economy. Some of it was reflected in public spending. Airport security was federalized, a new Department of Homeland Security was created, military reserves were called up, defense spending rose, and an airline bailout fund was created (the last being off-balance-sheet as far as the federal government was concerned.)

Other diversions of resources occurred in the private sector. Property insurance premiums rose, for the same or lesser amount of coverage. Airline charges rose, to cover the new security costs. New "security construction" was undertaken to make businesses more secure against terrorist attacks.

Still further costs of the attacks are not reflected in economic data at all. As anyone who has flown in the last year will tell you, the average check-in time for flights originating in the U.S. has lengthened by 30-60 minutes. For passengers, this is completely lost time, accompanied by a considerable amount of aggravation, yet it is not reflected in published data.

The Immigration and Naturalization Services has tightened up its controls, and introduced many new procedures, requiring students coming to the U.S., for example, to file a new application annually, rather than simply one for the course of study as a whole. As a consequence of this, and of tightened enforcement, students validly attempting to attend U.S. colleges are being sent back to their home country, at enormous deadweight cost to them and their families. Again this is not reflected in official economic statistics -- INS inefficiency, and that of the colleges, of course greatly increases this cost burden.

In all three ways, therefore, the disaster of September 11 has diverted resources to items people don't want. This is not the same as diverting them to the public sector. A Medicare prescription drug provision, for example, would provide senior citizens with goods they undoubtedly do want -- prescription drugs -- albeit in a manner that may be inefficient and economically damaging. Conversely, higher insurance premiums do not provide customers with any services they are not already getting, they merely increase the costs of those services. Disasters thus reduce the efficiency of the economy; they increase expenditure on services and goods that provide no additional value to their consumers, while apparently increasing economic activity.

This case was most famously expressed, though with dreadful timing, by Paul Kennedy in his book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers:

Once their productive capacity [is] enhanced, countries...normally find it easier to sustain the burdens of paying for large-scale armaments in peacetime and of maintaining and supplying large armies and fleets in wartime. It sounds crudely mercantilistic to express it this way, but wealth is usually needed to acquire and protect wealth. If, however, too large a portion of the state's resources is diverted from wealth creation and allocated instead to military purposes, then that is likely to lead to a weakening of national power over the longer term. In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically--by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars--it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all--a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline.

But the problem with his particular application of the thesis--his argument, explicit or implicit, that the United States was forcing its own decline by waging the Cold War--was that the U.S. was not, in fact, in a period of economic decline and that, though the Cold War had indeed been a costly mistake, we were about to win it even as he wrote. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the current twenty year economic boom both unfortunately served to discredit an argument that has much wisdom to it. One result is that we are probably not paying as much attention to the Buchanacons as we should, though their hysteria admittedly makes it difficult to do so.

It is a worthwhile and well-justified task at the moment to confront terrorists and terror regimes, particularly Islamicists in the Middle East and the remaining Communist state (N. Korea, Cuba, China), but we should remain aware of the price we stand to pay in terms of retardation of our own economic development and moral compromise as we co-operate with despicable "allies" and we should limit ourselves to the doable, not necessarily the easily doable, but certainly the conceivably doable. So, for instance, toppling the Taliban was ridiculously easy, but building a stable democracy in Afghanistan seems little more than a pipe dream. Right now, the Afghan government has sufficient control and credibility that it has allowed us to duck out gracefully, but it seems unlikely that this government can endure in the long term, given the ethnic/tribal rivalries that have characterized that unhappy country's history. We should by all means lend them financial and political support and hope that they do manage to create a relatively liberal and democratic society, but if they do so it will be surprising and it will be because of their determination, not because of our continuing intervention. Nor is such a government truly necessary to our purposes. It will take less time, effort, and money to vanquish subsequent enemy regimes there than to try to prop up a friendly one.

Similarly, one has to be concerned about stories like the following, Get real: Driven by a neo-conservative dream, the US is loath to relinquish control in Iraq. But the price for Washington's stubbornness may be failure (Brian Whitaker, August 26, 2003, The Guardian):

Talk of impending failure in Iraq may sound like whinging when it comes from those who opposed the war, but last week the unspeakable seven-letter F-word was uttered by one of the bastions of US neo-conservative hawkery.

Under the headline "Do what it takes in Iraq", an editorial in the Weekly Standard called for a huge commitment of more troops, more money and more civilian workers to fend off disaster.

"Make no mistake," the magazine said. "The president's vision will, in the coming months, either be launched successfully in Iraq, or it will die in Iraq ... the future course of American foreign policy, American world leadership, and American security is at stake. Failure in Iraq would be a devastating blow to everything the United States hopes to accomplish."

Unfortunately for President Bush, this is true. He has left no face-saving escape route for himself or his country.

The neo-conservative solution is to devote to Iraq whatever it takes and for as long as it takes, for a whole generation if necessary. The Weekly Standard wants an immediate allocation of $60bn (£38.4bn) for reconstruction. If the Bush administration is serious, "then this is the necessary down payment," it said, while the official Washington line has been that reconstruction will be funded by Iraq's (still largely non-existent) oil revenue.

Only total commitment on a scale not seen since the end of the second world war can ensure US success in Iraq, the Weekly Standard insisted, but the problem for George Bush is that he can't give that commitment, at least not if he values his presidency.

This is absurd. The rebuilding of Europe didn't work out terribly well--as its cultural decline and economic stagnation demonstrates--but it had at least been an integral part of the West and there was some reason to believe it could be salvaged. Most importantly, the people of Europe obviously wanted our help and shared a substantial portion of our vision of how they might be saved (though not a large enough portion as things turned out). The same can hardly be said for Iraq and the idea that we should make a commitment comparable to the one we made in post-War Europe is deranged. It is the triumph of hope over reason and of ideology over self-interest.

Better to heed the counsel of a great scholar of the Middle East, Put the Iraqis in Charge: Why Iraq is proving much tougher than Afghanistan. (BERNARD LEWIS, August 29, 2003, Wall Street Journal):

What then should we do in Iraq? Clearly the imperial role is impossible, blocked equally by moral and psychological constraints, and by international and more especially domestic political calculations. An inept, indecisive imperialism is the worst of all options, with the possible exception of subjecting Iraq to the tangled but ferocious politics of the U.N. The best course surely is the one that is working in Afghanistan--to hand over, as soon as possible, to a genuine Iraqi government. In Iraq as in Afghanistan, a period of discreet support would be necessary, but the task would probably be easier in Iraq. Here again care must be taken. Premature democratization--holding elections and transferring power, in a country which has had no experience of such things for decades, can only lead to disaster, as in Algeria. Democracy is the best and therefore the most difficult of all forms of government. The Iraqis certainly have the capacity to develop democratic institutions, but they must do so in their own way, at their own pace. This can only be done by an Iraqi government.

Fortunately, the nucleus of such a government is already available, in the Iraqi National Congress, headed by Ahmad Chalabi. In the northern free zone during the '90s they played a constructive role, and might at that time even have achieved the liberation of Iraq had we not failed at crucial moments to support them. Despite a continuing lack of support amounting at times to sabotage, they continue to acquit themselves well in Iraq, and there can be no reasonable doubt that of all the possible Iraqi candidates they are the best in terms alike of experience, reliability, and good will. It took years, not months, to create democracies in the former Axis countries, and this was achieved in the final analysis not by Americans but by people in those countries, with American encouragement, help and support. Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress deserve no less.

One suspects that we'd do best to make Mr. Chalabi's group share power pretty extensively with the Shi'ite majority, but all we're really looking for is a graceful way to get out, having fulfilled our mission already when we got rid of the Saddams. As Mr. Lewis says, we can stand by ready to help if the Iraqis choose to create and maintain democracy, but right now we're really just in the way and the worst option available is the neocon notion of trying to rebuild the whole place ourselves.

We're quite fortunate--though our good fortune, it must always be remembered, is the residue of brilliant design--in that our political, military, and economic power is so massive that we've been able to conduct a couple of wars on the cheap. It would be an ill-fated decision though that saw us devote ever larger portions of our economy to the essentially imperial task of trying to govern the Islamic world from Washington. The Buchanacons are wrong about the use of American military might, but right about the futility of nation-building and correct to worry about what such exercises will do to our own society.

By all means let us wage war on terror--including in N. Korea, Syria, and battles yet to come--but let us do so rapidly, ruthlessly, and efficiently, and let us be cognizant of the insidious way in which seeming military strength can conceal structural damage being done to an economy and a resulting decline in real power. The war on terror should be treated like a war, in which we confront and defeat enemies, and that shouldn't take terribly long--perhaps five or six years. Talk of turning it into a generational struggle, with us taking responsibility for the future shape of the Middle East is truly frightening. The neocons have long been looking for a national greatness project, some excuse for conservatives to wield a big government. But this is not a project that conservatives should support. Statism, under whatever guise, is destructive of society, of the economy, and ultimately of liberty.

MORE:
Iraqis must be left to build democracy at their pace (David Warren, 8/30/03, National Post)

The issue in Iraq is...not whether the U.S. should stay or leave. It is instead the extent to which the U.S. should engage in "nation-building" there. As his critics remember, and his friends, too, George W. Bush campaigned against the whole idea of nation-building by Americans abroad.

What he has been trying to do comes perilously close to what he rightly campaigned against. Not nation-building, by the U.S., but a concentrated U.S. effort to enable nation-building to take place within Iraq, and Afghanistan, and soon elsewhere. I compared it myself, a year ago, to one of the labours of Hercules -- the cleaning of the Augean stables. He is trying to create the conditions for the "river of democracy" to wash through the Middle East; just as President Reagan before him tried to create those conditions for Eastern Europe.

The American role in Iraq should thus be limited to providing security, for the transition to an Iraqi government much more acceptable to Iraqis and to the world, than the horrific government that preceded it.

Leave it to America: There are now calls for greater UN involvement in Iraq. That’s the last thing the country needs (Mark Steyn, 8/30/03, The Spectator)

The Canal Hotel turned out to be a perfect microcosm of the UN: a group of naive internationalists refusing to take the murkier characters prowling the corridors at face value and concerned only to keep the US at arm’s length. Yet for Kofi Annan, the French, the Democratic party and the world’s media, the self-inflicted insanity of what happened to the UN in Baghdad apparently demonstrates the need for Washington to hand over more control of Iraq to the blue helmets because ‘they’ve got far more experience in these kinds of situations’. The UN’s track record at nation-building varies according to the strength of the local obstructionist. Mr Vieira de Mello did such a good job transforming East Timor from the brutalised province of a Muslim dictatorship to a functioning infidel democracy that whoever makes Osama bin Laden’s audio tapes these days added it to his list of grievances against the West. But the dapper diplomat did a less impressive job in Cambodia, where Hun Sen decided to hijack the state, King Sihanouk strung along, and the UN colluded in the subversion of its political settlement.

If Kofi got his hands on Iraq, as world opinion so devoutly wants, the Cambodian scenario would be more relevant than the East Timorese. The most determined obstructionists in this case would be Iraq’s Arab neighbours: Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and co. don’t care whether the country winds up under another Baathist psychotic or a rent-a-rant mullah, or even a restored Hashemite as long as he’s at least minimally repressive. But they object very strongly to the idea of the Iraqi people living in liberty under a representative government with a free press, etc., because that’s not the kind of thing they want catching on. Putting the UN in charge of Iraq is a vote for ‘stability’ in the Middle East — the fetid cesspit stability of the Assads and Ayatollahs that, as argued in this space many times, is the principal ‘root cause’ of the region’s problems.

That’s why I’d rather the Americans stayed in control.

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THE MAN WHO RODE BUCEPHALUS

ALEXANDER THE WHO?: Face to face with history's Greatest (VICTORIA JAMES, Aug. 27, 2003, Japan Times)

The future conqueror of almost all the known world, who acceded to his father's throne at age 18 and died of fever aged just 33, claimed descent from the immortal Hercules. His mother, Olympias, stoked her son's god-complex by claiming she was impregnated not by Alexander's father, Philip II of Macedonia, but by a giant serpent.

All these myths collide in "Alexander the Great," an exhibition now showing at Tokyo National Museum in Ueno Park, which displays a number of representations of the great leader (statues, busts and coinage) in company of which he would doubtless have approved -- an extensive pantheon of classical gods and heroes.

Alexander was certainly divinely good-looking. Three images (one a nearly contemporaneous head of a statue, the others two Imperial Roman copies of third-century B.C. originals) clearly represent the same face over a period of time. The first is a beautiful boy with a head of curls; the next a youth with a resolute, firmly set chin; the third a mature man, his face filled out slightly though not a whit less handsome for it.

But Alexander's reputation didn't rest on his looks. At age 6 he is said to have received Persian envoys during his father's absence; at age 13 he began to study under Aristotle; at 16 he served as his father's regent; and, while still a teenager, in a wager with his father he subdued and rode a wild horse that no one had been able to handle. (The steed, named Bucephalus, became Alexander's warhorse.)

That was merely Alexander's grooming for greatness, and the beginning of the legend.

Nice short essay about Alexander, but for a fuller portrait we recommend the excellent biography by Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon 356-323 B. C.: A Historical Biography. Also, Baz Luhrmann is working on a biopic of Alexander's life, which might be great itself if he can pull it off.

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THE SKEPTIC?

The Domesticated Savage: Science reveals a way to rise above our natures (Michael Shermer, August 11, 2003, Scientific American)

One of the most striking features in artificially selecting for docility among wild animals is that, along with far less aggression, you also get a suite of other changes, including a reduction in skull, jaw and tooth size. In genetics, this is called pleiotropy. Selecting for one trait may generate additional, unintended changes.

The most famous study on selective breeding for passivity began in 1959 by Russian geneticist Dmitri Belyaev of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Siberia. It continues today under the direction of Lyudmila N. Trut. Silver foxes were bred for friendliness toward humans, defined by a graduating series of criteria, from the animal allowing itself to be approached, to being hand fed, to being petted, to proactively seeking human contact. In only 35 generations the researchers produced tail-wagging, hand-licking, peaceful foxes. What they also created were foxes with smaller skulls, jaws and teeth than their wild ancestors.

The Russian scientists believe that in selecting for docility, they inadvertently selected for paedomorphism--the retention of juvenile features into adulthood--such as curly tails and floppy ears found in wild pups but not in wild adults, a delayed onset of the fear response to unknown stimuli, and lower levels of aggression. The selection process led to a significant decrease in levels of stress-related hormones such as corticosteroids, which are produced by the adrenal glands during the fight-or-flight response, as well as a significant increase in levels of serotonin, thought to play a leading role in the inhibition of aggression. The Russian scientists were also able to accomplish what no breeder had ever achieved before--a lengthened breeding season.

Like the foxes, humans have become more agreeable as we've become more domesticated. [...]

A plausible evolutionary hypothesis suggests itself: limited resources led to the selection for within-group cooperation and between-group competition in humans, resulting in within-group amity and between-group enmity.

Well, yeah, except that the rational choices made by humans and applied to themselves and to silver foxes are actually the opposite of natural selection.

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I DON'T KNOW, BUT DO SOMETHING

Ice ages key to understanding change (Fred Pearce, 8/26/2003, Boston Globe)

We know about past levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere because researchers have been able to recover bubbles of ancient air trapped in ice. These bubbles reveal past temperatures and concentrations of gases in the air. They show that when the world was at its coldest, carbon dioxide levels in the air were low; and when it got warmer, they rose.

But they reveal something more startling. The changes between these two situations were not smooth and gradual. They were extremely quick. It is almost, Watson said, as if the planet has a rather crude thermostat, with just two settings -- ice age, and not ice age.

Put another way, there appear to have been two "stable states" for the planet's climate system. Once one of them broke down, the entire system switched within a few centuries to the other. [...]

None of this is proved. But whatever the precise mechanism, Watson said, we are left with the worrying fact that, in the past 2 million years or so, the world had two stable climatic states -- anchored at 190 ppm and 280 ppm of carbon dioxide. Why worrying? Because, Watson said, we have now slipped the anchors. By burning fossil fuels, we have forced up carbon dioxide levels to 370 ppm today. That is probably higher than for millions of years. And the level is still rising by almost 20 ppm a decade.

The question now is: How will the planet respond? Until now, climate scientists have mostly expected that a gradual rise in greenhouse gases will cause a gradual increase in temperatures. Now there are two other possibilities. The planet might find a way to keep temperatures down. Or it might make another jump -- to perhaps a third "stable state" about which we as yet know nothing.

How might that happen? Peter Cox of the British government's meteorological service, said that within 50 years, rainforests and their soils could begin to dry out and die as warming gathers pace. That would release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and accelerate warming. Others predict changes in the ocean circulation systems that reduce the oceans' abilities to absorb carbon dioxide from the air.

Nothing is certain in this. Climate scientists are being forced to acknowledge how little they know about how the planet works. But that ignorance, they say, should make us more worried rather than less.

The willingness of scientists to recommend radical courses of action despite "how little they know" is far more worrisome than the lack of knowledge itself.

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AL QAEDA VS. THE SHI'ITES?

4 With al-Qaida Ties Nabbed in Najaf Blast (AP, 8/30/03)

Iraqi police have arrested four men in connection with the bombing of Iraq's holiest Shiite Muslim shrine, and all have links to al-Qaida, a senior police official told The Associated Press on Saturday.

The official, who said the death toll in the bombing had risen to 107, said the four arrested men - two Iraqis and two Saudis - were caught shortly after the car bombing on Friday.

The bombing killed one of the most important Shiite clerics in Iraq, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, who had been cooperating with the American occupation force.

The police official, who led the initial investigation and interrogation of the captives, said the prisoners told of other plots to kill political and religious leaders and to damage vital installations such as power plants, water supplies and oil pipelines.

The police official said the men arrested after the attack claimed the recent bombings were designed to keep Iraq in a state of chaos so that police and American forces would be unable to focus attention on the country's porous borders, across which suspected foreign fighters are said to be infiltrating.

It's almost too much to be hoped for that these bombings would be al Qaeda related. What could they achieve other than to turn the Shi'ites against them? This would be the best of all possible outcomes for our purposes and would put enormous pressure on the Iranians who are reportedly holding several al Qaeda prisoners.

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SPEECH?

Ashcroft to Defend Ban on Some Abortion Protests (ERIC LICHTBLAU, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

The Justice Department plans to go to court to defend a federal law that bans protesters from blocking access to abortion clinics, a move that is angering some opponents of abortion who have been strong supporters of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

A federal judge in Houston, in a little-noticed decision, declared this month that part of the 1994 law, known as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, is unconstitutional because it exceeds the power of Congress to regulate commerce. The decision freed a man who had rammed a van through the front door of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Houston in a protest over abortion.

Anti-abortion leaders called the Texas decision an affirmation of the First Amendment rights of protesters. [...]

"It's very surprising, given the attorney general's stated position in support of the right to life," Colleen Parro, director of the Republican National Coalition for Life, said in an interview.

"Pro-life people expect John Ashcroft to be just and fair and act in the interests of the right to life whenever possible," said Ms. Parro, whose group is based in Texas. "If the Justice Department is standing up for this law, that is not going to give people confidence that John Aschroft is looking out for the babies. This will cause disappointment."

Mr. Ashcroft's stance on the clinic protection law became an issue at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2001. Critics said they were concerned that his strong opposition to abortion would color his enforcement decisions on abortion-related issues.

Mr. Ashcroft acknowledged at the hearing that he believed that the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion was "wrongly decided" and that he was personally opposed to abortion. But he added, "I well understand that the role of attorney general is to enforce the law as it is, not as I would have it."

You can't really expect the chief law enforcement official in the nation to defend your "right" to use a vehicle as a weapon.

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CROSSING THE LINE

Manslaughter Count Filed Against a Congressman (MICHAEL JANOFSKY, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

Representative Bill Janklow, who served four terms as governor of South Dakota before winning election to Congress last year, was charged in his home state today with second-degree manslaughter because of a traffic fatality there two weeks ago.

That felony charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, threatens to end a long and distinguished career that has made Mr. Janklow, a 63-year-old Republican, one of the most prominent politicians in the state's history. Before the accident, South Dakota Republicans were urging him to run next year for the Senate seat held by the minority leader, Tom Daschle. [...]

The prosecutor in the case, William J. Ellingson, the Moody County state's attorney, ruled out a charge of vehicular homicide, more serious than the manslaughter charge, after tests determined that no drugs or alcohol had been involved. In similar cases, Mr. Ellingson said, the manslaughter count has resulted in successful prosecutions.

Somehow, we draw a line between speeding, which it seems safe to say nearly every driver does, and running stop signs, which is unthinkable to most. And God help him if he'd been drinking. But he does deserve jail time and it wouldn't be surprising to see him resign from Congress before then.

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CASH OUT

Video Music Awards Celebrate 20 Years (Marla Lehner, August 29, 2003, Fox News)

The award-winners were a mixed bag. Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliott, the female rapper who had a leading eight nominations going into the show, walked away with a moonman for best hip-hop video and the coveted video of the year award, beating out crowd favorite, Johnny Cash, as well as 50 Cent, Timberlake and Eminem.

Cash, who many were predicting would sweep the awards, was unable to make an appearance because he was hospitalized, and won only one award, for cinematography. His video of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt” was seen as a swan song for the 71-year-old crooner.

When Timberlake beat Cash for the best male video, he expressed shock over the decision.

“This is a travesty. I demand a recount,” he said. “My grandfather raised me on Johnny Cash....I think he deserves this more than any of us in here tonight."

Whoever Justin Timberlake is, that's a stand-up thing to say.

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WE NEED MORE CHAOS

Death and Hesitation in Iraq (DEXTER FILKINS, August 30, 2003, NY Times)

Until now, the Americans have enjoyed relative stability among the country's Shiite and Kurdish populations, in the south and north, as they have battled a ferocious insurgency in the central part of the country.

The killing of Ayatollah Hakim, by stirring up the country's Shiite population, threatens to spread the chaos. Much will depend, it seemed today, on whom the Shiites blame for Ayatollah Hakim's death: remnants of Mr. Hussein's government, composed mainly of Sunni Arabs, or radical members of their own religious group.

The Governing Council, a group of Iraqis representing the tapestry of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups, has long been seen as a central piece in the American plan to nurture democratic government here.

But in recent weeks, American officials have expressed frustration over what they describe as the reluctance of the 25-member Council to seize the reins of political power. The Iraqis, meanwhile, have complained that the Americans, while talking about democracy, have refused to turn over power where it matters.

A kind of paralysis has resulted, according to both Iraqis and American officials, with the Governing Council taking little action in its first six weeks. "On the Council, someone makes a suggestion, then it goes around the room, with everyone talking about it, and then by that time, it's late afternoon and time to go home," said an aide on the Council. "We don't get a lot done."

As they have done on several previous occasions, American officials stood back today and waited for the Iraqis to act, reluctant to upstage them. "The Iraqi interim government is in control of the situation," said a spokesman for the Coalition Public Authority, the American branch of the government. "We have issued a statement, and that is all we have for now."

The studied reluctance by American officials and military officers to move in place of the Iraqis appeared risky. Shiites, accounting for 60 percent of the population, are deeply divided between moderates and radicals; those divisions are now likely to grow. At the same time, the entire Shiite population is suspicious that Sunnis loyal to Saddam Hussein may be behind the killing, Iraqi analysts said. All these tensions could quickly lead to further violence.

The solution to these problems is the same as it's been all along: put the Shi'ites in charge and let them deal ruthlessly with the Ba'ath remnants and with their own extremists.

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NOT SO ANNOYING AFTER ALL

Arthur Miller joins run for Idiotarian on the Year (Thought Mesh, 27 August 2003)

[W]e have some commentary by playwright Arthur Miller. In it he compares his play The Crucible to Senator McCarthy.
Miller himself commented […]

“They would say to me, ‘this is all fraudulent - there never were any witches, but there are Communists’,” he said.

“I could only say that in 1692, if you had stood on the main street of Salem, Massachusetts, and said ‘there are no witches’, I wouldn’t want to be your insurance man.”

I know that cultural / literary figures today are expected to be almost completely disconnected from reality, but this is delusional even for the glitterati. If someone had said “there are no witches” back in 1692 (and I suspect that some did) it would have been true but politically incorrect. The analogy for McCarthy would have been for someone to announce in 1950 that there were no Communists and had it have been true and politcally incorrect. Miller seems to think that the only thing stopping people from admitting that Communists didn’t exist was fear of the political consquences, not the billions of people oppressed by Communists. Just who Miller thinks was running the USSR, Eastern Europe and China at the time isn’t clear. I’ve heard plenty of apologists for Communism but never before one who denied the very existence of it.

AOG making the signal point that the existence of a "witch hunt" doesn't disprove the existence of witches.

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MULTILATERALISM IN ACTION

Talks impasse threatens cheap drugs deal: Accusations of sabotage sour WTO negotiations (Charlotte Denny, August 30, 2003, The Guardian)

A deal to provide cut-price copies of life-saving drugs for the world's poorest people was on the brink of collapse yesterday in Geneva, after developing countries objected to a last-minute compromise worked out to pacify the US pharmaceuticals industry.

A marathon session of negotiations ended early yesterday morning with no deal amid bitter recriminations and accusations of sabotage. [...]

The compromise hammered out by the US and four key developing countries was supposed to be ratified by all 146 members of the WTO on Thursday night. But when the Philippines indicated it was unhappy with the requirements on developing countries to prevent smuggling, dissent swelled among developing countries, with 20 indicating they had problems with the draft deal.

In the fervid atmosphere following the collapse of talks at midnight, some trade envoys accused development lobby groups of stirring up developing countries to sabotage the deal at the last minute. Kenya, one of the four developing countries which cut the original deal with the US, held up talks for six hours until its Geneva representative was overruled by Nairobi.

The Philippines then is pro-smuggling?

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ORDINARILY, I'D STICK THIS IN THE COMMENTS.

Bustamante Proposals Bold Weight Loss Program For State (AP, 8/29/03)

ANAHEIM -- Standing at the gates of Disneyland, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Friday that as governor he would propose an amendment to the California State Constitution to deal with what he called a burgeoning epidemic of obesity.

"Look at all these fat people," Bustamante said, gesturing to the lines waiting to enter Disneyland. "Californians are too fat. According to doctors I have spoken with, one-third of all Californians weigh too much, and ultimately those fat people will die. That will end up costing the state money that we don't have, and will threaten our pristine Californian environment as we have to dig wider and wider graves."

Bustamante unveiled a proposed new amendment to the state constitution, to be submitted to voters at the same time as the current recall question, that would cut gravity in half. "What we are proposing," Bustamante explained, "is to decrease what scientists call the 'acceleration of gravity' to 16 feet per second per second from 32 feet per second squared. This will cure our state weight problem in one fell swoop. We have been forced to take this action by the criminal neglect of the Bush Administration."

Bustamante went on to explain that fat Californians drive up gasoline prices because the added weight of having fat people in the car increases fuel consumption. He said that his proposal "will improve our health, reduce gasoline usage, reduce fuel prices, help our ailing aeronautical industry and should increase by 10% the number of games won by our California sports teams, except for the Clippers." Bustamante also claimed that last years electricity shortages were exacerbated because "fat people need more air conditioning."

Bustamante ended by noting that "The law of gravity is a cruel law, which I know well as it imposes its heaviest burden on our poor Latino communities. The people of California deserve to weigh less and I won't rest until they do. Our slogan is No on the recall, Yes on Bustamante, No to gravity."

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CAN THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD BE FAR BEHIND?

The lieutenant governor proposes amending the state Constitution to regulate gasoline prices. (Matea Gold and Elizabeth Douglass, August 29, 2003, LA Times)

Charging that international oil companies are manipulating the gasoline market, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante said Thursday that as governor he would work to bring the industry under state regulation in an effort to control gas prices.

Bustamante, who compared the behavior of oil companies to deception in the electricity industry, proposed amending the California Constitution to define gasoline as a public utility and subjecting gas prices to approval by the state Public Utilities Commission. [...]

Hawaii approved a price cap on gasoline that is set to take effect in July, but no state regulates the oil industry as Bustamante proposes. Oil companies would likely challenge the new law as a violation of the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"Gasoline -- and the business of selling gasoline -- is part of interstate commerce that belongs to Congress to regulate, if at all," said Anthony Sabino, an associate law professor at St. John's University's Peter J. Tobin College of Business in New York. "With all due respect to Mr. Bustamante, he is either very ignorant of the law, or he's getting incredibly bad advice from his advisors, or it's a publicity stunt."

Maybe he really is as big an idiot as everyone says.

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THE WIND BENEATH THE EMU'S WINGS

Old Europe (Ian Campbell, 8/28/2003, UPI)

"Four legs good, two legs bad" becomes the mantra of the pigs in George Orwell's "Animal Farm." "U.S. good, Europe bad" might be the mantra of many an American businessman.

For though the antiquities of Rome, the pubs of Dublin and the boulevards of Paris enchant Americans, old Europe tends not to charm economically or politically in the United States.

The European economy is seen as hugely inferior to the American one: less competitive, more expensive, less flexible, more statist. America leads; Europe does not follow: it is pulled along -- by the higher growth of the United States.

Politically, meanwhile, Europe is seen as the home of uncommitted and the plain wrong. The "old Europe" of France and Germany, to use U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld's disparaging term, opposed attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq while Britain stepped forward. Europe laughed at Reagan and his "tear down this wall" message to Mikail Gorbachev. Look what happened.

And Reagan's supply-side economics? Twenty years on it is the economics rather than the laughter that has lasted.

If ever there was a moment when the world needed Europe to be a serious economic factor it was immediately after 9-11, when an American economy that had already slowed received a horrific shock. Instead, Europe proved itself useless.

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AS THE KAERU BOILS

Spending slashed as incomes fall again: Wage earners tightened their belts by a mind-boggling 6% in July (The Japan Times, Aug. 30, 2003)

Spending by wage-earner households fell 6 percent in July in real terms from a year earlier for the largest monthly contraction in nine years and reversing the previous month's 0.4 percent increase, the government said Friday.

Average monthly household spending came to 326,772 yen, the Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications Ministry said in a preliminary report.

Their average monthly income, including summer bonuses, dropped 1.1 percent in real terms to 575,142 yen, falling for the 16th consecutive month. Disposable income declined a real 1.7 percent to 479,433 yen. [...]

The key gauge of consumer prices in Tokyo edged down 0.3 percent in August from a year earlier for a record 47 consecutive months of decline, the government said in a preliminary report Friday.

But the plaintive cry comes: "They make better cars...."

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UNCOMMON SENSE

Religion and the American Revolution (Christine Leigh Heyrman, National Humanities Center)

Teaching the American Revolution presents a prime opportunity to instruct your students in the ways that religion shaped the American past. [...]

The second approach--and my favorite--involves introducing students to Thomas Paine's Common Sense. This celebrated (and admirably brief and accessible) treatise was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a runaway bestseller. Published in January of 1776, it became an overnight sensation--a pamphlet pored over by people in the privacy of their homes and read aloud in taverns and other public gathering places everywhere in British North America. In short, a wide range of colonials, literate as well as illiterate, felt the force of Paine's arguments for breaking with Britain, and what he wrote persuaded enough undecided men and women to embolden the Continental Congress to endorse the Declaration of Independence by July of 1776.

Why did Common Sense succeed so brilliantly as a piece of political propaganda? Among other reasons, because it is a kind of secular sermon, an extraordinarily adroit mingling of religion and politics. Look at the opening paragraphs ("Time makes more converts than reason.") in which Paine casts the decision to support the cause of rebellion as a matter of feeling rather than thought, as a process akin to that of evangelical conversion. Review his assault on monarchy, which boils down to the proposition that all kings are blasphemous usurpers who claim a sovereign authority over other human beings that rightfully belongs only to God. Notice, too, how vehemently Paine insists that the Jews of the Old Testament rejected monarchical government--the obvious conclusion being that God's new "chosen people" in America should follow that example. Consider his assertion that the colonies are an asylum of religious liberty, implying that Americans must pass from argument to arms to protect freedom of conscience for religious dissenters. And, finally, don't miss how often the cadences of Common Sense echo and even reiterate the language of the Bible.

Ironically, Thomas Paine was anything but an orthodox Christian. Although bred to Quakerism in England during his youth, he had shed that religious influence years before writing Common Sense and later proudly proclaimed his deistical views in a pamphlet entitled The Age of Reason--which prompted pious Protestants, even as late as the twentieth century, to denounce him as a "dirty little atheist." But even if Paine was less than sincere--indeed, entirely disingenuous--in invoking the evangelical sentiments that suffuse Common Sense, he had an intuitive grasp of religious appeals that would move his American audience to political action. In other words, while Common Sense is not a reliable guide to Paine's private religious opinions, its enthusiastic reception in America tells us a great deal about the religious views of his audience.

There was some earlier discussion of whether the 55 mph speed limit was fundamentally based on morality or not. Note here how Jimmy Carter too knew that the way to sell an idea to the American people is to make it a moral/religious issue, President Carter's Address to the Nation: July 15, 1979:

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we've gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous tool on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It's a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them. [...]

[T]he solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country. It can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our Nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.

You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on Earth. We have the world's highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.

I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our Nation's problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act.

We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively and we will, but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.

Twelve hours from now I will speak again in Kansas City, to expand and to explain further our energy program. Just as the search for solutions to our energy shortages has now led us to a new awareness of our Nation's deeper problems, so our willingness to work for those solutions in energy can strengthen us to attack those deeper problems.

I will continue to travel this country, to hear the people of America. You can help me to develop a national agenda for the 1980's. I will listen and I will act. We will act together. These were the promises I made 3 years ago, and I intend to keep them.

Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources -- America's people, America's values, and America's confidence.

I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation.

In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With God's help and for the sake of our Nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.

Thank you and good night.

The tragedy of his presidency was that he was so weak a leader, as you'll see if you read the positively cringe-inducing first half of the speech, that he could no longer galvanize the nation to action.

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PRANKISH LORD

Hare Krishna Temple (LUCKY SEVERSON, August 29, 2003, RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY)

MARY ALICE WILLIAMS, guest anchor: Hare Krishna. The name conjures up saffron-robed devotees and 1970s songs. But where are they today? They have their own congregations now, a new temple in which to worship, and help from unlikely strangers. Lucky Severson found one vital Krishna community at the Stone Center of the Latter Day Saints.

