March 31, 2005
LATE IS THE HOUR:
Vatican: Pope receives Last Rites (Daily Telegraph 31/03/2005)
Pope John Paul II has received the Last Rites, the Roman Catholic sacrament reserved for the sick and dying.A Vatican spokesman confirmed reports from the Italian media that the Pontiff, who is suffering from a very high fever caused by a urinary infection, received the sacrament earlier today after doctors inserted a tube in his throat to ease his breathing.
Pilgrims gather for sombre vigil as Pope 'nears the end' (Richard Owen, 4/01/05, Times of London)
DOCTORS were rushed to the Pope’s bedside last night as his condition worsened dramatically and a senior cardinal said that he was “nearing the end”.Rumours swept Rome that the Pope had been given the sacrament of the infirm (last rites).
Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the chief Vatican spokesman, said that the Pope was suffering from a high temperature caused by a urinary tract infection that was being treated urgently with antibiotics. “The Holy Father today was struck by a high fever caused by a confirmed infection of the urinary tract,” Dr Navarro-Valls said.
“The medical situation is being strictly controlled by the Vatican medical team that is taking care of him.”
Vatican sources denied, however, that the Pope was being transferred to the Gemelli hospital in Rome, where he has already been treated twice since the beginning of February.
Early this morning the Vatican said that the Pope was responding to the antibiotics and his condition had stabilised.
Italian new agencies said that the Pope, 84, was suffering from a high temperature and substantial weight loss. The reports said that doctors had intervened because of a “worrying lowering of blood pressure”.
Overnight the lights were burning in the Pope’s rooms in the third floor of the apostolic apartment above a floodlit St Peter’s Square, which was sealed as pilgrims gathered to keep vigil. Italian television made special late-night broadcasts announcing that the Pope was “seriously ill”.
Pope suffers heart attack (The Age, April 1, 2005)
Pope John Paul II suffered a heart attack and his condition is "very serious", Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said today."Following a urinary tract infection, septic shock and a cardiocirculatory collapse occurred," Navarro-Valls said in a statement. [...]
Navarro-Valls said the Pope had been given the Holy Viaticum - communion reserved for those close to death - and had decided himself not to go to hospital for treatment.
WHAT IF NO ONE HAD NOTICED THAT NIXON WENT TO CHINA?:
Going Out for Indian: By helping India become "a major world power," the administration is showing the global seriuosness of the Bush Doctrine. (Tom Donnelly, 03/31/2005, Weekly Standard)
WITH THE NEWS from Iraq relegated to the back pages recently, last Friday's State Department briefing--especially since it was not devoted to Condoleezza Rice's latest fashion statements--attracted little attention. The subject: the evolving strategic partnership between the United States and India. The news? It is the "goal" of the Bush administration "to help India become a major world power in the 21st century."This is indeed a monumental and welcome development; it's the clearest sign to date that the Bush Doctrine has a genuine strategic logic, that it's more than a justification for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. To realize the president's goals, particularly the commitment to spreading freedom that was the core message of his Second Inaugural Address, the United States needs a workable, how-to plan, one that bends the instruments of international politics--most notably, the tools of "hard" power like military force and political alliances--to American purposes. A U.S.-India strategic partnership, if fully developed, would be the single most important step toward an alliance capable of meeting the 21st century's principal challenges: radical Islam and rising China.
Unlike our almost erstwhile allies in western Europe, India shares an equal strategic concern with both these challenges. Perhaps even more important, India shares a commitment to democracy that transcends ethnic nationalism--Hindu nationalism, in this case, will not suffice to govern a state that includes 120 million Muslims--and an understanding of the necessity for armed strength. India's position in South Asia puts it in an essential geostrategic location from both a continental and maritime perspective. In sum, the United States could hardly dream up a more ideal strategic partner.
Fifty years from today the forging of this alliance will rank only slightly behind liberalizing the Middle East among the President's accomplishment's yet the MSM has barely even noticed it.
ALL A WITE WASH:
'Inheriting Syria' in the Modern Age (Terry Gross, 3/31/05, Fresh Air)
Flynt Leverett is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. As Syria is prodded to withdraw its troops -- and influence -- from neighboring Lebanon, the region faces potentially drastic changes.A veteran expert on Middle East policy -- from the National Security Council and the State Department to the CIA -- Leverett has also written a new book, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial By Fire, about Bashar al-Assad's rule of Syria after following his father as the country's leader.
For today's priceless moment with the Realists, Ms Gross asked Mr. Leverett if Bashar Assad and his father could be called "brutal" rulers. Mr. Leverett was, naturally, unable to say any such thing, though he did go on to explain that 10 to 20, 000 Syrians had "died" at Hama. One wonders how many of your people you have to murder to qualify as brutal in his book. Meanwhile, by the end of the program he was almost sobbing at the thought of the challenges that poor Baby Assad faces.
YES, DEAR:
Grumpy old men are a myth. It's the women who rage (Lewis Smith, 4/01/05, Times of London)
GRUMPY old men are just a myth. It’s women who are really raging in old age, research indicates.
Far from following the lead of Victor Meldrew, elderly men are calm old buffers who refuse to fly off the handle. Their womenfolk, on the other hand, have been boiling with anger since they were young, a situation that fails to improve with age.
The grumpy old women do score over men in one respect, however; they are much better at hiding their anger.
“Victor Meldrew was the exception and not the rule,” Jane Barnett, of Middlesex University, said in reference to Richard Wilson’s permanently cross character in the hit television show One Foot in the Grave.
She added that the Grumpy Old Women television programme, featuring people such as Janet Street-Porter and Germaine Greer ranting at a succession of irritants, was far better at reflecting reality than its counterpart Grumpy Old Men.[....]
[R]ather than follow the stereotype of male anger and reasonable female calm the women showed themselves to be far crosser than men. Once organised into age brackets it became clear that although men and women showed the same levels of anger aged 18 to 25, their responses sharply diverged as they aged.
By the time they are heading for their 40th birthday men are far less easily angered and the downward trend continues, though not at the same rate, during the ages of 41 to 60. Women’s anger levels remain the same throughout their lives and by the time they collect their pensions they are as aerated as the day they began their careers.
The study backed up previous research indicating that there is a gender difference in what makes people angry.
Men were far more likely to be infuriated by the actions of strangers and inanimate objects while what made women most cross were the people they were closest to. Frustration at failing to meet personal goals was the same for men and women.
Miss Barnett told the conference in Manchester yesterday that more research was needed into why men calm down while women “remain simmering” through the ages.
Do you really need this research when you've got Harvard Faculty meetings you can observe?
WHO ELSE WOULD YOU LEND MONEY?:
Surprise--America Owes Too Little (Kenneth L. Fisher, 04.18.05, Forbes)
What is the right debt level for society to carry? The answer is: that level where our marginal borrowing costs approach our marginal return on assets. This is, in fact, the same formula that a corporation would use. If you can borrow at 6% to build a factory that will yield a return of 12%, you should borrow.The U.S. is nowhere near there. As a result, we need more debt to get more income, so people can become wealthier.
The Federal Reserve counts $97 trillion of assets in the economy, offset by $44 trillion of debt, leaving (with rounding) $52 trillion of net worth. The asset figure, to be sure, involves some double-counting (General Motors' factory, an asset, is financed by bonds, counted again as an asset in your individual retirement account), but no matter: The key figure is the $52 trillion at the bottom of the U.S. balance sheet. And we're getting a great return on that $52 trillion. Our national income is $12 trillion.
Yes, most of the income is labor income, not a return on capital as conventionally calculated. Yet think for a moment: Why are labor rates higher here than in Madagascar? It's precisely because we have so much invested in the form of roads, factories and job skills. I compare the $12 trillion income to the $52 trillion of net capital and conclude that capital is extremely productive in this country. I'm not worried about importing a little more of it and putting it to use.
Folks fret about our $2 trillion of consumer debt and $4 trillion of federal government debt. But these are small numbers in relation to our income, to our total debt (mortgage and business debts are far larger) and to our net worth. Stop worrying. Instead, buy stocks.
Lend us more and we'll make it grow.
ANY THEORY THAT SOUNDS NONSENSICAL ENOUGH IS:
Black holes 'do not exist': These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims. (Philip Ball, 3/31/05, Nature)
Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.
George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.
THAT'S WHY GOD GAVE US PLIERS:
I pulled out my own teeth (TREVOR KAVANAGH, 3/31/05, Daily Sun)
TONY Blair yesterday faced a woman who pulled out SEVEN of her teeth after failing to find an NHS dentist.Great-grandmother Valerie Halsworth, 64, removed them with her husband’s pliers.
She pulled out a seventh tooth over the weekend before meeting the PM in Coventry yesterday.
If more folks were like Ms Halsworth maybe National Health wouldn't be collapsing.
GOOD ENOUGH FOR HARRY:
Bush Highlights Thrift Savings Plans (Fox News, March 31, 2005)
The retirement savings plan that federal employees enjoy and President Bush cites as a model for his individual investment accounts differs in a key regard from what he proposes: Bush would carve the new accounts out of the Social Security taxes workers now pay.The government workers' savings plan, by contrast, is in addition to the Social Security taxes they pay and the benefits they are promised.
Democrats have said they would be much more inclined to embrace the private accounts — the signature item of the president's proposed Social Security overhaul — if they, too, were treated as an add-on to the traditional benefit check rather than a partial replacement.
One Republican, Rep. Clay Shaw of Florida, who oversees a House Social Security subcommittee, has filed legislation that would create the accounts as an addition to the program. But so far the broader debate over ensuring Social Security's long-term solvency has stalled over opposition to the president's "carve-out" accounts.
"It is just so unfair, misleading and fraudulent," Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said of the president's references to the Thrift Savings Plan (search). The Nevada Democrat accused the administration of using carve-out accounts as a Trojan Horse for eliminating Social Security, by siphoning off the taxes that pay benefits.
Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, said: "It's a political pitch because his accounts can't stand on their own merits, so what he tries to do is pretend that the Thrift Savings Plan that Congress and federal employees have is the same as what he's proposing and is something Congress is denying to the public."
Do it as an add-on but means test SS benefits and both sides can claim victory, even though it effectively ends SS.
IS THAT AN INCRIMINATING DOCUMENT IN YOUR PANTS OR ARE YOU HOMELESS?:
Ex-National Security Adviser to Plead Guilty to Taking Classified Material (Fox News, March 31, 2005)
Former national security adviser Sandy Berger will plead guilty to taking classified material from the National Archives, a misdemeanor, the Justice Department said Thursday. [...]The former Clinton administration official previously acknowledged he removed from the National Archives copies of documents about the government's anti-terror efforts and notes that he took on those documents. He said he was reviewing the materials to help determine which Clinton administration documents to provide to the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
He called the episode "an honest mistake," and denied criminal wrongdoing.
Berger and his lawyer, Lanny Breuer, have said Berger knowingly removed the handwritten notes by placing them in his jacket and pants and inadvertently took copies of actual classified documents in a leather portfolio. He returned most of the documents, but some still are missing.
If your kid said he was sorry about taking the cookies but they ended up in his pants by mistake you'd punish him more severely.
COME BACK, PTOLEMY, ALL IS FORGIVEN:
Five Out of Five Researchers Agree: Earth's Solar System Special (Sara Goudarzi, 3/31/05, SPACE.com)
Though researchers find more and more distant planets revolving around alien suns, the discoveries highlight that Earth and its solar system may be an exceptionally rare place indeed.That was the consensus here Wednesday evening among five planetary science experts who spoke at the 5th annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Panel Debate held at the American Museum of Natural History.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium, moderated the informal discussion. At issue was whether our solar system is special, why it looks the way it does, and how others thus far detected differ. The debate took place between theoretical and observational scientists on the different aspects of detecting and categorizing alien solar systems. About 700 people attended the event.
Prior to the discovery of planets around stars other than our sun in the 1990’s, scientists thought that alien solar systems must look something like our own. They presumed that just like our solar system, there would be small rocky planets like as Earth close to their host stars and large, low density ones a little farther out. But what they discovered were solar systems unlike ours with big Jupiter-like planets close to their host star.
Of the 150 alien planets found, none of them resemble our own. “So maybe it’s not the enigma of other solar systems, it’s the enigma of our solar system,” Tyson said in opening the debate.
The more science you do the better our ancestors look.
IF I WERE TRULY OBSESSED WE'D HAVE NAMED THE THIRD KID "DELINO":
My Fantasy Life: Our NEWSWEEK sports columnist, finally, comes clean and puts you in touch with his infantile side. (Mark Starr, March 31, 2005, Newsweek)
I confess that, for a man my age, I have a very active fantasy life. And my wife can get really steamed about it sometimes.Nah, not that kind of fantasy. I told you ages ago that I haven’t had an impure thought about another woman since Natalie Wood crossed the Great Divide. I’m not talking about the ladies. I’m talking fantasy baseball.
I am one of the multitude of Americans—estimates now run to 15 million—who play fantasy baseball, a preoccupation that has grown from the quirky little hobby of some New York writers into a billion-dollar industry. (And there is now fantasy football, basketball, NASCAR and, for all I know, fantasy “American Idol” too … or is “American Idol” the actual fantasy?) The pioneers of the fantasy baseball game have seen very little of any money generated by their idea. Hardly surprising. If they had a knack for profit, they wouldn’t be in my profession.
For the uninitiated, fantasy baseball uses real players and real stats to create faux teams in faux leagues. The teams are formed in auctions—my league gathers for the annual bidfest in the basement of a West Side Irish bar in New York City—or in NFL-style drafts. At auction, everybody has the same amount of money to buy the same number of players for their team, a delicious counterpoint to the financial inequities in the real game.
The original concept is credited to Dan Okrent, who would later despair that its success would dominate his obituary. But now that Okrent has served as the first public editor (i.e., ombudsman) of The New York Times, he has assured himself a slightly different post mortem (“Dan Okrent, the first public editor of The New York Times and the man who invented fantasy baseball …”). Okrent shared the idea with his cohorts during a meal in a now-defunct New York restaurant called La Rotisserie Francaise. Thus the game became known as “Rotisserie Baseball.” When the hoi polloi got involved, they cut through the fancy Frenchified title and to the chase—fantasy baseball.
Okrent’s Rotisserie gang made its debut in 1980, using National League players. Our league followed a year later, a junior circuit with an American League attachment. We became the American Dream League. (Our name was a riff on the Norman Mailer novel and meant as a decided irony for a bunch of ‘60s cynics who weren’t all that sold on the concept of the American dream.) What is remarkable is that we are now entering our 25th season, with 12 teams and 18 owners still going strong, still battling with our imaginary teams. (My team is Nova, a triple play on a fiery Starr, a smoked fish and, in a tribute to multiculturalism that was ahead of its time, “no go” in Spanish). This weekend we will come from six states around the country to celebrate the remarkable feat of our survival with a Tex-Mex banquet in Greenwich Village (if banquet and Tex-Mex can rightfully exist in the same sentence).
I joke not when I say it is remarkable. There are very few such alliances of pals—poker games, golf games, book clubs, investment clubs, dining groups or anything else—that have lasted a quarter of a century.
Infantile? We of the Juddernaut resent that crack.
DESPITE THE OBLIGATORY SATAN REFERENCE:
The Politics of Churlishness: GIVING GEORGE W. BUSH HIS DUE ON DEMOCRACY (Martin Peretz, 03.31.05, New Republic)
Bush, it now seems safe to say, is one of the great surprises in modern U.S. history. Nothing about his past suggested that he harbored these ideals nor the qualities of character required for their realization. Right up to the moment Bush became president, I was convinced that his mind, at least on matters Levantine, belonged to his father and to James Baker III, whose worldview seemed to be defined by the pecuniary prejudice of oil and Texas: Keep the ruling Arabs happy. But I was wrong, and, in light of what has already been achieved in the Middle East, I am glad to say so. Most American liberals, alas, enjoy no similar gladness. They are not exactly pleased by the positive results of Bush's campaign in the Middle East. They deny and resent and begrudge and snipe. They are trapped in the politics of churlishness.The achievements of Bush's foreign policy abroad represent a revolution in the foreign policy culture at home. The traditional Republican mentality that was so perfectly and meanly represented by Bush père and Baker precluded the United States from pressing the Arabs about reform--about anything--for decades. Not Iraq about its tyranny and its record of genocide, not Syria about its military occupation of Lebanon and its own brutal Baathist dictatorship, not Egypt about loosening the crippling bonds of a statist economy and an authoritarian political system, not Saudi Arabia about its championing of the Wahhabi extremism that made its own country so desiccated and the world so dangerous, and certainly not the Palestinians about the fantasy that they had won all the wars that they had actually lost and were therefore entitled to the full rewards due them from their victories. [...]
History has never traveled in the Middle East as fast as it has during the last two years. In this place where time seems to have stopped, time has suddenly accelerated. It may be true (more likely, it is not) that a deep yearning for democracy has been latent throughout the region for a long time. There certainly was a basis in reality for skepticism about the Arabs' hospitability to the opening of their societies. Whatever the proper historical and cultural analysis of the past, however, the fact is that democracy did not begin even to breathe until the small coalition of Western nations led by the United States destroyed the most ruthless dictatorship in the area.
Democracy in Mesopotamia? A fantasy, surely. But not quite. Iraq was, despite its unbelievably bloody history, a rather sophisticated place. During the nineteenth century, many Baghdadis went abroad to study. Modern nationalism sank some roots. Baghdad itself had a plurality of Jews, learned and mercantile, until they fled to the new state of Israel. An ancient minority of Christians survived into the age of Sunni pogroms and survives--though in lesser numbers--still. The Kurds grew relatively tolerant in the areas they dominated. And the majority Shia, though viciously persecuted from the founding of the Iraqi state after World War I--with the not-so-passive consent of the British colonials--and condemned to near-genocide by Saddam's revolutionary republic, have generally maintained the restraint that piety sometimes allows. After a year and a half of nearly daily Sunni bloodletting among them, the Shia have not wreaked the vengeance they surely could and, equally as surely, some of them long to take.
The U.S. liberation-occupation has now tried to cobble together these diverging Iraqis into the beginnings of a democratic regime. Wonder of wonders, these estranged cousins have shown some talent in the art of compromise; and trying to make this polity work is hardly an effort undertaken without courage. The judge who was killed with his son outside his home on his way to work at the tribunal that will try Saddam knew that danger stalked him, and so did the rest of the victims of Sunni bloodlust. This bloodlust evokes an unmistakable but macabre schadenfreude among many critics of the war, who want nothing of history except to be proved right. It is as if suicide bombings and other sorts of helter-skelter murder were a just judgment on the wrongdoings--yes, there have been wrongdoings, some of them really disgusting--of the Bush administration. And, even if ridding western Asia of Saddam is reluctantly accepted as justified, what blogger couldn't have accomplished what came after more deftly?
In any case, this churlish orthodoxy tells us that the Sunnis need to be enticed into the political game lest it be deemed illegitimate. In this scenario, it is the murderers who withhold or bestow moral authority. John F. Burns, the defiantly honest New York Times journalist in Baghdad, who has consistently reported the ambiguous and truly tangled realities of the war, now sees the Baathist and Sunni warriors in retreat, if not actually beaten. What will probably happen in Iraq is a version of what endured for decades in Lebanon: a representative government rooted in sect--argumentative, perhaps even corrupt, but functioning. Lebanon was never perfect, but it worked reasonably well, until the aggressive Palestinian guests took to commanding Shia turf to establish a "state within a state." (This was a phenomenon that the nimble Thomas L. Friedman did not much report on in the first leg of his journey From Beirut to Jerusalem, confiding that fear for his life and livelihood kept him from deviating too far from the Palestinian story as they wanted it told. Eason Jordan avant la lettre.)
