February 28, 2006
JUST A LIFESTYLE CHOICE...:
Lax laws 'could turn Nazi crank into global epidemic' (Richard Ford, 3/01/06, Times of London)
A NEW highly addictive drug used in Britain by clubbers and gay men is becoming a global problem, according to a United Nations report published today.The huge increase in use of methamphetamine — crystal meth — is being helped by lax restrictions on the chemicals used to manufacture it. People who take it can experience a ten-hour high and increased sexual arousal. [...]
The drug is known by various names, including “ice”, “meth”, “tina” and “Nazi crank”. It was first developed in 1919 and used by troops to keep awake. It was rumoured that Hitler injected it twice a day, hence the name “Nazi crank”.
MORE (via M. Ali Choudhury):
A poly life: Monogamy with more partners: Internet makes it easier to find fellow believers (Trevor Stokes, 2/22/06, Columbia News Service)
John and Sue have an offbeat marital arrangement. For the last five years of their marriage, Sue has spent three nights a week with her boyfriend, Fred.And that's not even the strange part.
As it turns out, John openly shares Sue -- and their king-size marital bed -- with Fred. Confused? Consider this: During the rest of the week, Fred sleeps at home with his wife, Peggy, and their male lover, Bill.
John, a 71-year-old San Francisco-based researcher, also has relationships outside his marriage to Sue. He has three current girlfriends, Fred has two and John's wife has four boyfriends. He even refers to Sylvia, the sister of one of his wife's lovers, as "my sister in love." Following along?
While John has nothing against monogamy, he said, "You have to spend a lot of energy to be monogamous."
It's hard to imagine a more energetic bunch than John, Sue and their various lovers, who belong to a growing movement of Americans who practice polyamory -- intimate long-term relationships with more than two people. (The polyamorous lovers in this story requested anonymity because of fears of discrimination from employers and even friends.)
OH PLEASE, NOT THE C-WORD!
Being kind to the cruel (Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post, February 28th, 2006)
So the archbishop of Canterbury is morally depraved. Yet, rather than shun or castigate him, Israel's religious leaders are wooing him. Israel's Chief Rabbis Yona Metzger and Shlomo Amar are planning to travel to England to meet with Williams in May. This will be their third visit with him.In remarks to The Jerusalem Post, Jon Benjamin, CEO of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who is helping to organize the meeting, explained that the proper response to the Anglican Church's divestment decision is "not to break off dialogue, but to intensify it."
The obvious question that arises here is: Why does he think that?
What does Israel have to gain from having its chief rabbis meet with a man like Williams? Why do Benjamin, Amar and Metzger believe that meeting with Williams will influence his actions, when he voted for divestment after meeting with them twice?
If they meet Williams in May, the message they will send is that one needn't treat Israel or the Jews with respect because we will exact no price for our mistreatment.
The chief rabbis' plan to meet with Williams neatly complements American Jewry's campaign to demonize and marginalize evangelical Christians who are Israel's staunchest supporters.
In just the latest example, on Sunday Haaretz published an interview with Reform Rabbi James Rudin, who served for 35 years as head of the American Jewish Committee's committee on inter-religious relations. Rudin recently published a book entitled The Baptizing of America: the Religious Right's Plans for the Rest of Us.
In his interview Rudin likened the struggle between conservative Christians and the rest of the country to the American Civil War. He explained: "While America is currently fighting a global war against international terrorism, there is an equally important war going on within the United States. The outcome of today's conflict will decisively determine the future of the American republic.
"Christocrats are waging an all-out campaign to baptize America. It is a struggle that will decide whether the United States remains a spiritually vigorous country but without an officially established religion, or whether America will become Christianized."
Christocrats? OK, whatever. But Heaven help us if America ever becomes Christianized.
THE ATLANTIC JUST KEEPS WIDENING:
AUDIO: Journalists are in New Orleans to witness the Mardi Gras (3:30) (The World, 2/28/06, NPR)
Journalists from all over the world are in New Orleans to witness the Mardi Gras celebrations. The city is going ahead with the famous party just six months after Hurricane Katrina. Host Lisa Mullins speaks with Norwegian TV reporter Gerhard Helskog about the recovery process and the festivities.
One of the Brothers is at corporate training with coworkers from Europe, Asia, Australia, etc., for a few weeks and had an amusing experience the other day: an Italian women said: "It's the strangest thing, all of us who are here from Europe are single and childless but all you Americans, the Aussies, and the Indians are married with three or four kids."
Similarly, at the end of this clip, Mr. Helskog almost off-handedly captures an enormous difference between America and Europe.
Secularists here have an obvious vested interest in obscuring such differences, but Europeans can see them clearly.
NOW TAKE THE FED'S FOOT OFF OUR THROATS:
Signs of an economic surge: Despite some weaknesses, the economy could grow at a 4 to 5 percent rate this quarter. (Ron Scherer, 3/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)
[T]he economic rebound from the slowdown at the end of last year is likely to be dramatic. Some economists think the economy is now moving ahead at a 4 to 5 percent annual rate - just about as good as it gets during a long period of rising interest rates. This sparkling economic performance - the fastest growth in three years - comes even at a time when the housing market, long the bulwark for the economy, is showing clear signs of slowing down."The economy is regaining momentum and will have a very solid first half of the year," says Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. "We all feel more confident than we did three months ago, when we were still wondering about the impact of the hurricanes."
ECONOMICS TRUMPS IDEOLOGY:
Arab boycott largely reduced to 'lip service' (ORLY HALPERN, 2/28/06, Jerusalem Post)
The Arab boycott, established by the Arab League in 1951 as an economic tool to hurt Israel, is a dying animal. Ask Aramex.The company, which provides delivery services around the world, is commonly used by Arab and Israeli companies who want to exchange goods without upsetting any Arab port officials. The company provides customers with US mailing addresses where Israeli products can be sent. It then exchanges the Israeli postalstamped packaging for a US-stamped package and sends it on to its Arab destination.
So while some Arab ports will not accept goods marked "Made in Israel," if you take off the sticker and send it through another country, the deal is done.
"Besides Syria, the Arab boycott is now just lip service," said Doron Peskin, head of research at InfoProd, a consulting firm for foreign and Israeli companies specializing in trade to Arab states.
CRANK UP THE HUSQVARNA (via Rick Turley):
Europe's chill linked to disease (Kate Ravilious, 2/28/06, BBC)
Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study.Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says.
Be the first on your block to buy our new bumper sticker: "Arbor Day is murder"
HOWDY, PARDNER (via Pepys):
Bush needs caution in wooing India (JOHN O'SULLIVAN, 2/28/06, Chicago Sun-Times)
India is not a neurotic superpower but it is still an ambivalent one. Almost all the economic and political developments cited above point the country toward adopting an economy strategy of free market globalization and a political one of alliance with the United States. The two countries share a common language, common liberal democratic values, similar legal and political institutions (inherited in both cases from the British), a common strategic rival in China, and a common enemy in al-Qaida. These similarities help to explain the growing Indian diaspora in America, the boom in U.S. companies outsourcing to India's own Silicon Valleys, the ease of military cooperation between Indian and U.S. military forces, and the fact that America is more popular in India than in any other country.Altogether, India's progress is bottom-up rather than top-down. It is also bipartisan. Both government and opposition have advanced the economic reform agenda in the last 14 years. So a change of government would probably not mean a drastic change of policy. It is likely to last.
Yet there are powerful groups that for various reasons dislike the switch of policy from socialism and neutralism to globalization and a pro-American diplomatic stance. India's "Regulation Ra" is naturally opposed to losing its control over economic life. Traditional industries would like to keep their protective subsidies. Influential left-wing intellectuals dislike the new official embrace of free market capitalism and globalization. Factions in the Congress government hanker for India's former role as the morally upright leader of the Third World sympathetic to global socialism. And some Indians are simply nervous about getting into bed with a partner as large and overwhelming as the United States.
Bush should therefore go carefully in wooing New Delhi. Rather than stress the exclusive nature of the Indo-U.S. partnership -- which frightens as well as flatters -- he might want to point out that other friends of India are also linking themselves more closely to the United States in the post-Cold War world. Howard's Australia is one. Tony Blair's Britain another. After the recent election in Canada, Stephen Harper's new government is likely to move closer to the United States. In fact the English-speaking world, plus Japan, is gradually emerging as an informal U.S. alliance. And in that alliance India would be a junior partner to nobody except the United States.
There's safety in numbers -- not only in the war on terror but also as a way of avoiding unintended domination in alliances led by a generous but sometimes careless United States.
India is the ideal location for the President to present himself as the humble American he spoke of in his debate with Al Gore.
IF YOU'VE BLAMED ONE ARAB, WE'LL BLAME THEM ALL:
War Rhetoric Blows Back in Port Furor (Ronald Brownstein, February 26, 2006, LA Times)
President Bush may not like the arguments that critics are raising against the Dubai company attempting to take over cargo and cruise operations at ports in six U.S. cities. But he should recognize them. The arguments marshaled against Bush closely echoed the ones he deployed to defend the Iraq war.The president, in other words, is stewing in a pot he brought to boil.
At the core of Bush's case for invading Iraq was the contention that the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks changed the burden of proof in evaluating potential threats.
Let's check and see just how similar the case against Iraq was to the case Mr. Brownstein proposes against Dubai, President's Remarks at the United Nations General Assembly (George W. Bush, 9/12/02, United Nations)
Twelve years ago, Iraq invaded Kuwait without provocation. And the regime's forces were poised to continue their march to seize other countries and their resources. Had Saddam Hussein been appeased instead of stopped, he would have endangered the peace and stability of the world. Yet this aggression was stopped -- by the might of coalition forces and the will of the United Nations.To suspend hostilities, to spare himself, Iraq's dictator accepted a series of commitments. The terms were clear, to him and to all. And he agreed to prove he is complying with every one of those obligations.
He has proven instead only his contempt for the United Nations, and for all his pledges. By breaking every pledge -- by his deceptions, and by his cruelties -- Saddam Hussein has made the case against himself.
In 1991, Security Council Resolution 688 demanded that the Iraqi regime cease at once the repression of its own people, including the systematic repression of minorities -- which the Council said, threatened international peace and security in the region. This demand goes ignored.
Last year, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights found that Iraq continues to commit extremely grave violations of human rights, and that the regime's repression is all pervasive. Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape. Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents -- and all of these horrors concealed from the world by the apparatus of a totalitarian state.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke its promise. Last year the Secretary General's high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for -- more than 600 people. One American pilot is among them.
In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolution 687, demanded that Iraq renounce all involvement with terrorism, and permit no terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. Iraq's regime agreed. It broke this promise. In violation of Security Council Resolution 1373, Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments. Iraqi dissidents abroad are targeted for murder. In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former American President. Iraq's government openly praised the attacks of September the 11th. And al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.
In 1991, the Iraqi regime agreed to destroy and stop developing all weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles, and to prove to the world it has done so by complying with rigorous inspections. Iraq has broken every aspect of this fundamental pledge.
From 1991 to 1995, the Iraqi regime said it had no biological weapons. After a senior official in its weapons program defected and exposed this lie, the regime admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks. U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons. Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
United Nations' inspections also revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.
And in 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War. We know now, were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.
Today, Iraq continues to withhold important information about its nuclear program -- weapons design, procurement logs, experiment data, an accounting of nuclear materials and documentation of foreign assistance. Iraq employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians. It retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon. Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should Iraq acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year. And Iraq's state-controlled media has reported numerous meetings between Saddam Hussein and his nuclear scientists, leaving little doubt about his continued appetite for these weapons.
Iraq also possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N. Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can inflict mass death throughout the region.
In 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the world imposed economic sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions were maintained after the war to compel the regime's compliance with Security Council resolutions. In time, Iraq was allowed to use oil revenues to buy food. Saddam Hussein has subverted this program, working around the sanctions to buy missile technology and military materials. He blames the suffering of Iraq's people on the United Nations, even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and to buy arms for his country. By refusing to comply with his own agreements, he bears full guilt for the hunger and misery of innocent Iraqi citizens.
In 1991, Iraq promised U.N. inspectors immediate and unrestricted access to verify Iraq's commitment to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and long-range missiles. Iraq broke this promise, spending seven years deceiving, evading, and harassing U.N. inspectors before ceasing cooperation entirely. Just months after the 1991 cease-fire, the Security Council twice renewed its demand that the Iraqi regime cooperate fully with inspectors, condemning Iraq's serious violations of its obligations. The Security Council again renewed that demand in 1994, and twice more in 1996, deploring Iraq's clear violations of its obligations. The Security Council renewed its demand three more times in 1997, citing flagrant violations; and three more times in 1998, calling Iraq's behavior totally unacceptable. And in 1999, the demand was renewed yet again.
As we meet today, it's been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, and to build, and to test behind the cloak of secrecy.
We know that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass murder even when inspectors were in his country. Are we to assume that he stopped when they left? The history, the logic, and the facts lead to one conclusion: Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger. To suggest otherwise is to hope against the evidence. To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble. And this is a risk we must not take.
Delegates to the General Assembly, we have been more than patient. We've tried sanctions. We've tried the carrot of oil for food, and the stick of coalition military strikes. But Saddam Hussein has defied all these efforts and continues to develop weapons of mass destruction. The first time we may be completely certain he has a -- nuclear weapons is when, God forbids, he uses one. We owe it to all our citizens to do everything in our power to prevent that day from coming.
The conduct of the Iraqi regime is a threat to the authority of the United Nations, and a threat to peace. Iraq has answered a decade of U.N. demands with a decade of defiance. All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?
The United States helped found the United Nations. We want the United Nations to be effective, and respectful, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world's most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime. Our partnership of nations can meet the test before us, by making clear what we now expect of the Iraqi regime.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately and unconditionally forswear, disclose, and remove or destroy all weapons of mass destruction, long-range missiles, and all related material.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all support for terrorism and act to suppress it, as all states are required to do by U.N. Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will cease persecution of its civilian population, including Shi'a, Sunnis, Kurds, Turkomans, and others, again as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown. It will return the remains of any who are deceased, return stolen property, accept liability for losses resulting from the invasion of Kuwait, and fully cooperate with international efforts to resolve these issues, as required by Security Council resolutions.
If the Iraqi regime wishes peace, it will immediately end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food program. It will accept U.N. administration of funds from that program, to ensure that the money is used fairly and promptly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
If all these steps are taken, it will signal a new openness and accountability in Iraq. And it could open the prospect of the United Nations helping to build a government that represents all Iraqis -- a government based on respect for human rights, economic liberty, and internationally supervised elections.
The United States has no quarrel with the Iraqi people; they've suffered too long in silent captivity. Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause, and a great strategic goal. The people of Iraq deserve it; the security of all nations requires it. Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and conquest, and open societies do not threaten the world with mass murder. The United States supports political and economic liberty in a unified Iraq.
We can harbor no illusions -- and that's important today to remember. Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990. He's fired ballistic missiles at Iran and Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Israel. His regime once ordered the killing of every person between the ages of 15 and 70 in certain Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. He has gassed many Iranians, and 40 Iraqi villages.
My nation will work with the U.N. Security Council to meet our common challenge. If Iraq's regime defies us again, the world must move deliberately, decisively to hold Iraq to account. We will work with the U.N. Security Council for the necessary resolutions. But the purposes of the United States should not be doubted. The Security Council resolutions will be enforced -- the just demands of peace and security will be met -- or action will be unavoidable. And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power.
Hmmm, how many of those conditions does Dubai meet?
It would be inappropriate to pretend that Mr. Brownstein's own argument -- that Dubai is a risk just like Iraq was because in theory a terrorist plot could be launched from Dubai -- contains either logic or reasoning, but if we follow it to its conclusion, we ought to attack Logan Airport, even though with the exception of Fenway Park, a few colonial historic sites, and any potential remaining Pewter Pot restaurants, it seems the place least in need of daisy-cutting in Boston.
BEEN BUSY FOR QUITE AWHILE, EH? (via Tom Corcoran):
'Jurassic beaver' found in China (BBC, 2/28/06)
The discovery of a beaver-like fossil that lived when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth could challenge some currently accepted ideas on mammal evolution.Castorocauda lutrasimilis, which was unearthed in China, is a species previously unknown to science. [...]
The fossil was found in the Middle Jurassic Jiulongshan Formation, a deposit rich in the remains of dinosaurs, early insects and other organisms.
The creature had fur, a broad scaly tail, and webbed feet for swimming. It was about the size of a small female platypus and had seal-like teeth for eating fish.
Castorocauda lutrasimilis resembled a modern-day beaver, but belonged to a group that became extinct long before rodents appeared.
TOUGH TIMES FOR TERRORISTS (via mc):
Leader of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia Killed (ABDULLAH AL-SHIHRI, 2/28/06, Associated Press)
The leader of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia and two men who helped attack the world's largest oil-processing complex were among five militants killed during police raids in the capital, authorities said Tuesday.
Al Qaeda's had a rough four and a half years.
NOT AS CUTE A STORY AS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THIRTY YEARS AGO:
Prom date for Epstein: GM makes Maine girl’s day (Tony Massarotti, 2/27/06, Boston Herald)
Grace Needleman and Alice Evans, friends and classmates at Cape Elizabeth High School, stood behind one of the backstops at the Red Sox minor league complex hoping to grab the attention of one well-known member of the organization. The object of their affection: general manager Theo Epstein, who was also the subject of the winter’s most-watched soap opera. [...]
To capture Epstein’s attention, the friends carried a pair of homemade posters that they held up against the chain-link backstop.
The first read: “Theo, we’re excited you didn’t go.”
The second: “Will you go to the prom with me?”
Epstein, who was watching promising left-hander Jon Lester throw live batting practice when he spotted the girls, walked over to the backstop to acknowledge them.
“When’s your prom?” he asked before fulfilling the girls’ requests for autographs.
IT SERVES W'S ENDS:
Americans Are Cautiously Open to Gas Tax Rise, Poll Shows (LOUIS UCHITELLE and MEGAN THEE, 2/28/06, NY Times)
The nationwide telephone poll, conducted Wednesday through Sunday, suggested that a gasoline tax increase that brought measurable results would be acceptable to a majority of Americans.Neither the Bush administration nor Democratic Party leaders make that distinction. Both are opposed to increasing the gasoline tax as a means of discouraging consumption, although President Bush, in recent speeches, has called for the development of alternative energy to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
Eighty-five percent of the 1,018 adults polled opposed an increase in the federal gasoline tax, suggesting that politicians have good reason to steer away from so unpopular a measure. But 55 percent said they would support an increase in the tax, which has been 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993, if it did in fact reduce dependence on foreign oil. Fifty-nine percent were in favor if the result was less gasoline consumption and less global warming. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.
The key is not to just raise the taxes on gasoline but at the same time to reduce income taxes, thereby serving one of the President's primary goals of switching to a system that taxes consumption and encourages savings. Sell it as a security measure, let the Left emphasize the environment and the Right its anti-Arab component ,and you've got a doable tax reform.
CHANGE OF VIEW:
No father-son picnic (JON HEYMAN, February 28, 2006, Newsday)
We'll assume that Roger Clemens would never have brushed back his beloved mother, Bess. But when stepping into the batter's box against him, other family members shouldn't feel too relaxed.After a surprise home run by Koby Clemens off his Hall of Fame-bound father yesterday, Clemens let loose with a fastball that moved Koby far off the plate.
Obviously armed with inside information about his father's pitching habits, Koby, 19, quickly turned away from the inside fastball just before it popped the catcher's mitt.
"I've been throwing at him since father-son games," said Clemens, who might have been kidding about that. [...]
Said Koby: "He was like, 'Sorry about that pitch inside. I was trying to change the view of the ball a little bit.'
INTERVIEW: Roger Angell, Still Throwing Strikes (Dave Weich, Powells.com)
Dave: Even the minor details in your profile of Bob Gibson are fascinating. I had no idea that he played for the Harlem Globetrotters. We hear a lot about Gibson these days; for example, when people talk about pitchers throwing on the inside half of the plate. He's also associated with major league baseball deciding to lower the mound.Angell: In 1969, they lowered the mound because of him.
I see him once in a while. He's still the same, an exceptional guy. He's very quiet and reserved. I spent a lot of time with him doing that long piece.
He's something. He really didn't like fraternizing. He thought all batters were a pitcher's enemy. I think he half-thought that maybe, somehow, by some weird chance, this weird, forty-year-old, balding writer with eyeglasses would come up to bat against him some day. I told him that, and he said, "Yeah, that could happen." Old time players say that of all the guys, he was the most ferocious. He had a burning concentration and the most powerful sense of competition.
I'd first noticed him after he struck out seventeen batters in the opening game of the 1968 World Series against the Tigers, which is still a record. Well, we went to the clubhouse in St. Louis, and black athletes, we didn't know them as well as we do now. He was silent and scary. He wasn't smiling. Someone said to him, "Were you surprised by what you did today, Bob?" He said, "I'm never surprised by anything I do." You could see the reaction going back in the rows of writers, saying, "What did he say?"
I hung around, as I often do, and most of the writers went away. I asked him, "Have you always been this competitive?" He looked at me, and he said, "I think so. I've got a four-year-old daughter and we've played about three hundred games of tic-tac-toe, and she hasn't beat me yet." And he meant it! He meant it!
END THE FICTION:
China warns Taiwan of 'disaster' (BBC, 2/28/06)
China has warned that Taiwan's decision to scrap a council on reunification with the mainland could bring disaster.The move will "create antagonism and conflict within Taiwan and across the strait," China's ruling Communist Party and government said in a statement.
Mr Chen announced on Monday that the National Unification Council and its guidelines would "cease to function" due to China's "military threat".
China said Mr Chen was pushing Taiwan towards formal independence.
No one is well-served by continuing the illusion that Taiwan and Palestine are not already sovereign states.
THE ONLY THEME (via Pepys):
A Prophetic and Violent Masterpiece (Theodore Dalrymple, Winter 2006, City Journal)
Burgess was not merely a social and cultural prophet. A Clockwork Orange grapples as well with the question of the origin and nature of good and evil. The Ludovico Method that Alex undergoes in prison as a means of turning him into a model citizen in exchange for his release is in essence a form of conditioning. Injected with a drug that induces nausea, Alex must then watch films of the kind of violence that he himself committed, his head and eyelids held so that he cannot escape the images by looking away from them—all this to the piped-in accompaniment of the classical music that he loves. Before long, such violence, either in imagery or in reality, as well as the sound of classical music, causes him nausea and vomiting even without the injection, as a conditioned response. Alex learns to turn the other cheek, as a Christian should: when he is insulted, threatened, or even struck, he does not retaliate. After the treatment—at least, until he suffers his head injury—he can do no other.Two scientists, Drs. Branom and Brodsky, are in charge of the “treatment.” The minister of the interior, responsible for cutting crime in a society now besieged by the youth culture, says: “The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories . . . . Common criminals . . . can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.” In other words, a criminal or violent act is, in essence, no different from the act of a rat in a cage, who presses a lever in order to obtain a pellet of food. If you shock the rat with electricity when it presses the lever instead of rewarding it with food, it will soon cease to press the lever. Criminality can be dealt with, or “cured,” in the same way.
At the time that Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, doctors were trying to “cure” homosexuals by injecting them with apomorphine, a nausea-inducing drug, while showing them pictures of male nudes. And overwhelmingly, the dominant school of psychology worldwide at the time was the behaviorism of Harvard prof B. F. Skinner. His was what one might call a “black box” psychology: scientists measured the stimulus and the response but exhibited no interest whatsoever in what happened between the two, as being intrinsically immeasurable and therefore unknowable. While Skinner might have quibbled about the details of the Ludovico Method (for example, that Alex got the injection at the wrong time in relation to the violent films that he had to watch), he would not have rejected its scientific—or rather scientistic—philosophy.
In 1971, the very year in which the Kubrick film of A Clockwork Orange was released, Skinner published a book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He sneered at the possibility that reflection upon our own personal experience and on history might be a valuable source of guidance to us in our attempts to govern our lives. “What we need,” he wrote, “is a technology of behavior.” Fortunately, one was at hand. “A technology of operant behavior is . . . already well advanced, and it may prove commensurate with our problems.” As he put it, “[a] scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame [for a man’s behavior] to the environment.” What goes on in a man’s mind is quite irrelevant; indeed, “mind,” says Skinner, is “an explanatory fiction.”