LUCKY SEVERSON: About 60 miles south of the Salt Lake Mormon Temple, along the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains, at the very epicenter of Mormondom, there is one edifice that is distinctly not Mormon. For a split second, you might wonder if you were in a far away country, like India. What you have here is the very first traditional Hare Krishna Temple built in the U.S.A.

Ten years ago when the Hare Krishna first proposed building a temple on a hill in a county that was over 95 percent Mormon, you could imagine the overall reaction here. It could best be described as disbelief. [...]

As his wife Vie looks on, Caru Das entertains a group of curious senior citizens. The Temple has become one of the most popular attractions in Utah County.

CARU DAS (President, Hare Krishna Temple, Utah): The first words coming out of many of our visitors' mouths when they come through the doors is: How did you guys get to be here? What are you doing here? How did this happen?

SEVERSON: It happened after [Dr. Stan Green, a radiologist, and a Stake President, which is a Mormon position above bishop] dropped by to check out the strange folk with ponytails, who had come to the area in the mid 1970s after learning that people here are exceptionally religious. The two men became good friends, and that led to offers of help from the neighbors and a $25,000 check from the Mormon Church -- otherwise known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, or LDS for short. It is not the first time the LDS Church has contributed to other religions within Utah.

Dr. GREEN (State President, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints): And I'm not sure they could do all of this if they had to pay for everything, and yet certainly they deserve a place to worship just like I deserve a place to worship.

CARU DAS: You know, we think of ourselves as the little brother in the area. And the LDS Church, metaphorically speaking, as the big brother, comes up, pats you on the back, and says good work, you know, we're glad you're here. Keep it up, and here's something to help out, and that was great for us.

Stands in sharp contrast to the bombing in Najaf, no?

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LIBRARY OF PC AMERICA?

Containing Multitudes: The Politics of the "Library of America" (Peter Wood, August 29, 2003, The Claremont Institute)

Last year, the now-defunct Partisan Review held a conference on the 50th anniversary of its seminal "Our Country, Our Culture" conference. The 1952 event marked a sea change among many American intellectuals who had begun to sense some of the deep attractions of American life and were finding ways to back out of the reflexive scorn for their country and their culture that had long been the identity badge of the American Left. In the year following 9/11, a similar re-discovery seemed to be in progress. At the opening dinner, I found myself at a dinner table with Gerald Weissmann, distinguished physician, biomedical researcher, and eloquent man of letters. I knew him, however, only by reputation and had never turned a page in The Woods Hole Cantata, Darwin's Audubon, or any of his other discursive books on the shoreline between science and literature. Perilous, those chance conversations with luminaries you know to be luminous but about whose actual work you are as ignorant as a sea cucumber.

We chatted about a project whose origins lay in that earlier rapprochement between America and the Left: the Library of America (LOA). Edmund Wilson in 1958 called on the United States to follow the example of the French, who had their Pleiade editions of great French writers. Americans had been notoriously more fickle towards their best writers. Not only had Moby Dick sunk to the cold depths of obscurity but, scandalously, William Faulkner's works at one point had all gone out of print. Here was a noble cause: gather the best American prose and poetry and publish it in uniform, reasonably priced editions that would stay in print for as long as the Republic would stand.

Wilson didn't live to see the realization of his dream, which came in 1979 with the help of the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. LOA was seen by many as a victory of Wilson's dream over a rival scheme favored by the Modern Language Association, but the series soon went in directions that Wilson never could have imagined.

I observed to Weissmann that the Library of America had started well but in recent years it had begun to pad its list more and more with writers of little real distinction. Some, like Kate Chopin, had been added to please the feminists. Some, like Zora Neale Hurston, appeared to be diversity hires. Nathanael West, author of The Day of the Locusts and Miss Lonelyhearts? Gay icon, I guess. A volume of John Muir's writings registers the environmentalist sympathies of our age. And then there is Gertrude Stein, who merits two volumes. Stein is a writer whose entire range lies between monotonic and moronic. Weissmann murmured in stern disapproval, and our conversation died away.

A week later I read in Darwin's Audubon Weissmann's tribute to a remarkable mind, "Gertrude Stein and the Ctenophore." Stein, he says, "changed forever the way we read the English language."

Personally, I think Hurston should be there, though Chopin, Stein, & West are sketchy. Anyway, it would be nice to see an LOA edition of Albert Jay Nock, but we conservatives do already have the Liberty Fund.

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NO SHERMAN, SHE

Mrs. Clinton Denies 2004 Presidential Run (AP, Aug. 29, 2003)

A drop in President Bush's poll numbers has increased speculation about New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton jumping into the 2004 Democratic presidential race - a notion the former first lady rejected Friday.

"I am absolutely ruling it out,'' Clinton said during a visit to the New York State Fair in Syracuse, N.Y. She had insisted in recent months that she will not consider entering the race for president this year even if that is what some Democrats want.

Fueling the speculation has been talk of a fall visit to Iowa, site of the nomination's kickoff caucuses Jan. 19, but no confirmation yet from her staff on whether Clinton will go.

A meeting of her fund-raising team next month is expected to include at least some discussion of presidential politics - more likely the 2008 race, according to some familiar with planning for the session.

And, there is her own campaign Web site, which includes a section called "Hill Notes'' - a sampling of supportive e-mail messages assembled by her staff. On a recent day, seven of the first 10 messages urged a presidential run, or alluded to the possibility.

"Though I had previously been dismissive of the need for me to run in 2004, I now find myself unable to refuse the heartfelt pleas of my Party and the thousands of people who have joined the spontaneous "Draft Hillary" movement. What I do now I do despite my firm wishes to fill out my first term but I do it because I have been convinced that my Party and our Country need me."

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HELLOOOOOOO.

Rate Your Music

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Services are expected to return to normal in 24 - 48 hours.

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YACCS is our commenting service.

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CRUZ CONTROLLED

Pair back tribes on gambling: Bustamante and McClintock deny any dealing for donations.(Margaret Talev, August 29, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

Two of the three top candidates seeking to replace Gov. Gray Davis in the recall election took their cases to moneyed Indian tribes Thursday, promising to support more gambling and less government intrusion on tribal lands in California.

Democratic Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and Republican state Sen. Tom McClintock drew standing ovations after their remarks to the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, according to members who attended the closed-door session at the downtown Hyatt Regency Sacramento. [...]

"In terms of Hewlett-Packard or any other industry group in California, we don't put a limitation on any of them," Bustamante said. "We don't say, 'You can only sell so many computers' or 'You can only have so many franchises.' What we do is let the market determine a lot of what is needed." [...]

New campaign laws limit donors to giving no more than $21,200 per replacement candidate in the recall campaign.

Through a loophole in election law, however, Bustamante can raise larger amounts by funneling them through his 2002 campaign account. Last week, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation used that loophole to donate $300,000. Bustamante has said the campaign could cost him $15 million.

That $300,000 is, by the way, about half of what Mr. Bustamante has raised so far. Meanwhile, the suggestion that a vice like gambling should not be subject to greater government controls than other businesses is totally irresponsible. It's one thing to say that gaming should be legal, quite another to say that we're obligated to let the free market determine its extent. At worst it should be treated just like its peers--alcohol, cigarettes, etc.--legal but regulated.

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COGITO ERGO SOMETHING OR OTHER

Machine Thinks, Therefore It Is (Michelle Delio, Aug. 27, 2003, Wired News)

A new type of thinking machine that could completely change how people interact with computers is being developed at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories.

Over the past five years, a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been working on creating intelligent machines: computers that can accurately infer intent, remember prior experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze problems and make decisions.

Forsythe's team was originally trying to create a "synthetic human" -- software capable of thinking like a person -- for use in national defense.

The thinking software was to create profiles of specific political leaders or entire populations. Once programmed, the synthetic human(s) could, along with analytic tools, predict potential responses to various hypothetical situations.

But along the way, the experiment took a different turn.

Forsythe needed help with the software, and asked some of the programmers in Sandia's robot lab for assistance. The robotics researchers immediately saw that the technology could be used to develop intelligent machines, and the research's focus quickly morphed from creating computerized people to creating computers that can help people by acting more like them.

Enlightenment Man in his desperation latched on to the absurdly inadequate assertion of Rene Descartes--"I think, therefore I am"--but as this story helpfully shows, thinking is rather a meager thing in the long run. Computers will sooner or later "think", but the fact that we'll be able to program them to accept any reality we choose suggests just how tenuous a basis that is upon which to base the claim that reason renders greater certitude than faith.

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WHAT HAPPENS IF GOD IS DEAD AND YOU'RE BUT A DIM REFLECTION OF HIM?

Has experimenting on human life lost its power to disgust? (Michael Cook, August 19 2003, The Age)

A US-trained scientist at Shanghai Second Medical University, Dr Huizhen Sheng, has published a peer-reviewed article in an international journal based in China describing how she created 400 embryos by injecting human DNA into the eggs of New Zealand rabbits. One hundred of these survived for several days.

Sheng says she won't be implanting these embryos in human surrogate mothers to create carrot-loving babies with floppy ears and big front teeth. Her interest is extracting embryonic stem cells - ultimately to work miracles such as getting Christopher Reeve to walk again, curing juvenile diabetes or reversing Parkinson's disease.

Her overseas colleagues were a tad sceptical about her work, but very interested. If her results are verified, they will mark a significant advance in cloning technology. [...]

None of the cloning experts interviewed by various newspapers overseas had ethical qualms about the hybrid embryos.

On the contrary, Robin Lovell-Badge, of Britain's National Institute for Medical Research, said he was impressed.

Harvard University cloning expert Douglas Melton said "I'm glad to see it published, as it will encourage others to try it." [...]

Not even two years ago, a tiny American biotech company, Advanced Cell Technology, set alarm bells ringing around the world when it claimed it had cloned a handful of human embryos. The ensuing controversy made front-page news, with abundant chatter about "standing on the threshold of a brave new world". [...]

It has taken less than two years to habituate ourselves to regarding human embryos as pharmaceutical fodder.

Now we've reached the point where scientists play at the ghastly fantasies of The Island of Dr Moreau and no one blinks.

The trouble with slippery slope is that we don't slip accidentally; we race down gleefully into the abyss.

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DON'T READ THIS ANYWHERE YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SEEN TEARING UP.

Fresh Glimpse in 9/11 Files of the Struggles for Survival (Jim Dwyer, New York Times, 8/29/03)

Until yesterday, when the Port Authority released its raw historical records from Sept. 11, the two men were remembered from glimpses as the north tower of the World Trade Center was heaving toward collapse. One was short, the other tall. They carried a crowbar, a flashlight and walkie talkies. Beyond that, say some who survived that day, the smoke had blurred their faces and hair and clothes into gray.

With their tools, the two men — Frank De Martini, an architect, and Pablo Ortiz, a construction inspector — attacked the lethal web of obstacles that trapped people who had survived the impact of the plane but could not get to an exit.

At least 50 people stuck on the 88th and 89th floors of the north tower were able to walk out of the building because Mr. De Martini, Mr. Ortiz and others tore away rubble, broke down doors and answered calls for help. Everyone above the 91st floor died.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has released to the press transcripts of emergency calls made on 9/11.

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GLAD TO HEAR IT.

USMTC: US Machine Tool Consumption (American Machine Tool Dealers Association)

June machine tool consumption up 3 percent

June U.S. machine tool consumption totaled $244.55 million, according to AMTDA, the American Machine Tool Distributors' Association, and AMT - The Association For Manufacturing Technology. This total, as reported by companies participating in the USMTC program, was up 67.1% from May and up 3.3% from the total of $236.79 million reported for June 2002. With a year-to-date total of $952.86 million, 2003 is down 17.9% compared to the same period in 2002.

These numbers and all data in this report are based on the totals of actual data reported by companies participating in the USMTC program.

'June orders were up 3 percent from June 2002, the first growth in a monthly year-on-year comparison since November 2000,' noted Albert W. Moore, AMT President. 'A single instance does not constitute a trend but a trend must have a starting point. Thanks to the expensing provisions in President Bush's jobs and economic growth tax relief bill this year is looking more promising.'

"A single instance does not constitute a trend", but the industrial market has been moribund for the last couple of years and any sign of an uptick is good news. Mr. Moore is exactly right to put the emphasis on the expensing provisions of the administration's tax bill -- business can now expense (immediately write off) a much greater amount of capital investment than they could last year. This amounts to a tax subsidy for business investment that, along with low interest rates, should result in industry buying a lot of machines, making a lot of stuff more efficiently and keeping inflation down.

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"FRIENDLY" FIRE?

Top Shiite cleric killed in Najaf blast (Pamela Hess, 8/29/2003, UPI)

At least 17 people, including a top Shiite cleric, have been killed in an explosion in the holy Shiite city of Najaf.

Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, the spiritual leader of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, was among those killed, Ahmed Chalabi, a member of Iraq's U.S.-backed governing council told the Arabic language network.

An attempt was made on the life of his nephew, Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim, in the same city Sunday. A bomb exploded outside the nephew's home and office, killing two bodyguards and his driver. Mohammed Saeed al-Hakim suffered light injuries and was moved to a safe house. He is one of four top leaders of the Hawza, the clerics that direct much of Shiite life around the world.

Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, 64, was based in Iran for much of Saddam Hussein's rule, and was seen as a key figure in Shiite politics in Iraq. He was killed Friday as he was leaving the gold-domed Imam Ali mosque after leading Friday prayers. [...]

After coming back to Iraq, al-Hakim said he would not remake Iraq in Iran's image.

"We don't want an extremist Islam," he said.

"We Muslims have to live together. We have to build security for our new society," al-Hakim said in May. "We want a democratic government,
representing the Iraqi nation, the Iraqi people, the Muslims, Christians and all the minorities."

But his initial opposition to the U.S. occupation of country was well known. He boycotted the first U.S.-backed meeting of Iraqi groups in April.
Later, however, SCIRI softened its position. Al-Hakim's brother, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, is a member of Iraq's new Governing Council.

Obviously in a region where the main way to communicate one's displeasure is by blowing oneself up it's impossible to say who did something like this, but it does nothing to allay the belief that this series of truck bombings is the work of Shi'ites settling scores. The three targets have been: the Jordanian embassy after Jordan offered asylum to Saddam's daughters, having previously opposed the first Iraq War; the UN which adminstered the embargo and opposed the war; and now a Shi'ite cleric who advocated co-operation with the Allies and whose brother is on the US-formed governing Council. The great hope in Iraq was that the Shi'ites would be so anxious to finally govern themselves and so happy to be out from under Saddam's thumb that they'd be able to form a relatively stable new state. If they're going to kill each other instead, there may be no reason to hope for a decent Iraq. In fact, if moderate Muslims are to be legitimate targets of other Muslims, the entire region is in even deeper trouble than we all knew it to be.

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FIRE IN THE STEPPES

Cossacks back to fight again (Sarah Rainsford, 8/29/03, BBC)

[S]ince the early 1990s the Cossacks have been busy reviving their culture. Their influence growing, they are now demanding federal status and land rights and believe it is a battle they can win. [...]

As they parade proudly past their ataman in full festival dress, the Cossacks certainly look like a formidable force. At the gateway to the Caucasus in the troubled Russian south, these nationalist-minded men cast themselves as modern-day defenders of Russia's borders and her Orthodox faith.

The Cossacks' own past is chequered but Ataman Nikolai Gankin from Kamchatka in the Far East believes their revival and the revival of Russia, will go hand in hand.

"The Cossacks today are at the vanguard of our people," he says. "Our souls ache for Russia and her fate. We must be united as Cossacks to stop our country being torn apart."

Most Cossacks these days are careful to keep within the law. In their historic heartland around Rostov-on-Don, pogroms are a thing of the past. However, in neighbouring Krasnodar region, relations with a Turkic minority remain tense.

The Cossacks believe the rugged steppe of the south is theirs, steeped in the blood of their ancestors. Anyone is welcome to live there, they say, as long as it is by Cossack laws. Some, like the burly Viktor Demyanenko, remain ready to fight those they see as intruders.

"The Russian nation is being diluted," Mr Demyanenko declares as large beads of sweat roll from his brow. "There are no Russians left at all in some villages! The foreigners are like weed, like locusts destroying everything in their path. So sometimes we have to jump in and scare them a bit."

The Cossacks are obviously a mixed blessing, but--like the Serbs--it would seem a bad idea to stifle the great warrior peoples who border the Islamic world, just in case it becomes a front line.

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TIMBER!

Remembering what our society was based on (MICHELE MARR, August 28, 2003, LA Times)

In 1957, the American Bar Assn. erected a memorial to acknowledge the influence of the Magna Carta on our Constitution and
American law.

The memorial, a classical, open-stone rotunda that shelters a pillar of English granite inscribed with the words, "To commemorate Magna Carta, symbol of Freedom Under Law," sits on the banks of the Thames in Runnymede, England, where the Magna Carta was sealed in June 1215 by King John.

Recent photos of the 5,280-pound monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments and 14 other texts that attest to the bond God has to our laws and liberties and placed in the lobby of the Alabama Judicial Building by Chief Justice Roy Moore reminded me of the memorial at
Runnymede.

The Magna Carta Memorial does not mention God as Moore's courthouse memorial does but the document it honors vociferously does. Like our own foundational charter of freedom, the Declaration of Independence, its preamble acknowledges God as the ultimate source of human law and liberty.

The preamble of that Great Charter of English Liberties concludes, "Know ye that we, unto the honour of Almighty God, and for the salvation
of the souls of our progenitors and successors, Kings of England, to the advancement of holy Church, and amendment of our Realm, of our mere and free will, have given and granted these liberties following, to be kept in our kingdom of England for ever."

The Declaration of Independence also establishes the tie between human rights, laws, liberty and God. It begins with an appeal to "the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle" a people. Then it asserts, "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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The Magna Carta Memorial has stood in Runnymede for nearly five decades. Moore's monument stands to be removed from public view, on the order of Alabama's Supreme Court, "as soon as practicable."

If you try to chop out every root of freedom that traces back to a Judeo-Christian origin there'll be nothing left to support the tree of liberty.

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MORE SATCHELMOUTH

Satchel Paige's State of the Game

1. Coaches try to change motion and batting stances of young players. They should leave 'em alone.
2. I call this night baseball heaven, playing when it's cool. Guys now don't know how it was. Now it's like falling into a mint of money.
3. Pete Rose is the toughest hitting in the game today. He gets a piece of the ball. I love him, he plays hard, like I did when I pitched.
4. All the young hitters try to hit home runs all the time. There's no more squeeze or drag bunting.
5. Millionaires took over and changed the game completely.
6. Pitchers today have arm trouble because they sit on the bench and don't work enough.

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TOO CLEVER FOR US DIMS

Alabama, Faith, and the Senate (Charles Krauthammer, August 29, 2003, Townhall.com)

Senate Democrats are opposing [Alabama Attorney General Bill] Pryor for the content of his beliefs about abortion, a political sin made doubly abominable in the view of Schumer because they are so sincerely and deeply held.

Is Schumer therefore anti-Christian or anti-Catholic? No. But the net effect of Schumer's "deeply held views'' litmus test, now slavishly followed by his fellow Senate Democrats, is to disqualify from the bench anyone whose personal views of abortion coincide with those of traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

This test is not a religious test. It's an ideological test -- that has the obvious effect of excluding from the bench tens of millions of believers who
suffer from "very, very deeply held views.''

The Schumer test is thus not a violation of the Article Six prohibition against religious tests for office. It is simply a clever way to get to the sameresult.

As always with Mr. Krauthammer, this is a very well thought out column which brings great precision to the issue. But its explanation is a bit too clever for us. If your test excludes every person of relatively orthodox religious views then it's an anti-religious test in our book. However, what's good for the goose is good for the gander; were we Senators we'd not vote to confirm anyone who did not have religious compunctions about abortion, homosexuality, etc. Of course, the difference is Democrats can't admit to having an anti-religious test or they'd get slain at the polls, while we'd feel quite confident going before the electorate with our anti-anti-religious test.

Here's a useful illustration of just how far out of touch congressional Democrats, the media, and other intellectual elites are on the centrality of
Judeo-Christianity to American life, USATODAY/CNN/Gallup poll results (USA Today, 8/27/03):

Do you approve or disapprove of a federal court decision ordering an Alabama court to remove a monument to the Ten Commandmentsfrom public display in its building?

Approve
19

Disapprove
77

No opinion
4

2003 Aug 25-26

When eight out of ten Americans agree on an issue, they're right. There's no reason they should yield to the judiciary's bizarre reading of the
Establishment Clause.

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ANOTHER LIBERTARIAN VOTER.

No license? No pop stand, St. Paul tells 2 youngsters (Kevin Duchschere, Star Tribune, 8/29/03).

Mikaela Ziegler, 7, and her 4-year-old sister, Annika, were selling refreshments Wednesday afternoon near the State Fairgrounds when a woman approached them. But she wasn't there to buy.

'She said, 'You can't sell pop unless you have a license,' ' Mikaela said.

That's how it came to be that an inspector with St. Paul's Office of License, Inspections and Environmental Protection shut down Mikaela and Annika's pop stand. . . .

"I don't think that was right," [Mikaela] said, "Cause you should be able to just sell stuff without having something that you don't know you're supposed to be having."

Government -- making life miserable for millennia.

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MOOT COURT

Off the hook - for now: Blair's balancing act at the Hutton inquiry was adept, but Iraq could yet be his undoing (Polly Toynbee, August 29, 2003, The Guardian)

Deftly, he delivered a challenge to Hutton that was almost an affront. His words had an apparent ring of nobility when he said that if the BBC's allegation that he knowingly lied had been true, it would have "merited my resignation". "This was an attack that not only went to the heart of the office of prime minister but an attack on how our intelligence services operated ... and on the country as a whole."

Yet on reflection, this resignation remark holds a knife to the throat of Lord Hutton - "Back me or sack me." It suggests, none too subtly, that if this inquiry finds the BBC in the right and Downing Street in the wrong, Hutton will have prime ministerial blood on his hands. That's the kind of thing that gives unelected judges the constitutional heebie-jeebies. How else could this be interpreted? Blair spoke in the past tense - "it would have merited my resignation" - as if the inquiry was already done and dusted, the conclusion foregone and any danger to himself long past. It might have been more politic to assume Lord Hutton still has to make up his mind about that, even if the evidence is swinging Blair's way.

One thing was clear from the back-to-back evidence yesterday of the prime minister and the chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies. The ferocity of the enmity between the two sides remains unabated, a pair of stags with antlers fatally locked. The battle is still on and it has not been cooled one iota by the still perplexing death that brought all this to a crisis.

There was a laugh among the press when Blair described a private telephone call with Davies, a last-ditch attempt to make peace at the top. His "compromise" proposal? That the BBC should admit their story was wrong, and the government would admit the BBC had the right to broadcast it!

One needn't be too cynical to adhere to the view that when people take responsibility for things it generally means they think they didn't do anything wrong. Neither Mr. Blair nor George W. Bush has wavered one inch on their belief that the case against Iraq was dispositive and no Congressional committee or its Parliamentary equivalent is going to go to the mat with a head of government on a simple question of judgment. To do so would make a mockery of representative government.

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MIRROR, MIRROR, ON THE WALL...

Don't Count Hillary Out (Richard Reeves, August 27 2003, Hartford Courant)

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 has changed totally in the past few weeks. At the beginning of the summer, Hillary could comfortably deny having national presidential ambitions because the comfortable conventional wisdom was that it didn't really matter who the Democratic candidate would be, because President Bush had a lock on re-election. (I'm sure that the thought has never crossed her mind that it would be better for her if Bush won in 2004, leaving her a clear field in 2008.)

But now! With Bush looking more vulnerable because there are not enough jobs at home and not enough peace abroad, Sen. Clinton has to check some numbers. If a Democrat, say Kerry, defeats Bush next November and then runs for re-election in 2008, then her next chance to run would probably be in 2012, when she will be 65 years old. And who knows what the world will look like then?

For the record, our new senator has said she was not interested in the presidency. So has former Vice President Al Gore, who might be rethinking his own future. Not for the record, though, Hillary and her advisers, including her husband the ex-president, her money men and pollsters, will meet shortly after Labor Day - Sept. 6, I hear - to discuss whether she should go for it. It is a decision that has to be made earlier rather than later because of November and December filing deadlines for the early primary elections that will almost certainly (and very quickly) identify the 2004 Democratic nominee.

We've been saying for two and a half years now that she's going to run in '04 and see nothing to make us change our minds. In politics if you want to run for president and the nomination is yours for the taking, you go for it. The interesting thing about the dynamics of the race is that the rest of the field has pursued the Party's Left so hard that, with a pliant media, she can probably get away with portraying herself as the Center-Right candidate of the lot.

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THE GALE SAYERS CANDIDACY

The Conservative Who Would Be Governor: Tom McClintock is running third in California, but he may be the one who determines the outcome of the race. (Bill Whalen, 08/27/2003, Weekly Standard)

McClintock is about as unlikely a "darling" as you'll find in California politics. He's not telegenic--he is seemingly incapable of cracking a smile on television, or even batting an eyelash for that matter. Nor is he well liked within the upper echelons of his party. Last fall, McClintock ran for state controller. Though he was the lone Republican and in a position to win his race, the California Republican party instead gave more than $1 million to Gary Mendoza, the GOP candidate for insurance commissioner, and nearly $350,000 to Republican state senator Bruce McPherson, who was running for lieutenant governor. McPherson lost by 550,000 votes; Mendoza, by 350,000 votes. McClintock fell a mere 17,000 votes short of victory.

Now, nearly 10 months after that election, McClintock has turned the tables on the Republican establishment. He doesn't have enough support to lead the recall field--take McClintock's best showing (12 percent, according to the Los Angeles Times), add half-to-two-thirds of the support from the now-departed Bill Simon, and at best McClintock runs at 15-20 percent. That's not enough to win, but it could condemn Arnold Schwarzenegger to a second-place finish and hand the race to Bustamante.

McClintock's appeal is that he's a conservative non-Arnold. Just listen to the voiceover on his newly released TV ad: "We must have a governor who knows every inch of this state government, and who stands willing to challenge the spending lobby that controls it." That's as much as shot at Schwarzenegger's credentials as it is at Democrats' lack of thrift. McClintock's ad also says: "California used to be the Golden State. Taxes were low. Jobs were plentiful. Tom McClintock was there." That's an appeal to older conservatives who voted for Proposition 13 back in 1978 and probably know little about Arnold's movies.

Indeed, much of the McClintock strategy is based on the premise that voters will choose a feisty legislator instead of a conciliatory actor/activist. If elected, McClintock has promised to slash bureaucracy, place a cap on state spending and outsource government services. He's promised to balance the state budget through executive fiat and ballot initiative, if need be. Them is fighting' words, in Sacramento.

Given a Republican legislature, Mr. McClintock would be an excellent choice for governor of California, better than anyone he's running against. But California has a Democrat dominated legislature and he's not going to win. Is he willing to be responsible for electing Cruz Bustamante instead of a Republican, even if a moderate Republican?

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EASY CHAIR

AUDIO INTERVIEW: Ed Gillespie (Laura Knoy, 2003-08-28, The Exchange: NHPR)

We speak with Republican National Committee Chair Ed Gillespie about the state of the party, including how this year's Republican races are shaping up. Laura's guest is Ed Gillespie.

I'd not previously heard an extended interview with the Party's new chairman, but he handled himself extremely well here today.

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ONE MISREGISTRATION = TWO FOOT LICKINGS

The perils of Pauline Hanson: why support for Australia’s version of Jean-Marie Le Pen surged last week after she was sentenced to three years in jail Sydney (Anthony Daniels, 30 August 2003, The Spectator)

Pauline Hanson irrupted on to the Australian political scene in the early 1990s, giving voice to blue-collar Australians who resented the immense social changes that had been brought about without their consent. They felt that the world of ice-cold tubes and meat pies was under threat, economically and culturally, from the world of kir and sun-dried tomatoes, a world in which the mainstream politicians, of whatever political stripe, increasingly lived and moved and took their being. When Hanson spoke in crude terms of the dangers of Asian immigration (a return to the yellow peril) and of the feckless Aborigines, she immediately won 22 per cent of the vote in her native Queensland. The proletarian lava had suddenly broken through the bourgeois crust.

From an outsider’s point of view, Hanson’s crime seems to have been relatively trivial. She registered her party — One Nation — without the number of members required by law, claiming that mere supporters at meetings were members. It is even possible that she failed to understand the law, rather than that she broke it deliberately, for the one thing upon which all educated Australians agree is her stupidity. Her one lasting achievement so far is to have bestowed upon Australian English the catchphrase ‘Please explain’‚ which she asked whenever anyone used a word of more than two syllables, such as ‘xenophobic’.

Having thus registered her party illegally, she and her co-founder, David Ettridge, who was also sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, accepted a subsidy of A$500,000 from the public purse to fund her election campaign (election campaigns are publicly funded in Australia). Although she subsequently paid the money back by raising it from her supporters, she was nevertheless charged with fraud. There are also charges pending that she used A$20,000 for her own private purposes.

Hanson had never been convicted of anything before, and it was swiftly pointed out in newspaper editorials and letters pages that killers have been known to receive lesser sentences. On the other hand, a former convict was reported as saying that since Hanson had asked for longer sentences, it was only right that she should receive one. And the only Aborigine in the Australian senate requested that Hanson be given special protection, because the prison to which she had been sent was full of the very Asians and Aborigines whose immigration and conduct she had so vociferously condemned. Truly, the whirligig of time brings in its revenges.

There's something seriously wrong with a democratic state where registering your political party incorrectly can land you in prison.

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DECONSTITUTING THE RECONSTITUTED

Up to 40 More Taliban Killed in Fighting - Report (Reuters, August 28, 2003)

More Taliban fighters were killed on Thursday as a major operation by Afghan soldiers backed by U.S.-led forces and aircraft to find hundreds of guerrillas entered its fourth day, officials and news reports said.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) agency quoted Afghan Colonel Qudratullah as saying he saw around 40 bodies on the battlefield in the Tangi Chinaran area of Dai Chopan district, part of Zabul province where the fighting has raged.

Afghan officials had already claimed 70 Taliban losses in the first three days of fighting, as Afghan soldiers and small groups of U.S.-led special forces searched for up to 1,000 militants. [...]

While estimates vary, it could be the largest concentration of Taliban fighters since the hardline Islamic regime was ousted late in 2001, raising concerns that the movement has rallied support to undermine the U.S.-backed central government.

Zabul governor Hafizullah told Reuters that at least four Taliban had been killed by around midday, before the heaviest clashes began.

Asked about reports that the Taliban's supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar may be among the fighters, he replied:

"I cannot tell you about that. I am not sure. I have not seen him with my own eyes."

There were reports today that the Mullah had been killed, though the Taliban claims he's not even in that part of the country. You have to wonder that these guiys are still so stupid that they'd gather 800 guys in one spot. Do they hold up signs saying: "Kill us"?

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SCHROEDINGER'S FCAT

NAACP files complaint against Florida education department (BRENDAN FARRINGTON, August 28, 2003, Associated Press)

The NAACP filed a federal complaint against Florida's education department Thursday, seeking to stop use of statewide assessment tests until the achievement gap between minority and white students is eliminated.

If you don't open the results envelope does the disparity not exist?

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BABY, I'M SINKIN' DOWN

Palestinians are at the crossroads (SALIM MANSUR, August 28, 2003, Toronto Sun)

In the following decades, Palestinians paid a mounting price for rejecting the UN settlement of 1947.

Finally, suffering greater abuse from their Arab brothers than from Jewish denial of their rights, the Palestinian leadership indicated its willingness to take a page of history from the Israelis and settle their differences by diplomacy.

The world applauded. America opened its doors to the Palestinian leadership. The seal of approval came with the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Yasser Arafat and his Israeli counterparts, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

But then Palestinians allowed themselves to be overtaken by fanaticism. George Santayana defined it as "redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim."

For Palestinians, there can be no progress through blaming Israeli bigots for fuelling the spiral of violence, since the smoke of death suffocates all dialogue. Following 9/11, the demand on the Palestinian leadership has been unambiguous: to end violence whatever the excuse, and work with the international community to reach its goal.

Palestinians have to choose. And, having arrived at the fork in their road, the world watches with dismay their inability, or unwillingness, to end their dance with death and affirm life unconditionally.

At some level the decision does seem to be as simple as this: would Palestinians rather live themselves or keep killing Jews. To choose the latter is insane by definition.

MORE:
Palestinian Authority Freezes Funds of Islamic Charities (Ibrahim Barzak, Aug 28, 2003, Associated Press)

Palestinian authorities said Thursday they froze the bank accounts of nine Islamic charities to investigate whether the organizations funnel money to militants - the Palestinians' most striking action yet in a U.S.-sought clampdown on armed groups.

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"INFINITE BREADTH BUT ZERO DEPTH"

The Natural Law Is What We Naturally Know: an interview with J. Budziszewski (Religion & Liberty, May/June 2003)

R&L: The concept of natural law underpins the analysis in your latest book What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide. What is the natural law?

Budziszewski: Our subject is called natural law because it has the qualities of all law. Law has rightly been defined as an ordinance of reason, for the common good, made by the one who has care of the community, and promulgated. Consider the natural law against murder. It is not an arbitrary whim, but a rule that the mind can grasp as right. It serves not some special interest, but the universal good. Its author has care of the universe, for he (God) created it. And it is not a secret rule, for God has so arranged his creation that every rational being knows about it.

Our subject is called natural law because it is built into the design of human nature and woven into the fabric of the normal human mind. Another reason for calling it natural is that we rightly take it to be about what really is—a rule like the prohibition of murder reflects not a mere illusion or projection, but genuine knowledge. It expresses the actual moral character of a certain kind of act. [...]

R&L: What are the promises and perils of advancing a natural-law argument in the context of public policy disputes?

Budziszewski: The natural-law tradition maintains that the foundational principles of morality are “the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge”—in other words, they are not only right for everyone, but at some level known to everyone. If this is true, then the task of debate about morality is not so much teaching people what they have no clue about, but bringing to the surface the latent moral knowledge or suppressed moral knowledge that they have already. There is an art to this; people often have strong motives not to allow that knowledge to come to the surface, and they may feel defensive. One has to get past evasions and self-deceptions, and it is more difficult to do this in the public square than in private conversation. Even so, certain basic moral knowledge is “down there,” and our public statements can make contact with it. When this is done well, the defensiveness of the listeners is disarmed, and they reflect, “Of course. I never thought of that before, but somehow I knew it all along.” [...]