The fine fruits of the Bush administration's indifference to international opinion may be seen now in Lebanon, too. What is happening there is the most concrete intra-Arab consequence of the Iraq war. Nothing could be done in Lebanon without Syria's sanction, no government decision without the approval of Damascus, no business without a hefty Damascene percentage. Syrian troops and spies were everywhere. Lebanese of all sects and clans have been restive for years. But they lived in the fearful memory of their mad civil war, the civil war of the daily car bombs in the marketplace. Suddenly, the elections in Iraq, Bush's main achievement there, exhilarating and inspiring, sprung loose the psychological impediments that shackled the Lebanese to Syria. Even if the outcomes will not be exactly the same, this was Prague and Berlin at the end of the long subjugation to their neighbor to the east. More immediately, this was Kiev only a few months ago. The first mass protest against the Syrians and their satrap prime minister drew tens of thousands. Then there was the much larger crowd of pro-Syria Shia from the south, a disconcerting moment. But, after that, a multitude so huge that it defied counting, and so diverse. This was the true cedar revolution, a revolution of the young, for independence, for freedom from the failing but always brutal Damascus regime next door. Will Vladimir Putin be so stupid as to invest credit and arms in the stiff and callow son of Hafez Al Assad?
None of this happened by spontaneous generation. Yes, there were lucky breaks: Yasir Arafat died, Syria conspired somehow to have former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri assassinated. And yes, the new directions are young, and the autocratic-theocratic political culture of the Middle East is old, and it is once again too early to proclaim that the mission has been accomplished. As the ancient Israelite king observed, let he who girds his harness not boast as he who takes it off. But the mission is nonetheless real, and far along, and it is showing thrilling accomplishments. It is simply stupid, empirically and philosophically, to deny that all or any of this would have happened without the deeply unpopular but historically grand initiative of Bush. The hundreds of thousands of young people in Martyrs' Square knew that they had Bush's backing. The president seems even to have enticed Jacques Chirac into a more active policy toward Lebanon: For him, too, Syria had to go. If this satisfies Chirac's yearning for la gloire, so be it. (But it will not be so easy to maintain such alliances: Already, Security Council members are said to be working up plans to put the future of Lebanon under the protective care of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, when nothing in unifil's past--nothing--should provide confidence that it is able, or even disposed, to act decisively against Arab brutality.)
What is occurring in Saudi Arabia and Egypt is also heartening, if more than a bit tentative. Under pressure from the Bush administration, the Saudis have allowed the first local elections in the country's history: an election to bodies that cannot make big decisions, and an election limited to male voters, naturally. But infidels (that is, Shia) may also vote. By Saudi standards, this is the revolution of 1848. In Egypt, responding to the insistence of the Bush people, President Hosni Mubarak has allowed that he will permit opponents to run in the presidential elections against him. Mubarak has no chance of losing ... this time. Maybe, however, the son will not be the father's inevitable successor, and maybe the Arab custom of turning dictatorships into dynasties will also come to an end, at least in Cairo. And, in the brave figure of Ayman Nour, the world now has a hero of the anti-Mubarak forces to celebrate and to support. In both countries, to be sure, what we are seeing are the bare beginnings of a democratic process, the very bare beginnings. It will be years, maybe decades, before these become democratic polities. And there is always the chance--as was the case in Algeria, once the jewel in the shabby crown of the "nonaligned"--that the vox populi will vote wrong. In the Algerian instance, it had to vote wrong: The choice was between national fascists and pious fascists. Take your pick.
So the situation is certainly complex. But complexity is not a warrant for despair. The significant fact is that Bush's obsession with the democratization of the region is working. Have Democrats begun to wonder how it came to pass that this noble cause became the work of Republicans?
Jon Stewart Syndrome strikes again.
ARTICLES OF FAITH
Secularization Doesn’t Just Happen (Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, March, 2005)
“As society became more modern, it became more secular.” That sentence has about it a certain “of courseness.” It or its equivalent is to be found in numerous textbooks from grade school through graduate school. The connection between modernization and secularization is taken for granted. Christian Smith, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina, challenges what everybody knows in an important new collection of essays by several sociologists and historians, The Secular Revolution: Power, Interests, and Conflict in the Secularization of American Public Life (University of California Press, 484 pp., $60). The challenge is not novel with Smith. Social scientists who had long propounded “secularization theory,” Peter L. Berger very notably among them, have in recent years undergone a major change of mind. The contribution of Smith’s big book is in his detailed analysis of the dubious (sometimes contrary to fact) assumptions underlying the theory, and in the case studies he and his colleagues present showing how various interest groups have employed the theory in the service of their own quest for power, usually at the expense of religion and religious institutions.There are, writes Smith, seven crucial and related defects in conventional secularization theory. Over-abstraction: the literature of the theorists routinely spoke of “differentiation,” “autonomization,” “privatization,” and other abstract, if not abstruse, dynamics disengaged from concrete factors of social change such as interests, ideologies, institutions, and power conflicts. Lack of human agency: the theory was big on process without protagonists. It depicted secularization without secularizers. According to the theory, secularization just happens. Overdeterministic inevitability: “Religion’s marginalization from public life is portrayed as a natural or inevitable process like cell mitosis or adolescent puberty.” Secularization theory reflects a view of linear social evolution in the tradition of Comte and Spencer. “If there is one truth that history teaches us beyond doubt,” wrote the great Durkheim, “it is that religion tends to embrace a smaller and smaller portion of social life.” Any questions, class?
Idealist intellectual history: here the history of ideas is determinative. Owen Chadwick’s The Secularization of the European Mind (note the focus on the mind) puts the primary explanatory emphasis on the philosophy of liberalism, evolutionary theory, Marxist ideology, and so forth. Smith writes, “Culture, philosophy, and intellectual systems certainly matter. But they cannot be abstracted from the real historical, social, political, legal, and institutional dynamics through which they worked and were worked upon.” Romanticized history: there was in the view of secularization theorists an “age of faith”—for instance, the thirteenth century—which was succeeded and displaced by the age of reason and modernity. Then everything was religious; now everything, or at least everything that matters in public, is secular. Against that view, anthropologist Mary Douglas writes: “Secularization is often treated as a modern trend. But the contrast of secular with religious has nothing whatsoever to do with the contrast of modern with traditional or primitive. The idea that primitive man is by nature deeply religious is nonsense. The truth is that all of the varieties of skepticism, materialism, and spiritual fervor are found in the range of tribal societies. They vary as much from one another on these lines as any chosen segment of London life.”
An overemphasis on religious self-destruction: Berger’s 1967 The Sacred Canopy suggested that the Judeo-Christian tradition “carried the seeds of secularization within itself.” Ancient Israel’s monotheism began the secularization process by historicizing and rationalizing ethics, a process which Catholicism temporarily restrained but which the Protestant Reformation returned to full force in bringing about a “disenchanted” (Weber) world. A host of theorists agreed that the Reformation and the cultural exhaustion following the “wars of religion” hastened the process of secularization. While not discounting such claims entirely, Smith writes, “What most versions of secularization theory overlook is the important role played by other, nonreligious and antireligious actors in the process of secularization. At the very least, our analytical framework should include room to account for all the players who may have been involved in a process of change.”
Seventh and finally, underspecified causal mechanisms: the influential Bryan Wilson, for example, simply asserted the incompatibility of modernity and religion: “The moral intimations of Christianity do not belong to a world ordered by conveyor belts, time-and-motion studies, and bureaucratic organizations. The very thought processes which these devices demand of men leave little place for the operation of the divine.” One is reminded of the “demythologizing” New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann and his dictum that a man who knows how to work a light switch cannot believe in divine causality. Again, it was Berger who wrote very persuasively, thirty and more years ago, about the powerful linkage between “social structure” and consciousness. To all this Smith responds: “But sociologists and historians give too little attention to explaining exactly how and why these social changes had their supposed detrimental effects on religion. Exactly why did urbanization or technological developments have to undermine religious authority? Exactly how did industrialization and immigration work to produce religious privatization? Why should we treat these as some kind of ‘great gears of history’ that inexorably grind their way toward religious privatization? Rather than all nodding our scholarly heads together in what could be premature analytical closure, we need to go back and force ourselves to answer these questions again.”
Although these seven dubious beliefs clearly run through just about everything secularists think and do, most of them are certain they live in a world of pure and objective empiricism with minds uncluttered by prejudice or dogmatic influence.
WHY HAS [STORY] GIVEN US...:
Cracking the Story Code: There are seven basic plots that tell the human tale. (Christopher Booker, March 31, 2005, LA Times)
One of the greatest mysteries in our lives lies so close beneath our noses that we don't even recognize it to be a mystery. Why do we tell stories? Why has evolution given us the ability to conjure up these sequences of imaginary happenings, on which, through movies, novels, plays, TV soaps and comic strips, we spend so much of our lives?
THE GOYS WHO CRIED WOLF:
Wolfowitz wins unanimous bank vote (Andrew Balls, March 31 2005, Financial Times)
The World Bank's member countries met on Thursday to appoint Paul Wolfowitz, US deputy defence secretary, as president of the world's leading development institution.The bank's executive directors approved the controversial US nominee in a unanimous vote as James Wolfensohn prepares to step down at the end of May after almost 10 years in the post.
All that hysteria for nothing?
THEY'RE DOING THEIR PART:
Long Queues as Zimbabwe Votes in Test for Mugabe (Cris Chinaka, 3/31/05, Reuters)
Zimbabweans queued in large numbers on Thursday to vote in polls which President Robert Mugabe says will deliver a clear victory for his ruling party but which Western powers have already condemned as unfair.Thousands of voters in the capital Harare defied early drizzle to cast their ballots after polling stations opened at 7:00 am (12 a.m. EST), while in rural areas people turned out by bicycle and donkey-cart.