For Skinner, being good is behaving well; and whether a man behaves well or badly depends solely upon the schedule of reinforcement that he has experienced in the past, not upon anything that goes on in his mind. It follows that there is no new situation in a man’s life that requires conscious reflection if he is to resolve the dilemma or make the choices that the new situation poses: for everything is merely a replay of the past, generalized to meet the new situation.
The Ludovico Method, then, was not a far-fetched invention of Burgess’s but a simplified version—perhaps a reductio ad absurdum, or ad nauseam—of the technique for solving all human problems that the dominant school of psychology at the time suggested. Burgess was a lapsed Catholic, but he remained deeply influenced by Catholic thought throughout his life. The Skinnerian view of man appalled him. He thought that a human being whose behavior was simply the expression of conditioned responses was not fully human but an automaton. If he did the right thing merely in the way that Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell, he could not be a good man: indeed, if all his behavior was determined in the same way, he was hardly a man at all. A good man, in Burgess’s view, had to have the ability to do evil as well as good, an ability that he would voluntarily restrain, at whatever disadvantage to himself.
Being a novelist rather than an essayist, however, and a man of many equivocations, Burgess put these thoughts in A Clockwork Orange into the mouth of a ridiculous figure, the prison chaplain, who objects to the Ludovico Method—but not enough to resign his position, for he is eager to advance in what Alex calls “Prison religion.” Burgess puts the defense of the traditional view of morality as requiring the exercise of free will—the view that there is no good act without the possibility of a bad one—into the mouth of a careerist.
The two endings of A Clockwork Orange—the one that Burgess himself wrote and the truncated one that his American publisher wanted and that Kubrick used for his film—have very different meanings.
According to the American-Kubrick version, Alex resumes his life as violent gang leader after his head injury undoes the influence of the Ludovico Method. He returns to what he was before, once more able to listen to classical music (Beethoven’s Ninth) and fantasize violence without any conditioned nausea:
Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas [feet], carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor]. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.
Kubrick even suggests that this is a happy outcome: better an authentic psychopath than a conditioned, and therefore inauthentic, goody-goody. Authenticity and self-direction are thus made to be the highest goods, regardless of how they are expressed. And this, at least in Britain, has become a prevailing orthodoxy among the young. If, as I have done, you ask the aggressive young drunks who congregate by the thousand in every British town or city on a Saturday night why they do so, or British soccer fans why they conduct themselves so menacingly, they will reply that they are expressing themselves, as if there were nothing further to be said on the matter.
The full, British version of A Clockwork Orange ends very differently. Alex begins to lose his taste for violence spontaneously, when he sees a happy, normal couple in a café, one of whom is a former associate of his. Thereafter, Alex begins to imagine a different life for himself and to fantasize a life that includes tenderness:
There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa [girl] all welcoming and greeting like loving. . . . I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted. . . . For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son. . . . I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Burgess obviously prefers a reformation that comes spontaneously from within, as it does in the last chapter, to one that comes from without, by application of the Ludovico Method. Here he would agree with Kubrick—an internal reformation is more authentic, and thus better in itself because a true expression of the individual. Perhaps Burgess also believes that such an internal reformation is likely to go deeper and be less susceptible to sudden reversal than reformation brought from outside.
It's archetypal Anglo-American/Judeo-Christian literature in that it grapples with the only issue that really matters in human affairs, the choice between freedom and security, and comes down on the side of free will.
N.B.: Note that the scientists hate freedom because it leads to insecurity and evil in the world, which is the objection to God's Creation that gave rise to Darwinism. The Ludovicists know they could have created Man better.
HAPPILY EVER CAFTA:
Arias Wins Recount Of Costa Rican Vote,
Boosting Cafta Hope (John Lyons, Wall Street Journal)
Oscar Arias, the Nobel Peace Prize winner seeking Costa Rica's presidency for the second time, has won a hand recount of ballots in this month's photo-finish election, increasing the likelihood the nation will join a regional free-trade pact with the U.S.
A TECHNOCRATIC MAJORITY?:
A few trends are clear, however. The first is that Mr Calderón—who was not Mr Fox's choice as PAN's candidate, but came from behind to win the party's primaries—is on the upswing. The second is that Mr Madrazo's campaign has gone into a downward spiral. The series of scandals that have rocked the PRI, coupled with Mr Madrazo's lack of appeal to voters, have led most members of even his own party to doubt he can win. [...]
What is perhaps surprising is that there is little of substance at stake in the elections. Even with rivalry developing between centre-left and centre-right parties, ideology has little importance. “It will not be an election decided on policy proposals,” Manuel Camacho, a close adviser to Mr López Obrador, says firmly. That is because all three candidates not only agree on what the main issues are—the economy and crime—but also largely agree on what needs to be done: stimulate growth and get tough on criminals. So the election has become primarily a contest of credibility: who can be trusted to follow through best on proposals that are basically quite similar?
But the very consensus on the issues means that this election could bring about the sea-change in Mexican politics which many voters had hoped for when they elected Mr Fox. Under his minority administration, change did not come largely because he was unable to persuade a divided Congress to pass much of his legislation. Now both Mr Calderón and Mr López Obrador have begun talking openly of persuading some PRI deputies to form a governing coalition. Mexico is in sore need of structural reforms on many fronts: the tax system, the energy sector (Pemex, the state oil monopoly, currently accounts for over one third of government revenue), the justice system, education and pensions, to name only those areas most in need of overhaul. If a coalition were formed, it might just be possible that the next president, be he Mr Calderón or Mr López Obrador, could push such changes through Congress. If so, whatever the outcome of the campaign, Mexico could end up as the real winner.
And reform and optimism for the future would release some of the external pressure driving our immigration, though the internal forces -- the demand for cheap labor -- would remain.
THE APPLE OF LINDA'S EYE:
Bush, Speaking Up Against Bigotry (Richard Cohen, February 28, 2006, Washington Post)
There are times when George Bush sorely disappoints. Just when you might expect him to issue a malapropian explanation, pander to his base or simply not have a clue about what he is talking about, he does something so right, so honest and, yes, so commendable, that -- as Arthur Miller put it in "Death of a Salesman" -- "attention must be paid." Pay attention to how he has refused to indulge anti-Arab sentiment over the Dubai ports deal.Would that anyone could say the same about many of the deal's critics. Whatever their concerns may be, whatever their fears, they would not have had them, expressed them or seen them in print had the middle name of the United Arab Emirates been something else. After all, no one goes nuts over Germany, the country where some of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists lived and attended school.
To overlook the xenophobic element in this controversy is to overlook the obvious. It is what propelled the squabble and what sustains it. Bush put his finger on it right away. "What I find interesting is that it's okay for a British company to manage some ports, but not okay for a company from a country that is a valuable ally in the war on terror," he said last week. "The UAE has been a valuable partner in fighting the war on terror." It is a long way from a terrorist haven.
Somewhere in the White House, a political operative -- maybe the storied Karl Rove -- must have slapped his head in consternation as Bush made that remark. The politic thing for a president with a dismal approval rating (about 40 percent) would have been to join with the critics, get ahead of the anti-Arab wave and announce that he, too, was concerned about the deal, which was the fault, now that he thought about it, of pointy-headed bureaucrats, Democrats and the occasional atheist. Instead, the White House stuck to its guns, ordering a symbolic retreat -- more study -- but continuing to back the deal.
That Bush has done this should come as no surprise. As a bigot he leaves a lot to be desired.
It';s always amusing when Mr. Cohen intermittently recgnizes that other than the ", (R, TX)" at the end of his name, George W. Bush is pretty much his beau ideal of a president.
IF ONLY THE KENNEDY CLAN LISTENED TO THE CHURCH:
Public Officials Under God (E. J. Dionne Jr., February 28, 2006, Washington Post)
When John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, he said some things about Catholic bishops that might, in today's climate, be condemned as insolence toward church authority."I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute -- where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act," Kennedy told the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960. "I do not speak for my church on public matters -- and the church does not speak for me."
The Church can not, of course, force a politician to act in one way or another, but it must tell him when his actions are immoral and incompatible with his religion. He's then free to choose to be either a good Catholic or a good Democrat.
JUST SAY THE MAGIC WORDS:
Palestinians fear poverty if foreign aid lifeline severed (Matthew Gutman, 2/28/06, USA TODAY)
Middle East envoy James Wolfensohn said the Palestinian Authority faces financial collapse within two weeks because of Israel's decision to cut off tax transfers, Reuters reported Monday. He predicted that "violence and chaos" could break out unless a long-term funding plan is developed.Friendly governments in the region may pick up some of the slack. The largest single pledge so far is a one-time $100 million grant from Iran, according to Hamas spokesman Farhat Asad. Saudi Arabia gives the Palestinians about $15 million a month, according to Palestinian Authority Economy Minister Mazen Sinokrot.
The Palestinians are dependent on the money to build roads and other infrastructure projects in addition to meeting the authority's payroll. The Palestinian government is by far the biggest employer in the Palestinian territories with 150,000 employees — breadwinners for a million Palestinians, or a third of all Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.
"In March, I don't believe we'll be able to pay salaries," Sinokrot said. About 90% of the Palestinian budget is spent on salaries.
"That means the whole system could collapse, bringing unemployment and mass violence with it," Sinokrot said. He said the authority already has an $800 million deficit. [...]
Yousef Ju'edi, 46, is a father of five and owns a restaurant churning out kebab sandwiches behind the town hall here. He's worried about the government payroll even though he's not a civil servant. "I need them to get paid. When the civil servants don't get their paychecks, none of us will," he said through a haze of barbecue smoke.
Masri said he's been able to stretch Qalqilya's $6 million annual budget farther than his predecessors.
Masri is responsible for making sure the city streets are swept, the boulevards' shrubbery pruned and the cobblestones painted. Now, his flagship project in the municipality, revamping the decrepit electricity grid, is in jeopardy.
Issa Faris, the city's engineer, prides himself on the town's few brownouts.
Over the past year, the Hamas-run municipality operated without new parts, and even managed to pay back some of its electricity debts to its provider — the Israel Electric Company.
But without outside funding and the donation of equipment, "eventually the parts we have for transformers, cables, towers, etc. ... will break or corrode and we won't be able to replace them," he said. "We need that foreign aid."
NO CLAUSE FOUR, JUST PLUNKING FOR WAY THREE:
Cameron urges Tories to back him against right (Julian Glover, February 28, 2006, Guardian)
David Cameron will ask Conservative members today to back a radical redefinition of his party's goals in an effort to crush unease on the party's right wing over the scrapping of cherished policies.In a speech to party activists in London tonight the Conservative leader will appeal, over the heads of what he believes is a minority of disgruntled MPs, to the party membership which elected him with a commanding majority in last year's leadership election.
He will launch a document drawing together for the first time the party's central goals and call on party members to debate it and back it in a ballot. [...]
It sets out eight defining ambitions for the party, emphasising a compassionate agenda that focuses on helping the disadvantaged. The plan starts by pledging to put "economic stability and fiscal responsibility first" which it says "must come before tax cuts", and pledges that resources would be shared over time between better public services and reducing taxes.
The test of Tory policies must be "how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich", it says, reversing Margaret Thatcher's famous phrase to declare "there is such a thing as society". It promises to improve schools and hospitals "for everyone, not help a few to opt out", but insists that public services "don't have to be run by the state".
Government can be "a force for good", it declares, supporting aspirations such as home ownership, saving for a pension and starting a business, as well as supporting families and marriage, carers as well as sport, the arts and culture. "The right test for our policies is how they help the most disadvantaged in society, not the rich," the document argues.
The document echoes Mr Cameron's emphasis on the environment, calling for a "long-term, cross-party consensus on sustainable development and climate change". It also picks up on last year's mass campaign to end developing world debt, arguing that "it is our moral obligation to make poverty history".
Last night some Conservatives - although not Mr Cameron - argued that the document and party ballot was an attempt to define the modern Conservative party in the way Tony Blair's scrapping of clause four defined New Labour in the mid-1990s.
"I think the right thing to do is to put out what the party stands for and is fighting for," Mr Cameron told the BBC last night. "We don't have a clause four so I'm not asking the party to junk something."
Back to Thatcherism.
WHEN ABDUL COMES MARCHING HOME AGAIN
Debating terror in Hamas's backyard (David Frum, National Post, February 28th, 2006)
Iraq is shaken almost to destruction by the hatreds and contradictions tearing apart the Middle East and the Islamic world. Qatar cheerfully walks on both sides of the street at the same time, welcoming the American fleet and an Israeli diplomatic mission -- and simultaneously funding the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who justifies suicide bombings against U.S. forces and Israeli civilians, and the al-Jazeera satellite channel.I came to Doha to participate in the Doha debates, an amazing exercise in free speech sponsored by the outspoken wife of the ruling sheikh, Sheikha Mozah. Eight times a year, the Sheikha's foundation invites four panelists from around the world to discuss all sides of issues on which most Arab societies only allow one official view. The debates are hosted by the famously fearless British interviewer Tim Sebastian and broadcast worldwide on the BBC. (The debate in which I took part can be seen this coming weekend.) They take place in the atrium of the Qatar Foundation in Doha's Education City before a live audience of university students.
The topic set before this month's panel was: "Resolved, this House believes the international community must accept Hamas as a partner." Joining me on the negative was my friend Salim Mansur of the University of Western Ontario, a regular columnist for the Toronto Sun. On the proponent side: Stanley Cohen, a radical lawyer who has defended Hamas clients accused in U.S. courts, and Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammedou, associate director of a Harvard research program.[...]
As for me, I had decided what I wanted to say a week before, in Baghdad. My group had been touring the American military hospital in the Green Zone when casualties began to arrive from a suicide bombing -- all Iraqis, mostly civilians. The doctors hustled us out the door: They had work to do. But you did not need to see much to take away a lifetime's image of the savage wounds that extremist Islam was carving into the flesh and lives of the people of the Middle East.
With that memory in mind, I pleaded to the Qatari students: The terrorism of Hamas is aimed at Israel. But it will rebound upon you. The ideology of Hamas is the ideology that blew up the mosque in Samarra. It is the ideology that tyrannizes Iran. It is the ideology that triggered the 1994 civil war that killed between 40,000 and 100,000 Algerians.
Hamas lacks the power to destroy Israel. But the people who believe as Hamas believes hold the power to destroy places like Qatar -- as they are now daily destroying Iraq.[...]
In Doha, the motion in favour of Hamas carried 89% to 11%. In Iraq, the motion in favour of Hamas-like terrorism is carrying a whole nation toward the apocalypse.
Is there any need to fear a clash of civilizations when one side seems so determined to self-immolate?
WE’RE ALL LENINISTS NOW
Climate of Uncertainty (Stephen Hayward, Weekly Standard, February 27th, 2006)
Ultimately, policymakers will have to exercise their best judgment rather than wait for oracular scientific conclusiveness, which will never come. Notwithstanding the relentless drumbeat of studies offered as proof of onrushing catastrophe, policymakers are rightly wary of handing over the keys of the economy to the very same people who brought us the population bomb that turned out to be a wet firecracker, predicted imminent resource scarcity, which also fizzled, and even, in the 1970s, hyperventilated that our greatest climate risk was a new ice age. (The ice age scare was not the tiny sideshow climate action advocates today try to claim that it was; the EPA in the early 1970s thought one reason to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions was that "aerosols" like SO2 were reflecting too much sunlight and increasing the risk of cooling the planet.) The suspicion of hidden agendas is buttressed by the default position of the most vocal environmentalists and the front-page-seeking reporters who cover the climate beat: They greet with complete credulity the most extreme forecasts and portents, whether it is melting ice, boiling oceans, or expiring frogs.This is more than just a problem of having cried wolf too often; there seems to have been little introspection or second thoughts among environmentalists about why their Malthusian alarms rang false in the past. Given their track record, why should anyone believe that this time the alarmists have it right? There has been only grudging acceptance among environmentalists of the positive role of economic growth, the resiliency of human beings, and the dynamic world human ingenuity creates. It might be possible to grant more credibility to the alarmists if there were signs that their current analysis incorporates fundamental corrections of their previous neo-Malthusian frameworks. The recently released U.N. Millennium Ecosystem Assessment appears to go some of the way toward this kind of reappraisal, but the 12-volume (so far), 3,000-page report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read or comprehended.
This brings us to the official effort to assess climate change for the purposes of making policy: the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In the abstract the IPCC deserves it due. The effort to get to the bottom of climate change may be the largest scientific inquiry in human history. It requires the coordination of thousands of specialists, the development of whole new scientific techniques, and the refinement of elaborate computer models that need weeks to run on the world's most powerful supercomputers. Even discounting for the inherent weaknesses of computer models, this kind of sustained effort is likely to generate valuable knowledge in the fullness of time. Producing a coherent report every few years that combines all of this work is an extraordinary feat. The IPCC is currently well into the process of producing its Fourth Assessment Report, due out next year.
The problem with the IPCC process, however, is that the scientists and experts participating in each iteration have become increasingly self-selected toward those with a taste for climate alarmism. Past reports, especially the Second Assessment Report in 1995, were badly politicized by U.N. bureaucrats, misrepresenting the "consensus" the report actually contained. Rumors abound of internal political pressures to "sex up" the reports to make the case for the economically ruinous Kyoto agreement more compelling. Honest skeptics qualified to participate have found the consensus-oriented IPCC process too frustrating and have dropped out. For example, Richard Lindzen, a participant and chapter author in the Third Assessment Report in 2001, is not participating in the next round. More and more, the IPCC is becoming an echo chamber for one point of view, and is closed to honest criticism from the outside. They have not merely rejected criticism; in the fashion of environmental activists, they have demonized their reasonable critics.
The case of David Henderson and Ian Castles is a good example. Henderson, the former chief economist of the OECD, and Castles, a highly regarded Australian economist, noticed three years ago a serious methodological anomaly in the IPCC's 100-year greenhouse gas emission forecasts, which are the primary input for the computer climate models. Henderson and Castles made a compelling argument that the forecasts were unrealistically high. Everyone recalls the first day of computer science class: garbage in, garbage out. If future greenhouse gas emissions are badly overestimated, then even a perfect computer climate model will spit out a false temperature prediction. If Henderson and Castles are right, it means we may have more time to address even the most alarmist global warming forecasts. Since Henderson and Castles opened the debate, the IPCC's emissions forecasts have been subject to withering criticism from dozens of other reputable economists, including from a number of climate alarmists who, to their credit, argue that this crucial question should be got right.
The IPCC's reaction to Henderson and Castles was startling. The panel issued a vituperative press release blasting the two men for peddling "disinformation." A few scientists and economists connected with the IPCC had the decency to say publicly that the press release was a regrettable error. But it is typical of the increasingly arrogant IPCC leadership. The IPCC's chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, compared Danish eco-skeptic Bjorn Lomborg to Hitler because of Lomborg's wholly sensible and well-founded calculation that near-term emissions reductions make no economic sense. "What is the difference between Lomborg's view of humanity and Hitler's?" Pachauri told a Danish newspaper in 2004. "If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing." It is hard to have much confidence in an organization whose chairman can say this and keep his job.
The traditional heros of scientific inquiry challenged tradition and the Church. Today’s must wage an equally courageous battle against a thoroughly politicized scientific establishment.
February 27, 2006
GLORY DAZE (via Pepys):
What is the Third Way ? (The Bevin Society)
Andy McSmith explains: “A simpleton might have answered that Tony Blair ought to know what the Third Way means because it is his slogan, but that would be to misunderstand the nature of the Blair project.The Prime Minister is consciously following in the footsteps of Margaret Thatcher who fought her way to power armed with a determination to win and only a vague idea of what she stood for. Once in office she enlisted intellectual help and hit upon privatisation as the policy which symbolised all she stood for, and invented Thatcherism”. This account of Thatcherism bears little resemblance to its historical existence only twenty years ago.
Thatcher ousted Ted Heath on the basis of a very definite political project, and her supporters spent four years explaining that she intended to call a halt to egalitarian development, to restore inequality as a stimulus to competitiiveness, to break the power of the trade unions, and as far as possible to restore the struggle for survival of each against all which was the motor power of capitalism and which had made England great in the nineteenth century. She preached the virtues of raw capitalism for years before the 1979 election.
All her think-tanks did after the election was devise capitalist things to do. Martin Jacques and Marxism Today took little account of Thatcher’s capitalist crusade in 1975-79, beyond responding to it with traditional slogans. It was assumed that all that differentiated her from Heath was personality. Marxism Today, Tribune, the Labour Left, the Trotskyist groups and the Communist Party, had all opposed the Bullock reform which would have made social democracy functional by weaving it into the structure of the economy. For all their ‘political science’ they showed no analytical capacity about real events. A profound socio-economic crisis gave rise to a Royal Commission proposal for a social-democratic structural reform.
They opposed that reform because it was not “socialism”, and threw themselves into a purposeless militancy in the late seventies. Those were the conditions which enabled Thatcher to win power and set about implementing her policies. After she had been in power for a couple of years it suddenly dawned on Martin Jacques and others that something had changed in Britain, that Thatcher was not Heath or Macmillan, and that the Labour movement was actually being destroyed. And how did they respond to this discovery? They became Thatcherites.
Waking the DemocratsAl From, 2/27/06, Real Clear Politics)
To understand the impetus behind the DLC and the New Democrats, it is important to understand the plight of the Democratic Party in the 1980s.Democrats had run out of ideas -- and liberalism was in great need of resuscitation. Liberals confused expanding government with expanding opportunity. They forgot what John Kennedy had taught -- that opportunity and responsibility must go hand in hand. They worried more about police power than public safety at home and more about American power than America's enemies in the world.
In the minds of too many Americans, government, once an engine of opportunity, had become an obstacle to opportunity. And, still reeling from the aftermath of the party's split over Vietnam, Democrats in the 1980s stood for weakness abroad and for equal outcomes, entitlements for favored constituencies, and big government at home.
The American people said, "No, thanks." Democrats lost at least 40 states in each of the three presidential elections during the decade. In 1984, the party hit bedrock -- losing 49 states for the second time in four national elections. Many experts said the Republicans had a lock on the presidency. Politically and intellectually, the Democratic Party was in a state of near-collapse.
Writing in The New Republic after the 1984 vote, analyst Bill Schneider described the Democrats' plight: "Beginning in the mid-1960s, two streams of voters began leaving the Democratic Party -- white Southerners and Catholic 'ethnic' voters in the North. The first stage of this realignment occurred in 1968 and 1972, when race and foreign policy were the major issues of contention. ... The second stage, 1980-84, has been much more devastating because the party has lost its credibility on economic issues."
The harsh consequences of both stages of realignment were evident again in 1988, when Democrats lost a presidential election that they thought they would win.
"Democrats must come face to face with reality," wrote William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck in their landmark 1989 study The Politics of Evasion: Democrats and the Presidency. "Too many Americans have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments and ineffective in defense of their national security."
The Democrats' dilemma after 1988, according to Schneider, was that there was no alternative between "those who want to reaffirm the party's old-time religion and those who want to turn to the right." But by moving to the left, Democrats would make things worse for themselves, he said, and, because they were a liberal party, it was unlikely they would nominate a candidate unacceptable to liberals.
What the Democrats needed, Schneider wrote, was a "tough liberal" in the mold of Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson -- tough guys who "couldn't be pushed around by the Russians or the special interests in Washington."
Into that breach stepped Clinton and the New Democrats.
By the end of the 1980s, it was evident that conservatism, like liberalism, was bankrupt of ideas, creating what Clinton and the New Democrats saw as a false choice between two tired, old approaches that no longer worked.
Forging a Third Way was the challenge facing Democrats when Clinton assumed the DLC chairmanship in New Orleans in March 1990. His first act as DLC chairman was to issue The New Orleans Declaration, a seminal document that laid out the core New Democrat beliefs and served as the philosophical foundation for the Third Way approach and the Clinton presidency.
Here are those core beliefs:
We believe the promise of America is equal opportunity, not equal outcomes; that the Democratic Party's fundamental mission is to expand opportunity, not government; and in the politics of inclusion.
We believe that America must remain energetically engaged in the worldwide struggle for individual liberty, human rights, and prosperity, not retreat from the world, and that the United States must maintain a strong and capable defense that reflects dramatic changes in the world, but recognizes that the collapse of communism does not mean the end of danger.