R&L: What role, if any, does natural law play in determining the substance of the laws that govern a particular society? What happens if natural law is banished from the legal process?

Budziszewski: Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you will not be able to do it. The law requiring taxes is based on the moral idea that people should be made to pay for the benefits that they receive. The law punishing violations of contract is based on the moral idea that people should keep their promises. The law punishing murder is based on the moral ideas that innocent blood should not be shed, that private individuals should not take the law into their own hands, and that individuals should be held responsible for their deeds. If we refuse to allow discussion of morality when making laws, laws will still be based on moral ideas, but they will be more likely to be based on false ones.

R&L: How does individual liberty function under the natural law?

Budziszewski: Natural law and natural rights work together. I have a duty not to murder you; you have a right to your life. I have a duty not to steal from you; you have a right to use the property that results from the productive use of your gifts. If we all have a duty to seek God, then we must all have the liberty to seek him.

The correlation of liberties and duties may seem nothing more than common sense, but that is what natural law is: Common moral sense, cleansed of evasions, elevated and brought into systematic order. Unfortunately, the contemporary way of thinking about liberty denies common moral sense. For example in 1992, when the United States Supreme Court declared that “[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” it was propounding a universal moral right not to recognize the universal moral laws on which all rights depend. Such so-called liberty has infinite breadth but zero depth. A right is a power to make a moral claim upon me. If I could “define” your claims into nonexistence—as the Court said I could “define” the unborn child’s—that power would be destroyed, and true liberty would be destroyed along with it.

That insistence that one's claim to liberties carries with it no corresponding duties must ultimately be destructive of liberty.

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THE SOFT UNDERBELLY OF THE WEST

The Islamization of France (Jean-Christophe Mounicq, 08/28/2003, Tech Central Station)

If Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilization” theory is right, France is on the front line. With at least six and maybe eight million Muslims living in its territory among a total population of 60 million, France is the most “islamized” Western country. Seeing France’s inability to adapt to globalization or to the aging of its population, it could be bad news for the world that the French are the first to be forced to facilitate the emergence of a “modern” Islam.

As nearly every Western country absorbs a fast growing Muslim minority, every Westerner should look closely at France. A French failure to integrate Muslims could lead to a general European and Western failure. Those who don’t believe in the clash of civilizations might at least see a clash between traditional Islamic values and Western republican values. This raises the question of the compatibility of Islam with secular democracy (separation of church and state) and human rights (especially the rights of women and of non-Muslims).

All Muslims do not interpret the Koran identically and do not practice the same forms of Islam. But which Islam is going to win in Western countries? Even if they do not say it openly, more and more French citizens fear an Islamist victory that could lead to religious and civil war. The vote in favour of Jean-Marie Le Pen is emblematic of this fear. Locally, votes in favour of the National Front are linked to the proportion of Muslim immigrants in the population.

The big question though is will Germany, when it's predominantly Turkish, still defeat France regularly in war, when it's predominantly North African?

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THAT DOES NOT COMPUTE

Outside a mosque, Sunnis critique the new Iraq: Under Saddam, the Sunni minority enjoyed favored status. Now they find themselves outnumbered on the Governing Council. (Cameron W. Barr, 8/29/03, CS Monitor)

[T]alk of loving the Americans was the exception. The rule was the assertion that the occupying powers are unfairly promoting the interests of Iraq's Shiite muslims and fomenting sectarian discord.

"They are causing the disputes between Sunni and Shiite," said Samir Mohammed Mahmoud, a retired official of Iraq's Finance Ministry. He said he regretted that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-led administration running Iraq, had not found a way to hold elections to establish the Governing Council, a group of 25 Iraqis the US selected through closed-door consultations. "The Americans provided the Shiite with the opportunity to take a large part of the [Governing] Council."

Shiites hold 13 of the council's seats. Many Shiite leaders say that they should get the power that they deserve in the new Iraq. Shiite Muslims constitute some 60 percent of Iraq's population, and have long been politically repressed.

As a result, Mr. Mahmoud argued, "no one agrees with this [Governing] Council, not even the Arab countries." The 22-member Arab League has refused to recognize the council, although some Arab states have indicated a willingness to work with the group without extending any formal approval.

"The British government came and occupied us in the 1920s," Mahmoud elaborated. "They used policies to separate Shiite and Sunni - it seems the Americans are using the same idea now."

"We've gotten over this thing of Sunni and Shiite," added a white-bearded, white-robed gentleman who declined to give his name but said he held a doctorate. "[The Americans] want us to be more and more divided."

"The Governing Council doesn't represent all Iraqi people; it's a sectarian council. Especially the Sunni [members] - they are exiles, they came in on American tanks," he continued.

Hard to figure out how it's possible both that the Sunni dominated the Shi'ites under Saddam and that the Iraqis are past all this sectarian stuff except for us trying to stir it up. And, if they are over their sectarianism, why does it matter how the power on the Council is divided?

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PROUD MARY

Economy improves in second quarter, raising hopes for second-half rebound (Jeannine Aversa, 8/28/03, Associated Press)

Idling for months, the economy finally shifted into a higher gear in the second quarter as consumers and businesses bought more and the federal government ramped up military spending on the Iraq war. The improvement reinforced the belief that the economy will pick up speed through the rest of the year.

The broadest measure of the economy's performance, gross domestic product, grew at an annual rate of 3.1 percent in the April to June quarter, according to revised figures released Thursday by the Commerce Department.

That was faster than the 2.4 percent growth rate first estimated a month ago and came after two straight quarters of lackluster economic growth. GDP, which measures the value of all goods and services produced within the United States, increased at just a 1.4 percent pace in the final quarter of 2002 and the first three months of this year.

''The economy is rolling forward now with considerable momentum and there's no reason to think we won't have strong economic growth through the rest of the year,'' said Bill Cheney, chief economist at John Hancock.

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NOT ON OUR SIDE

Deporting convicted killer wrong: U.N. (Toronto Star, 8/28/03)

A United Nations committee has ruled Canada shirked its international responsibilities when it deported a convicted killer to the United States in 1998 even though he faced a death sentence.

In a decision experts say is a giant step forward for human rights, the U.N. Human Rights Committee dismissed Canada's arguments that its decision to deport Roger Judge didn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Charter of Rights.

The U.N. ruling, issued last week, said countries such as Canada that have abolished the death penalty are obliged to protect life in all circumstances.

"They may not remove, either by deportation or extradition, individuals from their jurisdiction if it may be reasonably anticipated they will be sentenced to death," the committee, said.

Just supposing that Osama bin Laden showed up in Montreal tomorrow--if the Canadians refused to deport him to the U.S. would anyone quarrel with sending the American military to take him by force?

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NOT JUST THE AK-47

New penis grown on boy's arm (Annanova, 8/16/01)

Doctors have grown a new penis on a Russian boy's arm after he lost his old one in a bizarre accident.

The 16-year-old, named only as Malik, lost his penis after receiving an electric shock while urinating on an electric wire.

Big deal; every time Senator Clinton walks into a room with her husband people say she has one on her arm.

MORE:
Texas Man Wakes Up After Operation, Penis Missing ((Reuters, Aug 28, 2003)

An out-of-court settlement has been reached in the case of a North Texas man who woke up from bladder surgery only to find that doctors had amputated his penis without permission, lawyers said on Thursday.

Terms of the out-of-court settlement were not disclosed but Hurshell Ralls, 67, had been seeking over $5 million in a civil suit he filed in Wichita Falls, Texas, against the two doctors who removed his penis. They did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement. [...]

Ralls' attorney Steve Briley said that his client was having surgery in 1999 to remove a cancerous bladder, which would likely include the removal of his prostate gland. [...]

Ralls and his wife have not been able to recover from the anger and shock they felt after the surgery, his attorney said.

"Mr. Ralls was not informed that he was going to wake up and not have a penis," Briley said.

As long as they left him an arm it's apparently reversible.

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WHO'S ENTITLED TO INTERPRET THE LAW

The Era of Entitlement: What Alabama Judge Roy Moore, File "Sharers," and the Catholic Church Have in Common (Marci Hamilton, FindLaw's Writ, 8/28/2003)

This is the Age of Entitlement. I do not mean entitlement only in the sense of the belief that one is entitled to a government handout. I also mean entitlement in the simpler sense of the belief that one deserves to get exactly what one wants - regardless of the law and despite the public good.

Four examples drawn from recent legal controversies illustrate this point....

I went to bat for the Recording Industry Association of America.... In response, I received numerous emails from individuals who hold the belief that they have an entitlement to free music on the web....

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore and his followers have insisted on Justice Moore's supposed entitlement to keep the huge, stone rendition of the Ten Commandments he personally had installed in his courthouse....

Fortunately, the Entitlement Era may be coming to a close. With more and more institutions inclined to call lawbreaking just what it is ... entitlement is under siege. Lawbreaking is lawbreaking no matter who the perpetrator is - whether a church, or a state Supreme Court justice, or a college student - and increasingly, some have come to insist on that very truth.

Ms. Hamilton is absolutely right. The Entitlement Era has infected even the federal judiciary, who think they are entitled to issue edicts not clearly founded on either Constitutional or statutory law, and which others must obey. But this era of judicial entitlement may be coming to a close, as more institutions call judicial lawbreaking just what it is. Lawbreaking is lawbreaking, even if the perpetrator is a federal judge, and increasingly, some have come to insist on that very truth.

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THE HAWKISH AMERICANS

Most say Iraq war was worth fighting (Richard Benedetto, 8/28/03, USA TODAY)

The news from Iraq is mostly bad, and criticism of President Bush from Democrats is relentless. But nearly two-thirds — 63% — of Americans say the war in Iraq was worth fighting, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll shows. (Related: Full poll results)

That is not to say, however, that they are fully satisfied with the way things are going.

Overall, 54% say the president does not have a clear plan for the postwar effort to bring stability and democracy to the country. [...]

Fifty-seven percent say they believe the war in Iraq is part of the overall war on terrorism. Bush has repeatedly made that argument, and the poll suggests his message is getting through.

Bush's handling of the Iraq situation is approved by 57%, down slightly from 60% a month ago; 66% approve of his handling of terrorism in general.

And 59% approve of the job he is doing overall, a range he has maintained for more than a month, regardless of the ups and downs of the news from Iraq.

The BBC did a bit last night about how much the war was costing America, then went to some man-in-the-street interviews to see how people felt about it. The interviewee's were so supportive of the war and dismissive of the costs the piece could have run on Fox News.

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THERE WERE ARTICLES IN OUI?

Schwarzenegger Makes Light of Wild Past (Reuters, August 28, 2003)

On the same day that Arnold Schwarzenegger received the endorsement of 20 state Assembly Republicans in his bid to become governor of California, a decades-old interview resurfaced in which the actor copped to a number of titillating high jinks and kinky sexual acts during his years as a bodybuilder.

Just as Schwarzenegger was making the radio talk show rounds Wednesday to clarify his positions on several issues, the interview in the August 1977 issue of Oui magazine appeared on the Smoking Gun Web site, which was linked to via the political/celebrity gossip Web site the Drudge Report.

In the five-page interview with writer Peter Manso, Schwarzenegger admitted to smoking "grass and hash," hanging out with "entertainers, hookers and bar owners" during his early years in Venice, Calif., and participating in a group-sex encounter with a single female and several fellow bodybuilders from Gold's Gym, Schwarzenegger's early stomping ground.

"Having chicks around is the kind of thing that breaks up the intense training," he said, according to the reprint of the interview.

Schwarzenegger brushed off the story, saying only that he had things other than politics on his mind all those years ago.

"I haven't lived my life to be a politician," he said during a radio talk show.

In CA isn't the most damaging part of this likely to be the reference to women as "chicks"?

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PROTESTING OUR PROVOCATIONS ABOUT THE PLAYA'S, PIMPS, & PLUTOCRATS OF THE PIGSKIN

Why Is Baseball So Much Better Than Football? (Thomas Boswell, January 18, 1987, Washington Post)

(24) Marianne Moore loved Christy Mathewson. No woman of quality has ever preferred football to baseball.

Steve Martinovich, Canada's very own version of Robert Neville, took such exception to Mr. Boswell's assertions that he answered every one:

1. Granted
2. Granted
3. Cheerleaders...God's gift to men.
4. Granted
5. Given some of the people who've sang that song, not a plus for baseball
6. Football has also had The Purple People Eaters and the Steel Curtain
7. Not entirely true.
8. I might give you that.
9. Baseball also has Don Zimmer who dresses in a satin jacket.
10. The Redskins haven't had someone who could kick in eight seasons
11. Billy Martin was better than anything in football on this score
12. Nor should he have been ashamed.
13. That was a good Lasorda line
14. Hah! Major leaguers don't chew any more because "It's bad for you!" Hardly manly
15. No experience with pro football in that context
16. Ditto
17. Ditto
18. Ditto
19. Generalization and unfair given steriods in baseball
20. I'm Canadian, there's no such thing as cold weather
21. And 150 of them tend to be meaningless. Every football game counts
22. Granted
23. Anyone who quotes Adolph Hitler or George Carlin automatically loses an argument :-)
24. Many women in Wisconsin would disagree
25. This is true, baseball books are generally better. They also tend to be more maudlin.
26. True
27. True
28. That's true.
29. Screams of anguish! Soldier Field? Notre Dame Stadium? I could name several more easily. A lot of people consider Fenway to be a piece of crap
30. I can dig that.
31. This is a good argument. I'm not convinced because the skill set is so different, but is a good argument.
32. I played football...the face mask is useful.
33. True. Outside of RBs, WRs and QBs, I doubt many football players would be recognized
34. I almost laughed out loud at this one. Many of baseball's early owners were men who were at best ethically challenged. Today? I can
begin and end a conversation with Peter D'Angelos in Baltimore. Today, most baseball teams are owned by corporations so they can conveniently duck a charge into the character of a single person or family.
35. Pete Rose? That's rich.
36. So is any army. And?
37. QB ratings are a clear formula.
38. granted
39. There are a lot of stats in baseball that are useless. Most in fact are.
40. the DH is the death of real baseball
41. Bah.
42. The Fudge Hammer...No jokes about that one.
43. Sigh.
44. Wild cards serve what purpose in baseball? To expand the number of teams? And they want to expand it further? Stones...glass walls...
45. That's plain silly.
46. That bothers me as well.
47. Pass interference bothers me as well.
48. Agreed to a point
49. Half truth.
50. I hate instant replay. Is that computerized ump system any better?
51. That means football is more manly.
52. Absolutely untrue.
53. And they miss a great tradition.
54. Not true.
55. Not really true.
56. True to a point.
57. True. NFL refs should be full-time
58. And there are no reps in baseball?
59. See 51
60. Not true
61. Compared to changing the height of the pitcher's mound? The strike zone (which no one knows what it is even if its defined officially)?
62. Sigh, no long-lived football players? Jerry Rice? I could go on...
63. True
64. Actually it means fall has arrived
65. Ha ha, right
66. Neither is a winner here.
67. I doubt baseball is that clean
68. Agreed
69. That was funny in the 1940s.
70. The only people who praise Fenway are the ones who don't sit in the small seats...and that's from Boston sports writers
71. Ref. Homer Simpson: I never knew baseball was so boring without alcohol.
72. And?
73. Somewhat true
74. This means nothing
75. False
76. Real dances have been banned for years. And football lost something with that.
77. Some rules are bad.
78. And?
79. Not true.
80. Stupid managers don't exist in baseball?
81. True
82. And?
83. Ty Cobb.
83. Hello? Ref. Whining by Roger Clemens
84. True
85. Whatever
86. True
87. There's plenty of humour in football.
88. Funny.
89. Different sports, different methods. Do apples taste like oranges?
90. See 89.
91. No experience with football stadiums...one baseball stadium. I wasn't that impressed
92. True
93. I'll take his word for it. Isn't he in baseball?
94. Ha ha, because they're up in the luxury boxes eating food no baseball fan can afford at the park.
95. Could be.
96. And who cares until September?
97. So?
98. The manliness issue again. Let's see a baseball player get hit by another baseball player and not go on the 15 DL.
99. Whatever.

I'd just point out that the two best books ever written about football are essentially anti-football tracts: North Dallas Forty and Friday Night Lights.

At any rate, Mr. Martinovich is generally far more sound in his reasoning, as you'll see at his fine magazine, Enter Stage Right, perhaps the last bastion of conservatism in Canada.

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DIESELS HUMMIN'

Message of civil rights anthem remains powerful (CATHLEEN FALSANI, August 28, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

Since its release in the winter of 1965, the lyrics of the song "People Get Ready" by the Chicago group The Impressions have sunk into collective American consciousness, a civil rights anthem for the struggle that continues today in America and elsewhere.

The song, written by Curtis Mayfield, was long thought to have been inspired by the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream of an America where children will be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

In fact, "People Get Ready" was penned a year or two before the historic march on Washington, according to Cook County Commissioner Jerry "The Iceman" Butler, a former member of the Impressions.

Mayfield, who didn't attend the 1963 march, never minded that people thought it was because it was inspired by the same issues that launched the march, Butler said.

"When we started performing back in the 1950s around town here, it was right after Emmett Till was slain," Butler said, referring to the 14-year-old black Chicago boy who was murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after he reportedly whistled at a white woman.

"All of those things impacted on us because we were Till's age. . . . Then we got involved in terms of being aware of what was happening in the
South, in particular, and in our neighborhoods in general. All of that, I think, influenced his writings," Butler said.

Mayfield's song--the first successful gospel-influenced song to become a crossover hit on the Billboard charts--is laced with spiritual and biblical language.

With all due respect the great Impressions, the two best versions are by The Blind Boys of Alabama and by Jeff Beck with Rod Stewart.

The tune itself though is brilliant:

People get ready, there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket you just thank the lord

People get ready, there's a train to Jordan
Picking up passengers coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board them
There's hope for all among those loved the most
There ain't no room for the hopeless sinner whom would hurt all mankind
Just to save his own
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
For there is no hiding place against the kingdoms throne

People get ready there's a train comin'
You don't need no baggage, just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
You don't need no ticket you just thank the lord

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PAGING ASA HUTCHINSON

Another GOPer Opts Out (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Steve Chaggaris and Clothilde Ewing, 8/28/03, CBS News)

Wednesday, Gov. Mike Huckabee, R-Ark., nixed a run against Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who Republicans are hoping to knock off in 2004. "This is not the time to abandon the job I have," Huckabee said at a news conference yesterday.

Huckabee’s decision is interesting since he is term-limited when his term expires in 2006 and he could have run for the Senate while sitting as
governor. Perhaps he’s setting his sights on taking on first-term Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., in 2008.

Meantime, Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., who was widely expected to seriously challenge Senate Minority Whip Harry Reid, decided Monday he’ll stay in the House. "There is no doubt in my mind that I could defeat the existing senator on Election Day, but my decision has nothing to do with Sen. Harry Reid," Gibbons said at a news conference.

Other Republicans abandoning Senate bids in 2004 include: former college basketball coach Dale Brown against Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.; Rep. Jennifer Dunn, R-Wash., against Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. (although Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., did decide to run); and HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson and Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., against Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc.

Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., is still waiting to hear if he’ll have a formidable GOP challenger. There’s talk about former Rep. John Thune, R-S.D. - who lost a 2002 Senate race by 524 votes - taking him on.

One negative, though entirely worthwhile, aspect of the GOP having a hammerlock on the House for the forseeable future is that more senior
members who are in line for significant leadership positions and committee chairs are likely to stay put in their safe seats rather than go expend maximal effort to become very junior members of the Senate.

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WE ARE NOT THEM

UN nuclear chief slams US for double standards (Agence France-Presse, August 27, 2003)

The head of the UN nuclear agency accused the United States in a German magazine interview of effectively breaking a ban on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction through its research into so-called "mini-nukes."

Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) told the German weekly Stern, in its upcoming Thursday edition, that double standards were being used.

"Double standards are being used here. The US government insists that other countries do not possess nuclear weapons.

"On the other hand they are perfecting their own arsenal. I do not think that corresponds with the treaty they signed."

Of course there's a double standard. We can be trusted to use nuclear weapons for decent purposes; in fact we've been guilty of not using them as often as we should have. Other nations aren't trustworthy and we should be prepared to use our nuclear arsenal to stop them from developing their own. The wages of proliferation should be preemption.

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WATERING THE TREE OF LIBERTY

Civil war: A do-it-yourself guide (Spengler, 8/29/03, Asia Times)

Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority's scapegoat-in-chief, so deeply abhors the prospect of a Palestinian civil war that he cannot bring himself to attack Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Chin up, Mr Abbas: civil war is the sine qua non of nationhood. Permit me to try to sell you on the merits of having a civil war of your very own. Think of a civil war not as a luxury, but as an investment.

It is unpopular these days to draw attention to the merits of violence, particularly the sort that inevitably entails "collateral damage", that is, the slaughter of innocents. Progress supposedly brings us non-violent conflict resolution. Au contraire. The faster the world changes, the more people find themselves left behind, and the more people are left behind, the more diehards are willing to fight to the death.

Real nations, as opposed to romantic visions of nations, have no room for irredentists and other rejectionists. They need the sort of people who show up on time, pay dues to a respectable political party and get along (if grudgingly) with the neighbors. Having a civil war is de rigeur. All the right people do it. It shows that the prospective nation has the grit to sort out its own problems.

The truth, Mr Abbas, is that no one will take you seriously until you have your own civil war. [...]

If you let your lawn go to seed or let your dog bark all night, your neighbors will become impatient and compel you to take action. The same applies to civil wars. If you don't do it yourself, the neighbors may do it for you, and end up damaging your property.

It's no use to say, "They can't get all of us!" They don't need to get all of you. Consider that the American criminal justice system has incarcerated or otherwise controlled one out of every three black Americans between the ages of 20 and 30. That is nothing less than the ruin of a generation, but it correlates to a big decline in the rate of commission of violent crimes.

If America is willing to exterminate large numbers of its own discontented population, don't expect any compunction when it comes to you. In a war of attrition, the side with more resources and more killing capacity always wins. If you make yourself sufficiently obnoxious, the Americans will take the leash of the Israelis and let them sort you out, however long it takes.

No mistake could be worse for the Islamic fundamentalists than to buy their own rhetoric about how soft America has become. Even if true in some moral and cultural senses, it will not stop us from killing just as many as it takes to guarantee our security. Liberal democracies are efficient and enthusiastic practitioners of massively lethal warfare.

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KHATAMI V. KHAMENEI V. DEMOCRACY

Iran's reformers, conservatives square off (Safa Haeri, 8/29/03, Asia Times)

Iranian political analysts are unanimous in predicting that not only are the conservatives determined not to allow the next unicameral house be controlled by the reformists (as is the case now), they also want an end to the present political chaos caused by the endless feuds between the system's two opposed concepts of theocracy based of one man's absolute rule versus a republicanism mixed with a "tolerant religion", as defined by Khatami.

In the view of the analysts, the recent harsh crackdown on political dissidents and the independent press, which is close to the reformists, by the judiciary, a power that is directly controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei and which serves as the conservatives' political and police arms, is a clear indication of the hardliners' plans in that direction.

At the same time, the analysts say, the government's unprecedented firm stand in facing up to the conservatives is aimed at recovering at least part of the popularity that it has lost with its base, made up mostly of young voters, because of its dramatic failure in delivering the reforms that it had promised on the one hand and Khatami's continued bowing to the conservatives on the other.

To "punish" the reformers, Iranians who in all recent presidential and parliamentary elections had massively voted for Khatami and the reformers, deserted the polls in the last city and village council elections, offering Tehran municipality to the conservatives.

"The reformists' big mistake from the outset was that the political system of the Islamic Republic, based on the absolute rule of one person, is anything but democratic in the Western terminology of the concept," Dr Qasem Sho'leh Sa'di, a lawyer and outspoken political dissident speaking for the neo-reformists told Asia Times Online.

Contrary to the official reformists who insist on reforming Iran's constitution, the neo-reformers want drastic changes to the system, replacing the present theocracy with a secular democracy.

One thing you can say is that the Iranian experiment in Islamicism has been recognized as a failure in Iran far more quickly than was the Western experiment with Communist totalitarianism.

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THE BLACK HOLE

'High-Risk' Finance at the Federal Level (Kelly Patricia O Meara. 9/02/03, Insight on the News)

The introduction to the General Accounting Office (GAO) "high-risk" list of federal agencies engaged in dubious accounting practices provided by Comptroller General of the United States David Walker reads in part: "The high-risk status reports are provided at the start of each new Congress. This update should help the Congress and the administration in carrying out their responsibilities, while improving government for the benefit of the American people." In other words, the purpose of the "high-risk" list is to provide helpful information to Congress about management of government agencies and departments.

But, even though the status reports are well into their second decade, one is hard-pressed to find in them detailed information that might in fact be useful to Congress in appropriating funds. Nowhere is this more evident than in financial management of the agencies and departments, about which this magazine has reported with care for nearly five years.

To provide a sense of how government bureaucrats are handling the people's money the GAO has provided an upbeat, yet sobering, breakdown. In 2001 there were 23 departments or agencies on the high-risk list. Two years later the number has increased to 25. The good news is that the Social Security Administration's (SSA) supplemental-security-income program and the Department of Justice's asset-forfeiture program have been removed from the list.

However, four new designations have been added, including the Department of Homeland Security, the disability programs at the SSA and the Department of Veterans' Affairs, federal real property and deteriorating facilities, and the Medicaid program. And, although it will come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with the problems plaguing corporate pensions, months after the official "high risk" was made public, the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. (PBGC) was added to the list, raising the total yet another notch to 26. [...]

[W]alker again has raised the issue of the apparent inability of federal agencies properly and accurately to account for funds entrusted to them by taxpayers.

Apparent?

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ASAP

Perle Cites Errors in Iraq, Urges Power Transfer (Reuters, 8/27/03)

Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon adviser and architect of the U.S. war to topple Saddam Hussein, said the United States had made mistakes in Iraq and that power should be handed over to the Iraqis as fast as possible.

In an interview with the Le Figaro daily newspaper to be published Thursday, Perle defended the U.S.-led war in Iraq and restated his belief that France had been wrong to lead international opposition to the conflict.

"Of course, we haven't done everything right," said Perle, according to the French text of the interview. "Mistakes have been made and there will be others.

"Our principal mistake, in my opinion, was that we didn't manage to work closely with the Iraqis before the war, so that there was an Iraqi opposition capable of taking charge immediately," he said.

"Today, the answer is to hand over power to the Iraqis as soon as possible," he added.

Uh-oh, his fellow neocons aren't going to tolerate that.

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DUPED BY THE MORON

The Kids Left Behind (BOB HERBERT, 8/28/03, NY Times)

Next week the Senate will take up the education budget proposed for next year by the White House and Senate Republicans. From the perspective of those who are pro-children, it's loaded with bad news. Not only does the bill fall far short of the photo-op promises Mr. Bush made to provide funding for programs to improve public education, but it would actually cut $200 million from the president's very own (and relentlessly touted) No Child Left Behind Act.

We're talking about a real cut -- $200 million less than is being spent on this already underfunded initiative.

The proposed cuts, according to Congressional officials who have studied the budget proposal, would eliminate a high school dropout prevention program, would prevent more than 32,000 children with limited proficiency in English from participating in federally supported English instruction programs, would drastically cut high school equivalency and college assistance for migrant children, and would end the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship program.

The proposal would also cut more than 20,000 teachers from professional training programs, despite Mr. Bush's promise that teachers would "get the training they need to raise educational standards." And it would completely eliminate training for teachers in computer technology.

Among those who are steaming over the proposal is Senator Edward Kennedy, one of a number of Democrats who gave the president the kind of good-faith, high-profile, bipartisan support that was crucial to the passage of No Child Left Behind.

The Smart Party gets it anyway: the education bill was never about money, but about vouchers. George W. Bush was willing to give Ted Kennedyt whatever dollar figure the Senator insisted on, knowing that he could gut the bill later, so long as he got testing to show that schools are failing and vouchers so that kids can get out of those schools. That much was easy, because Democrats (and the libertarian Right) underestimated him. The hard part, even with the coming Republican super-majority, will be to reform the program so that vouchers can be used in private and parochial schools as well as public.

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ROBERT B. ZOELLICK, SUPERSTAR

In Reversal, U.S. Nears Deal on Drugs for Poor Countries (ELIZABETH BECKER, 8/28/03, NY Times)

Poor countries already have the right to manufacture copycat versions of brand-name medicines in the event of a health emergency by issuing what is called a compulsory license. But the poorest nations have no factories to produce such medicine. The pending trade agreement solves that problem by allowing these countries to import the generic drugs from developing nations like Brazil or India under the compulsory license.

Jeff Trewhitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry group for research-based American pharmaceutical companies, said there would be no comment until a final deal was reached. But officials who have met with American pharmaceutical executives said that the companies would not lobby against the agreement.

Ambassador Robert B. Zoellick, the United States trade representative, was credited today by several officials with persuading the American pharmaceutical industry, as well as the White House, that a compromise had to be reached before the trade talks start on Sept. 10.

In the last few days, the United States struck an accord with a crucial group of developing countries--including Brazil and India, which are large producers of generic drugs, and South Africa and Kenya--raising the odds for a full agreement by the 146 members of the trade organization.

In exchange for these new assurances sought by the pharmaceutical industry, the United States dropped its demand that the agreement cover only a few diseases and that it limit the number of countries eligible to import the generic drugs, several diplomats said.

Instead, the United States has successfully lobbied more than 20 developed nations to agree to voluntarily opt out of using this agreement to import generic medicines, several officials said.

"This is better than what the United States originally wanted and doesn't limit the scope of diseases," said Nelson Ndirangu, a member of the Kenya delegation to the World Trade Organization.

But several nongovernmental organizations said the compromise did not go far enough to ensure that generic versions of medicine could be produced and exported wherever they were needed.

The opposition of the NGOs is reassuring.

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METHINKS THE LADDIE DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

Moore's Law: The immorality of the Ten Commandments. (Christopher Hitchens, August 27, 2003, Slate)

The row over the boulder-sized version of the so-called "Ten Commandments," and as to whether they should be exhibited in such massive shape on public property, misses the opportunity to consider these top-10 divine ordinances and their relationship to original intent. Judge Roy Moore is clearly, as well as a fool and a publicity-hound, a man who identifies the Mount Sinai orders to Moses with a certain interpretation of Protestantism. But we may ask ourselves why any sect, however primitive, would want to base itself on such vague pre-Christian desert morality (assuming Moses to be pre-Christian).

The first four of the commandments have little to do with either law or morality, and the first three suggest a terrific insecurity on the part of the person supposedly issuing them. I am the lord thy god and thou shalt have no other ... no graven images ... no taking of my name in vain: surely these could have been compressed into a more general injunction to show respect. The ensuing order to set aside a holy day is scarcely a moral or ethical one, unless you assume that other days are somehow profane. (The Rev. Ian Paisley, I remember, used to refuse interviewers for Sunday newspapers even after it was pointed out to him that it's the Monday edition that is prepared on Sunday.) Whereas a day of rest, as prefigured in the opening passages of Genesis, is no more than organized labor might have demanded, perhaps during the arduous days of unpaid pyramid erection.

So the first four commandments have almost nothing to do with moral conduct and cannot in any case be enforced by law unless the state forbids certain sorts of art all week, including religious and iconographic art—and all activity on the Sabbath (which the words of the fourth commandment do not actually require). [...]

It's obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries? There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.

As always with Mr. Hitchens, this is most interesting from a psychoanalytic viewpoint--reflecting the kind of rage against God that surely presages his imminent conversion to Catholicism, just as his rage at Henry Kissigner presaged his conversion to realpolitik American military interventionism.

As for the rest he achieves some comic effect only by playing stupid. To begin with, there's obviously no possibility of a stable and enduring morality without a single authority, which is why the initial Commandments describe God and our duties to him--that we recognize His supremacy, that we not imagine Him to be objectifiable, that we respect Him, that we take time to contemplate Him and His works, etc.. They not only "have to do with moral conduct" but make morality possible. The alternative to this--which Mr. Hitchens used to be an advocate of, but wisely is no longer-is to erect in His place a State which enforces its will upon us and requires all the same things...except rest and contemplation. In the absence of morality there are only man-made rules and those rules must come from a human source that we all have to listen to--the State.

As for his laundry list of wished for additions in the final paragraph, several are of course already covered by the Commandments, while others are not demonstrably immoral. A couple for instances: thou shalt not murder would seem to rule out genocide while neither "offenses against gender equity" nor slavery need be forbidden by a coherent moral scheme, rather they are fundamentally political decisions we've tacked on, and not generally for the good.

Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas offered this Summary of the Law: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets." And the Ten Commandments are perfected by Christ's order to his disciples: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you..." That should adequately cover Mr. Hitchens' main objections, though it does suggest that he might be uncomfortable as a Jew--requiring that last mandatum from Christ in order to achieve clarity.

Even setting all of this aside though, when we turn to the particular question of why Americans should seek to recognize Judeo-Christian morality in public places, we need look no further than the foundational document of the nation, which reads: "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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." The Republic is an edifice built on one very simple idea, that God Created Man and in so doing endowed us with a small, but massive, bundle of rights that no mere government can have the legitimate authority to violate. If Mr. Hitchens is truly hostile to that idea, let him enunciate a better. His last idea--that all rights should be subordinated while the State make us all Equal--kinda went bung.

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IS THIS A SLEDGEHAMMER I SEE BEFORE ME? (Via Ransom Danegeld)

Enter the neo-Canaanites (Bret Stephens, Jurusalem Post, 8/21/03)

A . . . recent [Haaretz] profile (August 8) is of Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi. Benvenisti was once an old-style Labor Zionist who served in the 1960s as Teddy Kollek's deputy and in the 1980s became a muse of sorts for the New York Times's Tom Friedman. Hanegbi, a much less accomplished figure, was with Uri Avnery a leader in the ultra-Left Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) until he found the group too moderate for his views.

What unites Benvenisti and Hanegbi is that they have separately concluded that the two-state solution can't work. Many other Israelis, disillusioned with Oslo, have also come to this view, but not quite in the same way. For Benvenisti and Hanegbi, it isn't a Palestinian state that's a problem. It's a Jewish one. 'Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist here,' says Hanegbi. Says Benvenisti: 'This country will not tolerate a border in its midst.' . . .