THE CREAM OF THE WORST GOVERNED NATION IN THE WEST:
De Gaulle's Tattered Legacy (Jim Hoagland, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)
Charles de Gaulle bequeathed the French two big ideas and the atomic bomb to see them through the sad national duty of surviving without him. The bomb is still there and probably always will be. The ideas may not be as resilient. They face severe challenge this spring.One idea was to form a superbly educated, merit-based political elite to revitalize the defeated and demoralized nation that emerged from World War II. The cream of the intellectual crop would be chosen by rigorous examinations, educated in prestigious national schools and assigned important government jobs based on grades.
This meritocracy produced two working generations of talented, dedicated administrators who gradually moved to the top of France's business and political establishments. How you respond to "the French" depends in some measure on how you react to dealing with the smartest kid in the class, who cannot resist occasionally reminding you of that fact. You may not find that as invigorating as I (usually) do.
Is there a more absurd notion than a French elite? Who's the last Frenchman that mattered? Napoleon?
THE LAST HOSTAGE GOES FREE:
Koppel to Leave ABC (ABC News, March 31, 2005)
Who even knew he was still there?
CATS AND DOGS SLEEPING TOGETHER:
An Unlikely Meeting Of the Minds: For Very Different Reasons, Groups Agree on Gas Alternatives (Greg Schneider, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)
A who's who of right-leaning military hawks -- including former CIA director R. James Woolsey and Iraq war advocate Frank J. Gaffney Jr. -- has joined with environmental advocates such as the Natural Resources Defense Council to lobby Congress to spend $12 billion to cut oil use in half by 2025. The alliance highlights how popular sentiment is turning against the no-worries gas-guzzling culture of the past decade and how alternative technologies such as gas-electric hybrids are finding increasingly widespread support."I think there are a number of things converging," said Gary L. Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate and former head of the Family Research Council who has signed on to a strange-bedfellows coalition of conservatives and environmentalists called Set America Free. "I just think reasonable people are more inclined right now to start thinking about ways our country's future isn't dependent on . . . oil from a region where there are a lot of very bad actors."
One important factor in the convergence is there's no downside to the policy.
U HAUL:
THE GREATEST SAVE: The inside story of the daring rescue of a Tiger's mother (TAMARA AUDI and MICHAEL ROSENBERG, 3/31/05, Detroit FREE PRESS)
He went over the plan again in his head.Sixteen men on the ground, armed with M-16 rifles and newly sharpened machetes. Four men in the chopper, three more in the plane. The ground force would split into six Jeeps floated by boat across the Orinoco River. They would drive into the Amazon jungle as far as the Jeeps could go, then hike into the mountains the rest of the way, a two-hour march, each man weighed down by weapons and flak jackets. They would reach camp at sunrise and attack immediately.
He hoped she would be alive when they got there.
It had been five months since gunmen seized Maura Villarreal, the 54-year-old mother of Tigers pitcher Ugueth Urbina, whisking her away in a worn, green Ford Fiesta.
Even in a country with an alarming rise in the number of kidnappings, this one was unlike any other. The brazen, daylight abduction of a sports star's mother showed kidnappers were getting bolder. Maura's captors had even dressed in the official uniforms of the federal police.
The case stunned Venezuelans and dominated the life of Joel Rengifo, a fit, balding 48-year-old federal police commander with a methodical mind and crooked front teeth, lying now on an uncomfortable bed in a rented room, replaying the rescue plan, disobeying his own orders to sleep.
In a few hours, Rengifo and his men would leave this village outside Caicara, a last outpost before the mountainous jungle that consumes lower Venezuela, and embark on the most important mission of their careers and one of the most dangerous of their lives. [...]
On Sept. 2, Urbina boarded a flight from Miami to Caracas, the chic, turbulent capital of his home country.
It was a backward journey for Urbina, who had spent a decade trying to escape Venezuela's slums for a major league life in North America. In a scant three hours and 15 minutes -- the time it took to fly from Miami -- Venezuela's troubles would claim him, again.
In 1994, when he was 20 and barely holding a spot on a Double-A roster in Harrisburg, Pa., Urbina received what was then the worst news of his life. His father and biggest supporter, Juan Manuel, had been shot and killed trying to resist four young robbers on the streets of Ocumare del Tuy.
Urbina went home, devastated. He told his mother he would never play again. Maura would not hear of it. She reminded him that his father always thought he would make the big leagues and wanted him to be a star.
Five weeks after his father's murder, Urbina was back in the United States, playing ball. Friends said he returned with new purpose -- to make his father proud and give his mother and brothers a secure, comfortable life. In 1995, a year after his father's death, Urbina pitched in his first game for the Montreal Expos.
Three years later, already known for his fastball and intimidating on-mound sneer, Urbina signed a long-term contract with the Expos for $10 million.
He moved his mother and brothers out of a rough, cramped apartment complex in Ocumare del Tuy into a large white stucco house in a middle-class neighborhood of pastels, palms and new American cars.
Urbina installed himself in a gorgeous, bright-yellow mansion in a fashionable neighborhood of Caracas. He bought a gold Mercedes, a motorcycle and a few off-road four-wheelers. His first neighborhood was just a few miles away, rising above Caracas in the form of massive, jail-like apartment buildings and burnt orange ranchos -- tiny, hand-built concrete huts stacked every which way.
The spray-painted face of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara is still found throughout the January 23 barrio -- named for the date Venezuelans won democracy. Political unrest and gang violence are still common. Parents command children to be in by 6 p.m. Elderly people walk with snarling dogs on ropes for protection.
MATTHEW 25:40:
Schiavo dies after feeding tube removed (MIKE SCHNEIDER, 3/31/05, The Associated Press)
Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged woman whose final years tethered to a feeding tube sparked a bitter feud over her fate that divided a family and a nation, died Thursday, her husband's attorney said.
WHATEVER YOU DID UNTO ONE OF THE LEAST, YOU DID UNTO ME (Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Given at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC Thur, 3 Feb 94)
On the last day, Jesus will say to those on His right hand, "Come, enter the Kingdom. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was sick and you visited me." Then Jesus will turn to those on His left hand and say, "Depart from me because I was hungry and you did not feed me, I was thirsty and you did not give me to drink, I was sick and you did not visit me." These will ask Him, "When did we see You hungry, or thirsty or sick and did not come to Your help?" And Jesus will answer them, "Whatever you neglected to do unto one of these least of these, you neglected to do unto Me!"As we have gathered here to pray together, I think it will be beautiful if we begin with a prayer that expresses very well what Jesus wants us to do for the least. St. Francis of Assisi understood very well these words of Jesus and His life is very well expressed by a prayer. And this prayer, which we say every day after Holy Communion, always surprises me very much, because it is very fitting for each one of us. And I always wonder whether 800 years ago when St. Francis lived, they had the same difficulties that we have today. I think that some of you already have this prayer of peace - so we will pray it together.
Let us thank God for the opportunity He has given us today to have come here to pray together. We have come here especially to pray for peace, joy and love. We are reminded that Jesus came to bring the good news to the poor. He had told us what is that good news when He said: "My peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you." He came not to give the peace of the world which is only that we don't bother each other. He came to give the peace of heart which comes from loving - from doing good to others.
And God loved the world so much that He gave His son - it was a giving. God gave His son to the Virgin Mary, and what did she do with Him? As soon as Jesus came into Mary's life, immediately she went in haste to give that good news. And as she came into the house of her cousin, Elizabeth, Scripture tells us that the unborn child - the child in the womb of Elizabeth - leapt with joy. While still in the womb of Mary - Jesus brought peace to John the Baptist who leapt for joy in the womb of Elizabeth.
And as if that were not enough, as if it were not enough that God the Son should become one of us and bring peace and joy while still in the womb of Mary, Jesus also died on the Cross to show that greater love. He died for you and for me, and for the leper and for that man dying of hunger and that naked person lying in the street, no only of Calcutta, but of Africa, and everywhere. Our Sisters serve these poor people in 105 countries throughout the world. Jesus insisted that we love one another as He loves each one of us. Jesus gave His life to love us and He tells us that we also have to give whatever it takes to do good to one another. And in the Gospel Jesus says very clearly: "Love as I have loved you."
Jesus died on the Cross because that is what it took for Him to do good to us - to save us from our selfishness in sin. He gave up everything to do the Father's will - to show us that we too must be willing to give up everything to do God's will - to love one another as He loves each of us. If we are not willing to give whatever it takes to do good to one another, sin is still in us. That is why we too must give to each other until it hurts.
It is not enough for us to say: "I love God," but I also have to love my neighbor. St. John says that you are a liar if you say you love God and you don't love your neighbor. How can you love God whom you do not see, if you do not love your neighbor whom you see, whom you touch, with whom you live? And so it is very important for us to realize that love, to be true, has to hurt. I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be willing to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is not true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me.
It hurt Jesus to love us. We have been created in His image for greater things, to love and to be loved. We must "put on Christ" as Scripture tells us. And so, we have been created to love as He loves us. Jesus makes Himself the hungry one, the naked one, the homeless one, the unwanted one, and He says, "You did it to Me." On the last day He will say to those on His right, "whatever you did to the least of these, you did to Me, and He will also say to those on His left, whatever you neglected to do for the least of these, you neglected to do it for Me."
When He was dying on the Cross, Jesus said, "I thirst." Jesus is thirsting for our love, and this is the thirst of everyone, poor and rich alike. We all thirst for the love of others, that they go out of their way to avoid harming us and to do good to us. This is the meaning of true love, to give until it hurts.