We believe that economic growth is the prerequisite to expanding opportunity for everyone; that the right way to rebuild America's economic security is to invest in the skills and ingenuity of our people and to expand trade, not restrict it; that all claims on government are not equal; that our leaders must reject demands that are less worthy, and hold to clear governing priorities; and, that a progressive tax system is the only fair way to pay for government.
We believe in preventing crime and punishing criminals, not in explaining away their behavior; that the purpose of social welfare is to bring the poor into the nation's economic mainstream, not to maintain them in dependence; in the protection of civil rights and the broad movement of minorities into America's economic and cultural mainstream, not racial, gender or ethnic separatism; and that government should respect individual liberty and stay out of our private lives and personal decisions.
We believe in the moral and cultural values that most Americans share: liberty of conscience, individual responsibility, tolerance of difference, the imperative of work, the need for faith, and the importance of family.
Finally, we believe that American citizenship entails responsibility as well as rights, and we mean to ask our citizens to give something back to their communities and their country.
During the next 14 months -- with time out to get re-elected as governor of Arkansas in 1990 and for a legislative session in early 1991 -- Clinton traveled across the country meeting with elected, party, business, labor, and civic leaders, as well as ordinary citizens, to discuss those beliefs and innovative ideas for furthering them. During that period, Clinton shaped much of the agenda on which he was to run in 1992 -- the first New Democrat agenda.
He called that agenda "The New Choice" and presented it for ratification to the DLC's Convention in Cleveland in May 1991. That Cleveland meeting turned out to be a pivotal event for the New Democrat movement. The New Choice resolutions broke new ground, advocating ideas like national service, an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, welfare reform, charter schools, community policing, expanding trade, and reinventing government.
Typical of the Brits to be more forthright, even with themselves, in acknowledginmg that the Third Way is a shift to the Right (as it is a shift Left for conservatives, at least in terms of accepting the inevitability of a government mandated safety net), but what's really funny here is to look at who supports the New Choice and who opposes it. Democrats have spent the last six years fighting against free trade, school choice, entitlement reform, and privatization/out-sourcing in government.
The oddest bit comes later:
Because his ideas worked, Clinton not only redefined progressivism in this country, but served as the model for the resurgence of center-left political parties, from Europe and Latin America to Asia and Africa. That is his true legacy.
The resurgence that matters is of center-Right parties -- in Britain, America, Australia, Japan, Germany, Poland, Canada, etc. -- the parties of the Left in places like Latin America are returning to the same tired socialism/statism that our own Democrats are stuck defending. When Al From, the putative leader of the New Democrats these days, has so little clue, it seems safe to say that the party's time in the Wilderness is in no danger of ending anytime soon.
MORE:
The Strange Death That No One Cares About (Orrin C. Judd, 1/27/05, Tech Central Station)
ONE END, MANY MEANS:
Bush's Grand Strategy (Michael Barone, 2/27/06, Real Clear Politics)
[P]re-emption was not the only doctrine in the document. The words just quoted were preceded by a clause reading, "While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community ..." Even while claiming the right to act pre-emptively, Bush agreed to Tony Blair's plea for a second United Nations resolution to justify military action in Iraq, even though it was justified by previous resolutions and Saddam Hussein's defiance of them.And there was more to the strategy of securing America than just dealing with immediate threats. The NSS called for "global efforts to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations." Bush critics say that he has undercut that by continuing to reject the Kyoto Protocol. But the agreement Bush concluded with India, China, Japan and Australia to limit growth of greenhouse gases seems likely to produce significant results, while the European countries, for all their hauteur, are failing to meet their Kyoto targets.
Bush has also gone beyond the NSS by agreeing to joint military operations with India and encouraging a Japanese military presence abroad -- both counterweights to Chinese military power. Also going beyond his proposals is his massive commitment to combat AIDS in Africa, which is only hinted at in the document.
In other respects, Bush has not delivered on the promises of the NSS. The Free Trade Area of the Americas, envisioned for 2005, is nowhere in sight. And "an independent and democratic Palestine, living beside Israel in peace and security," won't appear soon.
Well, he can act unilaterally to destroy Iran's nuclear program, and will if necessary, but you can't unilaterally impose free trade. Meanwhile, Palestine is a democracy and Israel has been moved to the point where it's about ready to recognize its independence -- on Israeli terms -- peace and security will follow.
NEVER ASK A NEOCON HOW TO SOLVE A CULTURAL CRISIS (via Pepys):
Europe vs. Radical Islam: Alarmist Americans have mostly bad advice for Europeans. (Francis Fukuyama, Feb. 27, 2006, Slate)
The problem that most Europeans face today is that they don't have a vision of the kinds of positive cultural values their societies stand for and should promote, other than endless tolerance and moral relativism. What each European society needs is to invent an open form of national identity similar to the American creed, an identity that is accessible to newcomers regardless of ethnicity or religion. This was the idea behind Bassam Tibi's concept of Leitkultur (guiding or reference culture), the notion that the European Enlightenment gave rise to a distinct and positive universalist culture based on the dignity of the individual. Muslims coming to Europe would be minimally expected to accept this perspective as their own. The German Christian Democrats timidly endorsed a version of this five years ago, only to retreat in the face of charges of racism and anti-immigrant prejudice from the left. Interest in a "demokratische Leitkultur" has been revived in the wake of recent events, however, and a vigorous debate has opened up over how to define it. There will be many missteps along the way: The state of Baden-Württemberg, for example, recently introduced a test that would require the respondent to support gay marriage as a condition for citizenship, something deliberately designed to exclude Muslims.Time is getting short to address these questions. Europeans should have started a discussion about how to integrate their Muslim minorities a generation ago, before the winds of radical Islamism had started to blow. The cartoon controversy, while beginning with a commendable European desire to assert basic liberal values, may constitute a Rubicon that will be very hard to re-cross. We should be alarmed at the scope of the problem, but prudent in responding to it, since escalating cultural conflict throughout the Continent will bring us closer to a showdown between Islamists and secularists that will increasingly look like a clash of civilizations.
Hard to know which is more hilarious, the idea that the dignity of the individual is a product of the Enlightenment or that secularism is a civilization. Because the neocons have never grasped the centrality of Judeo-Christianity to Western Civilization their political prescriptions are always banal.
COULDN'T HE HAVE BORROWED DENG'S DUNCE CAP?:
Summers's End: Too bad Harvard's president wouldn't take his own side in a quarrel. (Peter Berkowitz, 03/06/2006, Weekly Standard)
The significance of Lawrence Summers's resignation under fire as president of Harvard University has been widely misunderstood. Oozing sympathy for a beleaguered and aggrieved Harvard faculty, the Boston Globe editorial page argued that because he was "arrogant" and "brusque," in short a "bully," Summers was "losing the ability to be effective" and so it was "sensible," and in the interests of all, for him to step down. A sympathetic editorial in the Washington Post portrayed Summers as a martyr, a foe of "complacencies and prejudices" who was forced to fall on his sword by a "loud and unreasonable" minority. An angry Wall Street Journal editorial, which colorfully decried "a largely left-wing faculty that has about as much intellectual diversity as the Pyongyang parliament," portrayed Summers as a victim whose apology, "in the wake of his 'gender' comments," failed "to placate his liberal critics."Summers's ouster certainly demonstrates--as Harvard professor Ruth Wisse observed in a Wall Street Journal op-ed and as another Harvard dissenter, Alan Dershowitz, argued in the Boston Globe--the power at Harvard of a faction within the faculty of arts and sciences for whom scholarship is politics by other means and who aggressively practice the politics of resentment that they loudly preach. Yet they could not on their own have brought down Summers, whose intellectual credentials as a brilliant economist and whose political credentials as former secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration are impeccable.
Summers's vociferous faculty critics--those who voted no confidence in him last year represent only about 25 percent of the arts and sciences faculty--needed, in the face of their scurrilous attacks, the silence of the vast majority of the rest of the Harvard arts and science faculty as well as the silence of the eight other faculties at Harvard. [...]
Alas, the Harvard establishment already seems to be drawing the wrong lesson from Summers's resignation. Summers critic Peter T. Ellison, a professor of anthropology and former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, told the New York Times: "I think the repair will be virtually instantaneous. I think the problem has been essentially President Summers himself."
In fact, the problem was that Summers was untrue to his sound instincts about the university's mission and unable or unwilling to articulate the principles that should organize and refine those instincts. Despite his considerable gifts, the bright promise when he was appointed in 2001, his evident joy in Harvard's remarkable students and his varied achievements during his five years at the helm, Summers's failure to stand up for himself and for the principle of free inquiry when both were under assault--indeed, his collaboration by means of public acts of abasement and contrition before those who would cut off speech and research in order to protect their own tender sensibilities and political agendas--leaves Harvard more enfeebled and more confused about its mission than when he arrived.
On the bright side, it's even more of a laughingstock than it was outside of Harvard Yard.
KENNEDY ON THE SPOT:
U.S. Supreme Court to hear arguments Tuesday on campaign finance (Christopher Graff, February 25, 2006, Associated Press)
A typically blunt statement by Howard Dean nine years ago about campaign contributions -- "money does buy access and we're kidding ourselves and Vermonters if we deny it" -- is at the heart of a case that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.Advocates of campaign spending limits say this case is their best hope in 30 years; opponents believe the justices will use the opportunity to firmly close the door once and for all on any such limits. All agree that the case provides the Roberts Court with a chance to put its imprint on how elections are financed and regulated around the country.
"Justice O'Connor, the swing voter in the recent campaign finance cases, has left the court," said Richard Hasen of Loyola Law School. "The Vermont case could present the new Roberts Court with an opportunity to begin imposing significant restrictions on the ability of the government to limit the role of money in politics."
With the exception of the imagined right of privacy, the fact that the Court pretty much only allows restrictions on speech when it is political -- which is the only type of speech the Constitution protects -- is where it's gone most seriously off track.
SO, CAN THESE ARABS RUN OUR PORTS?
US tsunami aid still reaps goodwill: A recent poll found Indonesians' support for the US is almost as high as it was in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. (Tom McCawley, 2/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)
The poll of 1,177 Indonesians in late January found that those "with a favorable opinion of the US" jumped from a low of 15 percent in May 2003 following the US-led invasion of Iraq, to more than 44 percent in January of this year. A similar poll released by the Pew Research Center in June last year also said tsunami aid had changed Indonesian opinions of the US."The military aid [after the tsunami], humanitarian help, and private philanthropy ... boosted the image of the US," says Djoko Susilo, a legislator on parliament's security commission, noting that "even rich Indonesians" don't generally give money to such causes.
And they're an emerging democracy to boot.
THE VOTE IS A HARSH MISTRESS:
One town doubts Hamas (Joshua Mitnick, 2/28/06, The Christian Science Monitor)
QALQILYA, WEST BANK: [...]When the militant group Hamas beat the ruling Fatah party for control of this Palestinian town of 42,000 in last May's municipal elections, the new councilors promised to pave uneven streets like the one outside Mustafa Juadei's glass business. And while Mr. Juadei awaits the road improvement, he says that potential clients go elsewhere.
Hamas's win in cities like Qalqilya was a harbinger of their surprise Jan. 25 victory in the parliamentary election. But, after experiencing six months of local Hamas rule, Qalqilya was the only district in which Hamas lost to Fatah last month. Now, as Hamas cobbles together the first Palestinian cabinet led by an Islamist party and struggles to secure much-needed aid money, some locals say a Hamas backlash could spread in the Palestinian territories.
DOING WHAT COMES NATURALLY
Polity's place in a polite society (Frank Field, The Australian, February 28th, 2006)
There are some common causes for the collapse of civility in Britain and Australia. Far and away the most important is that, not so long ago, the formation of our characters was not left to chance but today, increasingly, it is. In the past, family played a key role in shaping character, and its influence was reinforced by a rich array of civil institutions including churches, Sunday schools, trade unions, friendly societies and mutual aid clubs.Both families and this wider world held clear views on the type of character each of us should develop. The central message was that our own self-respect was inextricably bound with our guarding the self-respect of others. This character formation was carried out so well that governments simply did not have to think about the issue. Now they do.
The key to the collapse in civility is the decline in Christianity. The British character was shaped by the early 19th-century evangelical revival, which centred on the role of the family and duty to neighbours. This religious revival developed into a creed of respectability that became as natural a guide to behaviour as the air that was breathed. Respectability was not imposed by a pushy middle class. It was engendered by the working class, which learned from experience that chaos was the alternative to a life emphasising respect for others as well as for oneself.
As adamant libertarians, yobs, punks and bullies will tell you there is no need to impose artificial standards of behaviour on them because natural selection has left them hard-wired for co-operative morality and instinctively drawn to just the right balance between freedom and civility.
SURVIVAL CERTAINLY IS OF THE FITTEST THOUGH:
Russia’s Population Implosion (Sergei Kapitsa, Project Syndicate)
Years ago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn coined the phrase “preservation of the people,” by which he meant Russia’s cultural survival. Today, it applies to Russia in a far more literal way.Although I am a physicist, I began to study demography about15 years ago, in the belief that the key global problem was not so much the threat of nuclear annihilation as the dynamics of population growth. It was a grim recognition that Russia faces the opposite problem: a rapid decline in population that threatens every aspect of Russian life. [...]
Solzhenitsyn himself recently suggested that Russia’s national idea should be based on Ivan Petrovich Shuvalov’s proposal to Empress Elizabeth 250 years ago. “Every move, every law should be assessed in terms of whether it helps to preserve the people,” according to Solzhenitsyn. “If not, down with the law.”
Solzhenitsyn’s suggestion is crude, but right in a fundamental sense. Our public thought is fragmented, and the country’s intelligentsia, who are partly responsible for tending to society’s values and goals, are behaving in often-destructive ways. The live-for-the-moment mentality of hedonism and greed that they have encouraged is embodied in Moscow’s casinos, of which there are more than in the rest of Europe – or, for that matter, Las Vegas.
These values – reflected in the way people dress, how they behave in public, and the language they speak – are not the values of human life. A crime subculture is spreading in Russia, and it is attaining the status of official culture. Where the intelligentsia is not directly complicit, its members have, simply by remaining silent, refused to accept the responsibility that accompanies freedom. By contrast, Solzhenitsyn, Tolstoy, and other writers in Russia’s great literary tradition fully understood this responsibility.
The current Russian interpretation of freedom is instead characterized by a narrow, individualistic permissiveness that is incompatible with collective tasks. In other words, Russia’s population crisis is one manifestation of a crisis of ideas.
This, of course, raises the broader question of whether declining birthrates, in Russia and elsewhere, imply a crisis of the liberal idea of freedom, with its focus on individual rights?
Odd that there are still folk who think survival of the species is a physical imperative, rather than a spiritual drive.
IT IS NOT THAT DEMOCRACY HAS BEEN TRIED AND FOUND WANTING.... (via Tom Corcoran):
Democracy Angst: What's the alternative to promoting freedom in the Middle East? (Opinion Journal, February 27, 2006)
[T]he underlying argument deserves thoughtful consideration, and it goes something like this: Contrary to the rhetoric of the Bush Administration, the taste for freedom--and the ability to exercise it responsibly--is far from universal. Culture is decisive. Liberal democracies are the product of long-term trends such as the collapse of communal loyalties, urbanization, the separation of church and state and the political empowerment of the bourgeoisie. Absent these things, say the critics, democratic and liberal institutions are built on foundations of sand and are destined to collapse.This account more or less describes the rise of liberal democracies in the West. Yet simply because it took centuries to establish a liberal-democratic order in Europe, it does not follow that it must take centuries more to establish one in the Middle East. Japan took about 100 years to transform itself (and be transformed) from a feudal society into a modern industrial democracy. South Korea made a similar leap in about 40 years; Thailand went from quasi-military dictatorships to a genuine constitutional monarchy in about 20. As the practice of liberal democracy has spread, the time it takes nondemocratic societies to acquire that practice has diminished.
But, say the critics, Islamic and particularly Arab countries are uniquely resistant to change. Between 1981 and 2001 the number of non-Islamic countries rated "free"--that is to say, both democratic and liberal--increased by 34, according to Freedom House. By contrast the number of free Islamic countries remained constant at one, in the form of landlocked Mali. During the same period, the number of Islamic countries ranked "not free" increased by 10.
No doubt deep-seated cultural factors go some way toward explaining these statistics. But why seek abstruse explanations? In the same period when the U.S. was encouraging democratic openings in Eastern Europe, East Asia and Latin America--areas previously thought impervious to liberty, often for "cultural" reasons--it was supporting or tolerating undemocratic and illiberal regimes in the Middle East.
That period also coincided with the rise of al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the USS Cole, the outbreak of the terrorist intifada in Israel, and September 11. Mr. Fukuyama may or may not be right that promoting democracy does not resolve the problem of terrorism in the short-term. What we know for sure is that tolerating dictatorship not only doesn't resolve the terrorist problem but actively nurtures it.
Obviously if after they've had liberal democracy for two hundred years the Middle Eastern states are still impoverished and spitting forth suicidal terrorists we'll have to re-examine the assumption that Arabs are just as capable of democracy as blacks, Germans, Catholics, Slavs, Asians, etc. turned out to be, but for now it seems a tad premature to claim they aren't. For the nonce they're an argument against our historic support for colonialism and dictatorship in the region.
GIVE WAR A CHANCE:
Students Call for Banning of Peace Studies Class: Bethesda-Chevy Chase High Protesters Say That Teachings Are Skewed (Lori Aratani, February 26, 2006, Washington Post)
For months, 17-year-old Andrew Saraf had been troubled by stories he was hearing about a Peace Studies course offered at his Bethesda high school. He wasn't enrolled in the class but had several friends and classmates who were.Last Saturday, he decided to act. He sat down at his computer and typed out his thoughts on why the course -- offered for almost two decades as an elective to seniors at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School -- should be banned from the school.
"I know I'm not the first to bring this up but why has there been no concerted effort to remove Peace Studies from among the B-CC courses?" he wrote in his post to the school's group e-mail list. "The 'class' is headed by an individual with a political agenda, who wants to teach students the 'right' way of thinking by giving them facts that are skewed in one direction."
He hit send.
Within a few hours, the normally staid e-mail list BCCnet -- a site for announcements, job postings and other housekeeping details in the life of a school -- was ablaze with chatter. By the time Principal Sean Bulson checked his BlackBerry on Sunday evening, there were more than 150 postings from parents and students -- some ardently in support, some ardently against the course.
Why not create a War Studies course, taught by a hawk, and let the kids pick?
APOLOGIES ACCEPTED:
Cheney seen retiring after midterm elections (Insight, 2/27/06)
Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to retire within a year.Senior GOP sources envision the retirement of Mr. Cheney in 2007, months after the congressional elections.
No president has ever come to office with a clearer idea of what he wanted to achieve than George W. Bush and one key part of his program is a permanent Republican majority. In 2000 he chose a vp who was actually capable of running the government should that become necessary, but who wasn't capable of succeeeding him and locking down the legacy. That meant that Mr. Cheney would leave at some point before the 2008 presidential election cycle began to be replaced by an annointed successor.
Mr. Bush would have liked to do something revolutionary, like appoint Condi Rice, but she's not interested in running for the presidency, so he patched things up with John McCain who can so easily win the presidency in his own right that it will greatly expand Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Oddly enough, the one thing that could keep Mr. Cheney in office until Innauguration Day '09, contra this silly story, is that the President wouldn't want to embarrass someone who's served him so loyally and well.
ENOUGH TO WARM THE COCKLES OF EVEN A HEARTLESS CONSERVATIVE (via the Rude Dude):
VIDEO: Autistic basketball player creates mayhem at game (You Tube)
CBS ran an incredibly powerful story tonight that brings you to your feet and just keeps on giving each and every minute into it. Jason McElwain, an autistic high school basketball team member in Rochester NY, served as the coach's assistant and spirit leader for several years. On the final game of the season the coach let him finally put on a jersey with the rest of the team. Watch what happens then...
LOOK MA, NO LEAK:
A CIA Leak Trial Without the CIA Leak (Byron York, 2/27/06, National Review)
CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald argued at a hearing Friday that, as far as the perjury charges against former Cheney chief of staff Lewis Libby are concerned, it does not matter whether or not Valerie Wilson was a covert CIA agent when she was mentioned in the famous Robert Novak column of July 14, 2003. "We're trying a perjury case," Fitzgerald told Judge Reggie Walton. Even if Plame had never worked for the CIA at all, Fitzgerald continued — even if she had been simply mistaken for a CIA agent — the charges against Libby would still stand. In addition, Fitzgerald said, he does not intend to offer "any proof of actual damage" caused by the disclosure of Wilson's identity.
All they ever had to do was tell the truth, but Mr. Libby apparently didn't.
HOW'S THAT BOMBING WORKING OUT? (via mc):
Iraq Official: Top Zarqawi Aide Captured (SINAN SALAHEDDIN, Associated Press)
Interior Ministry forces captured a top aide to al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi during a raid in western Iraq, a security official said Monday.
Whether it's offended religious sensibilities or fear of civil war, the mosque bombing seems to have triggered intelligence disclosures within the Sunni community.
IT WOULDN'T BE A CIVIL WAR, JUST A DESUNNIFICATION:
Iraqi Sunni Bloc to Rejoin Talks on Government (EDWARD WONG, 2/27/06, NY Times)
Leaders of the main Sunni Arab political bloc have decided to return to suspended talks over the formation of a new government, the top Sunni negotiator said Sunday. The step could help defuse the sectarian tensions that threatened to spiral into open civil war last week after the bombing of a Shiite shrine and the killings of Sunnis in reprisal.That bloodletting has amounted to the worst sectarian violence since the American invasion nearly three years ago, and the possibility of Iraqis killing one another on an even greater scale appears to have helped drive Sunni Arab politicians back to moderation, after they angrily withdrew from negotiations last Thursday.
Since the day Baghdad fell the Shi'ites and Kurds have been eager for democracy and the Sunni opposed. Yet folks in the West think the threat -- or even the actuality -- of Civil War doesn't serve the long term interests of Iraq?
FOLLOW THAT BULLDOZER!:
What's Needed From Hamas: Steps in the Peace Process Must Match Conditions on the Ground (Henry A. Kissinger, February 27, 2006, Washington Post)
The advent of Hamas brings us to a point where the peace process must be brought into some conformity with conditions on the ground. The old game plan that Palestinian elections would produce a moderate secular partner cannot be implemented with Hamas in the near future. What would be needed from Hamas is an evolution comparable to Sharon's. The magnitude of that change is rarely adequately recognized. For most of his career, Sharon's strategic goal was the incorporation of the West Bank into Israel by a settlement policy designed to prevent Palestinian self-government over significant contiguous territory. In his indefatigable pursuit of this objective, Sharon became a familiar figure on his frequent visits to America, with maps of his strategic concept rolled up under his arms to brief his interlocutors.Late in life, Sharon, together with a growing number of his compatriots, concluded that ruling the West Bank would deform Israel's historic objective. Instead of creating a Jewish homeland, the Jewish population would, in time, become a minority. The coexistence of two states in Palestinian territory had become imperative. Under Sharon, Israel seemed prepared to withdraw from close to 95 percent of West Bank territory, to abandon a significant percentage of the settlements -- many of them placed there by Sharon -- involving the movement of tens of thousands of settlers into pre-1967 Israel, and to compensate Palestinians for the retained territory by some equivalent portions of Israeli territory. Significant percentages of Israelis are prepared to add the Arab part of Jerusalem to such a settlement as the possible capital of a Palestinian state.
Progress has been prevented in large measure by the rigid insistence on the 1967 frontiers and the refugee issue -- both unfulfillable preconditions. The 1967 lines were established as demarcation lines of the 1948 cease-fire. Not a single Arab state accepted Israel as legitimate within these lines or was prepared to treat the dividing lines as an international border at that time. A return to the 1967 lines and the abandonment of the settlements near Jerusalem would be such a psychological trauma for Israel as to endanger its survival.
The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs around Jerusalem -- a demand President Bush has all but endorsed -- for some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab populations. The rejection of such an approach, or alternative available concepts, which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic balance, reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open.
Folks who insist that Hamas won't evolve ought to think back just four years ago to when they were insisting that Sharon wouldn't.