Probably by chance, on the same day the Benvenisti-Hanegbi profile appeared, Haaretz carried a long feature by Daniel Gavron on the so-called Uganda scheme, which was debated at the sixth Zionist conference 100 years ago. Headlined 'Nowhere in Africa,' after the recent film about a German-Jewish family that escaped from the Nazis to Kenya, Gavron's article asks 'whether [the scheme's] rejection by the seventh congress was a fatal historical error."

The article is a mostly competent piece of journalism. It covers the historic ground well. It also leaves little doubt that a Jewish state had no chance of establishing itself, much less succeeding, on the Uasin Gishu plateau in East Africa - or anywhere else on the continent, for that matter. Nor is it likely that even a temporary African haven would have saved large numbers of Jews from the Holocaust. Few had the foresight to leave Germany and Eastern Europe while it was still possible to get out. A dusty outpost in Africa would hardly have been an enticing destination.

"Even the land of Israel and Jerusalem," Gavron writes, "were only just powerful enough magnets to attract a sufficient number of Jews to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state." . . .

What's interesting, then, about the Uganda article isn't what it says but the fact that it was written at all. It suggests an incredible fragility of belief in the Zionist enterprise as it came to be - and a negative belief at that. Are we here because it is, in some meaningful sense, our home? Not at all. We're here because it was the only workable and least-bad solution to an urgent refugee problem. Nowadays, however, perhaps it's not the ideal solution.

Of course I may be extrapolating too much. And Gavron and Haaretz are hardly typically Israeli. But Benvenisti touches on something very deep when he says that Israel's conflict is not between two national movements but between "a society of immigrants and a society of natives." It suggests that Jews no more belong here than they would have in Uganda. It suggests that Jews remain, at best, refugees. It suggests the Zionist enterprise is colonialist. And it means that the Jewish state is as illegitimate as it is doomed.

"In the end," says Hanegbi, "the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel." The only solution is to abandon the idea of a Jewish state - "the mad dream," he calls it - to mix with our Arab neighbors in mixed cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families, and to "take part in the democratization of the Middle East." Let's stop trying to be Jews, counsels Benvenisti, and let's stop trying to build a "Jewish state." We're "neo-Canaanites" now.

Victory is the only option (Caroline B. Glick, Jurusalem Post, 8/22/03)

The one move that the Abbas-Dahlan (Arafat) junta has made since ascending to international celebrity is the PA's sponsorship of the hudna [ceasefire]. Over the past two months, every time that they were asked about their moves to dismantle the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah terror organizations, they pointed to the hudna and said that this was all that was necessary to bring peace. Initially, Israel decried the hudna as a farce. But once Hamas and its friends in Islamic Jihad and the PA announced its implementation six weeks ago, the government immediately began to play ball.

The media also got taken in by the hudna. The day after 20 Israeli children and their parents were disemboweled and scorched in Jerusalem, the question that dominated the papers was: Is the hudna over? Even after Hamas announced yesterday the hudna was off, Israeli commentators continued to ask whether Hamas was serious about "restarting" its terrorist slaughter. . . .

A decision to kill, deport, or arrest Arafat and try him for crimes against humanity in an Israeli court of law would be an immediate catalyst for a military operation that would in fact bring this country victory and the security that would ensue. Why is this? Because the only way to win a war is to identify who the enemy is. After 10 years of lying to ourselves, the blood on the streets of our capital city calls out the truth. Hamas and Islamic Jihad could never operate if it weren't for the PA and Arafat and his new straw men Abbas and Dahlan. The longer our leaders dither and deceive us, the longer our army officers will believe that their work is meaningless and the longer our lives will be at the mercy of our enemies.

Our future lies in the hands of our leaders. Victory is the only option. What will it take for them to find the will to lead us to it?

Those of us old enough to remember when Art Buchwald was funny -- or to remember him at all -- will remember a column he wrote towards the end of every year imagining the meetings in which the most disastrous decisions of the year had been made. In that spirit, let's imagine the meeting leading to Israel's establisment: "Hm, we have a population of wretched, oppressed Jews who have been locked up in Europe's ghettos and shtetls for the last 1500 years. What should we do with them." "Obviously, send them off to a desert in the midst of a sea of rabid antisemites." One senses that this looked generous only in comparison to the Holocaust.

Fifty years later, the Israelis find themselves, through a series of logical steps, in a position in which they have to be restrained in their response to babykilling. The United States would have decimated any enemy that had done a tenth as much. Now the Israelis should be deciding between two stark choices -- capitulation or all out war. Naturally, in the aftermath of the latest bombing, there are those who counsel capitulation and those demanding war, but I expect that the Israelis, prodded by Washington, will punt. They will try, once again, to reconcile the irreconcilable, reminding us that the Jews are truly crazy; doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different outcome each time.

For my part, I remain convinced that the true guarantor of the future of the Jewish people is the United States. We even have some open desert of our own that could use some flowering and I don't think the Jackalopes are antisemitic, even if they are rabid. But my heart agrees with Ms. Glick. Kill Arafat. Try him if you must, but kill him.

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EVEN CARDINALS CAN BE IDIOTS

That old-fashioned Jew-hatred (Alan M. Dershowitz, Aug. 25, 2003, Jerusalem Post)

Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, who is the archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, has been telling anyone who is willing to listen that "the Jews" are to blame for the scandal surrounding the sexual misconduct of priests toward young parishioners!

The Jews? How did Cardinal Rodriguez ever come up with this ridiculous idea? Here is his "logic." He begins by asserting that the Vatican is anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian. It follows, therefore, that "the Jews" had to get even with the Catholic Church, while at the same time deflecting attention away from Israeli injustices against the Palestinians.

The Jews managed to do this by arranging for the media which they, of course, control to give disproportionate attention to the Vatican sex scandal. Listen to Rodriguez's own words:

"It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago.

"Why? I think it's also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?"

Rodriguez then goes on to compare the Jewish-controlled media with "Hitler," because they are "protagonists of what I do not hesitate to define as a persecution against the Church."

When asked whether he wanted to reconsider his attack, Rodriguez replied: "I don't repent sometimes it is necessary to shake things up."

At the point where you're bragging about receiving one of the world's worst terrorists you should have sense enough to shut up.

AS CAN B'NAI BRITH:
Jewish and Christian leaders launch countermissionary campaign (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 27, 2003)

B'nai Brith Canada today announced the launch of a campaign to inform members of Toronto's Jewish community about the activities of "Jews for Jesus."

Calling it the "Proud to be Jewish" Campaign," B'nai Brith's goal is to warn members of the Toronto Jewish community about the presence and methods of the missionary group and to advise them of their rights.

"This isn't about free speech," said Rochelle Wilner, president of B'nai Brith Canada.

"Targeted missionizing, especially when done in a manner calculated to deceive the unsuspecting, is offensive to our community. Christianity is not a branch of Judaism it's a different religion altogether, and any attempt to portray it as anything but a different religion is subterfuge.

"The term 'Jews for Jesus' makes about as much sense as 'Baptists for Buddha' or 'Catholics for Krishna,'" she said.

Ms Wilner would be right except that Christ and all of his initial followers were Jews and except for the basis of most of Christianity being Judaism. Typically it's anti-Semites who try to portray Christianity as wholly separate from Judaism.

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CAN'T BEAT THE CLASSICS

U.S. troops using confiscated Iraqi AK-47s (Andrew England, 8/24/2003, Associated Press)

An American soldier stands at the side of an Iraqi highway, puts his AK-47 on fully automatic and pulls the trigger.

Within seconds the assault rifle has blasted out 30 rounds. Puffs of dust dance in the air as the bullets smack into the scrubland dirt. Test fire complete.

U.S. troops in Iraq may not have found weapons of mass destruction, but they're certainly getting their hands on the country's stock of Kalashnikovs and, they say, they need them. [...]

In Humvees, on tanks but never openly on base U.S. soldiers are carrying the Cold War-era weapon, first developed in the Soviet Union but now mass produced around the world.

The AK is favored by many of the world's fighters, from child soldiers in Africa to rebel movements around the world, because it is light, durable and known to jam less frequently.

Now U.S. troops who have picked up AKs on raids or confiscated them at checkpoints are putting the rifles to use and they like what they see.

Some complain that standard U.S. military M16 and M4 rifles jam too easily in Iraq's dusty environment. Many say the AK has better ''knockdown'' power and can kill with fewer shots.

''The kind of war we are in now ... you want to be able to stop the enemy quick,'' said Sgt. 1st Class Tracy S. McCarson of Newport News, Va., an army scout, who carries an AK in his Humvee.

It may be the only truly well-designed thing the Soviets ever made themselves, but as someone on NPR also said it may be one of the most important machines of the 20th Century. Given how many people it's killed that sounds about right.

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FRIVOLOUS, BUT I DON'T WANT TO BE THE ONE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

Federal judge punts, sends Democrats' suit to 3-judge panel : Kazen critical of both sides in redistricting standoff (R.G. RATCLIFFE, Aug. 27, 2003, Houston Chronicle)

A federal judge told lawyers for runaway Democratic senators today that he believes their lawsuit seeking voting rights and free speech protections is all but totally frivolous, but he agreed to leave the final decision to a three-judge panel.

U.S. District Judge George P. Kazen said he believes Gov. Rick Perry and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst's push for mid-decade congressional redistricting is wrong and a waste of taxpayer money. However, Kazen also criticized the Democratic senators for fleeing to Albuquerque, N.M., to break the Senate's quorum.

"We're almost like the Middle East. We've got these two camps over here, and it's total victory or total surrender," Kazen said.

Kazen refused to grant the Democrats' request for a restraining order to prevent the Senate sergeant-at-arms from arresting them in case there is another special session. Kazen also urged Perry not to call a session until the three-judge panel hears the Democrats' lawsuit in about two weeks.

"Let's chill out for awhile. Let's stop spending the taxpayers money for awhile," Kazen said.

The self-exiled Democrats had hoped to find a friendly judge by filing the lawsuit in Laredo. Kazen was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter. But the judge made it clear from the start of today's hearing that the only reason he was not throwing the case out was that federal case law requires voting rights questions to be answered by a three-judge panel unless the lawsuit is wholly frivolous or fictitious.

"The agreement we've made is your lawsuit is not wholly frivolous," Kazen told Renea Hicks, a lawyer representing the Democrats.

Well, if Judge Kazen weren't so gutless the issue would be dead and no more taxpayer money would be spent. He's the one who kept it alive this time.

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CONSERVATIVE ENOUGH

Schwarzenegger lays out opinions on abortion, drugs, gays, other topics (ERICA WERNER, August 27, 2003, Associated Press)

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger made his clearest statements to date on abortion and other social issues on talk shows Wednesday, after weeks of criticism for not spelling out his views for voters in the California recall.

He said he favors legalizing marijuana for medical purposes and protecting a woman's right to abortion, but is against gay marriage and granting drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants. He said illegal immigrants already in the country should stay here, but he said it was a federal issue and a spokesman said he wasn't proposing an amnesty program. [...]

Schwarzenegger described himself as "pro-choice" but said he did not support late-stage procedures described as "partial-birth" abortions.

Asked whether he is in favor of parental notification when minors seek abortions, he replied, "I am. But in some cases when there is abuse in the family or problems in the family, then the courts should decide."

Schwarzenegger said he supports domestic partnerships but not gay marriage.

At worst he's a moderate in the John-McCain-running-for-president mold.

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SEND HIM TO CANADA

Foot Licker Gets 18 Months in Jail (AP, Aug 27, 2003)

A man accused of licking a woman's feet in a Bellingham grocery store was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to assault just before his trial was to begin.

Raymond Dublin, 36, formerly of Providence, R.I., pleaded guilty Tuesday at Uxbridge District Court to charges of assault and battery and lewd and lascivious behavior.

His attorney asked for a sentence of two years of counseling, but Judge Paul Losapio said counseling wasn't sufficient for Dublin, a two-time convicted sex offender who just completed a one-year sentence on similar foot-licking charges at a Woonsocket, R.I., supermarket.

"I don't know what type of counseling someone could undergo for this kind of behavior," he said.

Dublin was charged with sneaking up behind a woman at the Bellingham Save-A-Lot supermarket and licking her feet and toes in June 2002.

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NUMEROLOGY

EWN Exclusive Recall Election Poll (ABC7.com, 8/27/03)

The candidates vying to be California's next Governor have only been campaigning for a few weeks, but we've already seen front runners lose their lead in the polls - only to move back up again.

An exclusive Eyewitness News poll conducted by Survey USA, shows Arnold Schwarzenegger has a wide lead again, with support of 45-percent of registered voters. Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante has 29-percent.

Our exclusive survey could come as a surprise to some. It only counts registered voters who say they will cast a ballot October 7. The poll is based on 591 California residents who say they are certain to vote Oct. 7.

Though the Republican vote is splintered Arnold Schwarzenegger would win office today even though Cruz Bustamante is winning endorsements.

The numbers are reversing since August 11th survey.

Tom McClintock and Peter Uberroth top the rest of the field and the survey could give Governor Gray Davis some concern. If the recall election were today, he would be ousted by 64-percent of the vote with only a 35-percent vote of confidence.

There was an LA Times poll over the weekend that had Bustamante ahead, but the numbers were ridiculous and it was contradicted by internal polling, including that of Bill Simon, which had led to him conceding he couldn't beat Arnold Schwarzenegger and getting out of the race. The thing about this poll is that it has Mr. Schwarzenegger just slightly ahead of what Mr. Simon finished with in 2002 (45% to Mr. Simon's 42%). This would seem to be a realistic number, though it may well be the highwater mark--45% to 47% may be about as well as any Republican can do in CA at this point. Though, you'd have to think that if Tom McClintock gets out of the race and endorses and campaigns for Arnold, that could put him in at least striking distance of 50%.

Given the Democratic nature of the electorate it's hard to do other than make Cruz Bustamante the favorite, but it's a very winnable race for Arnold.

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THE VOUCHER SYSTEM TED KENNEDY ACCIDENTALLY HELPED PASS

At school, a new era of multiple choices for parents: Moms and dads get new options regarding the schools kids attend and add-on services. (Gail Russell Chaddock, 8/27/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

This fall marks the first year when neighborhood public schools feel the brunt of a new national experiment in accountability - and the impact on parents may be even greater than that on students and their teachers.

One result: more choices for parents. This fall, parents of 54 million students nationwide will see more comparative data about public schools than has been available, even to top administrators.

Parents will know which schools have highly qualified teachers, and which do not. They will know which schools are making "adequate yearly progress" toward state standards, and which are not.

The question is: What to do with the new information?

If parents act on new insights by moving their kids to different schools - ones that aren't deemed "in need of improvement," for example - it could have big implications not just for the future of their children but also for the shape of school reforms nationwide.

Already, charter schools, sought after by many parents for innovative approaches, house 685,000 students.

The No Child Left Behind Act, which President Bush once dubbed "the cornerstone of my administration," adds new choices. It requires that all groups of students - whatever their race, ethnicity, poverty level, English proficiency, or disability - demonstrate "adequate yearly progress." If not, parents have options, which begin to kick in this year.

For parents in the least successful of US schools, the choice may be to leave the neighborhood school or to tap into some $2 billion in federal funds to buy academic help, such as tutoring or after-school program.

"The new law says that choices should not depend on your ZIP code or your personal wealth. The goal now is to make choice a permanent part of public education for every student, and we're definitely moving in that direction," says Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona Superintendent of Education and CEO of the Education Leaders Council, an education reform advocacy group. But she adds that school districts are still far from complying with the laws provisions, and are especially lax in informing parents that services are available. "Last year, only about $40 million of the $2 billion in funds available were accessed by parents. This is a huge potential market of intervention for students.... We are not tapping it adequately."

Most of the nation's 15,000 school districts are still calculating which schools fall into the "need of improvement" category. They are then required by law to inform parents of this option, to offer alternative placements for children who want to move, and to help with transportation to get them there.

How many more stories like this will it take before the Stupid Party realizes they won secretly won a key battle in what will be a long fight with the No Child Left Behind Act.

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WE ALL HAVE OUR LIMITS

U.S. Ends AIDS Funding in Africa, Asia (AP, 8/27/03)

The State Department has cut off funding for an AIDS program benefiting African and Asian refugees, saying it believes a group taking part in the program supports involuntary abortions and sterilization in China.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Wednesday funds were offered to six of seven groups that received money from the department's Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration.

But the consortium of groups turned down the funding after the department excluded the seventh group, Marie Stopes International.

"We offered this funding to six of them, in order to continue supporting the good work that they've done on prevention and response to HIV/AIDS in refugee settings,'' Reeker said. "It was the consortium's decision not to accept the funding.''

Marie Stopes International was excluded because of its partnership in China with the United Nations Population Fund, a group the Bush administration said last year had violated a 1985 law against supporting forced abortion or sterilization.

Driving to work today there was a car with three bumper stickers (VT plates, of course):

"John Kerry for President"

"I'm Pro-choice America"

"Never, never, never, never shake a baby"

It's an interesting case of line-drawing, especially since Senator Kerry supports partial-birth abortion. Can you shake them for the first few hours or days?

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WHERE BELIEF IN MARKETS STOPS AND FAITH IN THE STATE BEGINS

Markets Versus Monopolies in Education: The Historical Evidence (Andrew Coulson, 9 June 12, 1996, Education Policy Analysis Archives)

The debate over educational funding and administration is an old one. Writing to his friend Tacitus almost two thousand years ago, the Roman lawyer Pliny the Younger described his plan to establish a secondary school in his home town, but added that he had decided to pay only one third of the total cost.

I would promise the whole amount were I not afraid that someday my gift might be abused for someone's selfish purposes, as I see happen in many places where teachers' salaries are paid from public funds. There is only one remedy to meet this evil: if the appointment of teachers is left entirely to the parents, and they are conscientious about making a wise choice through their obligation to contribute to the cost. (Pliny, 1969, p. 277-283)

Over the last decade, proposals for introducing a degree of parental choice and inter-school competition into education have abounded, particularly in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. In some cases, such plans are already in place. With few exceptions, though, current choice programs pose barriers to the entry of new schools and to the exit of unpopular ones, exclude religious and/or profit-making institutions, restrict admissions and staffing policies, and otherwise control the supply and demand for education. Though private schooling exists in most industrialized countries, there is only limited competition at the primary and secondary levels. The comparatively heavy burden of tuition, when compared to the "free" status of tax-supported schools, greatly limits the clientele for private education. This in turn keeps the density of private institutions to a much lower level than if government did not provide schools. As a result, there is no nation currently offering a truly free and competitive market in education.

The Case Against

As market-inspired reform has gained in popularity, it has been subjected to a great deal of criticism. Attacks have been directed at the possible ill-effects of parental- choice, of for-profit schools, and of market systems as a whole. The most often heard argument against a market is that parents cannot be expected to make sound educational choices for their children, and must instead leave the key decisions to experts. A significant number of parents, it is assumed, would either fail to inform themselves about competing schools, or would base their choices on the "wrong" criteria. This contention has been directed at the population as a whole (Carnegie Foundation, 1992; Wells & Crain, 1992), and also at specific groups such as the poor or the poorly-educated (Payne, 1993; Levin, 1991; Kozol, 1992). A related criticism is that racial and economic isolation might be increased if families selected their schools based on race, ethnicity, or social status (Cookson, 1994; Kozol, 1992).

On the supply side, skeptics argue that for-profit schools with bold promises, flashy advertising, and special programs would lure customers away from academically superior institutions (Krashinsky, 1986). Murnane (1983), and others have noted the possibility of fraud in voucher systems, in which corrupt principals could offer kick-backs to parents who chose their institutions. Profit-making schools are also expected by some critics to reject difficult-to-educate children, e.g. those with disabilities or serious discipline problems. According to Shanker and Rosenberg (1992), these children would be more expensive to teach and hence would either be expelled more readily or refused admission entirely.

All these objections have in common the idea that education is fundamentally different from other human exchanges, and that as a result, the natural checks and balances of the market would fail to operate as they normally do. There is a second line of argument that takes the opposite position, namely, that an educational market would fail precisely because it would operate in the same way as other markets (Krashinsky, 1986). Education, so the argument goes, benefits not only the students and their families, but their fellow citizens as well. These indirect benefits are said to include social harmony, political stability, and a thriving economy. According to Levin (1991), public school systems are capable of producing the aforementioned benefits, while a competitive market of private schools could either not produce them at all, or do so only at prohibitive regulatory expense.

The remaining criticisms are based on the results of "limited choice" or "public school choice" programs, which place many restrictions on schools and families, and generally do not allow the participation of private or parochial schools. Smith and Meier (1995), for example, argue that since programs allowing parents to choose from among different public schools have failed to substantially increase student learning, the same should be expected of an unregulated market. The experience with heavily regulated parental choice in the Netherlands (Brown, 1992; Elmore, 1990) is also cited in arguments against the effectiveness of competition. In the United States, comparisons between existing public and private schools have led Cookson (1994) to conclude that a market would not improve education. The same author also reasons that since private schools have rarely been included in choice programs, there is insufficient evidence to support free market educational reform.

The Case in Favor

Virtually all of the criticisms discussed above have been disputed by proponents of parental choice. Members of the minority groups assumed to be incompetent or uninterested in their children's education are foremost in defending their ability and prerogative to choose. State representative Polly Williams (1994), herself an African-American single parent, championed a private school choice plan in Milwaukee Wisconsin on the grounds that public schooling had failed the urban community and that competitive private provision offered a superior education. Similar arguments have been made by Native- American educator Ben Chavis (1994). Empirical studies have shown that poor parents with limited formal education, from Massachusetts (Fossey, 1994) to the mountain villages of Nepal (Pande, 1977), can and do choose schools on rational grounds (see also U.S. Dept. of Education, 1995; Martinez et al, 1994).

Arguments that racial segregation would increase under a free market have been challenged from two different perspectives. The late James Coleman (1990) observed that racial segregation within the American public school system was greater than that among private schools. So, while the percentage of African-American students in the public sector is greater than the percentage in the private sector, public schools are more likely to be all-white or all-black than their private counterparts. Opposing the very essence of the segregation claim are educators such as Derrick Bell (1987), who believe that the freedom to create separate schools for African Americans would be a boon rather than a hardship.

The assertion that private schools might defraud parents is commonly countered with the argument that such problems exist everywhere, including public schools. The cases of East St. Louis (Schmidt, 1995) and Washington D.C. are notorious examples. Rinehart and Lee (1991) note that a competitive market would at least exert pressure on a school to deal honestly and fairly with parents in order to maintain a healthy reputation, while the public monopoly offers educators no such incentive. Along the same lines, John Coons (1991) has observed that public schooling has not engendered the external benefits of social harmony and effective democracy assumed by its defenders. The American experience of Protestant bias in the education of immigrants at the turn of the century, as well as government-enforced racial segregation, are presented as evidence of this claim. Coons also contends that by removing the coercive element from school selection and allowing parents to choose for themselves, the goal of effective democracy would be strengthened.

To resolve the issue of difficult-to-educate children, Myron Lieberman (1991), investigated the current practices among private institutions. He found that rather than focusing on easy-to-educate students, the single largest group of for-profit schools actually serves the disabled. Studies have also suggested that urban private schools are able to maintain a higher level of discipline than their public counterparts with few if any admissions requirements, and only infrequent student expulsions (Blum, 1985).

For the supporter of free markets, objections based on public school choice programs are seen as misguided. To function effectively markets require significant competition, the lure of profit-making, and a minimum of restrictions on buyers and sellers. Few if any of these criteria hold among existing choice programs (OECD, 1994), and as a result it is argued that they cannot be expected to show any significant benefits (Lieberman, 1989).

The above rebuttals aside, the economic case for an educational market rests on two main presumptions: that monopoly control of education leads to coercion, indifference to the needs of families, and stagnation in the form and content of instruction, while competition and the profit motive would lead to greater quality and efficiency. The first case has been made at both national and school levels. While inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending in U.S. public schools tripled between 1959/60 and the present (U. S. Department of Education, 1993), test scores either held constant or declined (Sowell, 1993; Boaz, 1991). Comparisons between public school administrations and those of the private Catholic sector have shown the public bureaucracy to employ as many as thirty times the number of administrators per-pupil (Boaz, 1991). On a school by school basis, Eric Hanushek (1986; 1989) studied correlations between spending and student achievement only to find that the relationship was not statistically significant. Similar results have been reported by Childs & Shakeshaft (1986). Because of the absence of any truly competitive market in education, little direct contemporary evidence is available to demonstrate its effects on efficiency or achievement. In those cases where a limited degree of competition does exist, however, Hoffer et al. (1990), Borland and Howsen (1993), and others have found small but significant positive effects. Outside the field of education, the superiority of markets to monopolies is widely accepted, and Winston (1993) has demonstrated that reductions in regulation are generally associated with lower prices and better services for consumers, and even yield higher revenues for producers.

The Present Work

As can be gleaned from the arguments cited above, the debate over a market in education has drawn almost entirely from the limited body of contemporary evidence. With the exception of E.G. West's (1994) analysis of 19th century England, the historical evidence regarding market vs. monopoly provision in education has been largely ignored. Education, however, is not a recent invention. Two and a half thousand years of schooling, from the informal to the regimented, from complete parental freedom to totalitarian domination, have preceded current practice. The study of educational history thus offers a wealth of insights into the effects of monetary incentives and centralized administration on the actions of parents and educators.

The next section looks at the educational experiences of four historical periods and places: classical Greece, Germany at the Reformation, England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and France after the Revolution. This selection is a more or less representative sample from a larger survey of the subject currently in progress. The most valuable lessons these histories have to teach us concern the relationship between school governance and school quality. In particular, they highlight the differences between markets and centralized bureaucratic school systems on three important measures of school performance: how well they respond to and satisfy the demands of parents and students (e.g. through innovation and diversity in curriculum), the degree to which they benefit their students directly (e.g. higher literacy, job/life skills), and their indirect benefits to the rest of society (e.g. thriving economy, social harmony). [...]

Having described the history of schooling in these four different contexts, it is useful to see what commonalities present themselves. In particular, it is fruitful to look back at the three measures of quality listed in the introduction, namely: responsiveness and innovation, direct benefits, and indirect benefits.

There is no question that competitive educational markets have been more responsive to the needs and demands of parents than centrally controlled, subsidized systems. This has held true whether the monolithic systems have been run and paid for by governments, as was most commonly the case, or by religious societies. In Athens, changing public demand resulted in changes to the elementary curriculum, and even led to the creation of secondary education. Spartan schooling, both due to implicit features of its organization and to the explicit wishes of its rulers, kept all innovation and progress at bay for hundreds of years. In pre- reformation Germany, it was the small private school that was first to offer instruction in the vernacular, both to adults and children. The state-run schools fostered by Luther and Melanchthon often ignored the wishes of the public, insisting on a classical course of studies useless to the common man. The same was true of England's endowed grammar schools. English Dame schools, by contrast, taught only what parents were willing to pay for, even attracting families away from the subsidized schools run by religious societies. For centuries, the most sophisticated and modern instruction in England was to be had at private secondary schools, which introduced the sciences, practical engineering and surveying techniques, naval skills, and living foreign languages. Before they were squeezed out of existence by tax-subsidized public schooling, there was simply nothing that could compare to them. In France, monitorial schools led the way in pedagogical innovation and in meeting public demands--so much so that other schools were forced to adopt their methods in order to avoid losing pupils.

In looking at the direct benefits bestowed on students by different approaches to educational organization, the clearest distinction to be found is between the practical and the pointless. Privately financed and operated schools have tended to offer programs of practical benefit to their clients, while centralized systems have taught only those subjects chosen by their founders or administrators--in most cases subjects of little value to the average member of the public. While private schools have consistently taught literacy in the vernacular of their clients for thousands of years, this has only rarely been the case in state or charity-run schools. When it was finally taught by the religious societies in England, they often deliberately omitted teaching writing. Similarly, practical training in mathematics and science has been ignored by bureaucratic school systems until quite recently, while their history dates back to the 5th century B.C. in private schools.

Perhaps the most glaring contradiction between the beliefs of modern public school advocates and the historical evidence is in the area of indirect or social benefits (also called positive externalities). Defenders of public schooling argue that only it can preserve social harmony and a sound economy, while a competitive educational market would lead to social strife and presumably economic deterioration. Nothing could be further from the truth. Government-run schools have in fact been far more coercive, and far more likely to lead to social discord than their private counterparts. Tying themselves to a single religion or ideology, public schools have often alienated all those who did not share the chosen views. When French monitorial schools encouraged the intermingling of children of different social classes, and respecting intellectual merit no matter what its source, they were actually criticized for it by the ruling powers of public schooling. When English law forbade non-conformists to teach, they taught nonetheless, privately and illegally, and generally admitted students irrespective of their religion. Because private schools allowed families the option of pursuing the particular kind of education they value, conflicts were avoided.

Whenever the state chooses one world view over all others, it places its own people into conflict with one another. This has been happening for centuries, and it continues to happen today.

It's a strange thing, ask someone if their workplace would function more efficiently and their job be more satisfying if government bureaucrats took control of the company and, with the rare exception of the remaining unreconstructed New Deal/Great Society types, you're certain to get a "don't be ridiculous" for an answer. Yet these same folks are devoted to the notion that their kids' schools should be run by the State.

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WITH THE HEART OF A LION

The Realities of Courage (David Hogberg, 8/27/2003, AmericanProwler.com)

What do you suppose the phrase "you have to admire their courage -- and their realism" applies to? Our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan? Protesters in Iran? Nope, it applies to Republican governors who are willing to raise taxes. So said Washington Post columnist David Broder last Wednesday.

In a classic example of how not to think outside the box, Broder praised South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford and Alabama Governor Bob Riley who, unlike President Bush, "have chosen a different -- and more difficult -- course." When both were in Congress, they, presumably, took the easier path of opposing tax increases.

Funny how fleecing the taxpayer is somehow courageous but protesting the voracious appetite of government is cowardly and heartless. We're not in Kansas anymore.

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THE WISDOM OF JANGLING

How to Keep Young (Satchel Paige)

1 Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.
2 If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.
3 Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.
4 Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.
5 Avoid running at all times.
6 Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.

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OKAY, NOW MAKE A LEFT

Nascar: Engine of Change: Southern culture is driving back into the American idea. (DAVE KANSAS, August 27, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Last Saturday night, in the sparsely populated eastern hill country of Tennessee, more than 160,000 people gathered in this small town to watch cars race around a tiny oval. It was another sold-out event for Nascar, a sports juggernaut that now rivals the NFL in popular appeal.
It's a curious thing, Nascar's massive success. In an age of watered-down appeals to the lowest common denominator and concern about offending tender sensibilities, Nascar revels in its throwback authenticity. Races showcase muscular patriotism, grease-filled masculinity, fast cars and the unembarrassed invocation of God. All that goes down very well in the Bible Belt, where Nascar has its roots. But the remarkable growth of the sport has taken Nascar to places that squirm when too many American flags are flown. Even the green-minded Pacific Northwest is a strong television market for this gas-guzzling spectacle.

Nascar's growth has created challenges as the heirs of moonshiners start to mingle with urban wine sippers. While the good-ol'-boy concept has worked so far, Nascar frets about its image. One official says there's pressure to make the annual banquet--held in foreign territory (Manhattan)--"hipper." In addition, Nascar has shed smaller, Southeastern venues in favor of races in places like Chicago, Las Vegas and California. It's even talking about building a track near New York City.

"For me, leaving some of the smaller tracks, where the fans were closer to the action and there's more history, is a loss," says Robert Johnson, dean of the Lee College of Engineering at UNC-Charlotte, home to a motor-sports engineering program that attracts students from around the nation. "But at the same time, this is a sport, despite its incredible growth, that still provides access to the stars. It's hard to meet a pro football player, but these drivers are accessible, and they'll talk to you."

Still, it's not just the intimate aura of the sport. Nascar's growth coincides with a larger trend: The reincorporation of the South into the broader American idea. And to that end, Nascar finds itself rubbing off on the broader culture as much as it is trying to adapt to its broader fan base.

One of the most healthy things to happen in NASCAR in recent years was the rejection of Jeff Gordon by the fans, precisely the kind of crossover type who was supposed to appeal to the multi-culti crowd, right down to his Rainbow Warrior nickname. But the death of Dale Earnhardt left a void that does need to be filled, by his son or another, to keep the good ole boy image intact.

It's too much to hope though that you'd find another this great, The Last American Hero (Tom Wolfe)

The legend of Junior Johnson! In this legend, here is a country boy, Junior Johnson, who learns to drive by running whiskey for his father, Johnson, Senior, one of the biggest copper-still operators of all time, up in Ingle Hollow, near North Wilkesboro, in northwestern North Caro- lina, and grows up to be a famous stock car racing driver, rich, grossing $100,000 in 1963, for example, respected, solid, idolized in his hometown and throughout the rural South. There is all this about how good old boys would wake up in the middle of the night in the apple shacks and hear a supercharged Oldsmobile engine roaring over Brushy Mountain and say, "Listen at him-there he goes!" although that part is doubtful, since some nights there were so many good old boys taking off down the road in supercharged automobiles out of Wilkes County, and running loads to Charlotte, Salisbury, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, or wherever, it would be pretty hard to pick out one. It was Junior Johnson specifically, however, who was famous for the "bootleg turn" or "about-face," in which, if the Alcohol Tax agents had a roadblock up for you or were too close behind, you threw the car up into second gear, cocked the wheel, stepped on the accelerator and made the car's rear end skid around in a complete 180-degree arc, a complete about-face, and tore on back up the road exactly the way you came from. God! The Alcohol Tax agents used to burn over Junior Johnson. Practically every good old boy in town in Wilkesboro, the county seat, got to know the agents by sight in a very short titne. They would rag them practically to their faces on the sub- ject of Junior Johnson, so that it got to be an obsession. Finally, one night they had Junior trapped on the road up toward the bridge around Millersville, there's no way out of there, they had the barricades up and they could hear this souped-up car roaring around the bend, and here it comes-but suddenly they can hear a siren and see a red light flashing in the grille, so they think it's another agent, and boy, they run out like ants and pull those barrels and boards and sawhorses out of the way, and then-GgghEzzzzzzzhhhhhhggggggzzzzzzzeeeeeong! -gawdam! there he goes again, it was him, Junior Johnson! with a gawdam agent's si-reen and a red light in his grille!