BETTER STICK TO THE SAT WITH ESSAY:
Despite Discontent, Mugabe's Party Has Upper Hand in Vote: Opposition says fraud and intimidation will steer parliamentary poll today in Zimbabwe. (Robyn Dixon, March 31, 2005, LA Times)
The election is as much a test of Zimbabwe's longtime ruler, Robert Mugabe, as it is of African leaders' promise to uphold human rights and ensure elections are free and fair in order to win international investment.This year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice named Zimbabwe as an "outpost of tyranny," lumping it with repressive regimes in Myanmar, North Korea, Iran, Cuba and Belarus. South African President Thabo Mbeki, the continent's most influential leader, has advocated "quiet diplomacy" to persuade Mugabe to enact reforms, a strategy that has reaped little reward and divided Mbeki's African National Congress party. Mbeki has also said there is no reason to doubt that today's election will be fair.
"The collateral damage Zimbabwe has inflicted on the region, if not Africa as a whole, is immeasurable," wrote Dumisani Muleya, Zimbabwe correspondent for Business Day newspaper in South Africa. "Those efforts depend on African leaders' ability to tackle issues of democracy and governance in return for funding, but Mbeki and his colleagues have not fulfilled their side of the bargain. Zimbabwe is the test case."
South Africa's black leadership seems determined to fail the test.
YAO MING FOR PRESIDENT!:
Stature of Limitations in China: In a newly competitive society, being short can mean being passed over. To some people, the answer lies in a painful surgery that adds inches. (Ching-Ching Ni, March 31, 2005, LA Times)
She's an acting student. She sits in a wheelchair. He's a business major. He relies on crutches to get around.Each of them willingly had a doctor break their legs and insert steel pins into the bones just below their knees and above their ankles. The pins are attached to a bulky contraption that looks like a metal cage. For six months or so, they will wear this stretching device even though it delivers excruciating pain eased only by medication.
They dial the adjustment knobs daily, forcing the ends of the broken limbs to pull away from each other even as they heal. As new bone grows, the device forces it apart again, resulting in more new bone to fill the gap. Patients on the device typically gain about 3 inches in six months.
It may sound like medieval torture, but people who are determined to stand taller say it's nothing short of a dream maker.
At about $6,000, the treatment is out of reach for the average Chinese urbanite, who makes just more than $1,100 a year. But for some with money, it's a price they're willing to pay. In this increasingly competitive society, height has emerged as one of the most visible criteria for upward mobility.
Or they could just get rid of Communism and improve their diet.
THERE GOES PHILADELPHIA...:
States Debate Photo IDs at Polls (DEANNA WRENN, March 31, 2005, Associated Press)
Legislation that would require voters to show photo identification before casting ballots has touched off fierce debate in three states, with opponents complaining the measures represent a return to the days of poll taxes and Jim Crow.Lawmakers in Georgia and Indiana walked off the job to protest the proposals, which they say would deprive the poor, the elderly and minorities of the right to vote. Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, has already vetoed a similar measure and has vowed to do so again.
Republicans argue the bills would restore voter confidence and eliminate fraud without overly burdening voters, most of whom have driver's licenses or photo IDs anyway.
"I want everyone to be able to vote -- once," said Indiana state Sen. Victor Heinold, a Republican.
Nineteen states require voters to show identification, but only five of those request photo ID, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Those states -- Hawaii, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and South Dakota -- allow voters without a photo ID to present other forms of identification, such as a utility bill, or sign an affidavit of identity.
Critics say the measures in Indiana, Georgia and Wisconsin do not provide good alternatives for those without photo IDs.
No sweat, just require a national photo i.d..
+ 27, - 16:
A national sales tax (George Will, March 31, 2005, Townhall)
The power to tax involves, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, the power to destroy. So does the power of tax reform, which is one reason why Rep. John Linder, a Georgia Republican, has a 133-page bill to replace 55,000 pages of tax rules.His bill would abolish the IRS and the many billions of tax forms it sends out and receives. He would erase the federal income tax system -- personal and corporate income taxes, the regressive payroll tax and self-employment tax, capital gains, gift and estate taxes, the alternative minimum tax and the earned income tax credit -- and replace all that with a 23 percent national sales tax on personal consumption. That would not only sensitize consumers to the cost of government with every purchase, it would destroy K Street.
``K Street'' is shorthand for Washington's lawyer-lobbyist complex. It exists to continually complicate and defend the tax code, which is a cornucopia from which the political class pours benefits on constituencies. By replacing the income tax -- Linder had better repeal the 16th Amendment, to make sure the income tax stays gone -- everyone and all businesses would pay their taxes through economic choices, and K Street's intellectual capital, which consists of knowing how to game the tax code, would be radically depreciated.
Mr. Will has put his finger on the key to this idea, that the 16th be repealed.
ICC - USA = OK:
U.S. Drops Objection to Sudan Trial (GEORGE GEDDA, March 31, 2005, Associated Press)
The United States is dropping its objections to use of the U.N.'s International Criminal Court to try Sudanese responsible for an ethnic cleansing campaign in the Darfur region that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted more than 2 million, administration officials said Wednesday night.The administration had preferred that an African court try the case but agreed to a compromise during daylong discussions at the United Nations on Wednesday.
The United States has strongly opposed the ICC on grounds that American service members or civilians serving overseas could be subject to politically motivated or frivolous prosecutions.
In return for its concession, the United States received assurances that Americans deployed in Sudan, in whatever capacity, would not be subject to ICC prosecutions, the officials told The Associated Press. They asked not to be identified because the decision has not been officially announced.
The decision could raise hackles among conservatives for whom the ICC is an unaccountable body that cannot be trusted to the right thing.
That's silly. Conservatives are all for depriving second rates nations like France of their sovereignty so long as we keep our own.
WOULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN BETTER JUST TO NOT SIGN IT?:
UK greenhouse emissions still rising (David Crouch, March 31, 2005, The Guardian)
UK carbon dioxide emissions have risen for two consecutive years according to figures released today, despite government pledges on climate change.Emissions are now at their highest since 1996 and 3% higher than when Labour came to power in 1997. The government will need to implement drastic changes if it is to meet its target to reduce carbon pollution by 2010.
THEY MAY TIRE OF THEM, BUT WE DON'T:
Watching the Detective: Sherlock Holmes lives on—in fan societies, annotated versions, and new adventures (Lawrence Block, March 28th, 2005, Village Voice)
He was born on January 6, 1854, and died for the first time in May of 1891. Died, that is to say, in print, in "The Final Problem," locked in mortal combat with Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime, with the two of them plunging to their death at the Reichenbach Falls.A few years later, it became evident that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. In 1894, he returned to active practice, and handled hundreds of cases in the next decade. In 1902 he turned down a knighthood, retiring a year or two later to the Sussex coast, where he took up beekeeping—he hoped royal jelly, the food of the queen bee, might lengthen life and minimize the effects of aging—and began his magnum opus, The Whole Art of Detection. He put it aside, probably in 1912, and began undercover work in anticipation of the coming war with Germany.
He seems to have retired at the war's end, but it's hard to say for sure. There's no record of his death, and there are inferences, certainly, of his continuing life over the years. A recent report (of which more later) has him in Japan during the American occupation, strolling in the ashes of Hiroshima. He was 93 at the time, and if he's still alive now he'd be 151. That might strike one as impossible, but is the continuing existence of Sherlock Holmes one whit less conceivable than that he should have somehow ceased to be?
The novel A Study in Scarlet (1887) marked the first appearance in print of Sherlock Holmes, but it wasn't until four years later, when short stories began appearing in The Strand, that the character became popular with the reading public. His audience grew with every new appearance, but almost from the beginning his chronicler, Arthur Conan Doyle, began to tire of him. Before he'd finished the first series of 12 stories, his mother had to talk him out of killing his hero off, a threat which he acted upon in the 24th story, "The Final Problem."
If Doyle was happy to see the end of Holmes, he seems to have been the only person so disposed. City of London stockbrokers donned black armbands, and some 20,000 angry readers canceled their Strand subscriptions.
It's hard to say why Doyle tired of Holmes, but it's not unheard of for authors to grow weary of chronicling the exploits of series characters. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers are supposed to have had a conversation in which each expressed a desire to put a violent end to her chief protagonist, but neither Hercule Poirot or Lord Peter Wimsey received such harsh treatment.
Some 30 years ago, Nicolas Freeling killed his series detective, Inspector Van der Valk, midway through a novel, leaving his widow to solve the case. He subsequently wrote further about the widow—Arlette, her name was—and launched another whole series of books (about one Henri Castang). Readers, by and large, washed their hands of the son of a bitch. It's my understanding that Freeling resuscitated Van der Valk in 1990 in Sand Castles, but it was too late to win back his audience. They were through with him.
But when Sherlock Holmes came back, all was forgiven.
In the past couple years aothers killed off two terrific series protagonists: John Harvey did Charlie Resnick and Colin Dexter whacked Inspector Morse.
WE SHALL OVERCOME:
GOP works to overcome skepticism among blacks (Chuck Raasch, 3/30/05, Gannett News Service)
Skepticism aside, this time could be different. There is lingering discontent toward Democrats among some blacks while Republicans are forging new alliances on issues with powerful appeal in the black community, such as school vouchers. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile says Mehlman's efforts should be "cause for alarm" for her party.Republicans are reaching out to conservative black ministers and younger blacks who don't have the formative connection to the Democrats' pro-civil rights record of the 1960s. One of the more visible ministers is Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., head of the 3,000-member Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Md. Wearied by what he described as Democrats' timidity and indifference, the lifelong Democrat voted for Bush in 2004 and spoke out on Bush's behalf.
Jackson said he and other conservative black ministers, "gave permission for other Bible-based black Christians to unhook ... from the Democratic Party and vote their conscience."
Such ministers, Brazile wrote in the newspaper "Roll Call," "will assist the GOP in getting its message to black voters" and that some "may even like what they hear."
Jackson doesn't yet see the GOP as a panacea for black hopes, but he sees in Bush a man of religious conviction with a willingness to try new approaches.