401 WAYS TO LEAVE STATISM:
Workers offered Roth 401(k)s — slowly (Kathy Chu, 2/26/06, USA TODAY)
General Motors, Delphi, Vanguard and A.G. Edwards are among the first major employers this year to begin rolling out Roth 401(k) plans, which let workers withdraw money tax-free in retirement.Congress allowed employers to offer Roth 401(k) programs starting in January.
Companies so far are slow to adopt such plans, mostly out of fear of confusing employees with another retirement-savings option, says Michael Weddell of Watson Wyatt, a consulting firm.
But given GM's stature, its move could have a ripple effect. "Clearly, if any large, well-recognized firm offers a Roth 401(k), companies would take notice," says Robert Liberto of Segal Advisors.
Getting business to help transform retirement and health care and then means-testing government benefits will basically end them.
MORE:
Health-care fix will require cooperation, Wal-Mart chief says (Alison Granito, 2/27/06, Medill News Service)
Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott told a gathering of the nation's governors Sunday that although the company plans to expand its health-benefits program to cover more workers and their families, the country's health-care crisis cannot be solved by Wal-Mart alone."The soaring cost of health care in America cannot be sustained over the long term by any business that offers health benefits to its employees. And every day that we do not work together to solve this challenge is a day our country becomes less competitive in the global economy," Scott said. [...]
Scott said the retail giant intends to reduce the waiting period for health insurance for part-time employees and extend its "value plan," which allows employees to buy basic coverage for $11 a month, beyond the handful of markets in which it is available now. The company also will give part-time employees the option of insuring their children as well as themselves.
Scott said his company's health plans aren't perfect but called employer-mandate bills politically motivated and unrealistic. The bills have been driven by support from organized labor, long critical of Wal-Mart, which has successfully fought efforts to unionize its stores.
Scott asked for the cooperation of the nation's governors and a commitment to work with his company to find "real solutions" to the health-care crunch.
Government policy should push employers towards offering HSAs.
MEMO TO MOONBATS...:
The Emperor's Visit: Whither India? (Rajesh Ramakrishnan, 27 February, 2006, Countercurrents.org
The official invitation to President George Bush to visit India is a slap in the face of India's history of struggle against imperialism and has therefore evoked strong opposition from a sizeable section of Indians. The United States Government has a long history of imperialist aggression and war crimes against developing countries. The ravaging of Latin America and South East Asia, and the attack on Yugoslavia, are fresh in public memory. The barbaric attack on Afghanistan and the occupation of Iraq are the bloodiest conflicts of our times. The cruel torture of Iraqi civilians by the US military in the prisons of Abu Ghraib has been beamed worldwide by the media. The recent call of the UN Human Rights Commission to close down the Guantanamo Bay prison camp confirms that torture and abuse are part of the US war machine, evoking memories of Nazi concentration camps. Resistance to this war and occupation is growing within the US and UK. The people of Iraq are still waging a heroic struggle for independence from occupation. The Bush Administration continues to use the September 11 incident to justify a global military onslaught to capture key resources, markets and strategic regions. The threat of military attack looms large over Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela and now Iran. Falsely painting the Iranian civilian nuclear energy programme as a weapons programme, President Bush, who presides over the largest nuclear weapon stockpile in the world, is preparing for a military attack on Iran.
...India is now a key partner in that imperialist crusade to universalize liberal democracy. It's bad old days of supporting Third World dictatorships just because they were anti-Western are over.
THOSE ARABS OWN EVERYTHING...:
Indianans suspicious of toll road deal (Theodore Kim, 2/27/06, USA TODAY)
The deal seems simple: An overseas consortium has offered Indiana $3.85 billion to take up all maintenance, operations and revenue on the money-losing Indiana East-West Toll Road for 75 years.The political realities of privatizing one of the Midwest's most important roads have proved to be anything but simple for the deal's architect, Gov. Mitch Daniels.
And so does Republican xenophobia serve to undermine the privatization of government functions, one of the Right's most cherished dreams.
IRAN IS AN ISLAND:
Diplomacy About Iran's Nuclear Program Shifts from Moscow to Tokyo (Steve Herman, 27 February 2006, VOA News)
Iran's foreign minister has arrived in Japan for talks expected to focus on easing concerns over the Islamic republic's nuclear ambitions. Manouchehr Mottaki's three-day visit begins a day after Iran and Russia announced an agreement to establish a joint uranium enrichment venture, in the hopes of averting United Nations sanctions.Japanese officials say Foreign Minister Taro Aso will tell his Iranian counterpart that Tehran should suspend its production of enriched uranium, which can be used for producing nuclear weapons.
Japan supports the proposal for Iran to enrich uranium in Russia, but officials here say it is not clear whether, as a result of the deal between Moscow and Tehran, Iran has agreed to entirely give up enrichment at home.
Aso has said he will press the Iranian foreign minister, for details of the Iranian-Russian agreement.
Aso, speaking Monday to lawmakers, said that if international sanctions are imposed on Tehran, it will be difficult for Japan to press ahead with a huge oil project in southern Iran.
A textbook illustration of how the Axis of Good encircles Chinese Communists and radical Islamicists.
RESTORING RAILROADS WOULD SOLVE THAT:
Cost of doing business soars as traffic worsens (PATRICK DANNER, 2/27/06, MiamiHerald.com)
Since becoming group president of Regions Bank in Broward and Palm Beach counties three years ago, Evan T. Rees calculated he has logged some 100,000 miles on South Florida's increasingly crowded roadways.Like a lot of fellow commuters, Rees leaves his house earlier in the morning and his office later in the evening simply to avoid the rush-hour crush. ''It's getting worse and worse,'' Rees complained.
What's more, the quarterly visits Rees makes to each of Regions' 30 branches in the two counties used to take him about three-and-a-half days. With increased traffic, it now takes him an entire week. That means ''less time to visit with customers and be involved in community activities,'' he said.
What used to be considered largely a Miami-Dade County problem has crept into Broward. With traffic jams routine on Interstates 95 and 595 and the Sawgrass Expressway, the cost of doing business climbs as roadways become more clogged.
Growing congestion plagues communities throughout the country, but this area's clogged roads are among the worst. In South Florida, annual road delays per resident shot up 58 percent between 1993 and 2003, and drivers here wasted the equivalent of more than six work days stuck in traffic in 2003, according to the Texas Transportation Institute.
Transportation/traffic ranks with affordable housing and education as top issues for businesses when deciding whether to relocate or stay in the area. If congestion isn't eased, planners predict, it will hurt South Florida's ability to attract companies and jeopardize future economic development.
Note that the problem with cars isn't just economic, environmental and security costs, but social degradation.
SISSY:
Saddam Hussein ends hunger strike: lawyer (Suleiman al-Khalidi Mon Feb 27, 2006, Reuters)
Toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has ended on health grounds a hunger strike he began earlier this month to protest against the conduct of his trial, his chief lawyer said on Monday.
me-flippin'-ow...
ENERGY TRUMPS ENVIRONMENTALISM:
Labour decides Scotland must have nuclear future (PETER MACMAHON, 2/27/06, The Scotsman)
THE Scottish Labour Party yesterday agreed to support the building of nuclear power stations north of the Border.In a surprise move on the final day of the party conference in Aviemore, delegates overwhelmingly approved a call for ageing nuclear plants to be replaced or renewed. Allan Wilson, the deputy enterprise minister and a member of the party's Scottish policy forum, confirmed that the views of the conference would be taken into account when Labour draws up its manifesto for the 2007 elections.
The decision is set to increase tensions between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who are opposed to new nuclear power stations. However, the vote does strengthen the hand of Jack McConnell, the First Minister, who appears to have been preparing the way for the Executive to back a new generation of nuclear power stations in Scotland.
THE RED GREEN SHOW:
Dartmouth at Top of the Heap (Greg Fennell, 2/27/06, Valley News)
Three months ago, even the most optimistic of Dartmouth men's hockey fans couldn't have envisioned this.As the final buzzer signaled the Big Green's 3-0 win over St. Lawrence at Thompson Arena last night, player after Dartmouth player slapped shoulder and back of teammate in recognition of a rare accomplishment. Then player after Dartmouth player leapt from the bench and onto winning goaltender Mike Devine.
If further evidence was required, it came when captain Mike Ouellette handed coach Bob Gaudet the William J. Cleary Cup, emblematic of regular-season ECAC Hockey League supremacy, the first such trophy in Dartmouth history.
A team that couldn't have started its season worse couldn't have finished it better.
“This is awesome, just awesome,” said Gaudet amid family and friends on the Thompson ice after the game. “It's so hard to get a banner. To be able to put something up there where these guys can come back and appreciate years and years from now, I just think it's great.”
Aside from the hardware and the knowledge that Dartmouth (16-11-2 overall, 14-6-2 league) will finally install a championship banner on Thompson's east wall for the first time since reaching the NCAA Frozen Four in 1980, the Big Green knows a few other things, too.
After an 0-4 start for which Dartmouth is still paying on the national level, the Big Green lifted itself by going 14-2-2 over the rest of its league slate. It has beaten good league foes, and bad ones. It has outscored them, and it has silenced them. Based on tiebreakers, Dartmouth will enter the ECACHL tournament in two weeks as the top seed, a valuable advantage for a team with NCAA tourney aspirations that will probably need to win the league tournament to see those dreams through. [...]
Colgate earned its share of the title with a 2-1 win over RPI last night. And, yes, the Raiders also got a William J. Cleary Cup -- the women's cup, minus any identifying plate. That cup was supposed to reach the St. Lawrence women last night, but the weather made the trip impossible, so league officials decided to hand it over (temporarily) to Colgate.
The women's cup?
THOSE TRICKY DEMOCRATS:
As Canada's Slow-Motion Public Health System Falters, Private Medical Care Is Surging (CLIFFORD KRAUSS, 2/26/06, NY Times)
The country's publicly financed health insurance system — frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity — is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.Dr. Day, for instance, is planning to open more private hospitals, first in Toronto and Ottawa, then in Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. Ontario provincial officials are already threatening stiff fines. Dr. Day says he is eager to see them in court.
"We've taken the position that the law is illegal," Dr. Day, 59, says. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."
Dr. Day may be a rebel (he keeps a photograph of himself with Fidel Castro behind his desk), but he appears to be on top of a new wave in Canada's health care future. He is poised to become the president of the Canadian Medical Association next year, and his profitable Vancouver hospital is serving as a model for medical entrepreneurs in several provinces.
Canada remains the only industrialized country that outlaws privately financed purchases of core medical services. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other politicians remain reluctant to openly propose sweeping changes even though costs for the national and provincial governments are exploding and some cancer patients are waiting months for diagnostic tests and treatment.
But a Supreme Court ruling last June — it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists — appears to have become a turning point for the entire country.
"The prohibition on obtaining private health insurance is not constitutional where the public system fails to deliver reasonable services," the court ruled.
In response, the Quebec premier, Jean Charest, proposed this month to allow private hospitals to subcontract hip, knee and cataract surgery to private clinics when patients are unable to be treated quickly enough under the public system. The premiers of British Columbia and Alberta have suggested they will go much further to encourage private health services and insurance in legislation they plan to propose in the next few months.
Private doctors across the country are not waiting for changes in the law, figuring provincial governments will not try to stop them only to face more test cases in the Supreme Court.
So all this time when the Left has insisted that we adopt Canadian-style health care it was really just a secret plan for more privatization?
IS THERE REALLY A DANGER WE'LL HAVE TOO MANY KIDS WHO CAN ACE THE SATs?:
What's wrong with 'teaching to the test'?: Standarized tests simply mean we are setting high standards for our students. (Jay Mathews, 2/27/06, CS Monitor)
Teaching to the test, you may have heard, is bad, very bad. I got 59.2 million hits when I did a Google search for the phrase, and most of what I read was unfriendly. Teaching to the test made children sick, one article said. Others said it rendered test scores meaningless or had a dumbing effect on instruction. All of that confused me, since in 23 years of visiting classrooms I have yet to see any teacher preparing kids for exams in ways that were not careful, sensible, and likely to produce more learning. [...]Yet if you asked the thousands of educators who have written the questions for the state tests that allegedly produce all these terrible classroom practices, they would tell you their objective is the same as the classroom teacher's: to help kids learn. And if you watched the best teachers at work, as I have many times, you would see them treating the state test as nothing more than another useful guide and motivator, with no significant change in the way they present their lessons.
You can understand education professionals being upset, because it takes the curriculum away from them and gives it back to the taxpayers.
THEY UNDERSTAND FREE TRADE AND THE WoT BETTER THAN THE AMERICAN RIGHT:
Reaction disappoints U.S. backers in UAE (Nicholas Kralev, 2/27/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
"What's happening in the United States is disappointing for people like me," said Mr. al Tamimi, founder and managing partner of the United Arab Emirates' largest law firm, Al Tamimi & Co.
Businessmen, government officials and other residents of Dubai have experienced bewilderment and disbelief as they watched the U.S. reaction to the ports takeover by the state-owned company DP World, the Dubai-based ports operator.
Their reaction reflectsthe city's decades-long search for an identity, inevitably influenced by its Middle East location and Muslim traditions, but also by ambitions to become a free-market economy that attracts the West's wealthiest investors.
"I have a U.S. mentality. I was educated in the United States," said Mr. al Tamimi, who spent 18 months at Harvard Law School, ending in 1984. "I have a home in Idaho and spend most of my vacations in America."
But he said he had never expected the passions exhibited last week in Washington and the six cities whose ports may soon be managed by DPW -- New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Miami and Newark, N.J.
"It has changed my mentality," he said in his office on the 29th floor of Dubai's World Trade Center tower.
"We can build bridges between East and West by having bilateral businesses and common interests," he said. "By isolating this part of the world and pushing us in the corner, how do the Americans think things can change? By magic? I never talked like this before."
THEY FEAR THE SABOTS, NOT SEBASTIAN:
At ports, security vs. trade:
Rules on ports have existed since 1789, but the debate sharpens as globalization rubs up against the threat of terror. (Alexandra Marks, 2/27/06 The Christian Science Monitor)
oday, as technology has fueled changes at an ever greater pace, many economists contend that such "cabotage" laws are outmoded and anachronistic. And they point out that many restrictions passed in the 1920s have been relaxed - even though they still exist."When the dust settles, people are going to say some of these are pretty silly proposals when some of the biggest port facilities are already owned by foreigners, including the Chinese," says Edward M. Graham, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington and author of "US National Security and Foreign Direct Investment." "[Foreign ownership of port operations] has never proven to be a problem - the time to have banned it was 30 years ago before this became a highly globalized industry."
BETWEEN DOGMA AND DIPLOMACY LIES INEVITABILITY:
Hamas leader roils Israel debate: Ismail Haniyeh appeared to suggest that peace could be made with Israel under certain conditions. (Ilene R. Prusher, 2/27/06, The Christian Science Monitor)
After a weekend during which it was portrayed as a party that might be ready to make peace with Israel under certain circumstances, Hamas has found itself walking a fine line between dogma and diplomacy. [...]"There were three clear benchmarks which were articulated by the secretary-general," says Mark Regev. "He said that if Hamas wants to reach the level of internationally accepted interlocutor, they have to totally recognize Israel, they need to renounce terrorism, and come on board with international agreements.
"Ismail Haniyeh did not reach any of those benchmarks and that's clear," he adds. "We shouldn't let Hamas get away with word games. He's trying to market his product, but I still don't think it makes the mark."
Yet...
A BETTER ALTERNATIVE THAN GUANTANAMO:
'Oil attackers' killed in Saudi (BBC, 2/27/06)
Security forces in the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh have killed five suspected militants believed to be linked to an attack on an oil plant.Security sources say a siege took place at a villa in a Riyadh suburb in which shots were fired and grenades thrown.
PEOPLE LET ME TELL YA 'BOUT MY BEST FRIEND...:
Bush strides out to change the world with his new best friend (Gerard Baker, 2/27/06, Times of London)
American expectations are high for both legs of this trip, but especially for Mr Bush’s meetings with Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister.“The President’s visit, at least to some extent, marks the transition from a 40-or-so-year painful bilateral history to the transformed relationship the two countries have today,” Robert Blackwill, a former US Ambassador to India, said last week.
The change in the relationship is reflected in that India is, according to recent surveys, the one place where the popularity of the US, if not its President, has risen in the past four years.
American officials cite many areas of common interest. As Mr Bush presses a pro-democracy agenda for the world, India is the world’s largest free nation. Economic growth in the sub-continent has been rapid, bringing trade and investment opportunities for both countries’ companies.
The two countries have shared interests in energy security and, of course, in confronting Islamist extremism. And, in the US at least, some long-term strategic thinkers see India — democratic, capitalist and, in large part, English-speaking — as a powerful ally and makeweight to China’s growing hegemony in Asia, although Indian officials, eager to stay on good terms with their large neighbour to the north, are keen to play down that aspect of the relationship.
Mr Bush and Mr Singh will discuss those issues, and India’s relations with Pakistan, where a fledgling peace process is under way over the disputed territory of Kashmir.
A DEVASTATING JUXTAPOSITION:
The Fascist Soccer Star and the Auschwitz Survivor: Roman soccer star Paolo Di Canio is infamous for flashing the Hitler salute to his team's far-right fans. The mayor of Rome wants it to stop. He brought Di Canio and his Lazio teammates together with three Holocaust survivors. (Alexander Smoltczyk, 2/27/06, Der Spiegel)
Paolo Di Canio, captain of Lazio, has been suspended twice for saluting fans with an outstretched right arm -- the so-called "Hitler greeting." Among Lazio's right-wing fans -- the "Ultras" -- Di Canio has been their celebrated idol since. "Ave Paolo" has become a favorite chant in the Olympia Stadium where they play. On this day, though, Di Canio sits silently in the second row, listening attentively as the mayor explains why they are there.There are a number of incidents to point to. Recently, during a match against Livorno, a swastika flag and a portrait of Benito Mussolini -- Italy's fascist leader during World War II -- were seen on display in the hardcore fan corner. Even worse, some young fans unfurled a 30 meter long banner with a verse rhyming the place name Livorno with the Italian word "forno." The word means "oven." Livorno, prior to World War II, was home to a large Jewish community.
Were Di Canio not wearing his suit on his visit to the mayor, one would be able to see the so-called "fasces" he has tattooed onto his back. An ancient symbol depicting a bundle of sticks with an axe protruding from the top, the fasces is a symbol for Italian fascism, and was used on Mussolini's personal flag. On Di Canio's right bicep, he has a second tattoo: "DUX" it says -- Latin for "leader."
Shlomo Venezia wears his tattoo on his left forearm. His tattoo reads: 182727.
February 26, 2006
JUST HELP AND YOU CAN SAY ANYTHING:
German Intelligence Gave U.S. Iraqi Defense Plan, Report Says (MICHAEL R. GORDON, 2/27/06, NY Times)
Two German intelligence agents in Baghdad obtained a copy of Saddam Hussein's plan to defend the Iraqi capital, which a German official passed on to American commanders a month before the invasion, according to a classified study by the United States military.In providing the Iraqi document, German intelligence officials offered more significant assistance to the United States than their government has publicly acknowledged. The plan gave the American military an extraordinary window into Iraq's top-level deliberations, including where and how Mr. Hussein planned to deploy his most loyal troops.
The German role is not the only instance in which nations that publicly cautioned against the war privately facilitated it. Egypt and Saudi Arabia, for example, provided more help than they have disclosed. Egypt gave access for refueling planes, while Saudi Arabia allowed American special operations forces to initiate attacks from its territory, United States military officials say.
George W. Bush's entire political career is premised on accepting blame and not insisting on credit so long as his own ends keep advancing.
WRONG WAY:
Brown backs votes at 16 in radical shakeup of politics (Patrick Wintour, February 27, 2006, The Guardian)
Gordon Brown today signals his support for lowering the age of voting to 16 as part of a radical programme to counter widespread alienation from modern politics. In an exclusive article in the Guardian, he says Labour must be prepared to reopen the debate on electoral reform for the House of Commons, a proposal he has previously opposed.He says the executive must give up power, and again backs changes to the unelected House of Lords. Labour dropped the idea of voting at 16 after the proposal was rejected by the Electoral Commission, but Mr Brown's aides say the chancellor is in favour, so long as it is part of a package of "citizenship education" in schools.
Europe's problem is too much democracy, not too little. The lords should be strengthened and voting age raised to 21 for the married, 25 for singles.
ANYONE ELSE SMELL AN OPENING DAY 0-FER?:
Confident Rollins eyes DiMaggio's 56 (ROB MAADDI, 2/21/06, Associated Press)
The Phillies finished one game behind NL wild-card winner Houston despite Rollins' outstanding effort in the final month. He hit .385 (62-for-161) during his season-ending 36-game hitting streak, and now has his sights on breaking Joe DiMaggio's major-league record of 56.There is a catch, though, because DiMaggio did it in the same season. The major-league marks for longest hitting streak in one season and longest hitting streak spanning two seasons are separate records.
DiMaggio holds both marks with his 56-game streak in 1941, but there is a difference in the NL records: Pete Rose (1978) and Willie Keeler (1897) share the NL mark at 44 games. However, Keeler got a hit in his final game of 1896, so his run of 45 games overall is the first record Rollins can chase.
"I pretty much started getting ready for it mentally about three weeks ago," Rollins said.
Can he do it?
"Why not? That's what I'm here for, maybe do something special," he said. "Everybody wants to be that man at least once a year.
FRANK WAS THE ONLY CHURCH THEY LIKED (via ic):
Did the KGB help plan America’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? (Gerard Jackson, 20 February 2006, BrookesNews.Com)
Jimmy’s Carter’s Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the culmination of a very successful campaign by the Washington-based Marxist-Leninist Institute of Policies Studies and the KGB to permanently cripple America’s intelligence services. To understand how this came about it is necessary to take a brief look at the institute’s America-hating founders.The IPS was set up in 1963 by Richard Barnet and Marcus Raskin and funded by the pro-Soviet Rubin Foundation. [...]
Unfortunately for the US this pair have been allowed to do incalculable damage to country’s national security agencies. They were responsible for the 1974 Hughes-Ryan Act, piece of legislation that helped cripple intelligence operations by guaranteeing they would be leaked to America’s enemies. (Things haven’t changed much, have they?) But this is exactly what really lay behind the Act.
There are two shared characteristics here: a) those who took measures to cripple intelligence gathering were all Democrats; b) they were all connected by one means or another to the pro-Soviet IPS.
The Project on National Security was an IPS front to attack the CIA. In 1974 the Project was transformed into the CNSS (Center for National Securities Studies). Morton Halperin and Anthony Lake are two influential Democrats who helped launch the CNSS. Moreover, Lake was Senator Frank Church’s legislative aid. Church was also a good friend of the America-hating Richard Barnet and and seemed to share to some degree his anti-American view that the US was the real problem in the world.
In 1975 the CNSS published Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies. This was a brazen piece of Soviet disinformation that was used to influenced the Church and Pike committees and which helped bring FISA into existence. On Barnet’s advice Church employed a number of people from the CIP (Center for International Policy) as key committee staffers.
The CIP was an IPS front that Orlando Letelier was instrumental in forming. Letelier was a KGB agent who, with the full knowledge of Raskin and Barnet, used the IPS’s offices in Washington as his base of operations.
The document was mainly the work of Wilfred Burchett (an Australian journalist and KGB agent) and the traitor Philip Agee. So how could an obvious KGB operation have any influence on a congressional committee? Simple: the Church and Pike Committees used sympathisers and even members of the Institute for Policy Studies as advisers and researchers.
Like Senator Church Pike was deeply influenced by the CNSS’s Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies document. (The influence of this document was greatly assisted by IPS agents working on these committees). The support this classic piece of KGB disinformation received from leftwing politicians and the Nixon-hating media (now the Bush-hating media) resulted in the successful crippling of US intelligence agencies.
The pro-Soviet activities of the IPS were so brazen that Brian Crozier*, co-founder of London’s prestigious Institute for the Study of Conflict, could publicly state that
The IPS is the perfect intellectual front for Soviet activities which would be resisted if they were to originate openly from the KGB.
Yet IPS penetration was so deep in the Democratic Party that when Carter became president he appointed IPS fellow travellers to the White House staff and then more or less gave them carte blanche to further undermine his country’s intelligence structure, which is precisely what they did. Gregory Treverton and David Aaron, both IPS agents and Letelier contacts, crippled covert operations by having over 800 operatives fired. (Guess which foreign intelligence agency that pleased?)