I wasn't in the South five minutes before people started making oaths, having visions, telling these hulking great stories, all on the subject of Junior Johnson. At the Greensboro, North Carolina, Airport there was one good old boy who vowed he would have eaten "a bucket of it" if that would have kept Junior Johnson from switching from a Dodge racer to a Ford. Hell yes, and after that-God-almighty, remember that 1963 Chevrolet of Junior's? Whatever happened to that car? A couple of more good old boys join in. A good old boy, I ought to explain, is a generic term in the rural South referring to a man, of any age, but more often young than not, who fits in with the status system of the region. It usually means he has a good sense of humor and enjoys ironic jokes, is tolerant and easygoing enough to get along in long conversations at places like on the corner, and has a reasonable amount of physical courage. The term is usually heard in some such form as: "Lud? He's a good old boy from over at Crozet." These good old boys in the airport, by the way, were in their twenties, except for one fellow who was a cabdriver and was about forty-five, I would say. Except for the cabdriver, they all wore neo-Brummellian clothes such as Lacoste tennis shirts, Slim Jim pants, windbreakers with the collars turned up, "fast" shoes of the winkle-picker genre, and so on. I mention these details just by way of pointing out that very few grits, Iron Boy overalls, clodhoppers or hats with ventilation holes up near the crown enter into this story. Anyway, these good old boys are talking about Junior Johnson and how he has switched to Ford. This they unani- mously regard as some kind of betrayal on Johnson's part. Ford, it seems, they regard as the car symbolizing the established power struc- ture. Dodge is kind of a middle ground. Dodge is at least a challenger, not a ruler. But the Junior Johnson they like to remember is the Junior Johnson of 1963, who took on the whole field of NASCAR ( National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) Grand National racing with a Chevrolet. All the other drivers, the drivers driving Fords, Mercurys, Plymouths, Dodges, had millions, literally millions when it is all added up, millions of dollars in backing from the Ford and Chrysler Cor- porations. Junior Johnson took them all on in a Chevrolet without one cent of backing from Detroit. Chevrolet had pulled out of stock car racing. Yet every race it was the same. It was never a question of whether anybody was going to outrun Junior Johnson. It was just a question of whether he was going to win or his car was going to break down, since, for one thing, half the time he had to make his own racing parts. God! Junior Johnson was like Robin Hood or Jesse James or Little David or something. Every time that Chevrolet, No. 3, appeared on the track, wild curdled yells, "Rebel" yells, they still have those, would rise up. At Daytona, at Atlanta, at Charlotte, at Darlington, South Carolina; Bristol, Tennessee; Martinsville, Virginia-Junior Johnson!

And then the good old boys get to talking about whatever happened to that Chevrolet of Junior's, and the cabdriver says he knows. He says Junior Johnson is using that car to run liquor out of Wilkes County. What does he mean? For Junior Johnson ever to go near another load of bootleg whiskey again-he would have to be insane. He has this huge racing income. He has two other businesses, a whole automated chicken farm with 42,000 chickens, a road-grading business -but the cabdriver says he has this dream Junior is still roaring down from Wilkes County, down through the clay cuts, with the Atlas Arc Lip jars full in the back of that Chevrolet. It is in Junior's blood-and then at this point he puts his right hand up in front of him as if he is groping through fog, and his eyeballs glaze over and he looks out in the distance and he describes Junior Johnson roaring over the ridges of Wilkes County as if it is the ghost of Zapata he is describing, bound- ing over the Sierras on a white horse to rouse the peasants.

A stubborn notion! A crazy notion! Yet Junior Johnson has followers who need to keep him, symbolically, riding through nighttime like a demon. Madness! But Junior Johnson is one of the last of those sports stars who is not just an ace at the game itself, but a hero a whole people or class of people can identify with. Other, older examples are the way Jack Dempsey stirred up the Irish or the way Joe Louis stirred up the Negroes. Junior Johnson is a modern figure. He is only thirty-three years old and still racing. He should be compared to two other sports heroes whose cultural impact is not too well known. One is Antonino Rocca, the professional wrestler, whose triumphs mean so much to New York City's Puerto Ricans that he can fill Madison Square Garden, despite the fact that everybody, the Puerto Ricans included, knows that wrestling is nothing but a crude form of folk theatre. The other is Ingemar Johanssen, who had a tremendous meaning to the Swedish masses-they were tired of that old king who played tennis all the time and all his friends who keep on drinking Cointreau behind the screen of socialism. Junior Johnson is a modern hero, all involved with car culture and car symbolism in the South. A wild new thing-

Wild-gone wild, Fireball Roberts' Ford spins out on the first turn at the North Wilkesboro Speedway, spinning, spinning, the spin seems almost like slow motion-and then it smashes into the wooden guard- rail. It lies up there with the frame bent. Roberts is all right. There is a new layer of asphalt on the track, it is like glass, the cars keep spin- ning off the first turn. Ned Jarrett spins, smashes through the wood. "Now, boys, this ice ain't gonna get one goddamn bit better, so you can either line up and qualify or pack up and go home-"

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SELF-GOVERNMENT, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT

Dial down U.S. involvement in Iraq (Amitai Etzioni, 8/27/03, USA Today)

It is high time for a basic shift in approach: We must let Iraqis run most operations and openly take responsibility for them.

Once that happens, if there is not enough work, water or electricity to go around, Iraqis no longer will be able to blame us. If a water main or an oil pipeline blows up, it will be their own new government that is undermined, rather than U.S. forces and credibility.

The only matters that should remain under our control are the production and acquisition of weapons and the creation of a military force. This we can do from a small number of heavily fortified encampments outside of the major cities.

This radical change, critics may say, will allow the Baath party to reassert itself. As I see it, we should be willing to live with such a side effect during a transition period, just as we allowed many Nazi officials to keep running German ministries and factories after World War II -- for a while. Moreover, de-Baathification should be left to the Iraqis. If they refuse, they will live with the consequences.

Some may say that such a policy will lead to a Taliban-like Shiite government in the country's south. We should not be scared by such predictions. As long as we make it clear that if Iraqis host terrorists we will deal with them the same way we dealt with the Taliban, then they will be most unlikely to embark on such a course. And if the Iraqis are willing to put up with such a rigid, regimented life, that is their choice. Actually, given that many Iraqis, especially in parts of the country other than the south, oppose such fundamentalism, there will be plenty of opportunities for secular and religiously moderate Iraqis -- rather than Americans -- to confront the Shiites.

And what about the growing number of foreign terrorists? They did not come to fight a truly Iraqi government -- only our handpicked one. If they tried to tangle with a homegrown government, the Iraqis would run them out of town.

As Mr. Etzioni notes, freedom means, in part, being free to choose crappy governance.

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THE DEVIL EATS BACK BACON (via Brian Boys)

Overcoming Inertia on Porn: Sexual images of children are the target of Canadian Christian campaign. (Carol Lowes, 08/18/2003, Christianity Today)

Two years ago, Dallas police officers, U.S. postal authorities, and the Justice Department announced the arrests of 100 people in a global Internet child pornography ring. More than 250,000 people from 60 countries were paid subscribers, netting organizers more than $1 million a month. The bust has led to the arrests of hundreds of suspects around the world.

But comparatively few arrests have been made in Canada, even though police have the names of over two thousand suspects. Many understaffed police units have not followed up on the names and credit card numbers of the 2,300 Canadians who downloaded images advertised as child porn. Child porn generates $3 billion annually in online sales, according to a report by Internet Filters Review.

Robert Matthews of Ontario's police unit investigating child porn told the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, "Canadians produce as much or more child pornography, per capita, as any other developed country." [...]

Many Christian groups are calling for action. But they are finding inertia hard to overcome. Many Canadians consider graphic sexual content involving minors as a matter of free expression.

Maybe everything really is Canada's fault.

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THE ULTIMATE INDISTINGUISHABILITY OF TOTALITARIANISMS

Napoleon's Legacy Leads to the Gulag (Stephen Goode, Aug. 27, 2003, Insight on the News)

Dramatic subtlety has become an oxymoron in book marketing and among the reviewers who serve it, so it is not surprising that the prestigious journals that review literature didn't see anything to link these two new books. They should have.

Paul Johnson's concise and closely argued Napoleon is a biography of only 199 pages about the man who conquered most of Europe during the early years of the 19th century. It is part of the highly regarded "Penguin Lives Series" of the world's great men and women.

And, at 667 pages, Anne Applebaum's powerful and magisterial Gulag: A History isn't short at all. It is a detailed and deeply moving look at one of the 20th century's great evils, the vast network of Soviet concentration camps known as the Gulag where millions of men and women suffered, were starved and forced to do slave labor in the decades between 1917 and the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991.

The first of these books is set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and is about one man; the other encompasses much of the 20th century and tells the stories of millions. But in truth the two works tell us much about the same thing: the origins of modern dictatorships and the evils unleashed on the world by those dictatorships. [...]

How do the Gulag and Napoleon connect? In several ways. First, because it was Napoleon who set up the apparatus of state necessary to tyranny. Second, because of his example of ruthlessness. As Johnson points out, Napoleon's minister of police, Joseph Fouch?, "operated the world's first secret police," the prototype of the Gestapo under Adolf Hitler and in the U.S.S.R. of the secret police, known under various acronyms as the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB. But under whatever name, it was the Soviet secret police who were responsible for much of the horror perpetrated in the U.S.S.R.

Napoleon's taste for mass slaughter, too, portends that of the Soviet Union. Millions died in Bonaparte's military adventures - Johnson estimates the number at between 4 million and 5 million. At Jaffa during his Egyptian campaign, Napoleon ordered the slaughter of 4,500 prisoners. The mass killing was done by bayonet or by drowning to save ammunition.

In April 1940, the NKVD murdered more than 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn on Stalin's explicit orders, shooting each man in the back of the head, Applebaum reminds us. Then he covered it up, with subsequent help in doing so from his new ally Franklin Roosevelt, claiming that the Germans committed the massacre. It wasn't until 1991 that Boris Yeltsin admitted Soviet responsibility.

Johnson sees Napoleon as the prototype of much that has happened since his death. But, behind Bonaparte, Johnson names the French Revolution as the source of Napoleon's own lawlessness and contempt for life and tradition. Napoleon fulfilled the revolution's "example and teaching," Johnson argues. What was that example and teaching? "The revolution was a lesson in the power of evil to replace idealism, and Bonaparte was its ideal pupil. Moreover, the revolution left behind itself a huge engine: administrative and legal machinery to repress the individual such as the monarch of the ancien r?gime never dreamed of; centralized power to organize national resources that no previous state had ever possessed; an absolute concentration of authority ... that had never been known before; and a universal teaching that such concentration expressed the general will of the people."

As Simone Weil said: "It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, but revolution."

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WHERE WILL THE WHEEL STOP?

NEVADA: Nothing But Musers And Poseurs? (The Hotline, 8/27/03)

Richard Ziser, ex-chair of the Coalition for the Protection of Marriage, has become the first GOPer to enter the fray following Rep. Jim Gibbons' (R-02) decision not to run against Sen. Harry Reid (D). Other possible GOPers who said they my run included Sec/State Dean Heller, Treas. Brian Krolicki, LG Lorraine Hunt and Realtor Jack Woodcock (AP, 8/27).

Ralston Report's Ralston writes on "all these trial balloons floating by musers and poseurs alike." Ralston takes a "quick look at" the GOP "constitutional officers, who get mentioned" as Reid challengers "just because they have run statewide."

AG Brian Sandoval "would never leave so soon after being elected to his first term. He has patience."

Heller "wanted Gibbons' congressional seat. The most viable. He is really looking at it. Has personal considerations -- four kids, including one just starting college -- in four schools. Very supportive spouse. Will decide within two months. Won't run to lose just to acquire more name recognition. Will see if party" in NV and DC "will support him."

The fundraising matters less than having a credible candidate so long as the congressional elections get nationalized, which the President seems intent on doing.

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LINE KING

Jack Kirby Heroes Thrive in Comic Books and Film (ELVIS MITCHELL, 8/27/03, NY Times)

The characters that spilled out of Kirby's pen are not confined to the DC books or to the astonishing run that Marvel Comics had in the 1960's. In some cases Kirby pasted his characters over photo collages, furthering the Pop Art homage paid to him by Roy Lichtenstein. He also made a template in the 1940's by creating Captain America with Joe Simon.

In "The Great Comic Book Heroes," Jules Feiffer summarized the appeal of Kirby's 1940 comic books, a style that took on a smooth and magnetic elan: "Muscles stretched magically, foreshortened shockingly. Legs were never less than four feet apart when a punch was thrown. Every panel was a population explosion--casts of thousands: all fighting, leaping, falling, crawling."

Mr. Chabon agreed with Mr. Feiffer's assessment. "He could make the comics panel seem too small to contain the stories he was telling," he said. "What I loved about him then, and continue to admire about him now, was that sense of the inexhaustibility of his imagination in every issue of whatever comic he happened to be working on. He worked all over the place his entire career and would just fill each one with 15 great ideas for a story and just push them all into the same book together. And then the next issue would come out, and he'd have 15 more."

What's most interesting is to contrast his work to that of Steve Ditko.

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WHICH WOULD MAKE HIS CRITICS THE GENERALS

3 Plead Guilty as Terror Investigation in Virginia Expands (NEIL A. LEWIS, 8/27/03, NY Times)

Three members of a suburban Virginia group that federal prosecutors say was training to wage Islamic war abroad, notably in India, have pleaded guilty to weapons charges, and administration officials said today that they planned to expand their investigation into the group. [...]

One of the three who pleaded guilty on Monday, Yong Ki Kwan, admitted to a federal judge that he had trained with firearms at the camp of Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan in preparation for a possible mission abroad on behalf of an Islamic political cause.

Another defendant who pleaded guilty, Khwaja Mahmood Hasan, acknowledged visiting the camp. His lawyer, Thomas Abbenante of Washington, said in a statement that Mr. Hasan regretted his actions, which were out of character and the result of "youthful indiscretion and his being persuaded by the preaching of a misguided Islamic cleric," an apparent reference to Mr. Timini.

The third defendant who pleaded guilty on Monday, Donald T. Surratt, did not travel to Pakistan but admitted having transported weapons used in terrorist training.

The guilty pleas were especially satisfying to the Justice Department because a federal judge had criticized the indictments as weak and sought to release some of the defendants on bail. At the time of the June indictment, many experts in civil liberties denounced the investigation as harassment of Muslims who simply liked to play paintball together.

John Ashcroft is on a winning streak that must make Meadowlark Lemon envious.

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SPECIAL DELIVERY

A cry for radical change in Palestine (Rami G. Khouri, 8/27/03, The Daily Star )

As Israel-Palestinian mutual military and political violence increases, we are likely to see the most visible consequences of this within Palestinian society. The tensions between President Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas are the most obvious, but not the only, signs of this. Two prevailing Palestinian power structures are slowly falling apart - the one established 40 years ago when Yasser Arafat, Mahmoud Abbas and others in the mid-1960s founded Fatah and quickly took control of the Palestinian national movement after the 1967 war debacle, and the more recent self-governing Palestinian National Authority that was established after the 1993 Oslo accords, also dominated by Fatah and its partners. Both these Palestinian leaderships are slowly collapsing in a heap of unfulfilled expectations and self-inflicted incompetence.

These problems are not the sole making of the Palestinians. Israel has been miserly and inconsistent in agreeing to a fair and comprehensive peace based on ending its colonization of occupied Palestinian lands. It has consistently made progress toward a negotiated two-state solution dependent primarily on Israel’s a priori demand for ironclad security, rather than the more politically realistic attempt to fulfill Palestinian and Israeli security requirements simultaneously.

The United States is also an erratic third-party mediator. Its occasional dramatic gesture (President George W. Bush’s June trip to the region) is negated by two chronic failures: It has not used its power to push both sides to implement the peace-making dynamics that it has fostered and, more often than not, it lands closer to the Israeli than the Palestinian side on key controversies (e.g.: Washington just signed a $9 billion loan guarantees foreign aid package with Israel without carrying through on its recent threat to deduct from it part of the cost of Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank; and it has been much more explicitly understanding of Israel’s security concerns and right to retaliate and protect itself than it has been of the corresponding Palestinian viewpoint). The other “Quartet” sponsors of the current “road map” peace plan - Russia, the EU, the UN - seem to have washed their hands of the matter or are on an extended political vacation.

The US and Israel gambled when they pressured the Palestinians to name Abbas as prime minister. His impossible mission comprised the American-Israeli demand to crack down on Palestinian terror and legitimate armed resistance against Israel and the Palestinian popular demand to end the Israeli occupation. Abbas has not satisfied any of his four key constituencies - the Palestinians under occupation, the other 4 million Palestinian refugees abroad, the Israelis, and Washington.

Abbas will struggle now to dig himself out of this hole, where his failure to deliver translates quickly into irrelevance and oblivion. The Americans and Israelis hand-picked him in haste, and will drop him just as swiftly if he proves useless to them.

Mr. Abbas is not required to deliver anything, only to accept delivery of statehood, which will then make him appear to have delivered for the Palestinian people. If we can keep him alive that long.

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JOHN WHO?

Dean Jumps Out To Big Lead In New Hampshire: Survey Shows Surge By Former Vermont Governor (AP, August 27, 2003)

Dean leads Kerry 38 percent to 17 percent in the Zogby International poll of likely primary voters conducted this week. Kerry, the Massachusetts senator, led in New Hampshire earlier this year, with a 26 percent to 13 percent advantage in February. The two candidates were essentially tied in a poll by Zogby in June.

What is the premise of the Kerry candidacy if he can't win NH?

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WARNING--SILLY ITEM! (via Glenn Dryfoos)

Warning -- Serious Item! (Gregg Easterbrook, 8/26/03, TMQ)

Judge Roy Moore, the publicity-seeker who put the 2.5-ton Ten Commandments in the Alabama state courthouse, declared Monday that he could disobey the direct order of a federal judge because "judges do not make laws, they interpret them." Since, Moore continued, an interpretation can be wrong, therefore he may defy a judicial order. So presumably Judge Moore also thinks that if he sentences a man to prison, the man can declare that the interpretation might be wrong and walk free? It's exactly the same logic.

Moore further said that the First Amendment precept, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion," does not apply to him because "I am not Congress." Drag this incompetent lunatic out of the court quickly, please. Anyone with entry-level knowledge of Constitutional law knows that the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, was intended to extend the Bill of Rights to state governments; that a 1937 Supreme Court decision specifically declared that the First Amendment binds state officials like Judge Moore.

We're big fans of Mr. Easterbrook--for his political writing, and despite his love of the anti-American/anti-human NFL--but note the core silliness of the argument that the 14th binds all state officials to federal standards is demonstrated in the incorporation rulings a mere 70 years later. It's like saying the Constitution was intended to protect abortion rights as shown by Roe v. Wade. Folks who favor judicial activism should at least have the honesty to acknowledge that, no matter how much they like the results, it is anticonstitutional and antidemocratic.

Further, it is Mr. Easterbrook's logic that is specious: judges, including Judge Moore, are quite specifically given the authority to sentence people to jail; there is no similar grant of authority to federal judges to apply the Bill of Rights universally. James Madison and company may be dead, but if the Left wants to bind states with the Court's interpretations of the Bill of Rights, it should be easy enough to draft such an amendment. And it will be adopted on the 4th of never, which is why they don't use constitutional means to achieve their end.

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OTHER THAN THAT WE'D BE PALS

The Shi'ite-Sunni divide: Part 2: Slowly building bridges (Sultan Shahin, 8/27/03, Asia Times)

It is common knowledge that the militant Pakistani organization Sipah-e-Sahaba, that is accused of targeted killing of Shi'ites, has for years been financed by the Wahhabi rulers of Saudi Arabia. Iran is said to be financing Tehrike-Nifaze-Fiqhe-Jafria, a militant Shi'ite organization in Pakistan. These two organizations have kept fanning the flames of growing Shi'ite-Sunni enmity in Pakistan.

As for the Arab world, renowned US-based Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr says, "A great deal of money and effort has been spent in the last few years to fan the fire of hatred between Shi'ites and Sunnis in the Persian Gulf region, with obvious political and economic fruits for the powers-to-be."

It was not too long ago that Arabs conferred "near-unanimous legitimacy" to Saddam's invasion of Iran in the 1980s on the specious plea that the growing Shi'ite power in the neighborhood was a danger to the Sunni Arab rulers of the Gulf region. The eight-year-long Iran-Iraq war, that did more than anything else to widen the Shi'ite-Sunni divide, was supported to the hilt by the Western powers.

It is this unholy alliance of secular Arab nationalism of Saddam's Iraq, the Wahhabi Islamic fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia and Western imperialism with its massive media resources that has created the present perception of a vast Shi'ite-Sunni divide. It is not for nothing that the Western media seldom mention an Iraqi as Muslim. There are no Muslims in Iraq, only Shi'ites, Sunnis or Kurds; just as there were no Muslims in Kosovo, only ethnic Albanians.

The fact that the widely predicted Shi'ite backlash against the decades-long Sunni domination of Iraq has not materialized may mean that the imperialist project of divide and rule has not succeeded in that country, at least so far. Now it is for Shi'ites and Sunnis in other parts of the world to build on the Iraqi example and seek to bridge the gulf separating the two sects to promote harmony and peace undeterred by the bigotry of extremists and the machinations of imperialist powers.

If only we had sense enough to fan the flames. But it seems germane that we betrayed the Shi'ite uprising after the First Iraq War, a cause which would have served such purposes well.

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IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM; SILENCE 'EM

GAO Cites Corporate Shaping of Energy Plan (Mike Allen, August 26, 2003, Washington Post)

The White House collaborated heavily with corporations in developing President Bush's energy policy but repeatedly refused to give congressional investigators details of the meetings, according to a federal report issued yesterday.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in the report that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham privately discussed the formulation of Bush's policy "with chief executive officers of petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical and natural gas companies, among others."

An energy task force, led by Vice President Cheney, relied for outside advice primarily on "petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists," while seeking limited input from academic experts, environmentalists and policy groups, the GAO said.

So the Attorney General shouldn't talk about the nation's laws and the administration shouldn't talk to energy companies about energy policy? And Judge Moore shouldn't display the Ten Commandments and Mel Gibson shouldn't tell the story of the Crucifixion? Is the Left trying to outlaw the mere communication of conservative ideas? Are they incapable of answering them with ideas of their own?

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STORYBOOK ENDING

Loner who shot Reagan 'ready to be released' (Toby Harnden, 27/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

John Hinckley, 48, has been confined to secure wards in St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington for more than 20 years after being found not guilty of attempted murder by reason of insanity, but could soon be released without supervision.

After making several visits, accompanied by psychiatric staff, to bowling alleys, bookshops, cinemas and the beach over the past three years, Hinckley has applied for 10 unsupervised visits to his parents' home in Virginia, including five overnight stays.

In court documents, Hinckley's lawyer, Barry Levine, stated: "It is undisputed that Mr Hinckley's psychosis and depression have been in full remission and that he has shown no symptoms thereof for over a decade.

"Mr Hinckley does not pose a risk of danger to himself or others now or in the reasonable future." [...]

Several of Hinckley's day trips around Washington have been with Leslie deVeau, a former patient at St Elizabeth's who was found not guilty by reason of insanity of the murder of her 10-year-old daughter, Erin, in 1982. [...]

Previous applications for release were withdrawn due to Hinckley's obsession with the actress Jodie Foster. In 1987, he was discovered with 20 photos of Foster, with whom he had become fixated after seeing her in the film Taxi Driver.

He was also found to have corresponded with the serial killer Ted Bundy and Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1985.

The tragedy is that Mr. Hinckley could well be of more sound mind now than two of his victims: Ronald Reagan and James Brady.

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MAJORITY RULES

Dewhurst can change Senate's two-thirds rule, Justice Department says: Ruling comes day before Republicans and Democrats head to federal court (Austin AMERICAN-STATESMAN, August 26, 2003)

As the Legislature ended its second special session on congressional redistricting today, all the players in the partisan standoff geared up to take their battle to a Laredo courtroom on Wednesday.

But within hours of the session's end, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a ruling that raised new questions about whether the courts will have any authority to settle the dispute.

The ruling found that the Senate did not need pre-clearance from the Justice Department to get rid of an internal rule that requires two-thirds of senators to sign off on any legislation.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst had waived that rule to clear the way for a new congressional map that would likely give Republicans a majority in the state's 32-member congressional delegation. The map is supported by a majority of state senators, but not two-thirds.

Senate Democrats - who left the state to break the Senate's quorum and kill the map - sued in federal court, saying Dewhurst had violated the federal Voting Rights Act by changing the chamber's rules to draw a new map that will affect minority voters.

"Our analysis indicates that the practice in question is an internal legislative parliamentary rule or practice - not a change affecting voting - and therefore is not subject to the preclearance requirement," Joseph Rich, chief of the voting section in the Justice Department's civil rights division wrote to state officials.

Federal law requires changes to voting patterns or districts in southern states to be considered by the Justice Department before taking effect to ensure that minorities' voting rights are protected.

Now where are they going to hide?

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YOU DON'T NORMALLY LOOK TO GERMANY FOR GOOD POLITICAL IDEAS (via Rick Turley)

German Group Lobbies for Child's Right to Vote (NPR, 8/26/03)

In Germany, a nonprofit organization makes a child's right to vote the centerpiece of its agenda. The German Family Association says giving children the right to vote would force politicians to pay more attention to the younger generation and lead to policies that could reverse the country's dropping birth rate.

The better idea would be to allow fathers to vote for their children, so a father of three would have four votes.

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HERD ON THE STREET (via Budd White)

Debunking the myth of the 'Arab street' (Ari Melber, August 26, 2003, Baltimore Sun)

Politicians in the Middle East and the United States agree on one thing: The occupation of Iraq will shape how America is viewed in the infamous "Arab street." But any examination of public opinion in the region should begin by discarding this misleading cliche.

The Arab street is inaccurate, disrespectful and obstructive to U.S. efforts to engage the Middle East. There is no monolithic Arab street stewing with a singular hatred of the United States; the populations of 18 different countries and the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories do not think as one group.

It suggests a mob mentality; even when France is frustrating we don't decry the "French street." It is simply hypocritical to talk of public opinion at home and ethnic streets overseas.

Defenders say the term emphasizes the gap between Arab dictators and their citizens. But it is precisely those rulers who advance the impression that the "street" may erupt at any moment (even as they control information and limit expression). This is the most dangerous part of perpetuating the "street" fiction: It feeds the scare tactics of dictators in the Middle East.

Liberties -- for lefties only (Debra J. Saunders, August 26, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

Some of the very people who are attacking the Patriot Act on civil libertarian grounds are raising questions as to whether Attorney General John Ashcroft has the right to lobby in its favor.

Here's an idea for a new slogan: Free speech -- Ashcroft need not apply.

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to Ashcroft that speeches he delivered in U.S. cites to boost the besieged Patriot Act appeared to conflict with congressional rules regarding "publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress." Conyers objected to Ashcroft's goal of setting the record straight on the USA Patriot Act -- that is, correcting the anti-Patriot Act propaganda -- and suggested that Ashcroft "desist from further speaking engagements" until he could establish that what he was doing was legit. (DOJ attorneys disagree with Conyers' interpretation.)

In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union "questioned" the Department of Justice's "use of public money to counter broad public concern about the expansive surveillance powers of the law."

Note that both Conyers and the ACLU object to Ashcroft speaking out. If he had agreed with them, if he were not a dissident on their issue, apparently there would be no problem.

Somehow it's easier to believe that the experts are channeling the Arab street than it is to believe that the ACLU speaks for broad public concerns in America.

---

ANY WAY YOU SLICE THEM, YOU GET STATISM

Faith, Ideology, and Politics (David Forte, August 2003, John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs)

Many in the West think, or used to think, that the problem of violence in the Middle East lay within Islam itself. Jihad and Islam were, and are, seen as the same thing. There is no doubt that there is a strain of violence within Muslim culture, as there was a strain of violence within medieval culture, and within many tribal cultures. And my studies convince me that some elements of the legal tradition in Islam held by some particular writers can work to validate atavistic violence: the death penalty for apostasy, the prohibitions against blasphemy, the (otherwise normally appropriate) constraints on certain sexual activities, the approval of slavery, and the sometime legal degradation of religious minorities.

But what the recent bombing attacks in Israel and Baghdad show is that the enemy in the Middle East is not Islam, or at least the mainline tradition of Islam, but Fascism. The Baathists are overt Fascists, but so are Hamas and Hezbollah. Sometimes this brutal strain of Fascism wears an Islamic mask, but it is still in its essence the same kind of Fascist totalitarianism that ruined Europe, the same kind of Fascist/Communist totalitarianism that ruined Russia and China, and wounded Africa and Latin America. It is the Fascism that made the Holocaust in Europe and would do so again in the Middle East if it could.

The mask it wears, however, is important. In Germany, Fascism wore the mask of maintaining a rich cultural tradition, and seemed more valid because generations of intellectuals had accepted Social Darwinism. In Russia, Communism wore the mask of humanitarian concern for the worker and the poor, and it seemed more valid because generations of intellectuals had accepted the class dichotomies of Fabian Socialism and Progressivism. In the Middle East, Fascist terrorism tries to wear the mask of Islam, and it seems more valid to many because of its surface connection to a deeply held faith.

Considered simply as the idea that there should be an extremely powerful central State and that it should control every aspect of the nation's life, there really is no difference among Nazism, Communism, and Islamism

---

STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS COLD

Don't believe all you hear about California economy: Despite gloomy portrayals by candidates for governor, the state is staging a recovery. (Christopher L. Tyner, 8/27/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

To hear the gubernatorial candidates talk about it, you'd think California has become a Third World nation, a Bangladesh where people wear a lot of spandex. As the would-be governors pitch their wares for the Oct. 7 recall, they tell the same bedtime story: How the California dream has turned into a nightmare.

Yet their gloomy scenarios may be a bit melodramatic, even by California standards. True, the state is facing a serious budget problem and, like the rest of the nation, is struggling to pull itself out of an economic hole.

But the economy here is doing better than many states, and California still has some built-in strengths that others don't. Successes like Electronic Arts or Lockheed Corp. - busy building 100 C-17 military cargo planes in Long Beach - were created by a hothouse of growth ingredients that only California can serve up: a pool of educated workers, prestigious universities, great weather, entrepreneurial vigor, and a walletfull of venture capital.

It's the formula generating a $1.36 trillion economy - the fifth largest in the world. It draws 40 percent of the nation's venture capital to the state and has helped create an explosive housing market as well as awaken the slumbering high-tech industry.

It's gathering momentum despite the continued effects from the Sept. 11 terror attacks, a national economic downturn, the impact of the SARS epidemic on state travel and business, and the effects of the Iraq war.

Whenever a polity is struggling, folks ask who would want to run it. But that's precisely the time to get elected because you'll get credit for the inevitable recovery, even if you had nothing to do with it: witness Bill Clinton.

---

HURRY SLOWLY

Iraqis impatient for promised democracy: Four months after the US occupied Iraq, citizens wonder when they will have a say in the new government. (Cameron W. Barr, 8/27/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

"The Americans said they came ... to liberate Iraq from the former regime and promised to help us stand up again and reconstruct the country," says Salah al-Ezzi, a doctor who presides over one of Iraq's many tribes from a verdant, palm-fringed yard in a village an hour outside of central Baghdad. Four months later, he continues, Iraqis instead face arrests and checkpoints. "They don't pay any respect to the people," he says of the Americans.

Dr. Ezzi's views may be partly the product of impatience. It has been a year and eight months since the US toppled the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and general elections there are still 10 months away. It took US occupation authorities in post-World War II Japan more than a year and a half to hold elections. Postwar Germany was occupied by the allies in June 1945, with the first zone elections in 1946, and the first West German parliamentary vote held only in August 1949. [...]

Council member Mowaffak al-Rubaie says the US is pushing too fast toward a democratic system. "I personally feel the Americans are rushing us toward democracy," says Dr. Rubaie ruing the absence of a "democratic culture" in the country. [...]

Rubaie credits Bremer and his colleagues for appointing the members of the Council in a way that reflects Iraq's sectarian and ethnic diversity. "Show me one component of the Iraqi community that is not represented here," Rubaie says.

Others aren't so pleased. "You're dissecting the country," says Mudhar Showkat, a senior member of the Iraqi National Congress, a group formed in exile that has advocated speedy elections and a quick return to Iraqi sovereignty. He argues that the allocation of seats according to background sets a dangerous precedent. "You're building up something that will lead to a clash as it did in Lebanon," he warns, citing a country where complex formulas for apportioning power devolved into years of civil war.

Got that?

---

A HISTORIC MOMENT, BUT HOT HIS

McClintock sees recall election as historic moment (Daniel Weintraub, August 26, 2003, Sacramento Bee)

When California lawmakers voted in 1999 to approve legislation giving state employees more generous retirement benefits and opening the door to a round of big increases in local government pensions, only a handful of legislators opposed the bill.

One of them was then-Assemblyman Tom McClintock.

A couple of years later, when both houses of the Legislature overwhelmingly approved a rich new contract for state prison guards, giving them a 35 percent increase over five years, there was even less resistance. Just one lawmaker voted no. It was McClintock, who was by then a state senator.

Both bills became law and today stand as monuments to the worst excesses of the Legislature and Gov. Gray Davis. They also could be exhibits A and B in McClintock's campaign for governor in the recall election, vivid examples of how things would be different if he won on Oct. 7.

"Governor McClintock could have stopped both of those, and would have," the Ventura County Republican told me in a recent interview.

The pension bill is costing taxpayers more than $500 million a year, with the ripple effects on local government probably at least that big and still growing. The tab for the prison guards' contract, when fully implemented, has been estimated at upwards of $600 million annually by the non-partisan legislative analyst. Alone the two actions account for more than 10 percent of the structural gap between spending and revenues in the state budget.

McClintock, 47, believes that bills such as those are only the start of the problem. He has cast himself as the one candidate capable of taking on what he calls the "spending lobby" of interest groups, a loose and ever-changing coalition of public employee unions and advocates for the services they provide.

Mr. McClintock seems like a worthy guy, but he's not going to be the next governor of CA and if he were he couldn't get anything through the legislature anyway. He should cut a deal with Arnold and Karl Rove to back him in a campaign against Barbara Boxer in exchange for getting out of this race.

---

JUST KEEP MOVING THE GOALPOSTS

Bush, Speaking to Veterans, Says Iraq May Not Be Last Strike (DAVID STOUT, August 26, 2003, NY Times)

President Bush defended his policy on Iraq today, declaring that the United States had struck a blow against terrorism in overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. And Mr. Bush said the United States might carry out other pre-emptive strikes.