"If we don't figure out how to keep these young black men from going back to prison, and with seven of 10 black babies being born out of wedlock, I don't see much positive," Jackson said in an interview. "The house is on fire, so I felt as though it was time to rise up and speak. But many, many people are going to hold the Republican Party accountable."
In their latest efforts to reach out to blacks, Republicans have replaced broader "big tent" rhetoric of the 1980s and 1990s with more calibrated, issues-based arguments framed around morality and economic empowerment, from abortion to Social Security reform.
"There are a whole series of issues that are coming up to demonstrate that we have ideas and we have proposals that will be beneficial to the African-American community," Mehlman said. "(Republicans are saying) 'If you give us a chance, we will give you a choice.' "
The big tent told blacks what was in it for the GOP. Specific issues tell blacks what's in it for them.
ONE MAN'S TERRORIST...:
Elusive Castro foe may be here: A veteran Cuban exile militant linked to a string of violent acts against Fidel Castro and his government is reportedly in South Florida seeking safe haven. (ELAINE DE VALLE AND ALFONSO CHARDY, 3/31/05, Miami Herald)
Luis Posada Carriles, the legendary Cuban exile operative accused of blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976 and trying to kill Fidel Castro in 2000, is believed to have secretly slipped into South Florida after years of hiding abroad, a federal source said Wednesday.The source said he understands that Posada, 77, has been in the area for about a week and has made contact with government authorities.
The source said he may be trying to retain a local attorney, but didn't explain why. One possibility might be to help ensure Posada wouldn't be extradited to Venezuela, where he escaped from prison in 1985 while facing charges related to the airliner bombing.
The Cuban-born militant, however, does not face any charges in the United States.
Santiago Alvarez, a Miami developer who is a close friend and financial backer of Posada, said he talked to three attorneys on Wednesday in case his friend decides to come forward and seek asylum. Alvarez, however, said he would neither confirm nor deny Posada is in the area.
''I cannot tell you if I have seen him or have not seen him, if he is here or is not here,'' Alvarez said. ``What I can tell you is that I am signing a contract with a lawyer to represent him in case it is true that he is here and that he will present himself to immigration.''
Were Posada to emerge publicly in Miami, his presence could pose an embarrassing foreign-relations dilemma for the Bush administration. Amid the U.S. war on global terrorism, Posada's alleged involvement in hotel bombings and assassination plots could leave the nation open to criticism, especially by Cuba and Venezuela, whose governments are antagonistic toward American policies.
Oh no, criticism from Castro and Hugo? Maybe they'll make it a causus belli.
TALK ABOUT ROLE REVERSAL:
Ecuador to fight EU banana regime at the WTO (Lisbeth Kirk, 31.03.2005, EU Observer)
WHAT'S THE PROPER BALANCE BETWEEN DEMOCRACY AND COMMUNISM?:
Roh Accents Alliance With US (Shim Jae-yun, 3/31/05, Korea Times)
President Roh Moo-hyun stressed Wednesday the need for the nation to strengthen its alliance with the United States in efforts to maintain peace and prosperity in Northeast Asia."Our diplomacy should focus on playing a balancing role to prevent possible conflicts in the region,’’ Roh said while receiving a policy briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
"To that end, we need to firmly maintain the alliance with the United States,’’ he said.
Roh’s statement came amid growing concern focusing on a ``balancing role’’ will eventually distance Seoul from Washington and weaken the bilateral alliance. Some experts are concerned South Korea has moved closer to China, alienating itself from traditional allies such as the U.S. and Japan.
If you seek balance between Communist China and its democratic foes then aren't you too an enemy?
WHY PRE-EMPTION IS ALWAYS JUSTIFIED:
Spy agencies 'dead wrong' on WMD (KATHERINE SHRADER, 3/31/05, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
In a scathing report, a presidential commission said Thursday that America's spy agencies were "dead wrong" in most of their judgments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction before the war and that the United States knows "disturbingly little" about the threats posed by many of the nation's most dangerous adversaries.
Because we can know so little about what our enemies are up, to the only responsible position is to always assume the worst and act accordingly.
FEDERALISM IS FOR LOSERS:
Will the GOP need life support? (Glenn Harlan Reynolds, March 31, 2005, Salon)
The Terri Schiavo story is a tragedy in the truest sense. It is a case in which there are no happy endings and in which the mighty fall. One thing that has fallen is the notion of the Republican Party as a bastion of federalism and limited government.
The notion that a party born of abolitionism and devoted over the years to prohibition, anti-communism, strict drug laws, restrictions on abortion, etc. was ever primarily concerned about federalism is rather fanciful. Federalism is the politics of whatever party is out of power. Having lost control of the national agenda they seek to preserve their own power in the states they do control. And it's always a losing issue.
IT'S WHATEVER TIME WE DECIDE IT IS:
The power behind daylight-saving: Some grumble, but time change has purpose (Mark Sauer, March 31, 2005, San Diego Tribune)
Benjamin Franklin liked to sleep late. But waking early one day in 1784, the 78-year-old American minister to France was astonished to find the sun already streaming into his Paris residence.He wrote a whimsical letter to the Journal de Paris suggesting the madness of sleeping when it is light and wasting the cost of candles when it is dark. He suggested a solution: daylight-saving time.
It was an idea well ahead of its time and one which has proved remarkably controversial over the years. [...]
The many advantages of DST makes you wonder why it has been so fiercely resisted.
Besides providing an extra hour of light in the evening for recreation, many studies have shown DST saves energy, reduces the number of auto accidents and even lowers crime rates, said Prerau, who holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has co-authored three reports to Congress on the effects of DST.
"The idea has been contentious all over the world, and for the same reasons," Prerau said. "City people love it, country people don't."
Farmers are tied to the sun and DST has them operating "an hour late compared with everybody else for things like going to the bank in town, meeting trains and trucks for deliveries, or even going to a movie after finishing work," he explained.
"Then there was the danger for schoolchildren standing on rural roads in the morning darkness waiting for the bus."
Daylight-saving time begins in the United States at 2 a.m., local time, on the first Sunday in April. We revert to Standard Time at 2 a.m. on the last Sunday in October. [...]
One persistent complaint about DST comes from people who blame the confusion over the time change for being late to church on the first Sunday in April.
"But there is this marvelous observation from a priest in St. Petersburg, Fla.," Downing said. "Why is it, he wondered, that when we fall back to Standard Time in October nobody shows up to church an hour early?"
The Wife is just happy because she won't have to subtract an hour from the clock on my bedside table for a few months.
MORE:
Spring Forward Faster (DAVID PRERAU , 3/31/05, NY Times)
Studies in many countries have found that daylight saving time curbs energy consumption and reduces traffic fatalities. While I was a researcher at the Transportation Department in the 1970's, we did a study that found that under daylight time in spring and fall, electrical energy use fell by about 1 percent, the equivalent today of roughly three billion kilowatt-hours per month, while the reduction in traffic accidents saved 25 lives and averted 1,000 injuries each month. Crime also decreased.These results derive directly from the shift of daylight from morning to evening. For example, many people sleep through morning sunlight and then depend on electric lighting after the sun sets. Even taking commuters into account, far more people travel in the evening than in the morning, and this, when combined with poor visibility, leads to more traffic accidents. And more crimes in which darkness is a factor, like muggings, take place after dusk than before dawn.
Under the present law we have daylight time in October but not in March, even though the sun rises at similar times in both months. The European Union starts daylight time on the last Sunday in March, with few complaints. Adding one spring week of daylight time would synchronize us with Europe. Adding two weeks in the spring would double the benefit while not making a single sunrise later than those we already experience in October, thus reducing concerns about dark mornings for farmers and children heading for school.
We should also consider adding a week of daylight time in the fall. Daylight time now always ends just before Halloween - sometimes, as last year, on Halloween morning. Alarmingly, children's pedestrian deaths are four times higher on Halloween than on any other night of the year, and daylight time would provide another hour of light for young trick-or-treaters.
THE DEATHSTAR LIMPETH (via Jim Siegel):
2005 Major League Baseball Preview - The Yankees (TIM MARCHMAN, March 31, 2005, NY Sun)
Every year I preach that the Yankees are about to collapse, and they never do. I'm sticking with my preaching - the Yankees are about to collapse, and don't look like a 90-win team to me. They're horrible defensively, old and injury-prone, and boast a lineup consisting of five superb players and four mediocrities.This strangely built $200 million team is as thin as a dime. I count nine potential Hall of Famers on the roster, but no one else on the team is very good, with a few exceptions like Hideki Matsui and Tom Gordon. The contrast with the Red Sox, who have three superstars and 22 solid players, is stunning. The Yankees have no sixth starter, no credible reserves in the infield, the outfield or behind the plate, and several regulars who could be among the worst at their positions in baseball.
The Yankees' underlying statistics were those of an 89-win team last year, and it's not clear that they got much better over the off-season. The real improvement, of course, was bringing in ace Randy Johnson, who represents a marked improvement over Javier Vazquez. But I'm not clear how that does more than offset the terrible Tony Womack and the continued disintegration of the team defense. This team looks to me to be clearly inferior to the Red Sox.
The Sox have just two problems, only one of which can be taken care of in season. Unless you're willing to bet a World Series trophy that David Wells is going to be healthy in October they don't really have a number 2 starter to plug in behind Curt Schilling. They'll need to acquire someone by the All Star break and on a championship team the #2 is generally a second #1 so they're usually scarce. The other problem is that neither David Ortiz nor Manny Ramirez should ever be allowed to play defense, but they obviously can't both DH. Playing Manny in Left costs them a couple games a year and playing them both in the World Series is a recipe for disaster.