The CNSS and the ACLU, meaning the IPS, basically drafted FISA!
In fairness, the Soviets likewise funded nearly all of the Left's causes during the Cold War, like the nuclear freeze, and no one's ever called Democratic leaders like John Kerry on it, so ciphers will certainly get a pass.
HE'S EVEN COUCHED IT IN WINNING POLITICAL TERMS:
Montana's Coal Cowboy (CBS, 2/24/06)
The governor of Montana [Brian Schweitzer] says he can turn the billions of tons of coal under his state into enough diesel fuel to greatly reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. [...]"Why wouldn’t we create an economic engine that will take us into the next century, and let those sheiks and dictators and rats and crooks from all over the world boil in their own oil!" the democratic governor tells Stahl. Who does he mean? "Hugo Chavez. The Saudi royal family … the leaders in Iran. How about the countries that end with 'stan'? Nigeria? You tell me. Sheiks, rats, crooks, dictators, sure." [...]
"The Fischer-Tropsch (method of creating) diesel is a superb fuel. Not only is cleaner than conventional diesel, but it also leads to improved engine performance," said Dr. Robert Williams, senior energy scientist at Princeton University.
There is one drawback, however, says Williams. "The process would entail carbon dioxide emissions that would be twice the green house emissions of other fuels." But Schweitzer has a plan for that, too. "This spent carbon dioxide, we have a home for it — right back into the earth, 5,000 feet deep." Schweitzer says he can sell this to the oil industry, which uses it to increase the amount of oil it can extract.
Some complain that the huge pits dug to mine the coal will become scars on the landscape, because the mining industry has not been kind, historically, to the state. But Schweitzer says a law will force companies to bury and replant the pits.
As the port hysteria shows, there's plenty of free-floating xenophobia that can be exploited to radically alter America's gasoline dependence.
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE SEPARATION OF POWERS:
Specter Proposes NSA Surveillance Rules (Charles Babington, 2/26/06, Washington Post)
The federal government would have to obtain permission from a secret court to continue a controversial form of surveillance, which the National Security Agency now conducts without warrants, under a bill being proposed by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).Specter's proposal would bring the four-year-old NSA program under the authority of the court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
While it's helpful that he recognizes the program isn't covered by FISA, it's delusional of him to imagine that an act of Congress can cause it to be so covered.
THE OTHER FUNDAMENTALIST CLIMBDOWN:
Iran Says It Will Agree to Russian Enrichment Project (Peter Finn, 2/26/06, Washington Post)
The head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization said Sunday that his country had agreed in principle to set up a joint uranium enrichment project with Russia, a potential breakthrough in efforts to prevent an international confrontation over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
GOD'S IN HIS HEAVEN, ALL'S RIGHT WITH THE WORLD:
(JOHN SLEEZER/The Kansas City Star)
TAKE THE PEN FROM PUMPHEAD:
Power to the people: now everyone can make a difference: Democracy, the internet and NGOs are fuelling a global empowerment of ordinary citizens (Bill Clinton, 2/24/06, Sydney Morning Herald)
THREE things have happened since the end of the Cold War to give private citizens an unprecedented capacity to do public good.One is the right of democracy.
More than half the people in the world live with governments they voted in. I think that's a good thing.
I think it's good to see the election of a president in Iran and in Bolivia and the election of a Hamas government in Palestine, because the democratic process gives us a chance for resolving problems in all these places - because these elections mean the people have more power.
And the people want the benefits of democratic society.
You can't read this essay and come away with the opinion that Bill Clinton is particularly intelligent, even though he's generally right in what he says. The quality of the writing is just stunningly awful.
FRIST STOPS SAWING FIRST:
A Face-saving Dubai Deal in the Works?: GOP officials are apparently mulling over a deal that would allow for a new review of the Dubai Ports World contentious acquisition (TIMOTHY J. BURGER, MIKE ALLEN AND MATTHEW COOPER, 2/26/06, TIME)
If approved by all parties, the new deal would allow Bush to avert a GOP-driven bill to overturn the Dubai deal with enough votes to override Bush's threat of his first veto. Republican sources tell TIME that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee proposed the basic terms of a deal designed to give the White House a graceful way out, while also allaying the concerns of the many lawmakers in both parties who have said the deal could be a threat to our security. Under the Frist plan, the deal could stand a good chance of ultimately going through after the extended review. Frist aides apparently proposed the terms to representatives of the company and the White House late Friday. Neither has formally responded but both seemed interested in the idea, according to a Senate Republican aide. "This avoids a direct clash," the aide said. "It solves everyone's problem. The President doesn't have to cancel the deal or veto anything."
The deal goes through unchanged after a couple weeks and the yammerers get to pretend they achieved something. It's the kind of "compromise" the President specializes in.
THERE IS ONLY ONE CIVILIZATION AND SEVERAL PRETENDERS (via Mike Daley):
The civilisations of the modern world are more likely to collapse than collide (Niall Ferguson, 26/02/2006, Sunday Telegraph)
or all its seductive simplicity, I have never entirely bought the theory that the future will be dominated by the clash of civilisations. For one thing, the term "civilisation" has always struck me as much too woolly. I know what a religion is. I know what an empire is. But, as Henry Kissinger might have said, who do I call when I want to speak to Western Civilisation? Anyone who crosses the Atlantic as often as I do quickly learns how vacuous that phrase has become.As Robert Kagan said, in another Great American Essay, "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus" - at least when it comes to the legitimacy of using military force. In a whole range of ways - from the way they worship to the way they work - Americans and Europeans are more than just an ocean apart. As for "Judaeo-Christian" civilisation (a phrase popularised by Bernard Lewis, another prophet of the great clash), I don't remember that being a terribly harmonious entity in the 1940s.
The really big problem with the theory, however, is right in front of our very noses. Question: Who has killed the most Muslims in the past 12 months? The answer is, of course, other Muslims. [...]
Now Huntington is too clever a man not to hedge his bets. "This article does not argue," he wrote back in 1993, "that groups within a civilisation will not conflict with and even fight one another." But he went on to reassert that "conflicts between groups in different civilisations will be more frequent, more sustained and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilisation."
Sorry, wrong. It is well known that the overwhelming majority of conflicts since the end of the Cold War have been civil wars. The interesting thing is that only a minority of them have conformed to Huntington's model of inter-civilisation wars. More often than not, the wars of the New World Disorder have been fought between ethnic groups within one of Huntington's civilisations.
To be precise: Of 30 major armed conflicts that are either still going on or have recently ended, only 10 or 11 can be regarded as being in any sense between civilisations, in the sense that one side was predominantly Muslim and the other non-Muslim. But 14 were essentially ethnic conflicts, the worst being the wars that continue to bedevil Central Africa. Moreover, many of those conflicts that have a religious dimension are also ethnic conflicts; religious affiliation has more to do with the localised success of missionaries in the past than with long-standing membership of a Christian or Muslim civilisation. [...]
The future therefore looks more likely to bring multiple local wars - most of them ethnic conflicts in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East - than a global collision of value-systems. Indeed, my prediction would be that precisely these centrifugal tendencies, most clearly apparent in Iraq today, will increasingly tear apart the very civilisations identified by Samuel Huntington.
In short, for "the clash of civilisations", read "the crash of civilisations".
The fundamental problem with the clash of civilizations theory is that it's an outgrowth of multiculturalism, whereas the End of History, though Mr. Fukuyama never grasped the fact, is essentially Evangelical. China and the Middle East are going to evolve into liberal democracies because they have no other choice. You just can't build a decent society and a functional state/economy on Confucianism or Islamicism.
ANYONE THINK THEY'RE BETTER EDUCATED IN 2005 THAN IN 1855?
How the Liberal Arts Got That Way (MATTHEW PEARL, 2/26/06, NY Times)
Until the 1860's, Harvard presidents were anointed by and answered to the university's Board of Overseers, a powerful group of political and religious establishment figures that included the governor of Massachusetts, along with other dignitaries appointed by the Legislature. But in 1865 the Legislature passed a law democratizing things, allowing Harvard alumni to elect the overseers, in an effort said to "emancipate" Harvard (a loaded term in 1865) from politics, and render it an independent rather than state institution.In the years leading up to this transition, the Harvard presidents fought against the tide of liberalism, limiting the number of disciplines that could be taught and, within those disciplines, maneuvering student choices toward rigidly designed classical studies. When Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked to Henry David Thoreau that all branches of learning were taught at Harvard, Thoreau recalled of his own time there that, yes, "all the branches, but none of the roots." Students were insulated, reprimanded for congregating in groups, raising their voices and even "throwing reflections of sunshine around the College Yard."
All five of the transitory line of pre-1865 presidents — Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, James Walker, Cornelius Felton and Thomas Hill — had been Harvard students themselves, and all but one were clergymen. They fought in the humanities against the expansion of teaching foreign languages, and in the sciences against the spread of Darwinism, which was seen as antireligious. [...]
The 1865 law shaking up the Board of Overseers allowed the university to adjust more nimbly to events outside its gates. But the biggest result, four years later, was the selection of the next president, the chemist Charles William Eliot, who ushered in large-scale reforms that marked the renaissance in liberal arts education, not just at Harvard but also across the country.
Eliot, only 35 at the time of his inauguration, published a two-part series on "The New Education" in The Atlantic Monthly, setting forth a national agenda for educational reform. The presidents of colleges like Cornell and Johns Hopkins were compelled to coordinate their efforts with Harvard's. Appropriately, Eliot remained president for 40 years, the longest term in the university's history, and brought Harvard into the first years of the 20th century.
In a long-gestating paradox, however, the very changes that freed Eliot to renovate Harvard with a more independent and egalitarian framework also did in Larry Summers by leaving Harvard presidents without an identifiable constituency or a body to which, in the end, he may be said to answer.
You pretty much have to have gone to Harvard to think it paradoxical that a reform based on indulging the trends of intellectuals and the immature ends in the indulgence of intellectual trendiness.
FREE RIDER SYNDROME:
Time we chipped in on continental security (Rondi Adamson, Feb. 26, 2006, Toronto Star)
Washington will forge ahead with its missile defence program — essentially, an early warning radar system — whether Canada chooses to be involved or not. The U.S. will defend Canada from a missile attack (and any other kind of attack) as best it can, whether we are involved with the program or not.In short, we can afford to abstain, knowing the neighbour we frequently hold in such contempt, will continue to sacrifice money, time and lives, researching and carrying out new ways to secure us.
But should we continue in our role as another of the world's many armchair generals? Or should we recognize that while we are not powerful, we have much to offer in the defence of freedom.
Just because your little sister is annoying doesn't mean you let folks beat her up.
WHAT DID THE CONSTABLE DO TO P-O DICK CHENEY?:
US leader crashed by trying to 'pedal, wave and speak at same time' (MURDO MACLEOD, 2/26/06, Scotland on Sunday)
The official police incident report states: "[The unit] was requested to cover the road junction on the Auchterarder to Braco Road as the President of the USA, George Bush, was cycling through." The report goes on: "[At] about 1800 hours the President approached the junction at speed on the bicycle. The road was damp at the time. As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting 'thanks, you guys, for coming'."As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head. The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers... then assisted both injured parties."
The injured officer, who was not named, was whisked to Perth Royal Infirmary. The report adds: "While en-route President Bush phoned [the officer], enquiring after his wellbeing and apologising for the accident."
At hospital, a doctor examined the constable and diagnosed damage to his ankle ligaments and issued him with crutches. The cause was officially recorded as: "Hit by moving/falling object."
No details of damage to the President are recorded from his close encounter with the policeman and the road, although later reports said he had been "bandaged" by a White House physician after suffering scrapes on his hands and arms.
At the time Bush laughed off the incident, saying he should start "acting his age".
Details of precisely how the crash unfolded have until now been kept under wraps for fear of embarrassing both Bush and the injured constable. But the new disclosures are certain to raise eyebrows on Washington's Capitol Hill.
Capitol Hill Blue and Kos insist alcohol was involved.
TURNOUT TEST:
Cantwell must convince E. Washington voters she represents their voices (Rick Eskil, 2/26/06, Seattle Times)
Eastern Washington's soil is known for the wheat, wine grapes and sweet onions it produces.But U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell is looking at Eastern Washington as fertile ground for something else — votes. The senator and her campaign staff see the region as having the greatest potential to improve on her 2000 showing in which she beat incumbent Slade Gorton in a squeaker.
Frankly, Cantwell has nowhere to go but up. She was crushed throughout Eastern Washington. Gorton, a Republican, outpolled Democrat Cantwell by at least a 2-to-1 margin in most counties.
Matt Butler, Cantwell's campaign manager, said his candidate plans to spend considerable time and devote resources to Eastern Washington in this fall's campaign against her Republican challenger, Mike McGavick.
McGavick must convince W. Washington voters he's mainstream (Joni Balter, 2/26/06, Seattle Times)
Former Safeco CEO Mike McGavick is the Republicans' best hope in six years to grab a U.S. Senate seat in Democratic-leaning Washington state. McGavick is young, smart and speaks moderate GOP-ese. He has the distinction of being fresh and new and therefore a candidate with minimal baggage.Eight months before the U.S. Senate election in Washington, President George Bush is wildly unpopular in our state. McGavick mentions his Republican status and, subliminally, his connection to Bush only in the last seconds of an introductory TV ad. But Democrats will remind voters at every turn McGavick is another vote for Bush and the equally unpopular Republican Congress.
Therefore, if McGavick wants to beat Democratic incumbent Maria Cantwell in suburban King, Pierce and Snohomish counties, where the 2006 election will be decided, he has to play against type. He has to offer a mainstream GOP message clear and distinct from the Bush White House.
McGavick largely agrees with the president on the Iraq war, a position problematic in Western Washington, where voters are ready to hear the words "end game." McGavick believes it is foolish to announce a timetable for leaving because it reveals too much.
He also agrees with Bush on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, on renewal of the Patriot Act, on confirmation of Samuel Alito to the U.S. Supreme Court.
McGavick distinguishes himself from Bush, however, by being moderately pro-choice. He is for a woman's right to choose, but against federal funding for abortion, which unnerves those who bristle at limiting rights for a class of women. He won't say if Roe v. Wade should be overturned. His limited pro-choice stance must be reconciled with his support for Alito, who is almost certainly another vote to overturn Roe.
Republicans can say whatever they want about "choice" as long as they keep voting against it.
SO RAISE GAS TAXES A DOLLAR:
Greener fuel or corny ploy? (MARY WISNIEWSKI , 2/26/06, Chicago Sun Times)
Ford is promoting E85 stations through a partnership with ethanol producer VeraSun. Ford will help offset the cost of converting gas pumps to E85, while VeraSun provides branding and marketing.GM is promoting E85 this year with its folksy "Live Green. Go Yellow" ad campaign. On its Web site, shaggy-headed young people stand in fields of corn, talking about ethanol while a jangly guitar plays in the background.
Biofuels are also getting a push from the White House, with President Bush asking for $150 million to promote biofuels in his fiscal year 2007 budget. One of the goals of the initiative is to accelerate research to make cellulosic ethanol -- ethanol made from non-food based matter such as cornstalks and switchgrass -- cost-competitive by 2012, potentially displacing up to 30 percent of the country's current fuel use by 2030.
Terminals that receive ethanol and distribute it to retail gas stations receive a federal income tax credit of 51 cents per gallon, according to the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition. Most gas sold in the Chicago area contains 10 percent ethanol.
On average, retail E85 is priced 25 cents to 30 cents cheaper than regular unleaded gasoline, according to Jim Tarmann, field services director for the Illinois Corn Growers Association.
The cost to use E85 is actually higher when E85's lower mileage is taken into account.
The E85 price at Gas City was discounted at $1.99 -- 50 cents lower than regular unleaded gasoline at the station. But using the Energy Department's mileage estimate, gas would have to be 80 cents higher for E85 be an equal value.
The NEVC's mileage is more optimistic -- figuring E85 mileage at 5 perecent to 12 percent less, depending on the vehicle and driving conditions.
TEACHING TO THE TEST AT LEAST REQUIRES TEACHING, EH?:
Lessons from another state's high-stakes test (Linda Shaw, 2/26/06, Seattle Times)
Five years ago, Massachusetts stood where Washington does now.It had a 10th-grade state test, soon to be a graduation requirement, that, just like the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL), fewer than half of the sophomores passed each year.
School leaders hoped that scores would shoot up once the test counted. Critics predicted disaster. Parents protested, some students boycotted — and others sued.
Massachusetts Commissioner of Education David Driscoll said everyone he talked to seemed to have a child, friend or neighbor they feared wouldn't pass.
Then the results came in. And they were so good that states like Washington, which requires its own high-stakes test for graduation beginning in 2008, now look to Massachusetts for reassurance.
In 2001, the first year that Massachusetts sophomores took the test for keeps, the passage rate shot from 49 percent to 68 percent. By the time that class graduated, only 5 percent of seniors didn't get a diploma because they didn't pass the MCAS (Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System).
"People underestimated the effort of teachers and students once they focused on a clear set of goals," said Paul Reville, former member of the Massachusetts Board of Education.
A big increase in school funding helped, too. And as the passage rate rose, protest wilted and schools and students worked to ensure that students passed the MCAS.
NO ONE EVER WENT BROKE....:
Scandinavian ships flying the flag of Panama, where the vessel is registered, employing Filipino workers, regularly sail into the Port of Baltimore. A German ship flying the Greek flag arrives weekly at the Virginia Port Authority's terminals in Norfolk with cargo from China.
"This is a global business, not an American business. Maybe we as an industry have not done a good job explaining that, but we've never been asked," says Peter S. Shaerf, managing director of merchant banking firm AMA Capital Partners LLC, in New York.
Nevermind the general population, look at the surpassing ignorance of our betters inside the Beltway.
MORE:
Everything you need to know about seaport controversy (DARLENE SUPERVILLE, 2/26/06, Chicago Sun Times)
World trade and U.S. security have come into conflict in the nation's harbors, which thrive on foreign commerce but may be vulnerable to terrorist infiltration.A deal to put a United Arab Emirates-owned company in charge of major operations at a half dozen U.S. ports has caused a backlash among both Republicans and Democrats. Dubai Ports World has agreed to postpone its move, giving President Bush more time to convince skeptical lawmakers the deal will not invite terrorism.
Here are some questions and answers about the deal, U.S. port security and the desert nation at the heart of the dispute...
At Port of Baltimore, Debate Hits The Docks (Dana Hedgpeth and Neil Irwin, 2/26/06, Washington Post)
Charles "Chaz" DiGristine, who's been working the docks for eight years as a longshoreman, said his 64-year-old mother called him the other night, worried that they were "selling the Port of Baltimore to a Middle Eastern company.""She was freaking out," DiGristine said. "I told her: 'Mama, nobody's selling the port. It's owned by the state. One company is buying another company. It's not that big a deal.' "
Ports such as Baltimore's serve as America's gateways to the rest of the world. Eight million tons of cargo cross Baltimore's piers a year, and the volume and numbers of people needed to move it make security a constant challenge. A day at the Port of Baltimore shows how these complexities play out on the ground.
The port, owned by the state of Maryland, has five major terminals that are leased to British, Danish, Japanese and American companies. Britain-based P&O operates the largest of them, the Seagirt Marine Terminal, where most cargo shipped in large containers is handled, along with part of the nearby Dundalk Marine Terminal, which handles mainly cars and construction machinery.
Early Thursday morning, as the sun was making an unsuccessful attempt to pierce the fog, 20 ships lay in wait at the P&O terminals. Some had arrived the day before. Others had sailed up the channel from the Chesapeake Bay during the night, with a local pilot guiding them to a berth. The American-owned Independence had come from Charleston, S.C., bound for the Middle East. The MSC Tasmania, Swiss-owned and sailing under the Malaysian flag, had come from South America, loaded with lumber, furniture and machinery, and would leave Baltimore for Charleston.
P&O is a stevedore, a company hired by shipping lines to oversee the loading and unloading of ships. And it is a terminal operating company, moving cargo on and off trucks and rail cars.
Its managers tell the longshoremen who perform the work under contract when and where to move what. Every day here in Baltimore, P&O takes care of an average of three ships and hires up to 900 longshoremen, sending out computer messages or calling the union hiring hall with job orders.
Thursday morning, 40 or so men were in the union hall, a drab building on South Oldham Street around the bend from the port, awaiting a call. At 6 a.m., a computer message arrived from P&O. It was up to Fontaine, the senior dispatcher for the International Longshoremen's Association Local 333, to fill the work orders.
"I need two lashers, one groundman and a Paceco," Fontaine boomed over his microphone to the men waiting in the gymnasium-like hall. P&O wanted two men to secure equipment with heavy chains, one to give directions as equipment is driven around and unloaded, and another to operate a Paceco crane.
Men who qualified filed past Fontaine, scanning their ID badges into his computer, which sorted them by seniority. Men's pictures popped up on the screen, and the computer spat out the names of the four guys who would get those jobs, with tickets for the docks.
They headed to the Dundalk terminal with a 44-year-old Harford County resident named Surrendor McKnight, a union member known as a gang carrier who oversees the crew on the ground.
"Gotta go, gotta hustle," said McKnight.
They drove off into the cold, dark morning, parking close to the ship.
"Men," Fontaine called out to them, "welcome to another day in paradise."
Doesn't anyone in the chattering class watch The Wire?U.S. ceded control of ports (William Glanz, February 26, 2006, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
The furor over a United Arab Emirates company taking over some operations at six U.S. ports underscores the global nature of the shipping industry and the minor role played by American interests.
Foreign-owned companies dominate the maritime industry amid the war on terrorism, and many U.S. ports would be drowsy backwaters without them. [...]
"I'm willing to guess there's a very large segment of the U.S. population that doesn't know where many things are made, or more importantly, how they got from where they are made to the target in Peoria," says Michael Berzon, president of Mar-Log Inc., a Maryland supply-chain and supply-chain security consultant.
EVOLUTION AND MALE FANTASY
Cavegirls were first blondes to have fun (Roger Dobson and Abul Taher, The Times, February 26th, 2006)
The modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks.According to the study, north European women evolved blonde hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.
The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000-11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men. [...]
Just how such variety emerged over such a short period of time in one part of the world has long been a mystery. According to the new research, if the changes had occurred by the usual processes of evolution, they would have taken about 850,000 years. But modern humans, emigrating from Africa, reached Europe only 35,000-40,000 years ago.
We certainly agree that being swarmed by sultry, determined blondes is the perfect way to finish off a tough mammoth-hunting trip, but man, those redheads scare us.
JUST MAKE SURE YOU LEAVE THE RIGHT ONE AT SS:
Team turns shortstop prospects on to other positions (Bob Finnigan, 2/26/06, Seattle Times)
[F]our of Seattle's top prospects — Mike Morse, Adam Jones, Asdrubal Cabrera and Oswaldo Navarro — have shifted off shortstop.Morse is now regarded as a utility player at the big-league level, although long term he projects as an everyday corner outfielder or infielder if he ever taps his power potential.
Jones, a year or more from playing in Seattle, has been moved to center field, where he has drawn comparisons to Ken Griffey Jr.
Cabrera, who climbed to Tacoma last year, and Navarro, whose play in the field is probably better than anyone except Betancourt, are now primarily second basemen.
But Matt Tuiasosopo is still at shortstop and will stay there for the foreseeable future.
"You have to be careful and walk a fine line," said Benny Looper, Seattle's vice president for player development. "There is no denying Betancourt's ability to field the position with the premier shortstops. But he has to hit a bit and he has to stay healthy, so you have to be careful when you go converting the guys behind him."
Actually, all of the above are capable of playing shortstop because the organization makes sure they had enough time there to develop.
"We've made it a practice to make sure the guys are comfortable playing short or whatever their position is in the infield," Looper said. "Then we move them around so they get familiar with other spots."
February 25, 2006
FORCED?:
Sudan man forced to 'marry' goat (BBC, 2/24/06)
A Sudanese man has been forced to take a goat as his "wife", after he was caught having sex with the animal.