"No nation can be neutral in the struggle between civilization and chaos,'' Mr. Bush told members of the American Legion gathered in St. Louis for the group's convention.

"We've adopted a new strategy for a new kind of war,'' Mr. Bush said, to loud applause. "We will not wait for known enemies to strike us again. We will strike them in their camps or caves or wherever they hide, before they hit more of our cities and kill more of our citizens.''

"We will do everything in our power to deny terrorists weapons of mass destruction before they can commit murder on an unimaginable scale,'' Mr. Bush said. "The security of this nation, and our friends, requires decisive action, and with a broad coalition, we're taking that action around the globe. We are on the offensive against terror, and we will stay on the offensive against terror.''

The president also repeated his vision of a Palestinian state living in peace with Israel. But he added, "A Palestinian state will never be built on the foundation of violence,'' and he said organizations that helped to finance Middle East terrorism under the guise of charitable giving must be thwarted.

Let's hear Howard Dean run against a war while we're fighting it.

---

WE MAY NOT BE BAKING OUR PARENTS, BUT WE ARE ALL ON VACATION

DUBYA TROUBLE? (John Podhoretz, August 26, 2003, NY Post)

A PAGE-ONE Washington Post article summed up this week's conventional wisdom perfectly: "The president no longer enjoys the aura of invincibility that surrounded him only a few months ago . . . Democrats especially have re-evaluated his presidency and concluded that, on the issues now dominating the political debate, Bush does not have the upper hand."

Only one problem: The article by Dan Balz and Dana Milbank was published a year ago - on Aug. 11, 2002.

Its thesis was that President Bush's standing had faded after 9/11, that he was vulnerable, and that the White House was getting scared.

It's déjà vu all over again. [...]

The August madness of 2002 is not exactly the same as the current hysteria. Bush's polls are worse; 9/11 is almost two years in the past, and the post-war situation in Iraq is nervous-making and difficult.

But it's August. August means Bush and his staff have gone on vacation - they're working, and fund-raising, but they are not generally speaking playing offense.

They'll be back, with bells on, after Labor Day - as they were last year, when Bush went to New York on the anniversary of 9/11 and then, the very next day, confronted the United Nations with the necessity of challenging Iraq's defiance.

Meantime, let's get serious.

No line better exemplifies the degree to which this Administration uses big time business operations as a model for governance and the discipline with which they apply the insight than Andy Card's statement from last year: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."

---

)

The University in the Future - Response (Professor Andrew Abbot, University of Chicago, 4/4/2001)

[L]et me unmince a few words about one of the local sacred cows, a cow I have tended carefully over the last decade. We don't have a faculty taught core. It's more so than elsewhere, and maybe it's better designed than elsewhere, but it's not truly faculty taught. Our humanities core was cut--I was there, my friends--because the faculty involved no longer wished to teach it. They don't believe in teaching students about values. According to what many of them write, they're not really clear whether they have any values themselves. They're not sure what they want to teach (although they'd certainly like to teach it in Paris rather than Chicago). The social sciences core is sometimes thought to be a little healthier intellectually--that's the shibboleth of me and my fellow social scientists--but still a good half the social science faculty avoid teaching in it. The reality of the curricular wars here is that many faculty would like to settle into the fatuous routine of lecture courses, disguised as very-much-needed surveys, in which they can do less work. Most faculty here secretly think it a waste of time for eminent academics with planet-wide reputations like theirs to be at the same time teaching somewhat randomly chosen elite 18-year-olds how to write a paragraph of prose. Surely somebody else can do that.

Subject of the experiment: University professors. Stimulus: Virtually unlimited federal funding. Observed response: Professors avoid teaching and commonly substitute declarations of opinion for research. Conclusion: Money without accountability corrupts.

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MAKING THE WORST OF THE INEVITABLE

Shiite Clerics Clashing Over How to Reshape Iraq (NEIL MacFARQUHAR, 8/26/03, NY Times)

The clerics who hold sway over Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority are locked in a violent power struggle pitting the older, established ayatollahs counseling patience with the occupation against a younger, more militant faction itching to found an Islamic state. [...]

The tense standoff, as described by clerics from both factions, is playing out among the twisting alleyways of this holy seat, a battle for the leadership of Iraq's Shiite community, which accounts for 60 percent of the country's population of about 25 million.

In one corner sit the senior ayatollahs clustered around Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, all betting that it is only a matter of time before the United States delivers a democratic state that the Shiites can dominate through sheer numbers.

Arrayed against them are more activist opponents of the American-led occupation who back Moktada al-Sadr and who believe that Shiites should aggressively pursue an Islamic state modeled on clerical rule in Iran.

"It goes back in history to two distinct lines in Muslim and particularly Shiite thought," said Sheik Shaibani, a 33-year-old cleric who runs the Islamic court in Najaf in defiance of the elder clergy.

"There are those who say you must undertake jihad in times of oppression, and those who say we must stay silent until the reappearance of the Mahdi," he said, referring to the Shiite savior.

Although not calling for an outright holy war, the young clerics hint at the possibility.

Since Shi'a rule is inevitable, one wonders what point is served by our seeming to stand in the way of it.

---

"RAV PAM HAPPY"

The sage and his ‘special’ friend (Rabbi Shimon Finkelman, 8/26/03, Jewish World Review)

In the winter of 1989, a son was born to Rabbi and Mrs. Baruch Rabinowitz of Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. The child, Nota Shlomo, was born with Down Syndrome.

In the years that followed, Rabbi Avraham Pam, dean of Brooklyn's Mesivta Torah Vodaath, one of America's premiere institutions of higher Jewish learning and one of this generation's greatest Torah luminaries, developed a deep attachment to the child. He also agreed to act as Nota Shlomo's sandak, godfather

When Nota Shlomo was past the age of four, his father began taking him to shul (synagogue) on Shabbes (Sabbath) at the rabbinical school. Nota Shlomo did not disturb the praying; instead, he would circle the perimeter of the Torah Vodaath sanctuary with quick steps, again and again. Someone suggested that perhaps this was not in keeping with k'vod hatefilla (respect for prayer). Rabbi Pam disagreed. "Perhaps this is his way of praying," he said, for he perceived that Nota Shlomo possessed a lofty neshoma (soul). "If it's not really disturbing, we should not stop him."

Sometimes during prayer, Nota Shlomo would place himself to the right of the aron kodesh (holy ark) with a Tehillim (Psalms) in hand and shake to and fro, lift both his hands upward and make sounds as if he was praying. Rabbi Pam mentioned this in a public address, and commented that one cannot know what such a child accomplished with his "prayer." Similarly, when Nota Shlomo hurried to open the aron kodesh prior to the Torah reading, Rabbi Pam remarked that, certainly it was of great significance for the congregation that he was the one performing this honor, though what Heavenly ramifications this has is beyond us.

Wouldn't life be banal if there were no things that are beyond us?

---

LINE OF FIRE

US KILLING 'NOT ERROR' (London Mirror, Aug 26 2003)

A REUTERS cameraman was deliberately killed by US troops after he filmed them digging a mass grave, his brother claims.

[N]azmi Dana said: "The US troops killed my brother in cold blood.

"Mazen told me by phone a few days before his death that he discovered a mass grave dug by US troops to conceal the bodies of their fellow comrades killed in Iraqi resistance attacks.

"US forces knowingly killed him to prevent him from airing his finding."

Boy, these Reuters guys don't even pretend to be objective journalists do they.

---

LEGAL, SAFE, AND FREQUENT

The Key To Immigration Is Assimilation, Not Separatism (SEAN HIGGINS, 8/26/03, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY)

IBD: How exactly is immigration changing California?

[Victor Davis] Hanson: It used to be done in a way that was legal and measured, and allowed the natural process of assimilation to work pretty well.

But since about 1975, the number of the people who are coming has grown. And we, the host country, have given up on assimilation and allowed separatism to occur in our schools. The result is that we are creating an amoral apartheid society. [...]

IBD: Is assimilation in fact occurring?

Hanson: It is. I make that clear in my book. There is a powerful engine for that in popular culture, whether it is the Williams sisters or Tiger Woods or Jennifer Lopez. People of all different races are intermarrying. They have the same taste in television and in movies.

But the schools are promoting a multicultural separatist ideology — whether it's bilingual education or separate graduation ceremonies. We are in a race between the powers of assimilation and the powers of separatism.

That is the issue at the heart of it. We just need people to come in from Mexico in a little smaller numbers and through a legal process, so we can assimilate them legally.

IBD: Many free-market economists say the benefits of mass immigration outweigh the costs. What do you think?

Hanson: One thing I've noticed is that each side tries to produce statistics that refute the other. It's hard to adjudicate which body of evidence is correct.

My feeling is that the contribution of unskilled labor to the overall GDP of the U.S. is rather small. But it's very important to localized sectors like restaurants, building and agriculture within the Southwest.

It's a sad commentary on California when you have a 9% unemployment rate in many counties and the employers are saying nobody will work and they have to bring in people from Mexico. [...]

IBD: So this is primarily a matter of changing the political process?

Hanson: It has to start with a dialogue. Those on the open borders-corporate-libertarian side have precluded debate by demonizing people as nativist, protectionist or Neanderthal. They work hand in glove with the racial left, which demonizes people as racist. Between the two, they have precluded almost all debate on it.

IBD: Do we need stuff like English-only laws?

Hanson: We've never needed them before. We just need to revert back to what we used to do: encourage them to learn English.

The point here is that the problems with immigration are mainly our fault: our abandonment of the teaching of our own culture in schools; a welfare system that makes possible the refusal of the native poor to work undesirable jobs; and declining fertility rates that require importation of workers.

MORE:
Latinos are Looking Up (Zev Chafets, 8/26/03. Jewish World Review)

Latinos aren't wealthy - most families earn less than $40,000 a year - but they are staunchly optimistic. Sixty percent think the economy will be better in a year. Almost 75% believe their children's lives will be better than their own.

The majority put assimilation ahead of diversity - 51.2% hope for greater assimilation. Less than 40% support "keeping [their] own culture, even if it means staying somewhat separate from the rest of American society."

Neither are Latinos inclined to see themselves as victims. Asked about the main barrier to success in the U.S., a large plurality listed language.

Almost 70% could think of no instance in the past year in which they suffered ethnic or racial discrimination. Just 3.7% regard bias as the most important problem they face.

Fully 85.5% say that affirmative action should be based more on need than on race. Among potential Democratic primary voters, the Rev. Al Sharpton got just 1.8%.

Politically, a majority of Latinos call themselves conservative or moderate, and this is evident in their social and economic views. Fifty-six percent favor government vouchers for private or church schools. A similar number support tax cuts for individuals and businesses. Less than 7% want to raise taxes to increase government spending. Although twice as many Latinos identify with the Democratic Party as with the GOP, these are unmistakably Republican positions. [...]

Seen through the prism of this poll, Hispanics appear to be less a group of disaffected minority voters than a fairly typical community of Catholic immigrants. A generation ago, the Republicans converted working-class Italian-, Polish- and Irish-Americans into Reagan Democrats. This year, they will be trying to repeat the act, in Spanish.

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DOESN'T IT SEEM THEY'RE REPORTING THIS AS A VICTORY?

From: "CBSNews---Breaking_News"
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 08:37:13 -0400
To: orrin@brothersjudd.zzn.com
Subject: CBSNews.com News Alert!

The number of U.S. soldiers killed in post-Saddam Iraq has surpassed the
number killed during major combat. In the latest incident, a GI was killed
in a roadside bombing.

For news 24 hours a day, log on to www.cbsnews.com

---

HEY, WAIT, THE RELIGIOUS CAN'T BE SKEPTICAL ABOUT US!

Faith and Works: a review of 'For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and The End of Slavery' by Rodney Stark (Lisa Jardine, Washington Post)

In his latest book, For the Glory of God, Stark maintains that the extraordinary scientific and mathematical achievements of Newton and his contemporaries were in fact a direct consequence of their Christian beliefs. The so-called European Scientific Revolution, therefore, was a coherent rational development, driven by faith, and grew directly out of the strenuously rational theology of the medieval Church. [...]

Stark's argument is driven by the belief that "whether we like it or not, people acting for the glory of God have been a dramatic force for cultural change." It is hard to see why he should consider this view to be provocative. Most of us would concede that strong conviction drives those who aspire to alter the world in which they live. The case Stark goes on to make, however, is deliberately contentious. He claims that both enlightenment and bigotry are undertaken "for the glory of God." There is also something calculatedly obtuse about Stark's insistence that we ought to applaud the Church for its motivating rationality, while he freely admits that the officials of the established churches of the day were responsible for vigorously persecuting those who held beliefs incompatible with doctrine. Similarly, his apologetic claims that the witch-hunts resulted in far fewer deaths than conventionally claimed by historians and that the Church "strenuously opposed" slavery long before abolitionism seem perverse on the basis of the wealth of information now assembled by historians, and woefully under-documented compared with tables and statistics he produces elsewhere.

I fear that this book has been deliberately pitched at those who would dearly like to believe that the unifying thread through European and North American progress toward modernity has been and remains an explicitly Christian set of beliefs. I base this conclusion on a section that Stark tucks into the discussion of the emergence of science and which is headed "Evolution and Religion." Here he argues with characteristic directness that the hostility of Christianity to evolutionary theory derives from shortcomings within that theory, rather than from any more general difficulty the church may have had historically with science. Darwinism, he maintains, is not actually a theory at all but rather a set of surmises. Problems with evolutionary theory have been "hushed up." A recent survey of biologists found that 45 percent "acknowledged that the process of evolution is guided by God." In spite of his many disclaimers, stressing the even-handedness and sociological rigor of his approach, Stark appears here himself to adopt the skeptical position of the creationists.

And skepticism is inappropriate because it's a received truth or something? Should he adopt the credulous position of the Darwinists?

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EVERY MAN HAS HIS BREAK POINT (via ef brown)

The Great Escape, or how I finally shook off the state (Harry Mount, 25/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last. I have finally slipped free of any form of state control. Transport, health, education, the day at work, the evening at play - the Government's great, big, dirty paw no longer messes with my day-to-day existence and my life now rattles happily along, on smooth, privately-run, rails.

Everything turns up on time. Everyone I deal with is polite. If anything goes wrong, it's only ever my fault. And, what's more, this pampered world costs less than the battered version that the state provides.

The final breaking of the bonds came when I did my back in last weekend playing tennis.

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CRANK UP THE VCRs

A TWENTIETH CENTURY TESTIMONY BY MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE (EWTN)

This engaging encounter with a controversial journalist exposes the twentieth century's idolatries, ideologies, and pretenses, and why they crumble after an encounter with Christ. This documentary follows Muggeridge - who embraced Catholicism in his eightieth year - to his English country estate, Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum where he is immortalized, and to the Holy Land.

Sunday August 24, 7:00 PM
Tuesday August 26, 1:00 PM
Friday August 29, 3:00 AM

It was on yesterday and it was about the most pastoral hour of television imaginable.

MORE:
-ESSAY: RUSSIA REVEALED: The Five-Year Fiasco (Malcolm Muggeridge, 5th June 1933, The Morning Post)
-ESSAY: RUSSIA REVEALED: Crucifixion of the Peasants (Malcolm Muggeridge, 6th June 1933, The Morning Post)
-ESSAY: RUSSIA REVEALED: Terror of the G.P.U. (Malcolm Muggeridge, 7th June 1933, The Morning Post)
-ESSAY: RUSSIA REVEALED: How World is Deceived: Art of Gulling our Intelligentsia (Malcolm Muggeridge, 8th June 1933, The Morning Post)
-ETEXT: JESUS REDISCOVERED (MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE)
-ESSAY: THE HUMANE HOLOCAUST (Malcolm Muggeridge, Winter 1980, Human Life Review)
-The Great Liberal Death Wish (Malcolm Muggeridge, May 1979, Imprimus)
-ESSAY: A Knight of the Wounded Countenance (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: The Oddest Prophet: S?ren Kierkegaard (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: Impending Resurrection (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: Blaise Pascal (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: Saint Augustine (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: William Blake: Eye for Eternity (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-ESSAY: Jesus (Malcolm Muggeridge)
-REVIEW: of Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome> (Malcolm Muggeridge, The Guardian)
-The Malcolm Muggeridge Society
-Malcolm Muggeridge: The Iconoclast
-Malcolm Muggeridge (Spartacus)
-FILMOGRAPHY: Malcolm Muggeridge (IMDB.com)
-Malcolm Muggeridge Centenary (May 22-23, 2003) (Wheaton College)
-Malcom Muggeridge (Wikipedia)
-EXCERPT: Muggeridge: The Biography By Richard Ingrams
-LECTURE: Malcolm Muggeridge's Scourging of Liberalism (Russell Kirk, September 21st, 1989, The Heritage Foundation)
-ESSAY: Piano-player in a brothel: Christopher Howse says that Malcolm Muggeridge, born 100 years ago, was very much a man of the 20th-century world -- but rebelled against it (The Spectator)
-ESSAY: Malcolm Muggeridge's journey (Roger Kimball , June 2003, New Criterion)
-ESSAY: The Collision of Two Minds: Malcolm Muggeridge Meets Francis Schaeffer (David Virtue, Touchstone)
-ESSAY: Saint Mugg (R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr  , American Spectator)
-ESSAY: A tale of truth and two journalists (Ian Hunter, 3/27/00, Report Magazine)
-ESSAY: "Deliberate," "diabolical" starvation: Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin's famine (Marco Carynnyk, May 29, 1983, The Ukrainian Weekly)
-ESSAY: Top 100 Catholics of the Century: #58 Malcolm Muggeridge (Daily Catholic, 9/21/99)
-ARCHIVES: Malcolm Muggeridge (NY Review of Books)
-ARCHIVES: Malcolm Muggeridge (Find Articles)
-ARCHIVES: Malcolm Muggeridge (Mag Portal)
-REVIEW: of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe (Christopher Hitchens, Weekly Standard)
-REVIEW: of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe (Lawrence S. Cunningham, Commonweal)
-REVIEW: of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe (Digby Anderson, National Review)
-REVIEW: of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography by Gregory Wolfe (First Things)
-REVIEW: of Muggeridge: The Biography By Richard Ingrams (Frances Stead Sellers, Washington Post)
-REVIEW: of Muggeridge: The Biography By Richard Ingrams (John Gross, New Criterion)
-REVIEW: of Muggeridge: The Biography By Richard Ingrams (Bruno Maddox, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW: of Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life By Ian Hunter (Edward B. Fiske, The New York Times)

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BUTTERFLIES, WITCHES, AND SAN FRANCISCO SUPERVISORS

Taking 'college protest' to a new level this fall: S.F. school will offer a degree in activism (Joe Garofoli, August 12, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

San Francisco's New College of California is offering something for the socially conscious this fall that they'd never get marching in the streets: a college degree in activism.

For $5,500 to $6,000 a semester, the 32-year-old Mission District school is offering bachelor's and master's humanities degrees with a concentration in "activism and social change." While schools from Vermont to Santa Cruz boast versions of do-gooding curricula, degrees in activism are hard to come by.

"Students can shape their own (activist) program at other schools," said Michael Baer, senior vice president at the American Council on Education and former provost at Northeastern University. "But to have it all together -- the theoretical and the practical -- under one roof and labeled as such is somewhat rare."

Almost as rare is New College's eclectic lineup of activist instructors, a progressive all-star team that includes tree-sitting environmentalist Julia "Butterfly" Hill, "ecofeminist witch" and author Starhawk and San Francisco Supervisor Chris Daly.

Baer called the program instructors at the 800-student school accomplished and "as competent as any you'd see at a similar-sized school. The difference is, at at a larger school, you'd be exposed to wider array of different perspectives."

If Mr. Baer managed to say "the practical" without smiling, he's a pod person or a robot.

---

)

There is Something Wrong With Humanism (Jeremy Stangroom, Butterflies and Wheels)

If humanists do indeed bring non-scientific criteria to bear when judging scientific theories, it might be objected that they do not do so in the name of humanism. If humanism is nothing more than a rational secularism, then there isn't any extra humanist ingredient against which scientific theories can be judged. However, the difficulty with this objection is precisely that it only works by setting up an equivalence between humanism and rational secularism. It is true that some people see humanism this way, but many people do not.

What then is this possible extra ingredient, properly humanist, against which the merits of scientific theories might be judged? The answer is that it is the constellation of ideas which constitutes the human-centred aspect of humanism. These ideas include: that human beings are free, rational agents; that they are, in various ways, the source of morality; that human dignity and flourishing are important; and that there are significant common bonds between people, which unite them across biological, social and geographical boundaries. These ideas - and variations on them - are espoused in numerous humanist writings (just type 'humanism' into Google - and read at your leisure). However, the claim is not that all humanists accept all these ideas. It is rather that they are representative of a discernible and significant thread in humanist thought. Or, more strongly, it is at least arguable that if a person has no sympathy at all with these kinds of ideas, then they are not a humanist. As Kurtz and Wilson put it, in their Humanist Manifesto II: "Views that merely reject theism are not equivalent to humanism. They lack commitment to the positive belief in the possibilities of human progress and to the values central to it."

What evidence is there then that these kinds of ideas might be involved in the judgements that humanists make about scientific theories? Let's take, as an example, the article by Kenan Malik, "Materialism, Mechanism and the Human Mind", which appeared in the Autumn 2001 edition of New Humanist magazine. In this article, Malik argues that human beings are "exceptional" in that they "cannot be understood solely as natural beings". In pursuing his argument, Malik attacks "mechanistic" explanations, which reduce human beings, and the human mind, to the equivalent of sophisticated machines. He argues that this view is flawed in that it fails to recognise that humans are conscious, capable of purpose and agency. According to Malik, human beings are, in a sense, outside nature, able to work out how to overcome the constraints of biological and physical laws. In his words: "Our evolutionary heritage certainly shapes the way that humans approach the world. But it does not limit it, as it does for all other animals."

It is quite hard to make sense of this argument. For starters, the idea that the evolutionary heritage of human beings does not limit the way we approach the world is highly questionable. For example, it's hard to see how we can rule out the possibility that had our brains evolved differently, then puzzles that presently seem intractable (for example, the fact that there seems to be something that it is like to be a human being) would have long ago been solved.

But, more significantly, the whole idea that human beings are somehow outside nature is slightly odd. It seems here to amount to the claim that things like consciousness, agency and free will are real - though non-physical - and that they are, in principle, beyond scientific, or at least mechanistic, explanation. But the trouble is that Malik, in this article at least, does not argue for this position. He merely repeats what everybody already knows - that it certainly seems that we all have inner lives (and everything that entails), and it's a bit of a puzzle.

So what's at stake here? Why not draw less hard and fast conclusions about the proper domain of scientific explanation? Perhaps part of the story has to do with the spectre of anti-humanism, which seems to be in the background of all scientific attempts to get to grips with the stuff of human existence. [...]

The important point is that Malik is grappling with a tension that lies right at the heart of humanism. If a person is serious about science then they cannot, without fear of contradiction, embrace a doctrine which requires, as humanism might, that human beings have free will or that the stuff of consciousness is non-physical and causally efficacious. To escape the possibility of contradiction by asserting the truth of the kind of science or philosophy which is, in principle, anti-reductionist in its approach to humans is to allow ideology to govern scientific and philosophical commitments.

This contradiction is why we so delight in taunting those who claim to be rationalist/materialist/secularist/whatever: they're too decent to deny free will (too devoted to the species), but too doctrinaire to let go of their anti-religious bent, so they descend into just this kind of endlessly amusing incoherence. They end up arguing that all is determined by natural/material forces, but then, almost magically, Man is set free from the constraints of Nature and has free will, a conscience, etc..

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WHAT'S WITH THIS NEW COOL STANDARD?

Conservative -- and cool: How the right has come to reflect middle America's pop culture (James Sullivan, August 24, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle)

With California's recall election scheduled for Oct. 7, Gov. Gray Davis is facing the prospect of losing his own gig. His detractors say it's the budget woes, but the underlying issue is an image problem: Gray Davis is a profoundly un-funky man.

For better or worse, Davis represents the present-day face of the Democratic Party in America -- apparently humorless, wonkish, staid and distant. The party of John F. Kennedy and Jesse Jackson has turned an embarrassed cheek to its own charismatic past, preferring in recent years to cast itself as efficient, businesslike and not in any way associated with the radical longhairs some of its members may have been during the dreaded 1960s.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, once considered your father's Grand Old (and hopelessly out-of-touch) Party, are addressing middle America in their own language, which is to say, their popular culture. George Bush drives a pickup truck, hams it up with Ozzy Osbourne and speaks about world affairs in simple, homely terms so "the boys back home in Lubbock" can understand.

Don't try telling this to that Ed Villainy guy.

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60-40 VISION

Gibbons says he could beat Democrat Reid in Nevada Senate race ( SCOTT SONNER, August 21, 2003, Associated Press)

Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., says he's convinced he could unseat Democratic Sen. Harry Reid next year though he hasn't decided whether to try.

The four-term congressman said he intends to announce by the end of the month whether he'll run against the second-ranking Democrat in the U.S. Senate.

"We're very close to making a decision. We are getting the right information that we need to have," Gibbons said in an interview this week.

"One of the questions is whether or not we have the base of support and the resources to win the race," he said.

"My belief is that it would be a very winnable race. We could do it," he told The Associated Press.

The sorry state of congressional Democrats is amply demonstrated by the fact that their two highest ranking members in the Senate are both considered vulnerable in 2004.

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KILL HIM

Yasser Arafat Reasserts Authority Over Palestinian Security Forces, Appointing Security Adviser (STEPHEN GRAHAM, 8/25/03, Associated Press)

Yasser Arafat appointed a new national security adviser Monday, an apparent bid to reassert control over the Palestinian security forces and undermine his prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas.

Arafat is locked in a struggle over control of the Palestinian security forces with Abbas, who has Washington's backing and is under pressure to crack down on Palestinian militants following a Hamas suicide bombing last week. The bombing and Israel's fierce response has thrown the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan into turmoil.

America and Israel have shied away from what needs to be done because they've always believed that only Arafat could make a final peace deal. But there's never going to be such a deal, only an imposed two state settlement, so kill him.

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"ENORMOUS ABSENCE"

THE ANTI-ANTI-AMERICANS: A summer of obsessions in France. (ADAM GOPNIK, 2003-09-01, The New Yorker)

“Anti-Americanism in France is always a magnet for the worst,” Bernard-Henri Lévy said one evening in July. He was sitting in the study of his apartment on the leafy Boulevard Saint-Germain, and even for a casual meeting he wore, as he has done in public for thirty years, an elegant uniform of black suit and open white shirt, the collar lapping over his lapels. B.H.L., as everyone calls him, who remains one of the central media figures in France, has had a great critical success with a book entitled “Qui A Tué Daniel Pearl?” (“Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”), which is, in a way, the most vivid and intensely realized of all the “pro-American” texts. It is an inquiry into the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan last year of the Wall Street Journal reporter, and will be published next month in English by Melville House Books. Unapologetically personal, the book recounts B.H.L.’s own investigation in Pakistan and India, and also in America, with sidelights on his previous campaigns in Bosnia and Bangladesh. One reason for its success in France is that it is written almost in the tone of what the French call a polar, a noirish police thriller, full of one-sentence paragraphs and portentous cliff-hangers (“He was the man who knew too much. But what did he know?”). It also attempts, on a deeper level, to paint a character portrait of the man who did kill Danny Pearl, or, at least, arranged his kidnapping: Omar Sheikh, the Islamist who was convicted in Pakistan last year. Like Mohammed Atta, he turns out to be not a barefoot wild-eyed Mahdi but a child of the West, London-raised and educated—the New Naipaulian Man, lost between two cultures, enraged at the West and mesmerized by a fantasy of Islam, only now armed with a total ideology and an A-bomb.

On a third level, “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?” is a demonstration piece, a deliberate embrace by a French intellectual of an American journalist, and a book that insists that the death of an American journalist (and one who worked for the Wall Street Journal, at that) was as important for France as for America. B.H.L.’s purely political, or forensic, conclusion is that it is naïve to speak of Al Qaeda as an independent terrorist organization. At most a band of Yemenis and Saudis, the Al Qaeda of American imagination and fears—the octopus of terrorism capable of bringing tall buildings down in a single morning—is largely controlled by the Pakistani secret service, he says, and he concludes that Pearl was kidnapped and murdered with its knowledge. Pearl was killed, B.H.L. believes, because he had come to understand too much about all of this, and particularly about “the great taboo”: that the Pakistani atomic bomb was built and is controlled by radical Islamists who intend to use it someday. (He writes that Sheikh Mubarak Gilani, the cleric whom Pearl had set out to interview when he was kidnapped, far from being a minor figure, is one of Osama bin Laden’s mentors and tutors and has a network in place in the United States. John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, Lévy claims, in a detail that, if not unknown, is unpublicized in the United States, had transferred from the Nation of Islam to Gilani’s sect shortly before he began his killing spree.)

The essential conclusion of this central Parisian thinker and writer is, therefore, not that the American government ought to be more conciliatory toward the Islamic fundamentalists but that our analysis of the situation and its risks is not nearly radical enough. “I am strongly anti-anti-American, but I opposed the war in Iraq, because of what I’d seen in Pakistan,” Lévy said. “Iraq was a false target, a mistaken target. Saddam, yes, is a terrible butcher, and we can only be glad that he is gone. But he is a twentieth-century butcher--an old-fashioned secular tyrant, who made an easy but irrelevant target. His boasting about having weapons of mass destruction and then being unable to really build them or keep them is typical--he’s just a gangster, who lived by fear and for money. Saddam has almost nothing to do with the real threat. We were attacking an Iraq that was already largely disarmed. Meanwhile, in some Pakistani bazaar someone, as we speak, is trading a Russian miniaturized nuclear weapon.”

The relentless first-person address of Lévy’s new book has been mocked--“Tin-Tin in Pakistan”--but its egocentrism feels earned, and even admirable. There are three kinds of writers addicted to the first person: the kind whose “I” remains a pillar of self-reliance, supporting the text (Camus and Bruce Chatwin are both masters of this sort); the kind whose “I”s magically become “you”s (Montaigne, Thurber); and then a third, rarer kind (Mailer, Malraux), whose insistent “I”s somehow become an extended and inclusive “we,” and who, through sheer lack of embarrassment about their own self-dramatization, end up enacting the dream life of their generation. B.H.L. is, or has become, in his last three books, a writer of that kind, and of that stature.

“The real issue, which the Americans don’t see, is that the Arab Islamist threat is partly manageable,” he went on. “One can see solutions, if not easy ones, to the Israeli-Palestinian question, to the Saudi problem. The Asian Islamist threat, though, is of an entirely different dimension. There are far more people, they are far more desperate, and they have a tradition of national action. And they have a bomb. Even North Korea is less dangerous than Pakistan--a Stalinist country with a defunct ideology and a bomb is infinitely less dangerous than a country with a bomb and a new ideology in the full vigor of its first birth. That is the real nexus of the terrorism, and fussing in the desert doesn’t even begin to address it.

“The French opposition to the war was opportunist in part, rational in part, but mostly rooted in a desire not to know. What dominates France is not the presence of some anti-Americanism but an enormous absence--the absence of any belief aside from a handful of corporatist reflexes. This whole business with the intermittents is typical: it’s corporatism pursued to the point of professional suicide. All that we have to replace it with is the idea of Europe; so far, we have overcome romantic nationalism, but we have nothing left to replace it with.”

What's important to recognize is how seductive that absence of any belief at all is. The ceaseless pleading for toleration and "respect for other cultures", the hysterical baying when George W. Bush refers to evil, and the opposition to the display of the Ten Commandments, all have their sources in this notion that if only we had no core beliefs ourselves we'd be able to get along with everyone. The problem, in the first instance, is that your own lack of beliefs is never a guarantee that the next person you meet won't have something he believes in, quite possibly something antithetical to your interests. Secondly, even supposing that we achieved the epoch where all men let each other "do their own thing", no one is willing to live for long with their neighbors doing things they find repellant. What sounds warm and fuzzy in theory turns untenable when you're supposed to ignore things like, just for example, female circumsicion or sati (widow burning); or, in France's case, something rather less objectionable like the wearing of headscarves. It turns out we all do believe things after all, and believe them strongly enough that we're willing to say that others should adhere to them, no matter how much conflict that causes. Witness the willingness of those who wished we believed in nothing to try to force absence on the people of Alabama.


MORE:
Western culture is superior (Mona Charen, August 19, 2003, townhall.com)

To say that Western culture is superior is not to say that any particular person living in the West is superior to any person living elsewhere. That would be ridiculous. But it is equally ridiculous to deny that the moral standards, customs and beliefs of the West contribute to fairer and far more humane societies than are found elsewhere.

We are now engaged in a mission to remake the Middle East -- to introduce democracy, the rule of law and religious pluralism. But as we undertake this task, which would be extremely difficult under the best of circumstances, we are hampered by the fact that a sizeable minority of our own people does not believe at all that our way is better. They, in fact, regard the very suggestion as obscene. Any shortcomings of more primitive societies, when they are acknowledged at all, are blamed on others, usually on us.

Feminists who are quick to file lawsuits for even the smallest slight in this country are strangely reluctant to make common cause with women in nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. Why? Is it because championing those women would imply that Western society -- which feminists have so long derided as sexist -- is far better than any others when it comes to the treatment of women?

Is it really arrogance, as the liberals would have it, to believe that the system and the culture we've inherited is superior to others? Or is it ingratitude to deny it?

The Angry Man (Phyllis McGinley 1905-78)

The other day I chanced to meet
An angry man upon the street--
A man of wrath, a man of war,
A man who truculently bore
Over his shoulder, like a lance,
A banner labeled “Tolerance.”

And when I asked him why he strode
Thus scowling down the human road,
Scowling, he answered, “I am he
Who champions total liberty--
Intolerance being, ma’am, a state
No tolerant man can tolerate.

“When I meet rogues,” he cried, “who choose
To cherish oppositional views,
Lady, like this, and in this manner,
I lay about me with my banner
Till they cry mercy, ma’am.” His blows
Rained proudly on prospective foes.

Fearful, I turned and left him there
Still muttering, as he thrashed the air,
“Let the Intolerant beware!”