WHEN JAW-JAW IS WAR-WAR:
Why World War IV can't sell (John Brown, 4/01/05, Asia Times)
In a recent essay (Are we in World War IV?) Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch commented quite rightly that "World War IV" has "become a commonplace trope of the imperial right" of the United States. But he didn't mention one small matter - the rest of the US, not to speak of the outside world, hasn't bought the neo-cons' efforts to justify President George W Bush's militaristic adventures abroad with crude "we're in World War IV" agitprop meant to mobilize Americans in support of the administration's foreign-policy follies. That's why, in his second term, Bush - first and foremost a politician concerned about maintaining domestic support - is talking ever less about waging a global war and ever more about democratizing the world.
Rather, it's proved much easier to win than even the neocons expected. With less than two thousand men lost and democracy imposed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Liberia, Ukraine, Palestine, Lebanon, Kyrgyzstan, Togo, etc. and elections beginning to occur even in supposedly unreformable places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt it's just hard to think of it as a conventional war. Perhaps we need a new term for the kind of global conflict where we can topple a regime just by talking tough.
JESUS WEPT:
SERMON DELIVERED BY BISHOP CLEMENS AUGUST COUNT OF GALEN (The Third Sermon, preached in the Church of St. Lambert's on August 3rd, 1941)
My Beloved Brethren,In today's Gospel we read of an unusual event: Our Saviour weeps. Yes, the Son of God sheds tears. Whoever weeps must be either in physical or mental anguish. At that time Jesus was not yet in bodily pain and yet here were tears. What depth of torment He must have felt in His heart and Soul, if He, the bravest of men, was reduced to tears. Why is He weeping? He is lamenting over Jerusalem, the holy city He loved so tenderly, the capital of His race. He is weeping over her inhabitants, over His own compatriots because they cannot foresee the judgment that is to overtake them, the punishment which His divine prescience and justice have pronounced. ‘Ah, if thou too couldst understand, above all in this day that is granted thee, the ways that can bring thee peace!’ Why did the people of Jerusalem not know it? Jesus had given them the reason a short time before. ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often have I been ready to gather thy children together, as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings; and thou didst refuse it! I your God and your King wished it, but you would have none of Me. . . .’ This is the reason for the tears of Jesus, for the tears of God. . . . Tears for the misrule, the injustice and man's willful refusal of Him and the resulting evils, which, in His divine omniscience, He foresees and which in His justice He must decree. . . . It is a fearful thing when man sets his will against the will of God, and it is because of this that Our Lord is lamenting over Jerusalem.
My faithful brethren! In the pastoral letter drawn up by the German Hierarchy on the 26th of June at Fulda and appointed to be read in all the churches of Germany on July 6th, it is expressly stated: ‘According to Catholic doctrine, there are doubtless commandments which are not binding when obedience to them requires too great a sacrifice, but there are sacred obligations of conscience from which no one can release us and which we must fulfil even at the price of death itself. At no time, and under no circumstances whatsoever, may a man, except in war and in lawful defence, take the life of an innocent person.’
When this pastoral was read on July 6th I took the opportunity of adding this exposition:
For the past several months it has been reported that, on instructions from Berlin, patients who have been suffering for a long time from apparently incurable diseases have been forcibly removed from homes and clinics. Their relatives are later informed that the patient has died, that the body has been cremated and that the ashes may be claimed. There is little doubt that these numerous cases of unexpected death in the case of the insane are not natural, but often deliberately caused, and result from the belief that it is lawful to take away life which is unworthy of being lived.
This ghastly doctrine tries to justify the murder of blameless men and would seek to give legal sanction to the forcible killing of invalids, cripples, the incurable and the incapacitated. I have discovered that the practice here in Westphalia is to compile lists of such patients who are to be removed elsewhere as ‘unproductive citizens,’ and after a period of time put to death. This very week, the first group of these patients has been sent from the clinic of Marienthal, near Münster.
Paragraph 21 of the Code of Penal Law is still valid. It states that anyone who deliberately kills a man by a premeditated act will be executed as a murderer. It is in order to protect the murderers of these poor invalids—members of our own families—against this legal punishment, that the patients who are to be killed are transferred from their domicile to some distant institution. Some sort of disease is then given as the cause of death, but as cremation immediately follows it is impossible for either their families or the regular police to ascertain whether death was from natural causes.
I am assured that at the Ministry of the Interior and at the Ministry of Health, no attempt is made to hide the fact that a great number of the insane have already been deliberately killed and that many more will follow.
Article 139 of the Penal Code expressly lays down that anyone who knows from a reliable source of any plot against the life of a man and who does not inform the proper authorities or the intended victim, will be punished. . . .
When I was informed of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal for the purpose of putting them to death I addressed the following registered letter on July 29th to the Public Prosecutor, the Tribunal of Münster, as well as to the Head of the Münster Police:
‘I have been informed this week that a considerable number of patients from the provincial clinic of Marienthal are to be transferred as citizens alleged to be "unproductive" to the institution of Richenberg, there to be executed immediately; and that according to general opinion, this has already been carried out in the case of other patients who have been removed in like manner. Since this sort of procedure is not only contrary to moral law, both divine and natural, but is also punishable by death, according to Article 211 of the Penal Code, it is my bounden obligation in accordance with Article 139 of the same Code to inform the authorities thereof. Therefore I demand at once protection for my fellow countrymen who are threatened in this way, and from those who purpose to transfer and kill them, and I further demand to be informed of your decision.’
I have received no news up till now of any steps taken by these authorities. On July 26th I had already written and dispatched a strongly worded protest to the Provincial Administration of Westphalia which is responsible for the clinics to which these patients have been entrusted for care and treatment. My efforts were of no avail. The first batch of innocent folk have left Marienthal under sentence of death, and I am informed that no less than eight hundred cases from the institution of Waestein have now gone. And so we must await the news that these wretched defenceless patients will sooner or later lose their lives. Why? Not because they have committed crimes worthy of death, not because they have attacked guardians or nurses as to cause the latter to defend themselves with violence which would be both legitimate and even in certain cases necessary, like killing an armed enemy soldier in a righteous war.
No, these are not the reasons why these unfortunate patients are to be put to death. It is simply because that according to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’. The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed. I have no intention of stretching this comparison further. The case here is not one of machines or cattle which exist to serve men and furnish them with plenty. They may be legitimately done away with when they can no longer fulfil their function. Here we are dealing with human beings, with our neighbours, brothers and sisters, the poor and invalids . . . unproductive—perhaps! But have they, therefore, lost the right to live? Have you or I the right to exist only because we are ‘productive’? If the principle is established that unproductive human beings may be killed, then God help all those invalids who, in order to produce wealth, have given their all and sacrificed their strength of body. If all unproductive people may thus be violently eliminated, then woe betide our brave soldiers who return home, wounded, maimed or sick.
Once admit the right to kill unproductive persons . . . then none of us can be sure of his life. We shall be at the mercy of any committee that can put a man on the list of unproductives. There will be no police protection, no court to avenge the murder and inflict punishment upon the murderer. Who can have confidence in any doctor? He has but to certify his patients as unproductive and he receives the command to kill. If this dreadful doctrine is permitted and practised it is impossible to conjure up the degradation to which it will lead. Suspicion and distrust will be sown within the family itself. A curse on men and on the German people if we break the holy commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ which was given us by God on Mount Sinai with thunder and lightning, and which God our Maker imprinted on the human conscience from the beginning of time! Woe to us German people if we not only licence this heinous offence but allow it to be committed with impunity! [...]
March 30, 2005
ALL ABOUT THE MBA:
Bush Is Keeping Cabinet Secretaries Close to Home: Spending Time at White House Required (Michael Fletcher, March 31, 2005, Washington Post)
President Bush is requiring Cabinet members to spend several hours a week at the White House compound, a move top aides say eases coordination with government agencies but one seen by some analysts as fresh evidence of the White House's tightening grip over administration policy.Under a directive instituted by Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. at the start of Bush's second term, Cabinet secretaries spend as many as four hours a week working out of an office suite set up for them at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. There, they meet with presidential policy and communications aides in an effort to better coordinate the administration's initiatives and messages.
"It allows us to work on a much more regular basis with the Cabinet in helping to manage issues," said Claude A. Allen, Bush's domestic policy adviser. "It also helps us lay the groundwork that is going to be necessary to implement the very aggressive agenda that the president has laid out for his second term."
The new practice applies to every Cabinet agency, although the heads of the Defense, State, Homeland Security and Justice departments are required to be at the White House so regularly for meetings that they rarely use the suite, said Erin Healy, a White House spokeswoman. Robert S. Nichols, spokesman for the Treasury Department, said that Secretary John W. Snow was already spending a lot of time at the White House "in large part due to his key role on the president's top domestic priorities, primarily Social Security."
One White House official said the policy has caused some consternation among some of the Cabinet secretaries, but the officers publicly defended the new practice. "Having an office and time to work at the White House is a great way to build an effective and cohesive team," Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao said.
Paul C. Light, a professor of public service at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, sees its purpose differently. "This administration has been very conscious in the second term of the need to control what happens in Cabinet agencies and to make sure Cabinet officers don't get too far out there," he said. "I find it absolutely shocking that they would have regular office hours at the White House. It confirms how little the domestic Cabinet secretaries have to do with making policy."
He's been president for 4+ years and they still haven't figured out that he runs the administration on a business model?
THOU SHALT NOT:
Clerics of 3 Faiths Protest Gay Festival Planned for Jerusalem (LAURIE GOODSTEIN and GREG MYRE, 3/31/05, NY Times)
International gay leaders are planning a 10-day WorldPride festival and parade in Jerusalem in August, saying they want to make a statement about tolerance and diversity in the Holy City, home to three great religious traditions.Now major leaders of the three faiths - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - are making a rare show of unity to try to stop the festival. They say the event would desecrate the city and convey the erroneous impression that homosexuality is acceptable.
"They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it."
Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."
Israeli authorities have not indicated what action, if any, they might take to limit the events. Banning the festival would seem unlikely, though the government could withhold the required permits for specific events, like a parade.