NOW THAT WOULD BE POETIC JUSTICE:
Ex-member of Colombian army joins race to unseat Rep. Tancredo (Karen E. Crummy, 2/25/06, DenverPost.com)
Republican Juan Botero, a consultant who once served in the Colombian army, announced Friday that he is running against U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo for the 6th Congressional District seat.And while he says he will conduct a positive campaign, that isn't stopping him from coming out swinging at his opposition.
"Tom Tancredo is a one-trick pony that is obsessed with the issue of immigration," Botero said. "He has neglected many of the other issues in his district and that's what makes him one of the worst legislators of our time."
DID HE BORROW BLAGOJEVICH'S ADVISORS? (via Gene Brown):
Hybrid Cars to Get High-Occupancy Waiver (DANNY HAKIM, 2/25/06, NY Times)
Hybrid-power cars will be allowed to use high-occupancy-vehicle lanes on the Long Island Expressway starting on March 1, regardless of how few people are in the car, the Pataki administration said on Friday.The policy, which applies only to the highest-mileage hybrids like the Toyota Prius and the hybrid version of the Honda Civic, brings to New York an incentive used by several other states to promote fuel-efficient vehicles. Virginia, for example, is one of the top markets for hybrid vehicles because it has allowed them for several years in its H.O.V. lanes. California, Arizona, Colorado, Florida and Georgia are among the states with similar laws.
In New York, the expressway is the only highway that has H.O.V. lanes, which are meant to encourage carpooling. For hybrid-car owners, it will certainly be a welcome policy, in view of the expressway's reputation as "the world's biggest parking lot."
In a statement, Gov. George E. Pataki said the new rule "will help create a stronger, cleaner New York."
Make it an Ethanol-only lane and he wins the Iowa Caucus.
ON TO THE NEXT SILLINESS:
GOP Leaders Draw Back From Bid to Block Port Deal (Jonathan Weisman, 2/25/06, Washington Post)
A Dubai company's offer to delay taking control of terminal operations at six U.S. ports, combined with aggressive White House lobbying, has tempered a rush by congressional GOP leaders for quick action next week to block the $6.8 billion transaction, which has triggered a political furor.
U.S. Intelligence Agencies Backed Dubai Port Deal (Walter Pincus, 2/25/06, Washington Post)
A former senior CIA official recalled that, although money transfers from Dubai were used by the Sept. 11 hijackers, Dubai's security services "were one of the best in the UAE to work with" after the attacks. He said that once the agency moved against Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and his black-market sales of nuclear technology, "they helped facilitate the CIA's penetration of Khan's network."Dubai also assisted in the capture of al-Qaeda terrorists. An al-Qaeda statement released in Arabic in spring 2002 refers to UAE officials as wanting to "appease the Americans' wishes" including detaining "a number of Mujahideen," according to captured documents made available last week by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. The al-Qaeda statement threatened the UAE, saying that "you are an easier target than them; your homeland is exposed to us."
One intelligence official pointed out that when the U.S. Navy no longer made regular use of Yemen after the USS Cole was attacked in 2000, it moved its port calls for supplies and repairs to Dubai.
Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Tuesday praised the "superb" military-to-military relationship with the UAE, saying, "In everything that we have asked and work with them on, they have proven to be very, very solid partners."
ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER TRADE DEAL:
El Salvador in US free trade deal (BBC, 2/25/06)
The US has formally agreed a free trade pact with El Salvador but has told five more Central American nations that they must do more to finalise similar deals. [...]The announcement, by the US Trade Representative's office, came ahead of a meeting between US President George W Bush and his Salvadorean counterpart Antonio Saca.
Meanwhile, most of the folks who were hysterical about steel tariffs are now trying to stop the port deal, making it pretty clear who's free trade and who isn't.
ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE
World population to hit 6.5 billion today (Nicholas van Rijn, Toronto Star, February 25th, 2006)
Thomas Malthus wouldn’t have known what to make of it.At precisely 7:16 p.m. Eastern time today a woman somewhere in the world will give birth and bring the planet’s “official” population to 6.5 billion people, says the U.S. Census Bureau.
Malthus, the British economist who famously predicted in 1798 that the world’s population - then just under a billion - was growing so fast that people would soon be without enough to eat, wouldn’t have to look far to see tens of millions starving today in vast parts of Africa and other parts of the Third World.
But he’d have a hard time explaining the bounty and groaning tables common to the industrialized west and many other parts of the globe.
“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man,” Malthus wrote.
Although he gave Charles Darwin the germ of the idea that led to the theory of evolution, Malthus might have wanted to spend a bit more time on this one.
“Malthus would be astonished not only at the numbers of people, but at the real prosperity of about a fifth of them, and the average prosperity of most of them,” demographer Joel Cohen told Wired News.
Has there ever in history been a more destructive idea than that people are liabilities, not assets?
THERE'S A THERE THERE:
What should I do, Imam?: Novelist Robert Ferrigno imagines the Islamic Republic of America in the year 2040 (MARK STEYN, 2/23/06, Maclean's)
Every successful novelist has to convey the sense that his characters' lives continue when they're not on the page: an author has to know what grade school his middle-aged businessman went to even if it's never mentioned in the book. In an invented world, that goes double. And in a "what if?" scenario, where you're overlaying an unfamiliar pattern on the known map, it goes at least triple. Saying "Imagine the U.S. under a Muslim regime" is the easy bit, creating the "State Security" apparatus and Mullah Oxley's "Black Robes" -- a Saudi-style religious police -- is only marginally more difficult. It's being able to conceive the look of a cul-de-sac in a suburban subdivision -- what's the same, what's different -- that determines whether the proposition works or not. Ferrigno has some obvious touches -- the USS Ronald Reagan is now the Osama bin Laden -- and some inspired ones -- the Super Bowl cheerleaders are all male -- but it's the rich layers of detail that bring the world to life. In one scene, a character's in the back of a cab and the driver's listening to the radio: instead of Dr. Laura and Dr. Phil, it's a popular advice show called "What Should I Do, Imam?" It doesn't have any direct bearing on the plot but it reinforces the sense of a fully conceived landscape. There's no scene set in 2028, but if you asked Ferrigno what Character A was doing that year he'd be able to tell you. If you said "What's Dublin or Brussels like in this world?" he'd have a rough idea.The Islamic Republic came into being 25 years earlier in the wake of simultaneous nuclear explosions in New York, Washington and Mecca: "5-19-2015 NEVER FORGET." A simple Arabic edition of the Koran found undamaged in the dust of D.C. now has pride of place at the House of Martyrs War Museum. On the other hand, the peckerwoods retrieved from the wreckage the statue of Jefferson, whose scorched marble now graces the Bible Belt capital of Atlanta. But what really happened on that May 19? Was it really a planet-wide "Zionist Betrayal"? Ferrigno's story hinges on the dark secret at the heart of the state, which various parties have kept from the people all these years. Car chase-wise, it's not dissimilar to Fatherland, Robert Harris's what-if-Hitler-won-the-war novel, in which a 1960s Third Reich is determined to keep its own conspiracy hidden. And in the sense that both plots involve the Jews, plus ça change -- in life as in art.
The local colour is more compelling than either the plot or the characters: there's a guy -- maverick ex-fedayeen -- and a girl -- plucky, and dangerous with a chopstick -- and a sinister old villain with the usual psycho subordinates. Standard fare, but in a curious way the routine American thriller elements lend the freaky landscape a verisimilitude it might not otherwise have had.
The texture certainly is what sets the novel apart, that sense -- all too rare in sci-fi/fantasy -- that the author has simply plucked a story from a fully imagined world, rather than just created enough of a facade to front the novel.
GENETICALLY MORALIST:
Movies with Morals: Versatile director Danny Boyle, the man behind Millions, has made some inventive films that are quite steeped in stories of morality. But he's a little reluctant to admit it …. (Jeffrey Overstreet, 3/15/05, Christianity Today)
Damian and his brother see the world so differently. Damian's generosity and compassion has its roots in his faith. Anthony's materialism, anxiety, and lack of trust are rooted in … what exactly?Boyle: The whole structure of this story is built around the fact that Damian is 8. This was borne out by the research we did, by the auditions for Damian's role in this film—all of the 10-year-olds, like Damian's brother Anthony in the film, have a foot through the door of adulthood, and they're greedy for more of it. You can't turn back at that door once it's open. But the 8-year-olds—all of them—they didn't have that yet. So it's somewhere between 8 and 10 that it happens.
I've thought about it a lot, because I've got kids. I didn't notice that change in them myself, because when you're bringing up kids, you're bringing them up every day. You're not looking at sample groups like that.
So the whole film is built around the difference between Damian and Anthony and the battle between them. There's the older brother who's always talking about what's real and what's not, what the tax rate is and what it isn't, and what the mortgage is. The younger kid, he's talking about the "unreal." He's not self-conscious about things being unreal, because he doesn't even think about them being unreal. He sees these figures and he communicates with them, and that's his world. And it's tangible and real—it's not imagined.
So when he wins the debate, he gets to spend the money the way he thinks it ought to be spent, because they've all tried to do something that they wanted to do with it, and they've all failed. It's like that phrase, You keep what you've got by giving it all away.
That sounds like the refrain of almost every U2 song.
Boyle: It does! I was actually thinking of that song by Ian Brown, the guy from the Stone Roses: "Keep What Ya Got."
So, it sounds like we're to understand that Damian really does have these encounters with saints, right? Or is it instead that he's a kid with a really active, healthy imagination?
Boyle: Wordsworth, in one of his poems he talks about childbirth. You're born from the sea, and as you walk up the shore, you know where you've come from, and you can see your Creator. But once language (your ability to describe things) arrives, you've just come over the brow of the hill. And you look back and you can't see it anymore.
Before the point of language arriving, you're still in touch with your source. When you look at babies, there's something in their eyes sometimes. They look over your shoulder sometimes, and they're looking at something. And you look back, but you've lost it. And you think, "What are they looking at?" So I think there is something in that.
It's a brave thing to bring up religion in a movie these days. It was so controversial for Mel Gibson to put The Passion of the Christ on the screen, but that came from a deep sense of religious conviction. Is there any personal resonance for you with the iconography of Catholicism and the Christian tradition that inspires Alex's imagination?
Boyle: Oh, yeah, I was brought up a very strict Catholic. My mom was a devout Irish Catholic and she wanted me to be a priest, until I was about 13. One of her favorite saints was Our Lady of Fatima. So I was surrounded by it as a kid. My mom has been dead since 1985, but the film's dedicated to my mom and my dad.
I think the important thing about Damian's relationship with the saints is that it's his imagination. That's what allows him access to them or not. It's about whether you believe. Some people believe they're real—even some people making this film think they're real. Others think they're just flights of the imagination. But Damian is an artist, and he has access to that. It will take him different places as he gets older. So it's not like he's a religious figure. It's faith that's linked to the imagination—the power of taking a leap—rather than it being faith in a strictly conventional religious sense.
You made Millions soon after the zombie movie 28 Days Later. You've done wild romantic comedies and now you've got a sci-fi project in the works. Is there a central theme or a moral question that runs through your projects?
Boyle: As soon as you say they're about morality, you're heading in that territory where things become preachy. But there is a moral factor to them, yes. I think all you try and do is test your own principles against ideas.
I personally accept that we've left behind ideologies. As Westerners, we've become what we are: consumers. But within that, there remain principles that you do have or you don't have. And you can test them in certain circumstances through stories.
I think they're all very moral films, but I wouldn't particularly want them to be known as that, because they're not meant to be. That's like the DNA of them.
For an interesting look at some of his earlier work, check out Hamish MacBeth
February 24, 2006
OUR TROLLOPE:
The Great American Spy Novel: Charles McCarry and The Tears of Autumn 30 years later (BRENDAN BERNHARD, LA Weekly)
It’s tempting to say that Charles McCarry’s The Tears of Autumn is the greatest espionage novel ever written by an American, if only because it’s hard to conceive of one that could possibly be better. But since no one can claim to have read every American espionage novel ever written, let’s just say that The Tears of Autumn is a perfect spy novel, and that its hero, Paul Christopher, should by all rights be known the world over as the thinking man’s James Bond — and woman’s too.Originally published in 1974, The Tears of Autumn has been out of print for more than a decade. Thanks to the Overlook Press, which is going to be slowly reissuing several other McCarry novels, it is available once more. (Penguin has purchased the paperback rights.) Economical in length, tersely poetic in style, it purports to solve the biggest political mystery of the 20th century: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In a just world, or at any rate a braver one, the liveliest film directors of the last few decades would have fought to bring it to the screen. That this hasn’t happened can perhaps be explained by the fact that its interpretation of the Kennedy assassination quietly stings American pride in a way even Oliver Stone wouldn’t countenance.
McCarry, who is 75, lives in Massachusetts but spends his winters in Pompano Beach, Florida, where I met him in February. [...]
Starting in 1972 with The Miernik Dossier, an innovative concoction of fictional official reports and documents written by various agents trying to decide whether a Polish dissident is a double agent or merely an eccentric, and ending with 2004’s Old Boys, in which a group of retired septuagenarian agents get together for one last covert operation, McCarry has now written seven novels in which Paul Christopher, Autumn’s hero, plays a major role.
From the start, McCarry has been recognized as a genre writer of exceptional ability. Eric Ambler, whose A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) is often referred to as the greatest thriller ever written, wrote that McCarry’s first novel was “the most enthralling and intelligent piece of work” he had read in years. Autumn was a best-seller (the only McCarry novel to achieve that status) 30 years ago, and remains his best-known work. Subsequent novels in the Christopher cycle such as The Secret Lovers (1977), The Last Supper (1983) and Second Sight (1992) have been praised by everyone from Elmore Leonard to Norman Mailer, whose own massive CIA novel, Harlot’s Ghost, owes McCarry an obvious debt. And when he has strayed from the espionage field, McCarry has done just as well. The Washington Post’s book critic, Jonathan Yardley, called McCarry’s 1995 novel, Shelley’s Heart, which is about a presidential election stolen through the manipulation of computerized voting machines, the greatest novel ever written “about life in high-stakes Washington.” The real mystery about McCarry’s work is why it hasn’t been more popular.
Timing may have something to do with it. The post-Watergate era was not the ideal moment to bring a virtuous CIA agent before the serious reading public. Paul Christopher is the kind of American one doesn’t read about much anymore — intelligent, sensitive, multilingual, nonviolent, at home anywhere in the world, and a talented poet to boot. And though Autumn and the other books in the Christopher series are frequently skeptical about the value of intelligence work, sometimes devastatingly so, they don’t express any doubt about the value of the Cold War struggle itself, and the CIA is depicted in sympathetic terms. Unlike Le Carré, McCarry never fell for the idea that there might not be much difference, on a moral level, between the CIA and the KGB, let alone the societies they represented. [...]
The Tears of Autumn sold half a million copies in paperback, and was translated into several languages. It remains his most famous novel, but for his fans it is only one side of a multifaceted work. Taken together, his Christopher novels form a vast intergenerational saga about love, espionage and betrayal that puts spying at the heart of human nature. (“Let me tell you something,” says an agent to an overly inquisitive 10-year-old girl in a later book. “You’re asking questions that nobody should ever ask and nobody would ever answer. People lie. You can’t just ask for the truth and expect other people to tell it to you. It’s too valuable. You have to watch, listen, read, remember, put things together.”) Spying, in other words, is just a glorified form of close observation. “Anyone who has ever conducted a secret love affair has practiced tradecraft,” notes McCarry.
The books span the globe — from Communist China (where Christopher is imprisoned for 10 years) to Washington, D.C.; from the Atlas Mountains (where his daughter, Zarah, is brought up alone by his first wife) and the jungles of the Congo to Berlin, Geneva, Rome, Paris. Though he professes not to have a style and not to want one, McCarry writes prose of unusual lucidity and grace. There are no rough spots or awkward words, and he never seems to strain. We see what he wants us to see as clearly as if it were projected onto a screen, and we feel and smell and taste and hear everything he describes.
Stories from one novel spill over into other novels, sometimes with Faulkneresque contradictions. To find out what happens to Molly, Christopher’s girlfriend in Autumn, you have to read the prologue to The Last Supper. The story of Christopher’s first marriage is in The Secret Lovers, while Second Sight describes the peculiar upbringing of Zarah. There is even a novel (The Bride of the Wilderness) that recounts the entire history of the Christopher family, going back centuries, before it reaches America. Many of the novels are love stories as much as spy stories, and often very sexual stories (McCarry writes well about sex). They also form a record of Christopher’s lifelong friendship, all the more touching because it is so formal, with David Patchen, his Washington boss, who was painfully disfigured during fighting in World War II. Both men signed up with the CIA at the same time, seeing in it an opportunity for “a lifetime of inviolable privacy.”
Though McCarry himself is classified as right-leaning in his political sympathies (read his Lucky Bastard for the ultimate satire of the Clintons, a Manchurian Candidate for the 1990s), Autumn is a powerful cautionary tale about the hazards of Americans getting caught up in alien cultures they cannot possibly understand, and it is not a book that a pro-war advocate would use to try to bolster his case now.
Were he not a conservative genre writer this might be considered the great American cycle of novels.
MORE:
-REVIEW ESSAY: Le Morte de Christopher: Charles McCarry's novels (Douglas A. Jeffrey, Summer 2005, Claremont Review of Books)
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER:
"I want to bring people weeping to their knees": Once known as Britain’s most reclusive band, Belle and Sebastian have reinvented themselves as a sophisticated pop machine desperate to convert the masses. Their leader Stuart Murdoch tells Peter Ross about his ambition, and explains how his songwriting talent and religious faith were born out of a long illness (Peter Ross, Sunday Herald)
When does he feel he came of age? “I only started having fun when I was 31 or 32,” he replies. “To be completely honest, my adolescence probably lasted from the age of 12 until 32. It lasted 20 years. I had a great time when I was 12. I was on top of my game. I had a lot of interest in girls, I was really into music, and then everything stopped. I don’t think I felt completely comfortable with myself again until I was 32, and then I felt exactly the same as when I was 12.”This prolonged period of not feeling at ease in his own skin was exacerbated by the fact that while studying physics at Glasgow University, Murdoch developed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, the beginning of “a nothing period that lasted for seven or eight years when I just dropped out of everything and had a shitty time”. He quit university and moved back in with his parents.
I mention that I have spoken to people who were ill as children, which turned them into outsiders and natural observers; although he sickened in early adulthood, was his experience similar? “Absolutely. It was the biggest thing that happened to me and will probably ever happen in terms of a crisis and change in personality. Everything changed within the course of a year. From being someone who was active in every way, suddenly I was not just observing, but fantasising about everyday life. Beforehand, I had been at university, I was running my own business – DJing and putting on clubs. Three years later, I’m sitting in a box bedroom in Ayr, unable to go out, and fantasising about going down to the shops or being able to make a cup of coffee for somebody. But these things were so far away from me, so all the fantasies became songs.”
What caused the condition? “I see it as a breaking down of your physical health due to long-term duress and stress, a physical manifestation of long-term mental stress and abuse of your body. That’s what happened to me. I drove myself into the ground.”
He was burning the candle at both ends? “Oh yeah, completely. All that stuff.”
Stuck in his bedroom, Murdoch brooded upon his favourite albums, films and books. “I would romanticise them, build them up and try to live inside them because it was a better world. I took the music of The Smiths or Felt or the Cocteau Twins and tried to live inside it, or the films of Hal Hartley, and just tried to exist. Then, happily, I started to write my own songs and that was a place to exist for a while.”
He could already play the piano, taught himself to play guitar, and discovered a talent for songwriting. As he wrote, he found he was becoming healthier. “Songwriting accompanied my coming back to real life. Spirituality and songwriting were my crutches.”
Murdoch began attending church for the first time since his childhood. His Christian faith and his music were all the more important to him because they both developed during the period when he was stepping back into the world. “If the songs have any worth at all it is because they meant everything to me at the time. It was almost like the fella in Lord of the Rings making his ring – he’s putting everything into it. The songs are my ring.”
With music pouring out of him, Murdoch was keen to go public; it was important that people hear his songs because he had a very clear sense of what they were for. “All this bad stuff had happened to me,” he says, referring to his illness, “and it seemed that it maybe could have been avoided if a certain figure had stepped in at a certain time – a mentor figure, a wise figure. You look around your friends when you are 18 or 19, and they are not really much use when suddenly you are in trouble and drowning. I felt that if I had had a mentor figure, some of the trouble could have been avoided or at least alleviated.
“So, to be quite honest, I felt that if I was going to do anything with songwriting, I wanted to be a mentor figure to whoever might be going through that same business and needing some help. That period in somebody’s life that we were talking about before, the cusp of adolescence into adulthood, there’s so much can go wrong and leave scars. It happened to me. So I wanted to write songs about that situation and put into somebody’s hand a record which is a guide on how to avoid the pitfalls. To some extent, I still do it.”
That desire to help, to guide, is of course a Christian impulse, and from the start, Murdoch’s songs for Belle and Sebastian contained references to religion, some very funny (in The State I Am In, Murdoch imagines himself upending tables in Marks & Spencer’s, a wry take on Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem) and others more sincere (“Reading the Gospel to yourself is fine,” he sings on We Rule The School).
“Do you consider your songwriting a gift from God?” I ask.
“Yes, absolutely,” he replies. “I think if you have a gift for anything, it’s a gift from Heaven, a gift from God. If you do anything good, that’s where it comes from.”
Over the years, as Murdoch has sung with his church choir, his voice has strengthened, which has helped the band. Conversely, as he has become more at ease as a songwriter, he has felt better able to state his faith in music, for instance in the rather evangelical song If You Find Yourself Caught In Love. “I think there has been a coming together,” he says. “In the church you get up and proclaim spiritual beliefs and sing songs to the Lord. I would never have done that so overtly when the group started, but as I have grown older, I’ve thought, ‘What the hell, I feel that way, so let’s do it’.”
Having once worked as a live-in janitor at his church hall, he now functions as an unofficial recruitment officer; it is quite common for Belle and Sebastian fans from overseas to turn up during a service, hoping for a glimpse of their idol. “We get couples from Japan and America putting their nose round the door. It’s nice, and the people in the church like a bit of fresh blood around the place. Visitors come from all over and some of them have chosen to stay. There is a girl called Andrea who came to see us in Toronto, and got up on stage with us and played one of her own songs. Then she ended up moving to Glasgow. She was sitting beside me in church this morning, singing tenor.”
From the start, Belle and Sebastian attracted devoted fans, drawn to the self-contained world of the lyrics, and the delicate music which, though always catchy, stood in stark relief to the brashness of Britpop. Also, Belle and Sebastian communicated directly with their followers via the internet, more or less bypassing the media, rarely giving interviews and releasing official photographs which, on those occasions when they did actually feature the band, portrayed them in disguise or in carefully staged tableaux. They were the first band since The Smiths that people actually venerated rather than simply enjoyed.
“It was a terrific time. I was high on it,” says Murdoch. “But I had prepared for it in my head for so long that it seemed like a natural thing. I had spent so much time making the records in my head, and the record sleeves, and knowing what sort of group I’d like to have that when it happened it just felt entirely natural. I knew we would touch a certain type of person because it had happened to me ten years before with the groups I loved. It was totally natural with the people that came to see us. It was akin to meeting your twin that you had been separated from at birth.”
ISN'T THE POINT TO SNAP HIGH SCHOOLERS OUT OF THEIR LIBERTARIAN PHASE:
An anti-communist reading list (Mike S. Adams, April 11, 2005, Townhall)
Today, I present a reading list, which should help any high school student understand the reality of socialism long before setting foot on a college campus. It will help abort any professor's attempt to advance his agenda by rewriting socialism's disgraceful history. [...]The Road to Serfdom (1944) - After I published last year's summer reading list, I was criticized for two omissions. One was "Orthodoxy" by G.K. Chesterton. The other was "The Road to Serfdom" by F.A. Hayek. Complaints regarding the latter exceeded complaints regarding the former by about two to one. Nothing more need be said.
Animal Farm (1946) - Maybe your high school student is having trouble in his English classes. Maybe that is, in part, due to his inability to pick up on symbolism. I flunked English four years in a row in high school, partly because of my inability to pick up on obvious literary symbols. Nonetheless, I picked up on everything in this great little novel. While this list is presented in chronological order, "Animal Farm" might be the best starting place among these ten books.