MORE:
-Phyllis McGinley (Academy of American Poets)
-Phyllis McGinley Papers (Syracuse University Library )
-STAMP: Phyllis McGinley

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STILL SETTING

Studying Japan from the Inside: What comes next for Japan's economy? Masako Egawa, executive director of Harvard Business School's Japan Research Office, sees a period of fundamental change ahead. (Cynthia D. Churchwell, Aug 25, 2003, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge)

Churchwell: What has been the most interesting company to write about in your case development?

Egawa: All the companies on which we developed cases are very interesting, and it is difficult to choose one. But if I have to choose one, I would say I enjoyed the case on Nissan Motor, the auto manufacturer that had been turned around by Carlos Ghosn. Ghosn was sent from Renault, the French auto company, which acquired management control of Nissan in March 1999. At the time Nissan had been in deep financial distress and had no choice but seek a foreign partner. Ghosn, who had never worked in Japan but had extensive experiences in other parts of the world, motivated the middle management at Nissan and transformed the culture of the company, leading to the dramatic recovery of its performance. What struck me most from this case was the power of the great leader. It was fascinating to learn that all the reforms Ghosn implemented were originally proposed by the middle managers who had been working for Nissan for twenty years, and that they were instrumental in the transformation process. The same group of people who had been working for an under-performing company can produce outstanding results if they have the right leader.

The point being, as Bill Emmott wrote years ago, it's not a culture that values, heeds or rewards creative thinking, which is one of the reasons they're in eclipse.

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SWEET MUSIC -- 'FLED TO FRANCE'

Saddam’s Orphans (Amir Taheri, National Review, 8/25/2003)

Two prominent Lebanese pan-Arabists have fled to France to avoid paying the mobs they hired for pro-Saddam demonstrations in Beirut last winter.

So the Arab street was in it for the money? We should offer them double to demonstrate for democracy, more U.S. intervention, and peace with Israel. Since they accept credit, the demonstrations should come real cheap.

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RUDY RIDES AGAIN

RUDY PUMPED TO STUMP (DEBORAH ORIN, August 25, 2003, NY Post)

Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is getting ready to throw his muscle behind muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California governor's race now that longtime pal Bill Simon is out, sources told The Post yesterday.

"Rudy will support him, and if it helps him [to campaign with Giuliani], I think we'll do it," said a source close to Giuliani, who's on a quick trip to Australia and will be back Friday.

Giuliani is expected to consult with Simon then and try to convince him to also enlist in Arnie's army. [...]

Giuliani, who became "America's Mayor" after leading New York City through 9/11, has become one of the Republican Party's top assets, recruited by candidates across the country for help in their races.

Mr. Giuliani is going to have a danged big pile of chits to call in when he runs for either Charles Schumer's senate seat or the NY governorship.

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THEY'RE NOT ON OUR SIDE

France to Israel: No evidence Hamas, Islamic Jihad are ''terror groups'' (Al Bawaba, 25-08-2003)

France expressed objections to placing Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the European Union (EU)'s list of "terror organizations", according to an Israeli report on Monday.

Israel's Yediot Aharonot website reported that diplomatic advisor to French President Jacques Chirac, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, told the Israeli ambassador in France, Nissim Zvilli, during a weekend meeting, that there is no evidence that these two organizations are "terror groups."

"If we find that Hamas and Islamic Jihad are indeed terror groups opposed to peace, we may have to change the EU's stand," Gordo conveyed. "However, we mustn't limit ourselves to one, clear cut, position."

It's time to stop humoring the Atlanticists and start treating the French like what they are: an enemy.

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EVERYONE SHOULD OWN ONE (OR ELEVEN)

MoveOn Moves Into Texas Fight (Dotty Lynch, Douglas Kiker, Steve Chaggaris and Clothilde Ewing, 8/25/03, CBS News)

MoveOn.org is raising money to support the 11 Democratic Texas state senators who’ve been camped out in New Mexico for almost a month to delay a vote on a GOP congressional redistricting plan.

MoveOn, which was formed to oppose the Clinton impeachment but has since morphed into an all-purpose lefty activist group, has raised more than $850,000 toward its $1 million goal in its "Defend Democracy" fundraising drive. The money will be used to help pay the mounting expense of the Democrats, who’ve been in Albuquerque since July 28 in order to deny the Texas Senate quorum in a special session called by Republican Gov. Rick Perry. [...]

MoveOn’s cash will certainly help the 11 Democrats, who have been staying a hotel for almost a month. A Texas political consultant working with MoveOn says 27,000 people have given money so far, including 2,000 Texans, the AP reports.

One would have thought it was illegal to purchase influence with elected officials, but, if not, it raises the age old question: "We've established what you are; now what's your price?"

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PUT THE DEPOSIT OF FAITH IN CDS

At Elite Prep School, Parents Do the Math (Wall Street Journal, 8/25/2003)

In discussing his pay as headmaster of the elite St. Paul's prep school, Bishop Craig Anderson is fond of invoking a biblical maxim: Of those to whom much is given, much is expected.

The Episcopal clergyman has been given much. Last year Mr. Anderson, whose official title is "rector," made $524,000 in salary, benefits and deferred compensation -- more than most college presidents. That doesn't include the seven-bedroom, 14,062-square-foot mansion that St. Paul's provides for him or the $32,000 stipend for his wife to assist in his official duties.

That compensation package has sparked an ugly fight at this genteel boarding school ...

Critics have attacked the school's vice rector, Sharon Hennessy, for her $316,400 in total compensation and the perks of her position, including a stipend for her spouse, membership in the upscale Canyon Ranch spa and an annual two-week summer sojourn on the French Riviera....

The 61-year-old rector says he's "baffled" by the complaints....

Since they joined St. Paul's, Mr. Anderson's total compensation has more than doubled; Ms. Hennessy's has gone up 79%. The school underwrites the rector's membership in a golf club in Maine and pays for business-class travel with his wife to raise funds from alumni in Europe and Asia. As part of his total compensation, St. Paul's also paid $25,000 a year for his daughter to attend the University of Chicago.

Old Gospel: "Silver and gold have I none, but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk." (Acts 3:6)
New Gospel: "Silver and gold I will have, plus mansion, education, and luxury vacation."
Old Gospel: "If we have food and clothing, we shall be content.... For the love of money is the root of all evils." (1 Timothy 6:8,10)
New Gospel: "I can't imagine why anyone would challenge my well-deserved income. Their attitude is baffling!"

By the way, have you heard the Episcopal Church's new definition of "Apostolic Success-ion"?

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BEEF, BEER, BLACK COFFEE, BACK HAIR AND 6-BUCK HAIRCUTS?

What (men) do women want? (Suzanne Fields, August 25, 2003, Townhall.com)

Do conservative women look for different qualities of masculinity in men than liberal women do? Is sex appeal not so much in the eye, but in a point of view? [...]

The American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank, devotes the current issue of the American Enterprise magazine to the sexual differences between Democrats and Republicans, lauding the Bush administration in a cover story: "Real Men, They're Back"

Jay Nordlinger, managing editor of National Review, recalls the formulation of the Democrats as the "mommy party" and the Republicans as the "daddy party" and declares that men like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have made it "daddy party time" in the nation's capital.

This formulation echoes George Lakoff, professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Berkeley, who argues that modern conservatives speak to people in terms of "the strict father morality," and liberals act like the "nurturant parent."

In his configuration, "conservatives have left liberals in the dust" because their arguments frame the issues in a more compelling way. The father teaches right and wrong, self-discipline and self-reliance while preserving the safety net of "compassionate conservatism."

This last is how George W. Bush may be able to make the GOP the majority party again. Being the disciplinarian is all well and good, but folks want to know they're going to be taken care of too. A system of privatized/individualized/voucherized socal services would combine self-discipline, self-reliance, and compassion in a new way.

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DIM ENLIGHTENMENT

How the Enlightenment made Christian belief impossible. (Peter Sellick, August 19, 2003, Online Opinion)

What were the intellectual moves that made faith impossible for modern man? It is important to understand that these moves were made by people who believed in God, not by atheists. They came later in the Enlightenment history and founded the basis of their atheism on the mistaken theism of the early Enlightenment.

Modernity began with Descartes and his grounding of the certainty of existence on the thought of the individual. Clear and certain ideas could be obtained via this thought. The emphasis on certitude is the key. In the thought of John Locke, who was a defender of the faith, certainty was a moral imperative and it was thus immoral to make religious statements that were irrational. He was prompted to think thus by the excesses of the religious enthusiasts of his day who were fond of claiming as a revelation from God their own religious ideas, as so often still happens in or own day. While I sympathise with this thinking as regards undisciplined claims on the authority of God, it set up a false alternative between certain knowledge and faith. If we entertain beliefs that cannot be rationally upheld then we are morally corrupt and socially pernicious: we take the stand that "anything goes". Locke held that believers should be challenged to validate their beliefs according to a particular tradition of rationality. This assertion neglected the rationality of theologians which had guided theology from the beginning. Locke's move opened the way for a positivist critique of faith.

It did not take long for Continental philosophers like Diderot to use this critique to the devastation of belief. Many educated, especially scientifically educated, men and women in the West reside in this critique that makes even a step towards the church impossible. To acquiesce in any religious belief is to let down the side and demean oneself. If there is no valid reason for believing that God exists then to believe so is reprehensible and to open the way to antinomianism. It is ironic that the rationality that was thought to be a property of God became God's demise.

Part of our problem in this is that Christianity has been confused with a theism that is more the product of early Enlightenment thought in which God became and object in the universe. This identification broke the nexus between God and the tradition of scripture, liturgy, practice and thought that was a mark of the medieval church. God was perceived to be an immaterial entity that could nevertheless interact with the material world. Such a construction produced obvious problems with the theology of creation and was a sitting duck for a rationality that demanded validation. While fundamentalism strived to believe in such a god no matter what, liberalism let this god go but was left with trying to fulfil the assumed religious needs of humanity. Thus human subjectivity replaced God. It is obvious that both fundamentalism and liberalism are products of Enlightenment thought. This is why the present-day church must look beyond the 17thC to search out those rich traditions that bear witness to a reality that is not so easily disposed of by human reason and which informs and confronts our living.

If the church is to become an authentic voice in our time it must confront the false alternatives that have come down to us from the Enlightenment and write a theology that is faithful to the early church. This can be done in the face of our changed thought about mechanism in the world because God is not a part of that mechanism. Any god that is part of the world is world, and a god of the world is an idol. This conception is faithful to the creation narratives in that God is distinct from creation.

If modernity produced fundamentalism that is irrational and the liberal church that has nothing to say, post-modernity must produce the post-liberal church that finds its life in close contact with those rich texts and practices that produced the cultural coherence of the past. It is the loss of this coherence that lays waste our cities and our citizens.

The process of secularisation has proceeded to the point that the church has now no voice in public life other than as the moral guardian beset by a sea of relative values. Again the irony; the quest for certainty has finally found its expression in the absence of all certainty.

The greatest irony of all is that even as reasons has demonstrated that all certainty is illusory, even a certainty that the thinker himself exists, the rationalists have staked their claim of superiority over religion on the notion that their beliefs (which they call evidence or facts instead of beliefs) are more certain than religious beliefs. Instead, accept that all is faith and can ultimately only be judged by the beauty of the discrete set of beliefs and it is awfully hard to argue that materialism, which is incapable of producing morality or a purpose to life, is superior to Judeo-Christianity which provides coherent and compelling visions of both.

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IF YOU WANT A SHIASTAN YOU'LL HAVE TO FIGHT FOR IT

Senior cleric targeted in latest Iraq violence (Gareth Smyth and Edward Alden, August 24 2003, Financial Times)

A senior Shia cleric was the target of a bombing in the central Iraqi city of Najaf yesterday that killed three guards and wounded 10 people, the latest in a string of attacks at the weekend that underscored the deteriorating security situation in Iraq.

Ayatollah Mohammed Said al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most senior Shia clerics, escaped with cuts to the neck.

Ayatollah Hakim recently told the Financial Times that the measures taken by US-led occupation forces against supporters of the ousted regime of Saddam Hussein were not strong enough, and called for the transfer of more decision-making in security and other fields to Iraqis.

A spokesman for Sciri, the leading Shia Muslim political group, said last night it had begun an investigation into the bombing, and suspected it was the work of loyalists of the former regime.

US-led forces have a very limited presence in Najaf, which is a scholastic city revered as the burial place of Imam Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Mohammed.

The bombing came on a weekend when ethnic clashes between Turkomen and Kurds broke out in the northern city of Kirkuk, leading to several fatalities.

This too is a hopeful sign. Folks on the Left are assuring us that all of Iraq will magically set aside centuries of ethnic and sectarian hatred to unite in opposition to the infidel Americans. But we need the Shi'ites to focus on purging the Ba'athis remnants and preventing al Qaeda and other foreign troublemakers from gaining a toehold. That process should include our turning over real power to them as quickly as possible.

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FREELOADING IMMIGRANTS?

12-year-old med student at U. of C. (MARTHA IRVINE, August 25, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

Sho Yano's mother hands him his lunch for school in a brown paper bag--a turkey sandwich and cookies included.

''You don't need any bones today? No bones?'' Kyung Yano asks her quiet, spectacle-wearing 12-year-old, who shakes his head ''no'' as they head out their apartment door. She wants to make sure he isn't supposed to take his samples of spinal bones and a human skull to class, where he's learning about human anatomy.

That class isn't at the local junior high, but at the University of Chicago, where Sho is a first-year medical school student--and the youngest person ever to attend one of the university's professional schools. [...]

If he weren't also getting his Ph.D. along with his medical degree--thus, pushing his age at graduation to 19 or 20--he'd also be on course to become the youngest person to graduate from any medical school. According to Guinness World Records, a 17-year-old graduated from medical school in New York in 1995.

For his part, Sho is utterly uninterested in setting records. He also shuns the labels often used to describe him--''prodigy'' and ''little genius'' among them.

Yes, he has an IQ over 200. And yes, he graduated in three years from Chicago's Loyola University, summa cum laude. But for him, going to school is about learning as much as he can. [...]

Born in Portland, Ore., Sho spent most of his early years in California, where his father, Katsura, now runs the American subsidiary of a Japanese shipping company. Sho lives in the university's family housing with his mother, who originally came to this country from Korea to study art history, and his 7-year-old sister Sayuri, a talented student in her own right who wants to be a cardiologist.

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FUTILE, BUT NOBLE

U.S. Said to Plan Bigger Afghan Role, Stepping Up Aid (DAVID ROHDE, 8/25/03, NY Times)

A senior American diplomat said President Bush, viewing the situation "like a businessman," had decided that investing more reconstruction money here now could lead to an earlier exit for American forces and save money in the long run. The United States currently spends $11 billion a year on its military forces in Afghanistan and $900 million on reconstruction aid. [...]

Under the new initiative, American reconstruction aid is expected to double, to $1.8 billion a year, officials said. A dozen senior American government officials would work as advisers to Afghan government ministers. Up to 70 staff positions would be added to the embassy in Kabul, where virtually the entire senior staff is being replaced.

The proposals are likely to be well received in Congress, given the widespread criticism there that the aid effort so far has been inadequate, officials said. [On Sunday, a White House spokesman declined to comment on the reports.]

United Nations officials say Afghanistan is entering what is arguably the most critical period since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001. National elections are to be held next June, and American officials are eager for the moderate government of President Hamid Karzai to fare well.

Visible progress must be shown in reconstruction, disarmament and security, particularly in the south, if a Taliban insurgency is to be curbed and any semblance of a fair election held, United Nations officials said.

No businessman would invest in the "rebuilding" of what never has been and never will be a coherent corporate entity.

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CANADIAN SCIENCE

Major cigarette brands fail fire test (Tom Blackwell, August 25, 2003, National Post)

From the headline, don't you assume they must be too hard to light?

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IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING WHAT TO GET US FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Diamond Jews -- and we don't mean jewlery: There have been 141 Jewish baseball players in the Major Leagues. Now you can collect them all in a unique new baseball card set. (Joe Eskenazi August 25, 2003, Jewsweek)

For anyone who says a Jew can't make it as a big-time athlete, Martin Abramowitz has an answer. Well, 141 answers, in actuality. The Newton, Mass.-based fan has created a baseball card set encapsulating every Jew who ever laced up a pair of spikes and stepped between the lines, going back to the days before pitching mounds and mitts.

Even the most ardent Jewish baseball fan will probably pause to utter a lengthy "uhhhhhh" after naming Sandy Koufax, Hank Greenberg and, maybe, Shawn Green. But Abramowitz's 141-card set has them all: Lipman Pike, Andy Cohen, Harry "The Horse" Danning, and Ken Holtzman get their due. [...]

The card set, known as "American Jews in America's Game," was born in Abramowitz's kitchen when he had a baseball epiphany. "I collect vintage Jewish baseball player cards," says Abramowitz, who is planning director for Boston's Combined Jewish Philanthropies when he isn't collecting cards or sitting at Fenway Park.

"So we were sitting at the table one day and [my son] Jacob was looking at his Ken Griffey Jr. and Michael Jordan cards and I was looking at my cards and I said I could never have a complete set because about 40 of these guys never had cards.

"He was half paying attention and he said, 'Make 'em yourself.' And he took out a piece of paper and scribbled a logo with a baseball and a Jewish star." [...]

The set is now distributed by the AJHS and can be ordered at www.ajhs.org. It will also be sold at the Hall of Fame, incidentally.

Before Shawn Green and Gabe Kapler made it to the majors a few years ago, there was a period when the only Jewish player was J. J. (Jose Juan) Batista. It always seemed particularly ironic that the Tribe's sole representative was named John the Baptist.

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THEY DON'T DESERVE MICKEY:

Disney fini? Don't take the Mickey (Telegraph, 8/25/2003)

It is clear by now that France never deserved Disneyland. It has never embraced it. Politicians and intellectuals still hold it up as an exemplar of the debased American culture.

Jean Baudrillard, the country's pre-eminent philosopher, wrote a book recently in which he ranted about "Disneyisation" and the "Disney Connection" of global corporations moulding the world into a single image. Disneyland is an easy target for politicians such as the former minister and presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who calls it a setting for "mass schizophrenia".

But the French are hypocrites over Disney. They appear to despise it and yet, since its construction, theme parks have become big business in France. There is now Vulcania, a volcano park in the Auvergne; Micropolis, an ant-themed park in Aveyron; Pescalis, a fishing park in Niort, not to mention countless new water ride parks around the country.

The French are reactionary: only their desire to compete with America motivates them to develop French culture. We innovate, they follow with an inferior French version. Were America not leading, who knows how desolate the life of French children would be.

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TAKE BACK THE FAITH

Evangelicals poised to take over the Church (Jonathan Petre, 25/08/2003, Daily Telegraph)

Evangelicals, dismissed as a vociferous minority by senior liberals during the Jeffrey John affair, are now poised to take over the Church of England.

A new study suggests that, if current trends continue, evangelicals will make up more than half of all Sunday church worshippers in 10 years' time, up from about a third now.

As they grow quickly, Liberals and Anglo-Catholics continue to decline, says Dr Peter Brierley, a former government statistician who heads Christian Research.

Moreover, all but a tiny proportion of the new breed of evangelicals will be theologically conservative, viewing sex outside marriage, including homosexuality, as outlawed by Scripture.

According to the new analysis, they are consolidating their grip on the Church's income, contributing a significant amount of money to church funds.

Also, half of all ordinands training to be the next generation of clergy are attending evangelical colleges.

The combined effect could be to provide the evangelical wing of the Church with an unprecedented power base as long as their numbers are reflected in the membership of the General Synod and the Church's leadership in future years.

Dr Brierley's projections are expected to alarm liberals, who have portrayed them as fringe fundamentalists whose influence is out of proportion to their numbers. His analysis indicates that, based on several national surveys by Christian Research, about 35 per cent of churchgoers in 1998 were evangelicals and that proportion could rise to half by 2010.

Of this, he estimates, just eight per cent will be "broad" or "liberal" evangelicals, who are relaxed over issues such as homosexuality. The remainder will be mainstream or charismatic hard-liners.

Another survey, detailed in this year's Religious Trends handbook, indicates that the total giving of evangelical churches is already about 40 per cent of the Church's national income.

Gotta love the term mainstream hard-liners.

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OVER REACH

Pakistan troops killed in Taliban ambush on truck (Noor Khan, 8/25/03, Examiner)

TALIBAN fighters ambushed a truck full of government soldiers in the southern province of Zabul, killing several, the provincial governor and a Taliban spokesman said yesterday.

The sides gave differing death tolls from Saturday’s attack. Mohammed Hanif, a Taliban spokesman who contacted the Associated Press by satellite telephone, said 12 government soldiers were killed and that no Taliban fighters had died. Governor Hafizullah Khan said five soldiers and three Taliban were killed. [...]

Hanif said the bodies of the dead government soldiers were left behind, but Taliban attackers took 17 automatic rifles from the vehicle before leaving the scene.

He said Abdul Rahim, a former Taliban commander of the border region of Spinboldak, led the attack. Rahim is one of several former Taliban being sought by the Afghan government. In talks with neighbour Pakistan, the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai has expressed concern that Rahim and other former Taliban have found refuge in Pakistan’s conservative tribal regions.

Attacks against the government soldiers and police have been stepped up in recent weeks. Dozens of police have been ambushed or their police stations attacked by suspected Taliban.

There are reports from former Tal iban that Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban’s leader, has reorganised his religious militia, appointing military commanders to areas of control. Rahim is well-known in the southeastern regions of Afghanistan.

It seems like one of our biggest problems in finishing off the Afghan phase of the war is that the Taliban remnants and al Qaeda can seek refuge in Pakistan. They're doing us a favor if they start attacking Pakistani forces and give that government an excuse to help us.

MORE:
U.S. jets attack Afghan Taliban camp, killing at least 14 (AP, 8/25/2003)

U.S. jets pounded a Taliban mountain hideout Monday, killing at least 14 insurgents in the deadliest air assault since rebels launched a series of strikes against Afghan government targets, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

Sweeping through the rugged mountains of southeastern Afghanistan, scores of Afghan militia and U.S.-led coalition special forces hunted down suspected Taliban fighters, who in recent weeks have been waging attacks on police officials and government convoys. [...]

The Afghan administration has complained to Pakistan -- a U.S. ally in the war on terror -- that Taliban leaders appear to have found refuge in its lawless tribal regions. Pakistan has deployed its troops there but the border regions are long and porous and lined with rugged mountains in which to hide.

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US TO SHIP ARMED IRAQIS TO EUROPE.

U.S. to Send Iraqis to Site in Hungary for Police Course (Dexter Filkins, New York Times, 8/24/03)

Eager to have more Iraqis take responsibility for their country's security, American officials here are planning to ferry as many as 28,000 Iraqis to Eastern Europe for an intensive police training course. . . .

The Iraqi police force has been given a largely warm reception by the Iraqi people, although it has been weakened by a lack of equipment, especially guns. In the southern Iraqi city of Diwaniya, for instance, only a fraction of the city's 2,500 police officers have guns. American marines overseeing the police have been forced to pair officers with guns with those who have none.

Mr. Kerik, acknowledging the equipment shortage, said that a shipment of 50,000 9-millimeter pistols would arrive shortly, and that 100,000 more would arrive next year.

28,000 thousand Iraqis armed with pistols v. Europe. Anyone willing to take Europe?

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YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK.

Some U.S. Soldiers in Iraq Seek Baptisms (Hrvoje Hranjski, AP, 8/24/03)

With war and death on his mind, Spc. Barry Page was baptized Sunday in the Tigris River by an Army chaplain at the sprawling U.S. military headquarters on the fabled river's banks.

A Southern Baptist working as a military policeman, Page said he decided to 'reannounce his life to Christ' in the birthplace of civilization.

'I realized death is walking in this place,' said the 22-year-old from Houston, his uniform and boots soaking wet. 'It can be any of us. Next time it could be me.'

The temperature was 120 as Page and three other soldiers waited outside one of Saddam Hussein's palatial complexes to take their turn in the water. The baptism took place behind the palace, where the river waters surround an artificial island overgrown with palm trees.

'This ground has a historical, biblical meaning,' Page said. 'I can say I was in the same waters. I'm glad I found peace with God.'

Each of the soldiers took careful steps into the arms of Army chaplain Capt. Xuan Tran, of the 4th Infantry Division's 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment. Waist deep in the river, Tran briefly submerged the soldiers, recited a verse from the Bible, and proclaimed 'Amen' three times.

The quintessential American story.

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ALWAYS BET ON RED

How judge's stand resonates in Bible Belt (Noel C. Paul, 8/25/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

Come sundown, an endless forest of pine trees casts long, spindly shadows on the highways in this town that, locals like to say, has more churches per capita than any other on the face of the earth.

The scent of pine pervades every block here in DeRidder, where 76 churches minister to a population of 9,000. Mixed with the smell of smoke from trash burnings, there is a brooding, mystical air to the town, as if hermits and knights might pop out of the woods any moment and walk casually into J.C. Penney's.

On this stage where the Christian faith pervades daily life as thoroughly as sunshine and human speech, and pride in old Southern heroes is undimmed, the attention of pastors, churchgoers, children, and even the unbaptized was fixed last week on one man, Roy Moore.

The Alabama judge's highly visible crusade to keep a Ten Commandments monument in the rotunda of the state judicial building appears to have won the admiration of almost everyone in town. "I think the judge is doing a good thing," says Gregory Jones, pastor of the Church of God In Christ, a Pentecostal denomination. "The Ten Commandments are the basis of our good judgment and belong in the courts."

Although the monument's removal as ordered by a federal judge now appears likely, and Judge Moore has been suspended, his determination has energized many Christians far and near, especially in the so-called Bible Belt of the South.

The variety of responses here to Moore's crusade, say experts, indicates a growing complexity in passion and point of view among conservative Christians across the country, even at a moment when many believe their values are being challenged more than ever before. What remains to be seen is whether the "last stand" of Judge Moore's monument will galvanize renewed efforts by conservative Christians to affirm the Ten Commandments' role in national life.

You'd have to think that we could be headed to the point where the divide between Red and Blue America isn't much narrower than that between America and Europe.

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BROKEN WINDOWS

A drop in violent crime that's hard to explain: A new study shows major types of crime at a 30-year low - leaving criminologists hopeful, but wary of complacency. (Alexandra Marks, 8/25/03, The Christian Science Monitor)

All the indicators, from the sagging economy to the increase in newly released ex-cons on the street, had led many criminologists to predict the crime rate would go up. But it's not - at least according to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), released Sunday by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. It found that violent crime and property crime are at a low not seen since 1973.

In 2002, there were 23 violent crimes per 1,000 people, compared with 25 victimizations per 1,000 people in 2001. A decade ago, the victimization rate was twice as high, meaning there's been a 54 percent drop in violent crime since 1993.

While everyone applauds the new figures, they're also wary. They worry that hidden in the good news are harbingers of problems ahead. Top on the list of concerns is complacency, followed by budget cuts. The deficit crunch has prompted local towns and big cities alike to scale back on crime prevention and reduction programs - key factors in the decade-long decline of everything from attempted robbery to rape.

But beyond the concern, some criminologists are willing to venture a theory - not proven, or provable - that might explain this surprising drop. Call it the Sept. 11 effect.

"The only thing that I can think of that can be seen as contributing to a downward trend is some sense of cohesion that's emerging as a result of the terrorist threat or the terrorist reality," says Alfred Blumstein, a noted criminologist from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "Other than that, I don't see much that should be contributing to this decline."

You'd like to think it's just greater social cohesion, but at some point don't welfare reform, higher incarceration rates and beefed-up policing--both pre and post 9/11--have to have some effect on numbers?

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ULTIMA THUNE

Right's sights on Daschle: Writer calls S.D. senator 'target No. 1' (Jeff Zeleny, Aug. 24, 2003, Knight Ridder Tribune News)

In South Dakota, recent political races have indeed become bare-knuckle affairs.

Few elections were nastier than one that ended here last fall when Daschle's protege, Sen. Tim Johnson, beat Republican rival John Thune by 524 votes in a contest in which more than $6 million was spent. Nationally, it was a rare bright spot for Democrats. Locally, the race still is heavily disputed and allegations of vote-buying remain prevalent.

All of that, not to mention Daschle's lightning-rod post as the leader of his party in the Senate, sets the stage for an even more contentious race. His is one of at least four seats Republicans believe they stand a chance of winning in the 2004 congressional election season, a period that even some Democrats fear may be bleak.

Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative Washington group that is weighing in on the South Dakota race, puts it this way:

''There are two Tom Daschles: the Tom Daschle with a very liberal voting record who has become part of the Washington establishment and the Tom Daschle that masquerades as a prairie state populist, pumping gas for people during his August recess.''

For the next 15 months, Moore added, ''Daschle is target No. 1.''

Who will run against Daschle is unknown. But the South Dakota political landscape became unexpectedly more complicated during this month's congressional break, when legislators traditionally leave Washington to spend time in their home districts.

The state's only House member, Republican Bill Janklow, had not ruled out challenging Daschle. But now he may face criminal charges for his role in a fatal traffic accident Aug. 16. And Thune, a former congressman who narrowly lost the Senate seat last year, has not said whether he will challenge Daschle, fill Janklow's seat if it becomes open or sit out the 2004 election season entirely.

Four? There are six potential GOP pick-ups just in the South: SC, GA, FL, NC, AR, & LA.


N.B.--Bill Janklow, contrary to my bizarre assertion last week, is obviously a Republican. I, meanwhile, am obviously a nitwit.

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THE MODERNITY OF BARBARISM

BOOKNOTES: Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman (C-SPAN, June 22, 2003, 8 & 11pm)

LAMB: OK, then go to the politicized version. What are the things that would be required in a society for them to say, OK, we`ll stop the terrorism?

BERMAN: Well, I mean, the goal of the terrorism, as conceived of by the followers of this kind of thinking -- the goal of the terrorism is to advance the notion of jihad, which is the struggle for Islam, as conceived in this version, and the goal plainly -- I mean, the goal is at different levels. At one level, it`s -- it`s really to destroy the kinds of societies that are not upholding the principles of this version of Islamism.

LAMB: Those principles are?

BERMAN: Those principles -- well, the principles of this kind of Islam -- let me explain further that I`m saying -- other people would answer this question by saying that the goals of this kind of terrorism are specific political goals, that the goals are to force Israel to withdraw its settlements or to force the United States to withdraw its troops from Saudi Arabia or to force certain other specific kinds of political issues. But that`s not actually how I understand the movement. My understanding of the movement is really that the goals are much larger, much more revolutionary than that, that if those relatively small things were the goals, they could be approached in a rather different way.

The goal really is to -- is to make a revolution all over the world. And the reason I speak about totalitarianism and why I`m interested in Camus and the philosophers of totalitarianism, theorists about totalitarianism from 50 years ago or so, is this, that I think that the radical Islamist movement is a totalitarian movement in a 20-century style, that -- my theory is this, that after World War I, a whole series of extremely revolutionary movements arose, and they arose for the purpose of overthrowing what I think of as the essentially liberal doctrines -- not liberal in the right-wing, left-wing version, but liberal in the sense of -- the liberal doctrines of -- of Western culture.

And by the liberal doctrines, I mean the notion of the separation of church and state, the notion that there should be a difference between the private and the public, the difference between the government and the society, the difference between the government and -- and economics, the notion that in one`s own mind, we can think in different -- in different categories at the same time, that in part of your mind you could be religious, and in another part of your mind, you can be scientific or rationalist. It`s the notion that -- that a society -- the liberal idea is the notion that a society based on those ideas will -- will progress. You can offer progress for -- for all mankind everywhere. This had been a large governing idea throughout the 19th century. And it wasn`t in practice everywhere, but people subscribed to this idea and had a great faith in it. There was some reason to have a faith in it.

World War I came along, and the idea came to seem preposterous because World War I was so horrible, so industrialist -- industrially murderous that -- that people who were thinking in those old terms of the liberal optimism in the 19th century were unable to conceive it -- conceive of it, unable to explain it. And as a result, in the years after the war, a series of movements arose which were rebellions against the old liberal idea. Each of those movements had the same idea, which was to overthrow liberal civilization and replace it with a civilization of a different sort, rock-like, granite, without any separation of spheres, a single sphere, permanent, unchanging, eternal, governed by a leader with a single organization or a single party and -- and like that.

LAMB: Name the -- just for examples, the leaders and the countries you`re talking about.

BERMAN: Right. The first of these movements was Lenin`s, and the movement was Bolshevism or the Communist Party, and then Lenin to Stalin. The next of them was Mussolini, who founded the fascist movement in Italy a very few years later. Franco, with the fascist movement of Spain, Hitler with the Nazi movement in Germany, the Iron Guard in Romania, the extreme right in France, and so forth, through almost every country in -- through every country in Europe and many countries around the world. And each of these movements was different from each of the others.

At the time, if anybody had said to you there`s something in common between the Bolshevism of Lenin and the Fascism of Mussolini, they would have said that`s -- that`s preposterous. Those movements are opposite. But from our perspective now, looking back on them, we should be able to see that all of those movements had a lot in common. And what they had in common was this urge to rebel against liberal civilization, the principles of liberal separation of spheres, replace that with a rock-like, granite society, the permanent, unchanging society with the single party, the single leader, and so forth.

So each of those movements had, in this respect, the same idea. They all arose in the years -- in the immediate years after World War I. They -- those movements all arose in Europe. But at the same time, the same inspiration spread to the Muslim world, and it spread into the Muslim world in -- a kind of Muslim totalitarianism arose which had all of the main principles of totalitarianism in Europe. It arose in the 1920s and `30s. It had different strands. One of those strands is the one that was finally given a theoretical shape by Said Qutb in his commentary on the Quran. Another of those strands is the one that finally evolved into the Ba`ath Party of Saddam Hussein. But these different strands really had a lot in common.

But in any case, they had the same idea as each of the European totalitarian movements, which was to effect a revolution in the world everywhere, not just to effect a few more -- a few local reforms, not just to -- not just to make a few political demands on someone, maybe be a little rough about it, but to advance one`s cause in a reformist or small fashion, not just to get a slightly bigger slice of the pie, but instead to make a complete revolution that was going to change thoroughly the whole of mankind.

LAMB: So Lenin and Mussolini and Hitler and others all had the same goal as the Islamists do?

BERMAN: In this deepest of ways...

LAMB: In the big -- in the overall...

BERMAN: In the -- in the overall, deepest of ways, they have the same goal. In all other ways, once we leave the very deepest level, they each had different goals and -- and one opposite from the other, and they -- one fought wars with the other, and each one was different. But at the very deepest way, it was all the same.