Interfaith agreement is unusual in Israel. The leaders' joint opposition was initially generated by the Rev. Leo Giovinetti, an evangelical pastor from San Diego who is both a veteran of the American culture war over homosexuality and a frequent visitor to Israel, where he has formed relationships with rabbis and politicians.
Organizers of the gay pride event, Jerusalem WorldPride 2005, said that 75 non-Orthodox rabbis had signed a statement of support for the event, and that Christian and Muslim leaders as well as Israeli politicians were expected to announce their support soon. They said they were dismayed to see that what united their opponents was their objection to homosexuality.
"That is something new I've never witnessed before, such an attempt to globalize bigotry," said Hagai El-Ad, the executive director of Jerusalem Open House, a gay and lesbian group that is the host for the festival. "It's quite sad and ironic that these religious figures are coming together around such a negative message."
You bet. Odd that the three great Abrahamic faiths would unite around morality.
THOSE WHO REMEMBER THE PAST ARE DOOMED TO THINK IT'S REPEATING:
Sinking Globalization (Niall Ferguson, March/April 2005, Foreign Affairs)
The last age of globalization resembled the current one in numerous ways. It was characterized by relatively free trade, limited restrictions on migration, and hardly any regulation of capital flows. Inflation was low. A wave of technological innovation was revolutionizing the communications and energy sectors; the world first discovered the joys of the telephone, the radio, the internal combustion engine, and paved roads. The U.S. economy was the biggest in the world, and the development of its massive internal market had become the principal source of business innovation. China was opening up, raising all kinds of expectations in the West, and Russia was growing rapidly.World War I wrecked all of this. Global markets were disrupted and disconnected, first by economic warfare, then by postwar protectionism. Prices went haywire: a number of major economies (Germany's among them) suffered from both hyperinflation and steep deflation in the space of a decade. The technological advances of the 1900s petered out: innovation hit a plateau, and stagnating consumption discouraged the development of even existing technologies such as the automobile. After faltering during the war, overheating in the 1920s, and languishing throughout the 1930s in the doldrums of depression, the U.S. economy ceased to be the most dynamic in the world. China succumbed to civil war and foreign invasion, defaulting on its debts and disappointing optimists in the West. Russia suffered revolution, civil war, tyranny, and foreign invasion. Both these giants responded to the crisis by donning the constricting armor of state socialism. They were not alone. By the end of the 1940s, most states in the world, including those that retained political freedoms, had imposed restrictions on trade, migration, and investment as a matter of course. Some achieved autarky, the ideal of a deglobalized society. Consciously or unconsciously, all governments applied in peacetime the economic restrictions that had first been imposed between 1914 and 1918.
The end of globalization after 1914 was not unforeseeable. There was no shortage of voices prophesying Armageddon in the prewar decades. Many popular writers earned a living by predicting a cataclysmic European war. Solemn Marxists had long foretold the collapse of capitalism and imperialism. And Social Darwinists had looked forward eagerly to a conflagration that would weed out the weak and fortify the strong.
Yet most investors were completely caught off guard when the crisis came. Not until the last week of July 1914 was there a desperate dash for liquidity; it happened so suddenly and on such a large scale that the world's major stock markets, New York's included, closed down for the rest of the year. As The Economist put it at the time, investors and financial institutions "saw in a flash the meaning of war." The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by about 25 percent between January 1910 and December 1913 and remained flat through the first half of 1914. European bond markets, which had held up throughout the diplomatic crises of the 1900s, crashed only at the 11th hour, as the lights went out all over Europe.
Some economic historians detect the origins of the deglobalization that followed World War I in the prewar decades. They point, variously, to rising tariffs and restrictions on migration, a slight uptick in inflation starting around 1896, and the chronic vulnerability of the U.S. economy to banking crises. To this list, it might be added that the risk of further Russian and Chinese revolutions should have been fairly apparent after those of 1905 and 1911, respectively.
The trouble is that none of these problems can be said to have caused the great conflagration that was World War I. To be sure, the prewar world was marked by all kinds of economic rivalries--not least between British and German manufacturers--but these did not suffice to cause a disaster. On the contrary, businessmen on both sides agreed that a major war would be an economic calamity. The point seemed so obvious that war came to be seen by some optimistic commentators as all but impossible--a "great illusion," in the famous phrase of the author Norman Angell. Even when the war broke out, many people optimistically clung to the illusion that it would soon be over. Economist John Maynard Keynes said that it "could not last more than a year."
With the benefit of hindsight, however, five factors can be seen to have precipitated the global explosion of 1914-18. The first cause was imperial overstretch. By 1914, the British Empire was showing signs of being a "weary Titan," in the words of the poet Matthew Arnold. It lacked the will to build up an army capable of deterring Germany from staging a rival bid for European hegemony (if not world power). As the world's policeman, distracted by old and new commitments in Asia and Africa, the United Kingdom's beat had simply become too big.
Great-power rivalry was another principal cause of the catastrophe. The problem was not so much Anglo-German rivalry at sea as it was Russo-German rivalry on land. Fear of a Russian arms buildup convinced the German general staff to fight in 1914 rather than risk waiting any longer.
The third fatal factor was an unstable alliance system. Alliances existed in abundance, but they were shaky. The Germans did not trust the Austrians to stand by them in a crisis, and the Russians worried that the French might lose their nerve. The United Kingdom's actions were impossible to predict because its ententes with France and Russia made no explicit provisions for the eventuality of war in Europe. The associated insecurities encouraged risk-taking diplomacy. In 1908, for example, Austria-Hungary brusquely annexed Bosnia. Three years later, the German government sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir to challenge French claims to predominance in Morocco.
The presence of a rogue regime sponsoring terror was a fourth source of instability. The chain of events leading to war, as every schoolchild used to know, began with the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. There were shady links between the assassin's organization and the Serbian government, which had itself come to power not long before in a bloody palace coup.
Finally, the rise of a revolutionary terrorist organization hostile to capitalism turned an international crisis into a backlash against the global free market. The Bolsheviks, who emerged from the 1903 split in the Russian Social Democratic Party, had already established their credentials as a fanatical organization committed to using violence to bring about world revolution. By straining the tsarist system to the breaking point, the war gave Lenin and his confederates their opportunity. They seized it and used the most ruthless terrorist tactics to win the ensuing civil war.
The similarities of course pale in comparison to the differences. First, Britain was not even the leading military power of the day. Though it was more engaged in world affairs, it had been apparent since the Civil War that all America required was motivation in order to crank up an unrivalled war machine, which it went on to demonstrate in the ensuing World Wars. Indeed, Britain could not have defeated several of its European rivals on its own, not least Germany. The United States has no rival today, no nation it could not defeat in hours were it sufficiently provoked. Folks imagine China a rival but America has a GDP several times that of China, despite a population less than a quarter of China's and spends more than ten times as much on its military. Not only are we not overstretched but our military expenditure as a percentage of GDP is quite low by the historic standards of a superpower. If we are an imperial power we are a mostly cultural one and we maintain it on the cheap.
Similarly, Britain didn't have the leading economy of its day. America had overtaken it in the 19th Century and today has a GDP the size of all of Europe's. Nor is America forced to pump its wealth into the black hole of colonies, as Britain was--a waste which Mr. Ferguson seems to cite with approval. Instead America is invested in its own economy; the same one that foreigners are so drawn to--a fact which Mr. Ferguson cites with disapproval.
As important though as the drastic difference in relative power between the Britain of 1914 and the America of 2005 is the imbalance between the threat of communism/socialism and that of Islamicism. In the world of 1914, a world completely dominated by Christendom, communism was an immensely appealing Christian heresy that represented a genuine internal challenge to even the successful Anglo-American model of democratic protestant capitalism. Islamicism on the other hand is totally external to the West, holding no appeal here and rather little even within Islam. It's just not a significant existential threat.
So all we're really left with is the possibility that we might do something stupid like becoming nationalistic and trying to put a stop to free trade and immigration. We may not want to dismiss our own potential for idiocy out of hand but we do need to note how little success Pat Buchanan had running on such a platform.
We'll find some way to screw up the current Golden Age eventually, but it doesn't seem likely that the era of American dominance will end in anything like the way the Pax Britannica did, or at least not for the same reasons.
LIVE LONG AND DESPAIR:
Elderly increasingly isolated from society (Lewis Smith, 3/31/05, Times of London)
A GROWING sense of loneliness among pensioners is destroying the self-belief and quality of life of the generation that won the war, a leading charity says.More older people than ever are finding themselves isolated from the rest of society, with almost two million of the elderly spending Easter alone.
Of the more than 1,100 people questioned for a survey published today by Help the Aged, one in five of the 65-plus age group who live alone see members of their family less than once a month; almost one in ten go six months or more between visits.
The fast pace of modern life is blamed by the age group as a prime factor in their dislocation from society with more than two thirds — about three million — feeling out of touch.Some 9 per cent feel completely cut off from society; 21 per cent feel they have been cast off and are of use to no one.
The sense of isolation is intensified because most pensioners have no friends under the age of 30, even though they would welcome greater contact with the younger generations.
The effects of loneliness are to make older people withdraw into themselves, fearful of rebuffs and increasingly doubtful of their own abilities. Paul McCann, director of policy for the charity, said: “We far too often shunt older people into the sidings of life, leaving them without enough money, activity but, above all, human warmth.”
In the focus on self and extension of life they've forgotten everything that makes life worthwhile in the first place.
WHO MAKES CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS LOOK WILD AND CRAZY?
Why sex is good for the species (Bjorn Carey, MSNBC, March 31th, 2005)
Sex is an expensive and risky business. It steals time and drains precious nutrient resources. And each act of reproduction runs the risk of messing up carefully crafted genetic blueprints. So why do we do it?The answer might seem obvious to you. But it's not so clear to biologists who consider that despite a logical alternative — asexual reproduction by simple cloning without the help of a partner — sex is preferred in the wild.[...]
Scientists don't know how sex even got started. But they have long suspected that organisms prefer sex specifically beca