1984 (1948) - Over the next few years, how many students will get a daily dosage of "the two minutes hate" by professors who are still seething with anger after the defeat of John Kerry? And how many times will the Office of Diversity remind us of the opening pages of 1984 as it seeks to do exactly the opposite of what its name implies?
Witness (1952) - This is one of the most important books of the twentieth century. Before and after reading this book, parents should encourage their children to visit www.biography.com and search for the name "Alger Hiss." What they read will demonstrate just how far in denial this nation still is regarding the Soviet infiltration of our government during the Cold War.
After 9/11, we can no longer afford such naiveté.The Gulag Archipelago (1956) - If you did not think that "We the Living" painted a realistic portrait of Soviet Russia during the Stalinist purges, this great work of non-fiction by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn will set matters straight. Some call it the greatest non-fiction book of the twentieth century. I can't argue.
Way too much Rand, but then she's the beau ideal of white male teens.
HIGH PRIESTS OF THE CIVIC RELIGION?:
Can a People Have Too Much Respect for the Law? (Lee Harris, 06/27/2005, Tech Central Station)
Can a people have too much respect for the law?This might appear to be a strange question to ask. Americans, after all, seem to believe that it is impossible to have too much respect for the law. Yet a visitor to our shores in 1867 -- and an English barrister at that -- disagreed with this proposition.
The visitor was William Hepworth Dixon, whose book, New America, is a delight to read. By and large, he found us as a people quite likable, unlike some of the earlier travelers from England, such as Charles Dickens and Francis Trollope, both of whom agreed that we were simply deplorable barbarians. Not so Dixon. Yet there was one aspect of our national character that disagreed with him. Our "deference to the Law, and to every one who wears the semblance of lawful authority, is so complete…as to occasion a traveler some annoyance and more surprise," Dixon wrote. "Every dog in office is obeyed with such unquestioning meekness, that every dog in office is tempted to become a cur."
Dixon singled out the Justices of the Supreme Court, noting with apparent dismay that they are "treated with a degree of respect akin to that which is paid to an archbishop in Madrid and to a cardinal in Rome."
Similarly, every president undergoes a revival of reputation once he leaves office and even our most disgraceful actions as a nation end up being seen as justified. It seems a function of democracy. After all, we're not going to blame ourselves for stuff, are we?
IF THE BEST DEFENSE IS A GOOD OFFENSE IT'S STILL AN OFFENSE, NO?
The Real History of the Crusades: A series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics? Think again. (Thomas F. Madden, 05/06/2005, Christianity Today)
They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense. [...]Urban II gave the Crusaders two goals, both of which would remain central to the eastern Crusades for centuries. The first was to rescue the Christians of the East. As his successor, Pope Innocent III, later wrote:
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbor as himself when, knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of heaviest servitude, he does not devote himself to the task of freeing them? … Is it by chance that you do not know that many thousands of Christians are bound in slavery and imprisoned by the Muslims, tortured with innumerable torments?
"Crusading," Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith has rightly argued, was understood as an "an act of love"—in this case, the love of one's neighbor. The Crusade was seen as an errand of mercy to right a terrible wrong. As Pope Innocent III wrote to the Knights Templar, "You carry out in deeds the words of the Gospel, 'Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for his friends.'"
The second goal was the liberation of Jerusalem and the other places made holy by the life of Christ. The word crusade is modern. Medieval Crusaders saw themselves as pilgrims, performing acts of righteousness on their way to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusade indulgence they received was canonically related to the pilgrimage indulgence. This goal was frequently described in feudal terms. When calling the Fifth Crusade in 1215, Innocent III wrote:
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice look on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors … unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons to the task of freeing him? … And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your soul to your body, who redeemed you with the Precious Blood … condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and the crime of infidelity if you neglect to help Him?
The re-conquest of Jerusalem, therefore, was not colonialism but an act of restoration and an open declaration of one's love of God.
Defenders of the Crusades oughtn't be bashful about their being offensive.
MORE:
Kingdom of Heaven: What Parts Are Real? (Timothy R. Furnish, History News Network)
My expectations upon entering the theater for Kingdom of Heaven were legion. As a movie buff, I had high hopes for another Ridley Scott film. As a historian of the Islamic world, I couldn’t wait to see the portrayal of the great Salah al-Din. As a history professor who likes to send his students to write papers on such historical movies, the chariot wreck that Oliver Stone had managed to make out of Alexander was still fresh in my mind. And as a Christian (albeit of the non-Catholic variety), I fully expected yet another two-dimensional bashing of my medieval co-religionists (may my Lutheran credentials not be revoked for saying that).Well, Scott made a better movie than Stone, but in doing so sacrificed a great deal of historical accuracy and believability on the altar of wishful thinking. [...]
[T]o paraphrase Diry Harry from Sudden Impact: “no, it’s not the wrong geography or the fictional characters or the plot foibles that get to me….what really, really makes me sick is that nobody, and I mean NOBODY, in the 12th century was giving speechs about religious tolerance.” Which is what Balian does when Salah al-Din shows up “with 200,000 men” (actually it was maybe 40,000, but who’s counting?). Of course, he was one of the few knights left after the crushing of the Kingdom’s army by Salah al-Din at Hattin in 1187, which in turn had been prompted by the brutality of Reynauld de Chatillion—a bit that Scott got right—and the military hubris of the Templars and their leader Guy de Lusignan (ostensibly King, by virtue of being married to Sibylla). Salah al-Din, the great Kurdish Sunni leader, had taken over both Egypt and Syria and so his realm surrounded that of the Crusaders. For many years he tolerated their existence, however (perhaps not least because he had his own inter-Muslim problems, such as the attempts by the “Assassins”—who were radical Shi`ites—to kill him). But when Reynauld attacked a caravan and killed his sister, Salah al-Din moved. After wiping out the Kingdom of Jerusalem’s forces at Hattin, Salah al-Din besieged the city. Balian, both in reality and the movie, led the heroic defense until finally surrendering the city to the Muslim forces. But does anyone really believe that Balian rallied the Christians by giving a 21st-century-style exhortation about the equal religious value of the Dome of the Rock, Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Temple of Solomon? He also sermonized that it was the people, not the holy sites, that really mattered. If that were the case, tens of thousands of western European Catholics would never have traveled thousands of miles to take Jerusalem in the first place. As much as Ridley Scott—or we—would like Muslims and Christians (and Jews) in the Holy Land to “just get along” today, what purpose does it serve to retroject this kinder and gentler monotheism 800 years into the past and pretend it motivated folks then?
That said, there are some very good aspects to this movie: the depictions of how “orientalized” the Crusaders had become; the battles (which I think compare favorably to The Lord of the Rings, especially in that they look more real); the return of Alexander Siddig (Dr. Bashir of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) as Nasir, one of the Muslim commanders; and perhaps most impressive, Salah al-Din’s portrayal by Ghassan Massoud. Would that a Muslim leader of his stature were around today, instead of epigones like Bin Ladin and al-Zarqawi. Kingdom of Heaven seems to be saying that the clash of civlizations between the West and Islam will only begin to end when a new Balian and a new Salah al-Din emerge. But it is the Islamic world, not Western Christendom, that riots at perceived (now indeed known to be false) slights to its holy book today. One might observe that the Muslim world is much more in need of a Salah al-Din than the West is of a Balian.
The Crusades: Understanding and Transcending "Civilization Conflict" (Justin Cave, February 4, 2005, Global Engage)
The Crusades of the medieval period serve as a difficult topic for the typical American Christian, who grows either disinterested or suspicious rather quickly if asked to dwell on the complexities of church history, not to mention the broader context of religious and political history. To many, church history seems a dusty and pointless preoccupation of up-tight, "institutional" faith. This attitude is perhaps especially prevalent among American evangelical Christians, whose emphasis on redemption, transformation, and reform tends to make them doggedly future-oriented.Thus, when the Crusades arise in conversation or argument, the usual reaction is an earnest if vague sense of guilt, accompanied by blanket apologies that make little reference to what was happening in those battles nine centuries ago. The Crusades are often simplistically confessed as a black mark on the Church's otherwise "spotless" record. Meanwhile, irresponsible propagandists and agitators in the Islamic radical movement use twisted histories of the Crusades to maintain their simplistic worldview of Muslims as righteous victims and Westerners as infidel aggressors.
Scholars of Western civilization and its conflicts with Islamic civilization know that the historical and contemporary reality is more complicated. This is why un-nuanced Christian expressions of contrition for the sins of the Crusades, while well-intentioned, can be counterproductive to genuine reconciliation with the Islamic world if they are not informed by historical facts and guided by a commitment to real truth-telling. As John Riley Smith has argued in the journal First Things,2 accepting blame humbly when one is at fault is always proper. However, to apologize for the nearly millennium-old actions of Martel, Richard, and Constantine XI, without insisting first on a proper historical understanding on all sides, merely perpetuates the abuse of history for rhetorical purposes.
Any thorough understanding of the Crusades must put them in "civilizational" context, and at this level of analysis it is apparent that some aspects of the Crusades were clearly geopolitically defensive in nature. This was not a world of clearly defined states observing tidy rules of sovereignty. There were empires and civilizations clashing, with enormous cultural/economic/religious/political stakes. And Islamic powers were often aggressors too; Christian powers hardly monopolized that role. The Crusades functioned historically to help defend the foundations of Western society, which were at various times under threat.
What the Crusades Were Really Like: Thomas Madden Dispels Myths (Zenit.org, , OCT. 10, 2004)
A Vatican Apology for the Crusades? (Robert Spencer, March 22, 2005, FrontPageMagazine.com)
The circumstances of the first Crusade were these: Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being molested by Muslims and prevented from reaching the holy places. Some were killed. This was finally the impetus that moved Western Christianity to try to take back just one small portion of the Christian lands that had fallen to the Muslim sword over the last centuries. “The Crusade,” noted historian Bernard Lewis, “was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war — to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”Whatever undeniable sins Christians committed during their course, the Crusades were essentially a defensive action: a belated and insufficient attempt by Western Christians to turn back the tide of Islam that had engulfed the Eastern Church. “When accusing the West of imperialism,” says the historian of jihad Paul Fregosi, “Muslims are obsessed with the Christian Crusades but have forgotten their own, much grander Jihad.” The lands in dispute during each Crusade were the ancient lands of Christendom, where Christians had flourished for centuries before Muhammad’s armies called them idolaters and enslaved and killed them. If Westerners had no right to invade these putative Muslim lands, then Muslims had no right to take them in the first place.
IN THE END, THEY JUST THINK THEY'D DO BETTER:
Does God Have Back Problems Too?: The illogic behind 'intelligent design.' (David P. Barash, June 27, 2005, LA Times)
[T]he living world is shot through with imperfection. Unless one wants to attribute either incompetence or sheer malevolence to such a designer, this imperfection — the manifold design flaws of life — points incontrovertibly to a natural, rather than a divine, process, one in which living things were not created de novo, but evolved. Consider the human body. Ask yourself, if you were designing the optimum exit for a fetus, would you engineer a route that passes through the narrow confines of the pelvic bones? Add to this the tragic reality that childbirth is not only painful in our species but downright dangerous and sometimes lethal, owing to a baby's head being too large for the mother's birth canal.This design flaw is all the more dramatic because anyone glancing at a skeleton can see immediately that there is plenty of room for even the most stubbornly large-brained, misoriented fetus to be easily delivered anywhere in that vast, non-bony region below the ribs. (In fact, this is precisely the route obstetricians follow when performing a caesarean section.)
Why would evolution neglect the simple, straightforward solution? Because human beings are four-legged mammals by history. Our ancestors carried their spines parallel to the ground; it was only with our evolved upright posture that the pelvic girdle had to be rotated (and thereby narrowed), making a tight fit out of what for other mammals is nearly always an easy passage.
An engineer who designed such a system from scratch would be summarily fired, but evolution didn't have the luxury of intelligent design.
Admittedly, it could be argued that the dangers and discomforts of childbirth were intelligently, albeit vengefully, planned, given Genesis' account of God's judgment upon Eve: As punishment for Eve's disobedience in Eden, "in pain you shall bring forth children." (Might this imply that if she'd only behaved, women's vaginas would have been where their bellybuttons currently reside?)
On to men. It is simply deplorable that the prostate gland is so close to the urinary system that (the common) enlargement of the former impinges awkwardly on the latter.
In addition, as human testicles descended — both in evolution and in embryology — the vas deferens (which carries sperm) became looped around the ureter (which carries urine from kidneys to bladder), resulting in an altogether illogical arrangement that would never have occurred if, like a minimally competent designer, natural selection could have anticipated the situation.
It's like claiming the Corvair wasn't created by intelligent beings because the engine tended to fall out.
PUTS THE AMERICAN BACK IN TOO:
HSA's Are the Right Medicine at the Right Time (Sally C. Pipes, 2/24/06, Real Clear Politics)
President Bush has put reforming health care at the center of his domestic agenda. Unlike previous presidents, he’s prescribing policies, such as Health Savings Accounts, that rely on freeing up individuals and markets, expanding tax savings, and providing more health care options, rather than expanding government.Health Saving Accounts, first allowed in 2004, combine high deductible medical insurance with a side fund that provides a tax deduction for contributions, tax-deferred investment growth, and tax free ultimate dispersal, provided funds are spent on qualified medical expenses. In 2006, an individual is responsible for the first $1,050 to $2,700 of expenditures ($2,100 to $5,450 for families). Routine care is paid for out of pocket, albeit in a tax advantaged way.
Just as car and homeowners insurance doesn’t pay for maintenance and minor repairs, health insurance kicks in only when true catastrophe strikes. Once a deductible is met, however, a generous insurance package, often 100 percent of covered expenses, takes over the burden. Money that isn’t spent in one year rolls over into the next, earning compound interest.
In short, Health Savings Accounts put the insurance back into health insurance, provide Americans with a triple tax free means to save for future expenses, and deliver a strong incentive to economize on the use of health care.
Like any change to the status quo, HSAs have powerful and vocal enemies.
Ms Pipes runs that "first allowed in 2004" past the reader too quickly. The GOP has been trying to get them through for years but W achieved it in the Medicare reform bill.
JUST IN CASE YOU WEREN'T CLEAR ABOUT IT BEING RACISM:
A Dubai Finesse (Charles Krauthammer, February 24, 2006, Washington Post)
If only Churchill were alive today, none of this would be happening. The proud imperialist would have taken care that the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co., chartered in 1840 by Victoria ("by the grace of God . . . Queen defender of the faith" on "this thirty first day of December in the fourth year of our reign"), would still be serving afternoon tea and crumpets on some immaculate Jewel-in-the-Crown cricket pitch in Ceylon.The United Arab Emirates would still be a disunited bunch of subsistence Arab tribes grateful for the protection of the British navy in the Persian Gulf.
And we hapless Americans -- already desperately trying to mediate, pacify and baby-sit the ruins of Churchill's Empire: Iraq, Palestine, India/Pakistan, Yemen, even (Anglo-Egyptian) Sudan -- would not be in the midst of a mini-firestorm over the sale of the venerable P&O, which manages six American ports, to the UAE.
Presumably the editor struck out the phrase "bloody wogs" and substituted "UAE"?
PUTS JOHN STEED TO SHAME:
Polygamist judge ordered removed from bench (Associated Press, Feb. 24, 2006)
A small-town judge with three wives was ordered removed from the bench by the Utah Supreme Court on Friday.The court unanimously agreed with the findings of the state's Judicial Conduct Commission, which recommended the removal of Judge Walter Steed for violating the state's bigamy law.
Steed has served for 25 years on the Justice Court in the polygamist community of Hildale in southern Utah, where he ruled on such matters as drunken driving and domestic violence cases.
PC SCIENCE:(via Raoul Ortega):
Kennewick Man yields more secrets (Sandi Doughton, 2/24/06, Seattle Times)
Kennewick Man is whispering across 9,000 years.The story his bones tell has no clear beginning yet. But the end is coming into sharp focus, say scientists who have been studying the controversial skeleton for the past six months. [...]
Seattle archaeologist Jim Chatters, who was the first scientist to examine the bones in 1996, said being able to re-examine them in greater detail with more modern methods has changed some of his earlier impressions.
For example, spots on the temple and elbow that he originally concluded were evidence of an infection have been shown to be simple weathering, he said.
Several other questions about Kennewick Man are still awaiting lab results, including a new round of carbon-dating and isotopic studies to show what his diet was like.
But the most contentious issue of all probably won't be settled for some time.
The first measurements of the skull showed it didn't match existing Native American populations. And that led to suggestions that Kennewick Man's ancestors might not have originated in Northern Asia like those of most Native Americans, who are believed to have crossed from Asia to Alaska about 11,000 years ago.
Owsley and his colleagues have made an extensive set of new skull measurements. They now are comparing them to a database of more than 7,000 modern and prehistoric people from around the world.
"We have a lot more work to do," he said.
Anyone who wasn't born in the last 24 hours think these guys haven't determined that he's not a population match but are trying to avoid being politically incorrect?
WARNING, YOU'LL DROOL MORE THAN YOU DID DURING THE CURLING....:
Picking Perfect Steaks: How to Make the Most Of the Beef You Cook at Home (Candy Sagon, February 15, 2006, Washington Post)
Diet trends come and go -- this month it's low-fat that's taking a beating -- but one thing remains certain: Americans still love their red meat. We eat an average of 67 pounds of beef a year and that hasn't changed for a decade, according to the newest government figures.What has changed are some of the choices we have at the supermarket when we want to cut into a juicy steak for dinner.
Randy Irion, director of retail marketing for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, says the industry is putting more effort in marketing beef to consumers. That means more beef with fancy "branded" names such as Rancher's Reserve and Certified Angus and Natural Beef, plus more of those full-service glass cases, where customers can pick out a specific steak.
Unfortunately, say some meat industry experts, the guy behind that glass case might not know much about the meat he's selling. Most of the meat-cutting has already been done at a centralized location and then shipped "case-ready" to supermarket and super-center chains across the country, says Joseph Cordray, a professor of animal science at Iowa State University who works closely with retail meat departments.
"A market may have one guy who knows how to cut meat, but most of the others [in the meat department] are not highly trained," Cordray says. "Real butchers are a dying breed."
The exceptions are some upscale or specialty chains, such as Whole Foods, Balducci's or Wegmans, or at the scattering of traditional butcher shops (see "Meat Markets" on this page). There, it's easier to find someone to give you expert advice about the different types of steak, how to cook them, even recipes.
We asked some of those butchers, as well as other meat experts, what you need to know when choosing the perfect steak. Here are their 11 top tips: [...]
· Try this two-step trick for cooking steaks. This is an old restaurant method and a practically foolproof way to make sure your steak is not overcooked. It works particularly well with a two-inch thick, boneless steak such as filet mignon. Sear the steak on one side in a hot, oiled pan on the stovetop over fairly high heat. This creates a nice brown crust. Flip the steak over, then place the pan in a 425-degree oven to finish the cooking. Roast to desired doneness (about 5 minutes for rare, 7 minutes for medium rare, 9 minutes for medium), depending on the thickness of the meat. Let the meat rest for 5 minutes to redistribute juices before serving.
· And the award for Best Steak goes to . . . the rib-eye. Ask a butcher what his favorite cut of steak is, and the boneless rib-eye gets the nod. In terms of juicy flavor and tenderness, the rib-eye has it all, says Bill Fuchs of Wagshal's. "It's not quite as tender as the loin, but it has a richer flavor. It's my favorite," Fuchs says. Adds Irion: "When they grade the beef carcass, it's the rib-eye they look at to determine the quality of the meat. You won't go wrong choosing a rib-eye."
MEPHISTOPHELES ADDS HIS ENDORSEMENT:
Barry Switzer joins Tom Osborne's team in Nebraska governor's race (Eric Olsen, AP)
Barry Switzer and Tom Osborne were fierce college football coaching rivals in the 1970s and '80s. Now they're playing on the same team, trying to get Osborne elected governor of Nebraska.Switzer was the swashbuckler from Oklahoma, the son of a bootlegger who broke Cornhuskers fans' hearts so many times by beating their beloved Big Red.
Osborne was the stoic, cerebral coach whose inability to beat Switzer's Sooners led him to emulate his nemesis' offense. [...]
More opposite personalities you will not find. Switzer liked to live hard and talk fast. Osborne wouldn't so much as cuss in public.
What strange bedfellows politics can make?
"I never voted party. Never cared about that," Switzer said. "I always voted for the guy, the person, the man or lady I thought was the best representative for me."
Switzer was the main attraction at a fundraising event for Osborne's gubernatorial campaign. Osborne will face incumbent Dave Heineman and Omaha businessman Dave Nabity in May's Republican primary.
I want the guy to be governor and all, but if Osborne wants to win he'll tell Switzer to shut his trap.
ENGAGING IN SOCRATIC DISCUSSION WITH A LYNCH MOB:
Port security frenzy: Real concern or real grandstanding? (Stuart Rothenberg, 2/23/06, Townhall.com)
While Democrats and Republicans vent their anger over the Bush Administration’s decision to allow a United Arab Emirates-based company from taking “control” of America’s east coast ports (from a British company), I have a question: Exactly what responsibility and authority does this UAE company have? Specifically, how is U.S. security weakened?I don’t know, and I bet 99.5% of the people discussing the “threat” don’t know. As a matter of fact, I’ll bet most of us have no idea what managing a port entails.
Since when is total ignorance of a subject any obstacle to expressing an opinion about it?
STRAIGHTS NEEDN'T:
Lawmaker's proposal: Bar Republicans from adopting (Carl Chancellor, Feb. 23, 2006, Knight Ridder Newspapers)
State Sen. Robert Hagan sent out e-mails to fellow lawmakers late Wednesday night, stating that he intends to "introduce legislation in the near future that would ban households with one or more Republican voters from adopting children or acting as foster parents." The e-mail ended with a request for co-sponsorship.On Thursday, the Youngstown Democrat said he had not yet found a co-sponsor.
ISOLATED IVIED IVORY TOWERS:
Students Hail Harvard President: Their strong support for Lawrence H. Summers is seen by some as a sign of a shift in campus politics. (Ellen Barry, February 24, 2006, LA Times)
If Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers was worried about how the undergraduates would greet him Wednesday night at his first scheduled event since announcing his resignation, those fears quickly were put to rest.He got a standing ovation after he walked in. He got a standing ovation before he left. A row of students with red letters painted on their chests spelled out "Larry."
Sarah Bahan, 22, was wistful as she left the meeting. She had kind words to say about Summers' emphasis on hard sciences.
Mark Hoadley, 21, said Summers' monotone speaking style was balanced by a "dynamic mind."
Troy Kollmer, 21, said "a lot of students feel bad for him and think he got a raw deal."
The show of student loyalty has come as a surprise to many faculty members and administrators at Harvard, who grew to loathe Summers during a five-year tenure that brought a raw blast of politics to the 370-year-old institution.
The professoriate lost their intended audience twenty years ago.
THE HAMMER HURT 'EM:
Curling: U.S. tops Great Britain for bronze medal (Minneapolis Star Tribune, 2/24/06)
[T]he United States defeated Great Britain to win the bronze medal.It meant that Pizza Pete Fenson of Minnesota will bring home a slice of the Olympics — the first U.S. curling medal ever.
The American men based in Bemidji, Minn., won the bronze by beating Britain 8-6 on Friday in the consolation game, jumping to an early lead and then clinching the victory with a simple draw to the middle of the target in the final end. That put the United States on the medal stand along with more traditional curling powers Finland and Canada.
Fenson, a Minnesota pizzeria owner, broke into a smile and gave a salute with his broom as his last shot settled into the scoring area. But the victory was especially emotional for teammate Shawn Rojeski; it was the second anniversary of his mother's death.
"I knew it was going to be an extremely difficult day for me today," Rojeski said. "This team is extremely satisfied with the way they played today — and for myself, it's that much of a better moment, for sure."
In addition to being shut out at the three previous Olympics where curling was a medal sport, the American men hadn't medaled at the world championships since 1978.
"Everybody was not expecting us to do well here," Rojeski said. "But we were pretty confident coming in that we could be contenders. We were definitely OK with coming in here and not being the No. 1 favorites."
Britain was shut out of a medal one Olympics after Scottish housewife Rhona Martin threw the "Stone of Destiny" to win the gold medal in Salt Lake City. David Murdoch's team is also from Scotland, which is considered the birthplace of curling.