And this deepest way was to overthrow liberal civilization, replace it with a different kind of modernity, which was -- that is to say, a different kind of modern society, benefiting from science and technological advance but which, unlike liberal society, was going to be solid, without any internal divisions, without any feelings of skepticism or doubt, a society that would be absolutely perfect, without cracks or contradictions, a society therefore that would last forever, or as the Nazis would say, a thousand years.

There's been some discussion of this issue in the comments, whether it is fair to call Islamicism a modernist movement. This is the definition by which all of the various statisms--modern liberalism, Nazism, communism, Islamicism--can be seen to be quite similar, in the denial that there should be a significant separation between the State and Society. Confusion about the matter arises because here in the already quite secularized West, we're more familiar with the State taking over what had in the past been fundamentally societal, often religious, functions. While, in the East, we see religious Islam asserting the claim that it should control the State. In reality, from the perspective of human freedom, there's little eventual difference among them.

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MONOCULTURE V. MULTICULTURE

People Like Us: We all pay lip service to the melting pot, but we really prefer the congealing pot (David Brooks, September 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)

Maybe it's time to admit the obvious. We don't really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.

Human beings are capable of drawing amazingly subtle social distinctions and then shaping their lives around them. In the Washington, D.C., area Democratic lawyers tend to live in suburban Maryland, and Republican lawyers tend to live in suburban Virginia. If you asked a Democratic lawyer to move from her $750,000 house in Bethesda, Maryland, to a $750,000 house in Great Falls, Virginia, she'd look at you as if you had just asked her to buy a pickup truck with a gun rack and to shove chewing tobacco in her kid's mouth. In Manhattan the owner of a $3 million SoHo loft would feel out of place moving into a $3 million Fifth Avenue apartment. A West Hollywood interior decorator would feel dislocated if you asked him to move to Orange County. In Georgia a barista from Athens would probably not fit in serving coffee in Americus.

It is a common complaint that every place is starting to look the same. But in the information age, the late writer James Chapin once told me, every place becomes more like itself. People are less often tied down to factories and mills, and they can search for places to live on the basis of cultural affinity. Once they find a town in which people share their values, they flock there, and reinforce whatever was distinctive about the town in the first place. Once Boulder, Colorado, became known as congenial to politically progressive mountain bikers, half the politically progressive mountain bikers in the country (it seems) moved there; they made the place so culturally pure that it has become practically a parody of itself.

But people love it. Make no mistake-we are increasing our happiness by segmenting off so rigorously. We are finding places where we are comfortable and where we feel we can flourish. But the choices we make toward that end lead to the very opposite of diversity. The United States might be a diverse nation when considered as a whole, but block by block and institution by institution it is a relatively homogeneous nation.

I don't get it. Isn't that the point of the melting pot, that you mix all the ingredients together and you get one undifferentiated thing? You get white bread, not fruitcake. Our motto is after all E Pluribus Unum or "Out of Many, One". The genius of America is that it doesn't much matter who you are or where you're from; you can come here, accept a few universal values, and maybe you won't be the same as your neighbor, but your kid will be the same as his. The key here--sorry to all you secularists--is than one of those universal beliefs we impose is that Man is a Created being, that he is Created in God's own image, and that he therefore has inherent dignity and a set of rights. America proceeds from an assumption of our similarity to one another.

Compare this to Europe, which has just adopted the opposite for its motto: "One in diversity". What could be more foolish than the belief that you can create a unified society if you try to maintain the things that make you different from one another? The problem for Europeans is that they don't have any universal beliefs any more, certainly not the belief that we're all Created by God in His image. This bodes ill for the attempt at Union, because in the absence of an organic extra-governmental unity they'll be reduced to imposing artificial unity via the mechanisms of the State. This statism, which requires a central authority to define the parameters of each and every interaction between peoples who can not be assumed to share any commonalities, must render a system that is so deliberate and sclerotic as to stifle the human soul, a problem that's easy to underestimate when you don't even believe in the soul.

---

WELL, IT'S A START

Ethnic fighting spreads in Iraq (STEVEN R. HURST, August 24, 2003, Chicago Sun-Times)

Rocket-propelled grenades were fired at statues of two Turkomen heroes as ethnic fighting spread to the northern city of Kirkuk and police tried to maintain order in a nearby town.

Gunfire echoed through Kirkuk Saturday night, and squads of police were stationed at each of the statues after the attacks. There was no indication of who was shooting or any sign of U.S. forces.

"We're worried about the situation, but we are working with city leaders and officials to resolve it," said Lt. Jonathan Hopkins of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Earlier, Kirkuk Mayor Abdul Rahman Mustafa, a Kurd, told the AP two people were killed and several were wounded. He did not identify the victims' by ethnicity.

According to both CNN-Turk television and private NTV television in Ankara, Turkey, hundreds of Turkomen, carrying blue Turkomen flags, marched on the governor's office. Turkey's Anatolia news agency reported two Turkomen were shot and killed and 11 wounded by Patriotic Union of Kurdistan forces.

The violence in Kirkuk, 150 miles north of Baghdad, followed fighting between Turkomen and Kurds on Friday in nearby Tuz Kharmato. Iraqi police killed two Turkomen tribesmen and wounded two others in Tuz Kharmato after they arrived to quell ethnic fighting, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, 4th Infantry Division spokeswoman.

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BOOKNOTES

In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History by Adam Bellow (C-SPAN, August 24, 2003, 8 & 11 pm)

Certain to be one of the most controversial books of the year, In Praise of Nepotism is a learned, lively, and provocative look at a practice we all deplore - except when we're involved in it ourselves.

Nepotism, the favored treatment of one's relatives, is a custom with infinitely more practitioners than defenders - especially in this country, where it is considered antidemocratic and almost un-American. Nepotism offends our sense of fair play and our meritocratic creed that we are supposed to earn what we get - not have it handed to us on a proverbial silver platter. For more than two centuries, a campaign has been waged against it in the name of fairness and equality in the courts, the legislatures, and in the public and private arenas - a campaign that has been only partly successful. For, far from disappearing, the practice has become so resurgent in recent years that we can now speak of a "new nepotism." In settings ranging from politics, business, and professional life to sports, the arts, and Hollywood, the children of famous and highly successful people have chosen to follow in their parents' career footsteps in a fashion and in numbers impossible to ignore. George W. Bush, Al Gore, Jr., and Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are only the tip of the iceberg that is an accelerating trend toward dynasticism and family "branding" in the heart of the American elite. Many see this as a deplorable development, to which Adam Bellow replies, Not so fast.

In this timely work (surprisingly, the first book ever devoted to nepotism), Adam Bellow brings fresh perspectives and vast learning and research to bear on this misunderstood and stigmatized practice. Drawing on the insights of modern evolutionary theory, he shows how nepotism is rooted in our very biological nature, as the glue that binds together not only insect and animal societies but, for most of the world and for most of history, human societies as well. Drawing on the disciplines of biology, anthropology, history, and social and political theory, Bellow surveys the natural history of nepotism from its evolutionary origins to its practice in primitive tribes, clans, and kingdoms to its role in the great societies of the world. These include the ancient Chinese, the Greeks, the Romans, Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and the democratic and capitalistic societies of the past two centuries, with extended consideration of the American experience. Along the way, he provides fascinating (and freshly considered) portraits of such famous and/or infamous figures as Abraham, Pericles, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Benjamin Franklin, and such families as the Borgias, the Rothschilds, the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, and the Bushes.

In his final chapter, Bellow argues that nepotism comes down to the bonds between children and parents, the transmission of family legacies, the cycle of generosity and gratitude that knits our whole society together. And since it is not going away anytime soon, he makes the case for dealing with nepotism openly and treating it as an art that can be practiced well or badly. In Praise of Nepotism is a book that will ruffle feathers, create controversy, and open and change minds.

We five consecutive Orrin Judds who all went to the same alma mater have a little saying: the only people who oppose nepotism are the ones with crappy gene pools.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (Doubleday)
-ESSAY: In Praise of Nepotism: Americans censure nepotism on the one hand and practice it as much as they can on the other. There's much to be said for "good" nepotism, the author argues—which is fortunate, because we're living in a nepotistic Golden Age (Adam Bellow, July/August 2003, The Atlantic Monthly)
-ESSAY: The Jewish Path to Success (ADAM BELLOW, 8/01/03, The Forward)
-REVIEW: of Another Life: A Memoir of Other People, by Michael Korda (Adam Bellow, National Review)
-EXCHANGE: 'Blinded by the Right': An Exchange (Adam Bellow, David Horowitz, R. Emmett Tyrrell, William Burke, Reply by Jane Mayer, NY Review of Books)

-INTERVIEW: Silver spoon (Aparajita Saha, Adam Bellow, September 2003, Money)

-ESSAY: Children of Paradise (John Powers, 7/17/03, LA Weekly)
-ESSAY: Dynastic succession in the land of the free (Emily Eakin, June 24, 2003, NY Times)
-ESSAY: Don't let jobs grow on family trees (Jonathan Turley, 7/29/03, USA Today)

-ARCHIVES: "adam bellow" (Mag Portal)
-ARCHIVES: "adam bellow" (Find Articles)

-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Adam Begley, NY Observer)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (John Homans, New York)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Merle Rubin, CS Monitor)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Sam Weller, Chicago Sun-Times)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Frederic Raphael, LA Times)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Philip Gold, Washington Times)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Scott McLemee, Newsday)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (David Updike, Esquire)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Chris Lehmann, Washington Post)
-REVIEW: of In Praise of Nepotism (Margo Hammond, PoynterOnline)

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CULT OF PERSONALITY

Farewell America: After six years, The Observer's award-winning US correspondent Ed Vulliamy takes his leave from a wounded and belligerent nation with which, reluctantly, he has now fallen out of love (Ed Vulliamy, August 24, 2003, The Observer)

Once smitten, it should be impossible to fall out of love with America. Who could fall out of love with that New York adrenaline rush, or the clutter of the 7 Train as it grinds on stilts of iron from Manhattan out to Queens through the scents and sounds of 160 first languages? Who could fall out of love with the mighty desert when a lilac dawn fades out the constellations in its vast sky? Who could fall out of love with the muscular industry of America's real capital, Chicago, 'city of big shoulders', as the poet Carl Sandburg described it? It was insurgent Chicago that first captured my heart for America as a visiting teenager in 1970.

Now it's time to leave the United States as a supposed adult, having been a resident and correspondent for exactly as long as Tony Blair has been Prime Minister - I was appointed that May morning in 1997 that brought Britain's Conservative night to an end. Blair's love for America seems to have deepened since; but love is both the strongest and most brittle of sentiments, and mine has depreciated. I still love that adrenaline rush, the desert light, those big shoulders; but something else has happened to America during my six years to invoke that bitter love song by a great American, BB King, 'The Thrill is Gone': 'And now that it's all over / All I can do is wish you well...'

I arrived in an America regarded by the world as 'cool'. One can never be sure whether a President defines the country or vice versa, but this was Bill Clinton's America. [...]

Meanwhile out in the world, intervention by the US was either welcomed by the persecuted of Haiti and Kosovo or else craved by (but culpably denied) those in Bosnia and Rwanda - as a force of deliverance, not of empire.

The whole thing is pretty vapid, but we particularly like the bit about how welcome Bill Clinton's America was in the world. Mr. Vulliamy has apparently forgotten such things as the retreat of the USS Harlan County from Port-au-Prince, the way we cut and ran after the Battle of the Black Sea, and that the "intervention" in Kosovo was a bombing campaign which ended in Kosovo being "occupied" by an international coalition. It may be that our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq will "fail", if our intent is to create stable new governments, rather than just to depose enemies. But we already know that our policies in Haiti and Somalia failed. And if everyone withdrew from Kosovo right now it seems unlikely that it would remain stable. But even setting aside these failures, why is it that these actions, ranging from the Caribbean to Central Europe to Africa don't show Bill Clinton's America to be a force of empire? Is it just because he was "cool"? Is Mr. Vulliamy a serious journalist or a correspondent for Tiger Beat?

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OMEGA MEN

We're All Gonna Die!: But it won't be from germ warfare, runaway nanobots, or shifting magnetic poles. A skeptical guide to Doomsday. (Gregg Easterbrook, July 2003, Wired)

Everywhere you turn, pundits are predicting biblical-scale disaster. In many scenarios, mankind is the culprit, unleashing atmospheric carbon dioxide, genetically engineered organisms, or runaway nanobots to exact a bitter revenge for scientific meddling. But even if human deployment of technology proves benign, Mother Nature will assert her primacy through virulent pathogens, killer asteroids, marauding comets, exploding supernovas, and other such happenstances of mass destruction.

Fringe thinking? Hardly. Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years." Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," warn of techno-calamity. Stephen Petranek, editor in chief of the science monthly Discover, crisscrosses the world lecturing on "15 Major Risks to the World and Life as We Know It." University of Maryland arms-control scholar John Steinbruner is lobbying organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Medical Association to establish an international review board with the power to ban research into the Pandora's box of biomedicine. [...]

At a time of global unease, worst-case scenarios have a certain appeal, not unlike reality TV. And it's only natural to focus on danger; if nature hadn't programmed human beings to be wary, the species might not have gotten this far. But a little perspective is in order. Let's review the various doomsday theories, from least threatening to most. If the end is inevitable, at least there won't be any surprises.

One helpful thing about all this rationalist hysteria is that it makes obvious some of the ways in which science resembles religion. If the claim of science and reason is that they afford a means of dispassionately analyzing reality and that this analysis leads inevitably to the conclusion that Man is relatively insignificant, these nearly universal apocalypticisms--ranging from fretting over things like Global Warming, nanotechnology and genetically-modified foods to Mr. Rees's fear that we'll open a black hole or something--are all basically attempts to restore Man to the center of existence and to place the believer at a pivotal moment in history. If we can destroy everything then we must matter as a species and if you and I are going to get to be here for the end of it all then we must matter individually. It's really nothing more than boasting: We may not get to be Alpha (God), but dammit, we're going to usurp the role of Omega!

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SOCIAL CAPITALISM

Public housing residents face ultimatum: Do volunteer work or get out (ERIK LORDS, August 23, 2003, Detroit Free Press)

Complete eight hours of volunteer community work a month or be evicted.

That's the ultimatum being given to hundreds of thousands of able-bodied, unemployed residents of public housing complexes across the nation and in metro Detroit as part of a new federal law that takes effect Oct. 1.

Aimed at improving impoverished neighborhoods and introducing nonworkers to career possibilities, the law exempts students, people with a disability, seniors, those working full-time and mothers participating in welfare-to-work programs.

Those affected will be required to work in churches, schools or with other nonprofit groups as part of the 1998 Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act. [...]

Betty Ward, deputy director of the Port Huron Housing commission in St. Clair County, said: "I think it's going to be a nightmare to track and enforce."

Like Stennis in Detroit, Ward said she is hopeful that her office will not have to evict residents. But the potential is there.

"One way to get out of it, for residents, is to get a job." Ward said.

Now, if only the middle class were as willing to impose responsibilities on itself for the government benefits it receives.

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ENLIGHTENMENT OR REFORMATION?

Losing his religion: Apostate Ibn Warraq campaigns for the right not to be a Muslim (Lee Smith, 8/17/2003, Boston Globe)

The Indian-born and English-educated Ibn Warraq, 57, is among the most prominent and outspoken Muslim apostates alive today. His 1995 book "Why I Am Not a Muslim'' was an impassioned polemic against almost 1,400 years of Muslim dogma and its effect on the Islamic world. The more recent collections he has edited–"What the Koran Really Says'' (2002) and this year's "Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out''–present less confrontational, more scholarly lines of attack.

Still, Warraq (the name is a pseudonym) aims to skewer the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of a faith that commands the allegiance of a billion people–as well as the hypocrisies of those Western defenders of Islam who would not tolerate its strictures in their own cultures.

To his admirers in the West and in the Muslim world, Warraq is a latter-day Voltaire who may herald an Islamic enlightenment. "He wants to open it up for people who are born into a religion they can't leave,'' says Patricia Crone, a scholar of Islam at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

To his critics, Warraq is an intolerant pseudo-scholar whose bitter polemics set back the very possibility of modernizing the faith. "If you already know what Islamophobes and Orientalists believe, this author has nothing original to add,'' says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA and the author most recently of "The Place of Tolerance in Islam'' (2002). "It's good propaganda, but not good scholarship.'' [...]

Warraq is particularly critical of Noah Feldman, the NYU law professor whom the US government has enlisted to assist in the drafting of Iraq's new constitution. If Feldman's new book "After Jihad'' is any indication of what that document will look like, Warraq is concerned.

"How can Feldman believe there is any compatibility at all between Islamist movements and democratic principles?'' he asks. "They are democrats only in that they will use elections to take power. One man, one vote, one time. The first people who suffer are women, and after that non-Muslims. The level of denial from Western liberals renders me speechless.''

Khaled Abou El Fadl, who attempts to use traditional canons of interpretation to bring out the tolerant and democratic aspects of the Koran, contends that democracy and Islam are both "defined in the first instance by their underlying moral values.''

One can only hope that El Fadl is right. But Warraq emphasizes that essential aspects of democracy, such as freedom of speech and freedom of belief, are best exemplified in Islam by those thinkers and writers it calls apostates.

Though he has little regard for Warraq's work, El Fadl himself recognizes the crucial importance of apostates and other religious dissidents. "The freethinkers pushed the limits of orthodoxy, and they were a point of attachment for many Muslims later on,'' he says. ``If all you had was orthodoxy all the time, Islamic civilization wouldn't have existed over 1,000 years. They dragged people along kicking and screaming.''

That Islam has a few structural problems is cause for a Reformation, not wholesale abandonment of the religion. It is not necessary to rid the Islamic world of God, but to create a space there for Man to govern himself. Khaled Abou El Fadl seems to have the better case, as see here: Islam and the Challenge of Democracy: Can individual rights and popular sovereignty take root in faith? (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Boston Review)


MORE:
-ESSAY: Islam and Intellectual Terrorism: Turbans of the mind are disallowing and disavowing proper intellectual engagement with Islam. (Ibn Warraq, New Humanist)
-INTERVIEW: Ibn Warraq: Why I Am Not A Muslim (The Religion Report, 10/10/2001)
-INTERVIEW: Islam and apostasy (The Religion Report, 02/07/2003)
-REVIEW: of Why I am Not a Muslim (MAXIME RODINSON, February 2000, Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society)
-ESSAY: Holy War (Chris Mooney, 12.17.01, American Prospect)
-ESSAY: When Ibn Warraq met Edward Said (Adil Farooq, January 16, 2003, Winds of Change)

-ESSAY: Islam and the Challenge of Democracy: Can individual rights and popular sovereignty take root in faith? (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Boston Review)
-ESSAY: Islam and the Theology of Power: "Supremacist puritanism in contemporary Islam is dismissive of all moral norms or ethical values." (Khaled Abou El Fadl, Islam for Today)
-ESSAY: Khaled Abou El Fadl: Reformer or Revisionist ? (Andrew G. Bostom, April 9, 2003, Institute for the Secularisation of Islamic Society)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Khaled Abou El Fadl: Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong ( "Ideas and Issues", Hugh LaFollette)
-ESSAY: Is Khaled Abou El Fadl a Moderate? (Little Green Footballs, 8/15/2003)

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ANTI-TAX IN NAME ONLY

National Conservative Groups Warm Up to Schwarzenegger: Republican Leadership Council has endorsed him, and anti-tax groups are courting, hoping he'll take a definitive stance on their issue. (Ronald Brownstein, August 24, 2003, LA Times)

Although national conservative groups at first remained aloof from the bid to oust California Gov. Gray Davis, their leaders increasingly view the recall as an opportunity to generate momentum heading into next year's congressional and presidential voting.

"It will set a tone for next year," said Grover G. Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform and a leading conservative strategist. [...]

But anti-tax and anti-spending conservative organizations are considering a role in the recall campaign. Schwarzenegger's camp has been negotiating for support from the Club for Growth, a leading conservative political action committee, as well as the large network of groups that revolve around Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform organization.

Norquist said that for Schwarzenegger, the key to gaining broader conservative support will be hardening his stand against new taxes. At a news conference Wednesday, Schwarzenegger came out strongly against taxes as a means to solve the state's budget shortfall but said he could not rule out tax increases to meet emergencies such as earthquakes.

Norquist is pressing Schwarzenegger to sign a pledge the group promotes that commits politicians not to support any net increase in taxes. "I think over the next week or so we'll see whether Arnold succeeds or fails in nailing down that he is not going to raise taxes," Norquist said. "Should he do that, then I think you will see a coming together around his campaign, and then you will see both Republicans and conservatives getting excited in California and nationally."

McClintock and Simon, until he withdrew from the race, had been criticizing Schwarzenegger for not signing the pledge. Schwarzenegger spokesman Sean Walsh seemed to denigrate the anti-tax pledge in an interview with Fox News last week, saying, "We're not going to play into any particular interest group who wants to just whipsaw us." [...]

Yet Steve Moore, president of the Club for Growth, said many conservatives were still in a "wait-and-see mode" about Schwarzenegger.

"We want to believe in this guy ... [but] he does have this one kind of annoying habit of trying to appease everybody, and I don't know if he can get away with that," Moore said.

Suppose, for the moment, that you grant Mr. Moore's position, that taxes should be the single issue upon which one bases his vote. Why then is it not necessary to do everythiong one can to defeat Cruz Bustamante, who is running on a pledge to hike taxes?

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PRO-PURGE

Kirkuk purges members of former ruling Baath party (Iraq Press, August 24, 2003)

The new administration of this oil-rich city says it is determined to obliterate the legacy of the former ruling Baath party.

Perhaps it has more reason to do so than any local administration in the country.

For three decades, Kirkuk was subjected to oppressive and occasionally bloody policy of ethnic cleansing.

Tens of thousands of families were uprooted and their land and belongings confiscated.

Diehard supporters of the deposed leader Saddam Hussein filled senior positions and they made sure that only the Baathists were allowed to stay in the city and work in its sprawling oil installations.

Kirkuk is a mosaic of ethnic and religious minorities and many thought it would pose a real problem for the US-led occupation troops to administer.

But Kirkuk is now one of the most peaceful cities in Iraq. It has an elected council and a functioning police force and judicial system.

The Iraqis need to purge like Karen Carpenter.

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MY WORK HERE IS DONE

Can It Be? The End of Evolution? (NICHOLAS WADE, August 24, 2003, NY Times)

The most improbable item in science fiction movies is not the hardware — the faster-than-light travel, the tractor beams, the levitation — but the people. Strangely, they always look and behave just like us. Yet the one safe prediction about the far future is that humans will be a lot further along in their evolution.

Last week population geneticists, rummaging in DNA's ever-fascinating attic, set dates on two important changes in the human form.

Dr. Alan R. Rogers of the University of Utah figured out that the ancestral human population had acquired black skin, as a protection against the sun, at least 1.2 million years ago, and therefore that it must have shed its fur some time before this date.

Clothing came long after we were naked. Dr. Mark Stoneking, of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, managed to address this question by calculating when the human body louse (which lives only in clothing, not hair) evolved from the human head louse. That proud event in human history dates to between 72,000 and 42,000 years ago, Dr. Stoneking reported

So where do we go from here? Have we attained perfection and ceased to evolve?

Where would anyone ever get the idea that Darwinism is deterministic?


MORE:
-ESSAY: Is human evolution finally over?: Scientists are split over the theory that natural selection has come to a standstill in the West. (Robin McKie, February 3, 2002, The Observer)
-ESSAY: As Good as It Gets (Robert E. Horseman, April 2002, CDA Journal)

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"ABOUT SCIENCE"

The Demiurge’s Laugh (Robert Frost, 1915, A Boy's Will)

IT was far in the sameness of the wood;
I was running with joy on the Demon’s trail,
Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.
It was just as the light was beginning to fail
That I suddenly heard—all I needed to hear:
It has lasted me many and many a year.

The sound was behind me instead of before,
A sleepy sound, but mocking half,
As of one who utterly couldn’t care.
The Demon arose from his wallow to laugh,
Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went;
And well I knew what the Demon meant.

I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.
I felt as a fool to have been so caught,
And checked my steps to make pretence
It was something among the leaves I sought
(Though doubtful whether he stayed to see).
Thereafter I sat me against a tree.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Going by Contraries: Robert Frost's Conflict with Science by Robert Bernard Hass (University of Virginia Press)
-ESSAY: The Demiurge's Laugh (Ann Elz, 4253 Project)
-ESSAY: Robert Frost & The New England Renaissance (George Monteiro)
-ESSAY: A Poet Reads Darwin (Mark Walhout, Jan/Feb 1999, Books & Culture)
-ESSAY: Mandelstam's Gardener (Michael Caines, Poetry Review)
-The Robert Frost Society
-ARCHIVES: "robert frost" (Find Articles)

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THE FLAVOR OF SIN

Pedophile Priest Killed in Prison Attack (Svea Herbst-Bayliss, 8/23/03, Reuters)

Defrocked priest John Geoghan, a central figure in the Catholic Church's sex abuse scandal, was killed on Saturday by a fellow-inmate in the prison where he was serving a sentence for child rape, a state prisons official said.

"There was an incident involving John Geoghan and another inmate around noon on Saturday. Geoghan sustained serious injury and was brought to Leominster Hospital where we was pronounced dead shortly before 2 p.m.," said Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department of Corrections. [...]

The Archdiocese of Boston, where Geoghan had served as a priest in many parishes, described his death as "tragic."

"The Archdiocese of Boston offers its prayers for the repose of John's soul and extends its prayers and consolation to his beloved sister Catherine at this time of personal loss," said Christopher Coyne, a spokesman for the Archdiocese.

Attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who represents many young men who say they were molested by Geoghan, said he was shocked and surprised to hear of Geoghan's death.

"My clients would rather have seen John Geoghan be punished in a way seen fit by society," he said. "They would have rather seen him endure the rigors of two more trials and endure the pain of more prison sentences."

Having failed to treat others with dignity John Geoghan died without dignity and that cycle surely is tragic. What he did was evil and he deserved to be punished for it, but by a reasoned action of our society, not on the impulse of another low-life. Personally, I tend to believe his crimes were so horrible, so transgressive, that even the death penalty should have been imposed. We should value human dignity so highly that the cost of violating it in the way John Geoghan did should be to lose your own life. That process too though should be dignified.

Meanwhile, there's an important element here that may be worth our while to consider. It's always tempting to think of people like John Geoghan as monsters, as so fundamentally different from us that they're barely human and their lives just don't matter. Here's a passage from a recent book review that frames the ideas involved nicely, REVIEW: of Hellfire Nation by James A. Morone (Jackson Lears, New Republic) :

Occasionally adolescent high jinks affect the history of thought. Consider the episode recounted by Augustine in his Confessions. "There was a pear tree near our vineyard, loaded with a fruit that was attractive neither to look at nor to taste. Late one night a band of ruffians, myself included, went off to shake down the fruit and carry it away.... We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs." Augustine agonized at length about the sheer perversity of his motives. "Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?" Certainly, "it was not the pears that my unhappy soul desired. I had plenty of my own, better than those, and I only picked them so that I might steal. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them away, and tasted nothing in them but my own sin, which I relished and enjoyed. If any part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor." And so a boyish escapade became a primary text of Christian thinking about sin.

For what became known as the Augustinian view, sin was a subjective experience, a self-satisfied pride that allowed the sinner to take pleasure in acts that actually alienated him from God, the source of all being. To be sure, sin had a social dimension, too. Stealing the pears by himself, Augustine wrote, "would have been no fun and I should not have done it." The desire to have "partners in sin" made it harder to exercise moral responsibility, "because we are ashamed to hold back when others say `Come on! Let's do it!'" But at bottom the Augustinian conception of sin was more psychological than social: it was an elusive but innate perversity -- a tendency toward estrangement from all creation -- rooted in every human soul, which could only be transcended with the aid of divine grace.

Of course there have always been other ways of thinking about sin. The chief alternative to Augustine's inward emphasis was the notion that evil is a palpable entity outside the self, one that could (and often did) take material and even fleshly form. The purest form of this belief in Augustine's time was the Manichaean heresy. Augustine had been a Manichee himself for ten years, and much of the intellectual drive of his autobiography arises from his struggle to free himself from the Manichees' materialist conception of evil by developing a subtler one. But subtlety never translated easily into the idioms of popular Christianity, which imagined sin embodied in either an actual devil or a demonized other -- the witch, the infidel, above all the Jew. Though theologians condemned the Manichaean heresy, the Manichaean tendency to divide the world into a virtuous "us" and a sinful "them" flourished in Christian tradition, animating absolutisms, inspiring crusades, and consigning the other to flames in the next world and sometimes in this one.

Still, Augustinian ideas survived, too. They sustained the doctrine of original sin, which despite its sometimes devastating impact on the human psyche at least preserved an emphasis on the universality of human corruption, refusing to isolate sin in particular groups of offenders. For centuries, when Christians thought seriously about sin, they turned to Augustinian tradition. The English Puritans who settled North America, for example, were nothing if not serious about sin. They insisted on a covenant of grace, not of works. This meant that the performance of apparently moral acts was mere mummery without a regenerate heart. The key to salvation was not morality, it was piety -- the spiritual state that resulted from an intense inner search for union with the deity.

This was precisely the sort of struggle that Augustine described, and it was at the core of American Puritanism. Oscillating between an exalted experience of divine grace and a deep sense of human depravity (including one's own), the Augustinian strain of piety dissolved the comforting delusion that evil could be situated outside the self. The attempt to live virtuously required constant questioning of one's own motives, constant awareness of one's own capacity to confuse self-interest with self-sacrifice. Sin was fleeting, insubstantial, evanescent -- but ever-present, in the hearts of the pious as well as the prodigal.

If John Geoghan deserved to die it was because he had so estranged himself from all Creation, from God and from all of us. It was because he was really quite like us, but plunged himself deep into the depravity that resides within us all and that we are commanded to resist, not because he was some kind of demon, affected by a sinfulness that the rest of us are untainted by. Whether for good or ill--and those of us who believe in freedom must think it good--we have free will, and John Geoghan freely chose to behave in an evil manner.

Whether God is so forgiving of Man that he forgives even such men and extends divine grace to even those of us who so completely embrace our innate depravity we've no idea. I only know that I don't have that great a capacity for forgiveness within me. It is surely not a good thing that John Geoghan was murdered--for that's all this was is a murder--but it's beyond me to see how it's a bad thing that he's gone.


MORE:
Geoghan's Death Is Described: Fellow Inmate Jammed Cell Door During Attack (Jonathan Finer, August 25, 2003, Washington Post)

John J. Geoghan, the former priest and convicted child molester killed in a Massachusetts prison Saturday, was followed into his cell just after lunch by a fellow inmate who bound and gagged him before strangling him with a bed sheet, according to a union representative for prison guards.

The attacker, whom authorities identified as Joseph L. Druce, jammed the electronically operated cell door to prevent guards from opening it. He tied Geoghan's hands behind his back with a sheet and gagged him. He then repeatedly jumped from the bed in the cell onto Geoghan's motionless body and beat the defrocked priest with his fists. [...]

Druce, 37, was immediately isolated and will be charged with murder, investigators said. Massachusetts does not have a death penalty, so it is unclear what additional punishment he could receive since he is serving a life sentence for strangling a man in 1988. He also was convicted while in prison of attempting an anthrax scare by sending envelopes filled with white powder and covered in Swastikas to about 30 Jewish lawyers nationwide in 2001.

The Worcester County district attorney's office said that Druce was born Darrin Smiledge but changed his name while in prison. Druce's father, Dana Smiledge, told the Boston Globe that his son hated Jews and blacks and had a grudge against gays.

So much for justice being served on behalf of the abused children, eh?

MORE:
GRACE GREATER THAN OUR SIN [Words: Julia H. Johnston, in Hymns Tried and True (Chi-ca-go, Il-li-nois: The Bi-ble In-sti-tute Col-port-age As-so-ci-a-tion, 1911); Music: Daniel B. Towner, 1910]

Marvelous grace of our loving Lord,
Grace that exceeds our sin and our guilt!
Yonder on Calvary’s mount outpoured,
There where the blood of the Lamb was spilled.

Sin and despair, like the sea waves cold,
Threaten the soul with infinite loss;
Grace that is greater, yes, grace untold,
Points to the refuge, the mighty cross.

Dark is the stain that we cannot hide.
What can we do to wash it away?
Look! There is flowing a crimson tide,
Brighter than snow you may be today.

Marvelous, infinite, matchless grace,
Freely bestowed on all who believe!
You that are longing to see His face,
Will you this moment His grace receive?

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)

Interview with Howard Dean (Oregon Public Broadcasting, 8/20/2003)

Interviewer: When you're here on Sunday do you plan to talk about some Oregon specific issues?

Howard Dean: Well I'm certainly going to talk about the Healthy Forests Initiative, which the president is plugging.... Because the president tried to use the forest fires to justify cutting a lot of old growth timber and he went too far....

Interviewer: Let me ask you about one other issue that is unique to Oregon and that is physician-assisted suicide.... In general where do you stand on physician-assisted suicide and Oregon's vote on that issue?

Howard Dean: ... I think this a very private, personal decision and I think individual physicians and patients have the right to make that private decision. I am very amused by the Right Wing--including the president and administration--who talk about liberty but then decide they're going to scrutinize everyone's behavior and tell them what they can and cannot do. There can't be a much more personal decision an individual makes than how to die and I think that is a personal decision left to individuals, their physicians and families.

Have you heard the new motto of the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party: Nature, liberty, and the pursuit of oblivion.

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IS "HAMAS" ARABIC FOR "MORONS"?

Hamas says Bush is "Islam's biggest enemy'' for freezing assets in bombing response (Associated Press, August 23, 2003)

Speaking to Dubai-based Al-Arabiya TV, Abdel Aziz Rantisi called the action "a theft of Muslim money by the Americans" and said the frozen money doesn't belong to Hamas.

"Hamas does not have any money in the U.S., Europe or even in the Arab states. President Bush has become Islam's biggest enemy," Rantisi said in the interview.

On Friday, the United States froze the assets of six Hamas leaders, including Rantisi, an aide to Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the group's spiritual leader. The United States also froze the assets of five European-based organizations that it said raise money for the radical Palestinian group.

Bush said he ordered the assets frozen because Hamas claimed responsibility for Tuesday's suicide attack on a packed bus in Jerusalem that killed 20 people, including six children.