"It's massively disappointing," Murdoch said.
With the Americans holding the big last-rock advantage known as the hammer for the final end, or inning, they played defensively and kept the British from building any protection. Murdoch had one rock in the target area, and he put his last rock out front as a guard.
But Fenson had an open draw around the right to get inside of Murdoch's rock and give the U.S. the bronze.
That Swedish chick last night came up big too, huh?
EVEN MORE REASON FOR DEMOCRATS TO HATE THEM:
Wal-Mart looks forward and back at health care (Timothy Goddard)
Wal-Mart is opening more 50 health clinics in their stores, adding to the nine started in a pilot program mainly in the Southeast. This could be the start of something remarkable–if Wal-Mart can begin applying the same downward price pressures to medical prices that it has applied to goods in general, then it could be the beginning of a trend that finally halts the long upward march of medical prices.
HOW CAN EVEN THE IL GOP NOT BEAT THIS GUY (Via Bucky Tremblay):
Illinois Governor Confused by 'Daily Show' (Fox News, February 24, 2006)
Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich wasn't in on the joke. Blagojevich says he didn't realize"The Daily Show" was a comedy spoof of the news when he sat down for an interview that ended up poking fun at the sometimes-puzzled Democratic governor."It was going to be an interview on contraceptives ... that's all I knew about it," Blagojevich laughingly told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in a story for Thursday's editions. "I had no idea I was going to be asked if I was 'the gay governor.'" [...]
The segment, which aired two weeks ago, also featured Illinois Republican Rep. Ron Stephens, a pharmacist who opposes the governor's rule. Stephens has said he knew the show was a comedy.
UNREALISM (via Pepys):
A passage to India: The pitfalls awaiting George Bush in the subcontinent (The Economist Feb 23rd 2006)
Mr Bush needs to avoid two kinds of mistake. The first, and most serious, would be to shower America's new friend with gifts that the United States can ill afford. Unfortunately, this has already happened. In July, when India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited Washington, he came home with a remarkable present: a promise from Mr Bush that he would aim to share American civilian nuclear technology with India.That was too generous. Under American and international law, such technology can be given only to countries that have renounced nuclear weapons and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India has never joined the treaty, and it tested nuclear weapons in 1998. Mr Bush, in effect, was driving a coach and horses through the treaty in order to suit his own strategic ends, a move that invites the accusation of hypocrisy from other nuclear states and wannabes not so favoured. The idea was that India, in return, should take steps to satisfy the Americans on a long list of nuclear-security concerns, such as not exporting weapons technology and continuing to observe a moratorium on testing. Most important, India was asked to separate its civilian and military nuclear programmes, with the former subject to a rigorous inspection regime.
So far, however, the proposals offered by the Indians actually to do all this are far from adequate. As Mr Bush packs his bags, desperate attempts are being made to bridge the gap. The obvious danger is that in order to portray his summit as a success Mr Bush will be tempted to accept even fewer safeguards from India. That would be a dangerous mistake: nuclear proliferation matters too much to allow excessive wiggle-room or create bad precedents. Fortunately, whatever deal is agreed between Mr Bush and Mr Singh will also require the approval of America's Congress, which has already taken a dim view of Mr Bush's nuclear generosity to India.
Sending the wrong signal on nuclear weapons is not the only potential pitfall in America's romance with India. Mr Bush should also be wary of sending the wrong signal about America's intentions towards China. Too often when Indian-American relations are discussed in Washington, the notion is invoked that India might somehow turn out to be a “counterweight” to China. Yet it is hard to see, in practical terms, what sort of counterweight India could actually be. On the contrary, that sort of talk is liable only to reinforce China's fear that America's grand strategic design is to encircle it and block its rise as a great power. That fear has already been strengthened by America's recent transfer of some of its military might from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The United States should not base its Asian strategy on that sort of balance-of-power diplomacy. Apart from anything else, India is far too canny, and cares too much about its own China relationship, to be drawn into such a game. Instead of encircling China, Mr Bush should concentrate on putting the American relationship with it on the right footing: deeper engagement, coupled with a determination to make China play by the rules. Yet Mr Bush's approach to this rising superpower has sometimes seemed almost casual: Hu Jintao, China's president, had been made to wait far too long for his state visit to Washington even before Hurricane Katrina forced him to cancel a visit last August. And Mr Bush has not worked hard enough at home to make the free-trade case against the protectionist hawks gunning for China (though, to be fair to him, he has not given them much comfort either).
Mr Bush must also take care to ensure that friendship with India does not damage his close ties to Pakistan, another American ally the president intends to visit on this trip.
India is a democratic ally. China is a nucleart-armed Communist nation and Pakistan a nuclear-armed, potentially Islamicist one. If you don't get that the India/America relationship is in good part about containing evil then you ought to have your Realist club membership privileges revoked.
IF WE DID THAT HERE... (via Brian McKim):
Mayor suspended over 'Nazi' jibe (This is London, 2/24/06)
London Mayor Ken Livingstone has been found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.Mr Livingstone was suspended from duty for four weeks from March 1 after being found guilty of bringing his office into disrepute.
The three-man Adjudication Panel for England unanimously ruled that Mr Livingstone had been "unnecessarily insensitive and offensive" to Evening Standard reporter Oliver Finegold in February last year.
...the Democratic caucus in Congress wouldn't be able to muster a quorum.
RUNNING THE MOTHER COUNTRY AS A HIPPIE COMMUNE:
Moral climate change in Britain (Terry Mattingly's religion column for 02/15/2006, On Religion)
[A] "moral climate change" has destroyed England's certainty that some things are right and some things are wrong, said Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham, in a speech last week in the House of Lords. Thus, civic leaders cannot agree on the meaning of words such as "freedom" and "tolerance" and religious faith is seen as a threat instead of a virtue."The 1960s and 1970s swept away the old moral certainties, and anyone who tries to reassert them risks being mocked as an ignoramus or scorned as a hypocrite. But since then we've learned that you can't run the world as a hippy commune," said Wright, a former Oxford don who also has served as Westminster Abbey's canon theologian.
"Getting rid of the old moralities hasn't made us happier or safer. ... This uncertainty, my Lords, has produced our current nightmare, the invention of new quasi-moralities out of bits and pieces of moral rhetoric, the increasingly shrill and polymorphous language of 'rights', the glorification of victimhood which enables anyone with hurt feelings to claim moral high ground and the invention of various 'identities' which demand not only protection but immunity from critique."
Instead of focusing on the cartoon crisis, Wright described other signs of legal and moral confusion in British life. Prime Minister Tony Blair, for example, sent painfully mixed signals after last summer's suicide bombings. His government leaned one way when it tried to ban efforts to "glorify" terrorism. Then it leaned the other way with legislation that would ban the promotion of "religious hatred."
Wright stressed that it will be dangerous to pass laws that attempt to replace, amend or edit religious doctrines that have shaped the lives of believers for centuries. But politicians seem determined to try.
Thus, Birmingham University forced the Evangelical Christian Union off campus and seized the group's funds because it refused to amend its bylaws to allow non-Christians or atheists to become voting members.
Thus, Wright noted that police have shut down protests in Parliament Square against British policies in Iraq. Comedians -- facing vague laws against hate speech -- are suddenly afraid to joke about religion. And was there any justification for government investigations of the Anglican bishop of Chester and the chairman of the Muslim Council of Great Britain because they made statements critical of homosexuality?
Public officials, said the bishop, are trying to control the beliefs that are in people's hearts and the thoughts that are in their heads. The tolerance police are becoming intolerant, which is a strange way to promote tolerance.
Long past time to end The Long Truce.
A TALE OF TWO AXES:
India's Hottest Jobs (Forbes.com, 02.23.06)
Much of the industrialized world frets about a looming talent shortage, but Indian bosses aren’t finding it difficult to fill job vacancies at all.Worldwide, two out of five employers are having difficulty filing positions, according to a 23-country survey released by employment services firm Manpower this week. In India, only one in seven bosses reports such problems.
In China, however, one in four employers reports difficulty in finding staff, with production operators in shortest supply--in contrast to India, where sales reps are the labor market’s hot commodity.
Regardless of the ease of finding staff in India, employment prospects remain strong in the economy, Manpower found in a separate survey, its quarterly employment outlook. Its most recent showed Indian employers continuing to report the most optimistic hiring expectations in the Asia-Pacific region, including China.
That reflects their overall optimism about the economy. A survey by management consultants McKinsey & Co. found Indian executives far more cheerful about the future than their Chinese counterparts, by 18 percentage points.
Chinese executives are, if anything, getting glummer. Their view of conditions in their own industries fell by 9 percentage points from when the same survey was taken six months earlier, and overall they had switched from being “fairly hopeful” to “neutral,” by McKinsey’s characterization.
McKinsey has also found a difference in the hiring plans of Indian and Chinese companies. India’s see a steady expansion of new jobs, whereas Chinese executives who plan to increase their workforce expect to add jobs in greater abundance than executives in other countries.
EXACTLY THE KIND OF ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION THE REGION NEEDS:
Dubai's Two Faces (David A. Andelman, 02.24.06, Forbes)
This is the new Dubai, presided over as a centerpiece by Dubai Ports World, among the largest and most prosperous of the emirate's new, homegrown corporations. DP World, at the centerpiece of the latest Washington imbroglio over terrorism and global security, rose to its global power and wealth on the growth of Dubai as the principal transit point for goods and services the length of the Persian Gulf and across the Middle East.Now embarked on a worldwide expansion effort, DP World is a symbol of the global reach and power to which this one-time mud-walled village near the strategic Straits of Hormuz now aspires.
But the old Dubai is also not far off. Here, along Dubai Creek, not far from the Gold Soukh shopping area and the narrow teeming streets where Indians and Pakistanis from the subcontinent peddle textiles and piece goods, huge, old wooden dhows that also ply both sides of the Persian Gulf tie up. They discharge their cargo directly onto the quays--thousands of bulging cardboard boxes that have never seen the inside of an RFID-monitored shipping container.
These are the remnants of the old Middle East. And Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum, who became ruler of Dubai just last month after the sudden death of his elder brother, is determined that the old Dubai will not in any fashion impinge on the development of the new Dubai--where businessmen from the Netherlands and New York arrive to plunk down hard cash for 14,000-square-foot apartments or sprawling villas that overlook the sea.
"This sheikh understands the value of progress and of a can-do attitude," says the manager of one of Dubai's leading hotels, smiling. He has lived here for years and watched this miracle sprout from the desert sands of the United Arab Emirates.
And clearly the sheikh is also not afraid. The miles of palaces belonging to the ruling family that mark long stretches of Dubai's glistening sand beaches are all but unpatrolled, the gates standing nonchalantly open on a leisurely Friday afternoon, the final day of the two-day Arabian weekend.
"There is no need for security," says one longtime resident who came to Dubai 20 years ago and, like 90% of the principality's residents, is a foreigner--in this case from southern India. "He has no need for security because he has no enemies."
Indeed, with the prosperity over which the royal family has presided, it's hard to see how the sheikh could have many enemies. In part this is due to the adept fashion in which the ruling family of Dubai has managed to walk the very fine line between friend, ally and financial partner with regard to the West, especially the United States, while recognizing that at the same time it is still very much an Arab nation in a volatile Middle East region.
He wasn't counting on the American fundamentalists.
MORE:
American Ports in a Storm: Columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls American objection to the Dubai port deal “shameful” (YaleGlobal, 23 February 2006)
The company manages container terminals and logistics operations in more than 100 ports spread over nearly 20 countries including China, India and Europe. The US politicians have criticized the deal because of Dubai’s past link to the terrorists and have argued that unlike P&O, which too was a foreign-owned company, the DP World is state-owned.However, Friedman says “We’re not turning over our ports, security over to Dubai Port Authority. We’re turning over the port authority and six ports to people who will say, “Park here, park there. Collect the fees and what-not and manage the traffic of the port.” Inspection will be done by the American workers and not by “cousins” brought from Dubai. “I think it’s a shameful and has slightly racist overtones to it," he says. “This is about keeping ‘a bunch of Arabs’ out of our country, that’s what this is really about. And it’s a bad thing, not only because it doesn’t reflect our real values.” Friedman points out that American companies like IBM, FedEx or UPS run around, doing business in the Arab world. “What if they then turn around and say, ‘You’re not going to take ours, well, we’re not going to take yours.’ We’re in a very dangerous tit for tat that could get going here.”
Friedman agreed that the unspoken subtext of the American criticism is the fact the DP World is run by Muslims. He sees a dangerous lurch toward such nativism provoking backlash. “It’s part of the dangerous backlash going on. Both sides are guilty of it. When people ransack a Danish embassy in Damascus and the government allows it. You know, governments are there to restrain people’s worst impulses. We have nativists in our country. They have nativists in their country that are going to always want to push these issues. Government’s job is to restrain that, and I think this is a real issue, a really shameful episode. I think the president’s right on this one.”
Globalization spawns port situation: U.S. needs friends in the Arab world such as UAE, say ex-diplomat and scholar (Douglas Birch, February 23, 2006, Baltimore Sun)
The furor over Dubai Ports World is calling into question whether Americans understand or trust even an Arab government that has close ties to the United States and shares its concerns about terrorism.The United Arab Emirates are seven sheikdoms spread along the southern shore of the Persian Gulf and loosely united in a federation. Until the debate erupted in Washington about the Dubai Ports World plan to partly manage ports in Baltimore and five other American cities, the Emirates were known largely for making money, not involvement in radical Islamic politics.
"I think this thing is a firestorm that's, frankly, politically motivated, and a dangerous one because it tends to polarize our relations with that part of the world," said Michael Sterner, a retired diplomat who was U.S. ambassador to the UAE in the 1970s. "I don't see any concerns whatsoever with having this state-owned company run the ports." [...]
"It's the Singapore of the Middle East," said Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University in Washington. "There's an enormous boom going on there, and they don't want to spoil it." [...]
Maintaining close ties to moderate Islamic states such as the Emirates is "essential" for the U.S., said Joseph A. Kechichian, an independent scholar and author of A Century in Thirty Years, a book about the UAE.
"We are now told to be afraid of Arabs because Arabs are terrorists," he said. "This is childish. And it's politically unwise. We need allies in the Muslim world, and the United Arab Emirates is one of the most important allies in the war on terrorism. We must not ostracize them."
The view that Arab-owned companies should be mistrusted or barred is naive at best, he said: "We have to accept that in a globalized economy, there will be new investors who will have leeway in global financial matters."
Terrorist groups have used the Emirates as a transit point for personnel and finances, experts say, because the Emirates are less authoritarian than many neighboring states.
One thing the whole kerfuffle illustrates is how tightly interwoven nativism, isolationism and protectionism are. Hillary Clinton can make some hay there.
OUGHT TO OUTSOURCE ALL OUR SECURITY:
Attack Fails at Huge Saudi Oil Site (SALAH NASRAWI, 2/24/06, Associated Press)
Suicide bombers in explosives-laden cars attacked the world's largest oil processing facility Friday, but were prevented from breaking through the gates when guards opened fire on them, causing the vehicles to explode, officials said.
LA VIDA AMERICANA (Via Eve)
Inquiring Gringos Want to Know: In 'Ask a Mexican,' a politically incorrect OC Weekly columnist fields readers' frank questions. He's a wiseguy with a cultural objective (Daniel Hernandez, LA Times, 2/23/06)
Arellano satirizes what he insists is Mexicans' disdain for immigrants from that small nation to their south: "Guatemalans are the Mexicans of Mexico. And who doesn't hate Mexicans?"It's funny how, sometimes, the inability to assimilate looks exactly like the path other people took to assimilation.Dear Mexican,
I am a Mexicana who is dating a gabacho. My gabacho always asks me why you see Mexicans lying in the grass under a tree…. ¿Por qué?
Dear Pocha,
… Mexicans, unlike gabachos, are good public citizens who know that parkland is best used for whittling the afternoon away underneath an oak, a salsa-stained paper plate and an empty six-pack of Tecate tossed to the side.
MORE: Ask a Mexican (2/9/06)
Dear Mexican,Why is it that from my personal, thoroughly unscientific observations it seems blue-collar, illiterate Mexicans are more prone to cheating on their wives than other races? Almost every other Mexican I have known seems to brag about how they got it on with their mamacitas while their wife and daughters of 7 and 8 were busy at the Sunday church.
Cheatie Cheatie Bang Bang
Dear Gabacho,
You’re right—sort of. In the landmark 1994 Sex in America: A Definitive Survey, researchers from the University of Chicago interviewed a random sample of 3,500 Americans and found that 25 percent of married men had strayed from their vows. Latino rates of infidelity were about the same, and lead researcher Edward Laumann told Hispanic Magazine that “he believed the stereotype of Latinos being more unfaithful than other people was overstated.” But there weren’t enough funds to create a Spanish-language questionnaire, meaning most of the 300 or so Latinos surveyed were pochos and not immigrant Mexican men. In the mother country, though, male infidelity is as Mexican as the tricolor—condoned by the church, tolerated by women, lionized in song. My favorite paean to cheating remains “Las Ferias de las Flores” (“The Flower Fairs”), a Chucho Monge composition immortalized by Trio Calavera that uses flowers as metaphors for mujeres and includes the immortal verse “And although another wants to cut her/I saw her first/And I vow to steal her/Even if she has a gardener.” So the question isn’t why Mexican men cheat, Cheatie, but rather why we tone down our tools upon immigrating to this country. Notch another victory for Manifest Destiny, which since the days of Cotton Mather has labored long and hard to turn this nation’s virile ethnic men into pussy Protestants.
RE-EXTENDING FAMILIES:
Fewer seniors going to nursing homes; stays shorter (Susan Jaffe, February 24, 2006, Cleveland Plain Dealer)
Despite the growing number of older people in Ohio, fewer are ending up in nursing homes, and when they do, they recover quicker - and go back home.Researchers at the Scripps Gerontology Center of Miami University found that nursing homes are becoming a respite - a place to recuperate from a stroke or bad fall, rather than a permanent destination.
For example, only 9 percent of those admitted to a nursing home were still there two years later, said Shahla Mehdizadeh, the lead author of the Scripps study, which compared Medicare and Medicaid payment information for 2001 through 2004 to an earlier period.
That rate was nearly three times lower than in 1994 to 1996, when 24 percent of those admitted were still there two years later.
VOTING FOR CHOICE WITH THEIR CHECKBOOKS:
Parents paying 'postcode premium' (BBC, 2/24/06)
Some parents would spend up to £25,000 on a new home to get their child into a better school, research suggests.The amount parents in Britain are likely to spend amounts to £18bn, the report by ING Direct Bank says.
A survey of 2,291 people found 39% of parents questioned said they were planning to move so that the family home was in a desirable catchment area.
With numbers and trends like that the only thing that would stop eventual voucherization is too few voters with kids.
UNSTOPPABLE WAVE:
China's censored media answers back (Tim Luard, 2/23/06, BBC)
A media clampdown - the latest of many over the years - has seen a string of journalists disciplined, dismissed or even jailed for violating official guidelines.Some of the campaign's targets, however, are refusing to be silenced.
And they have found plenty of supporters - some in unlikely quarters - willing to speak up on their behalf.
"There is now an unstoppable wave of demands for more freedom of expression and resistance to the old propaganda policies," said Jiao Guobiao, who was forced to resign his post as a journalism professor last year after accusing the government of handling the press in a manner worthy of Nazi Germany.
The row over the extent of people's right to know shows that the Communist Party's authority is ebbing away, he said.
But without censorship, the party could not maintain its rule for a day, he added. [...]
Propaganda officials have also faced other public challenges to their authority, including a rare strike by reporters in support of three editors dismissed from a leading daily, the Beijing News, late last year.
But what really worries them is that those now pushing for a lifting of censorship include not just journalists and activists, but also people in business, government and law who believe media reform is a necessary part of China's modernisation.
"It is not good for the Communist Party to keep to its old ways", said Jiang He, who runs a hi-tech company in the western city of Chongqing.
China's rapid economic growth is proving a strong force for change, he said, pointing out that the media was already far more open in many ways than in the past.
"It's such an information age. There's no way anyone can block everything," he said.
Dictatorships that lose the will to murder those who oppose them don't have a terrific record of longevity.
MOSQUE PAYBACK?:
Al-Qaeda in Iraq chief said killed in raid (AP, 2/24/06)
Al-Qaeda in Iraq's leader in northern Baghdad was killed in a raid Friday, the U.S. military said.The military identified Abu Asma, also known as Abu Anas and Akram Mahmud al-Mushhadani, as an explosives expert with close ties to important car bomb manufacturers in Baghdad.
He died in a northern Baghdad raid conducted by coalition forces with the help of Iraqi police, a military statement said.
OH CANADA, THEY STAND ON GUARD FOR THEE
O'Connor willing to re-open missile defence debate (John Ward, National Post, February 24th, 2006)
Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor says he's willing to re-open the controversial debate on ballistic missile defence.However, the minority Conservative government would eventually put the question before the Commons and since all three opposition parties have opposed the idea in the past, the concept is likely dead before it starts.
''It would really, ultimately, be up to a vote in Parliament,'' the minister told reporters Thursday.
The previous Liberal government seemed to favour participation in missile defence, which was a key policy for the Bush administration. The Liberals eventually made a U-turn and said no. [...]
Opponents of the missile plan say it won't work and risks kicking off a new international arms race.
Supporters say it could offer some protection against a terror strike, it would improve Canada-U.S. relations and since the Americans have asked for neither territory nor money, it would be cheap.
We’re holding out for a free toy.
NOW MAKE THEM REPUBLICANS:
Indian Americans - a growing force in the US (New Kerala, 2/24/06)
The Indian diaspora is today the third largest Asian community in the US, is upwardly mobile and is on its way to becoming a political force in that country.Cherian Samuel, a scholar at the Institute of Defence Studies and Anlyses (IDSA), made the observation here during a seminar Thursday on Indo-US relations, organised ahead of George W. Bush's visit.
Samuel said Indian Americans totalled about 1.7 million in the US according to the 2000 census, their numbers having gone up by an incredible 106 percent since 1990. It grew at a rate of 7.6 percent annually in the last 10 years.
"In the process, Indian Americans replaced Japanese Americans as the third largest Asian community in the US after the Chinese (2.7 million) and Filipinos (1.9)." [...]
Sixty-four percent of them were college educated as against the national average of 27 percent.
The average median family income for the Indian American community was estimated at $70,000, against the average family income of $50,000.
The Indian community was also upwardly mobile and included a large number of professionals.
To take a point, Samuel said, 38 percent of all physicians in the US were of Indian origin, as were 10 percent of all medical practitioners.
THE YOUNG GUNS OF AUTUMN:
Getting jazzed about kids is child’s play (Tony Massarotti, February 24, 2006, Boston Herald)
Remember these names, Sox followers: Josh Beckett and Jonathan Papelbon, Jon Lester, Craig Hansen and Manny Delcarmen. All are 25 or younger, all are pitchers, all are in major league camp. In recent Red Sox history, it is difficult to remember a time when the Sox had so many talented young arms so close to contributing at the big league level. [...]In recent Red Sox history, young pitching prospects have been like four-leaf clovers. There has been Pavano and Rose, maybe someone like Casey Fossum. There were Kevin Morton and Aaron Sele. But to find a collection of arms like this, you may have to go back all the way to the 1980s, then the Sox minor league system produced a stable that included Roger Clemens, Bruce Hurst, John Tudor, Bobby Ojeda and even Oil Can Boyd.
Among those arms, Clemens was the true barrier breaker. Red Sox history has been littered with home-grown positional players from Ted Williams to Carl Yastrzemski to Jim Rice, Fred Lynn, Ellis Burks and Mo Vaughn. But until Clemens came along - and these are Roger’s words here - pitching was always regarded as a “second-class citizen.”During the offseason, the Red Sox once again made a concerted effort to change that. With or without Theo Epstein, the Sox acquired Beckett. They kept Papelbon, Lester, Hansen and Delcarmen, despite repeated overtures from other clubs. When the Sox were at the winter meetings in December, one respected, longtime baseball evaluator said the only pitcher to interest him on the Red Sox’ 2005 playoff roster was Papelbon.
Yesterday, along with the other rookies in camp, Papelbon ran laps in his underwear.
Meanwhile, the Red Sox eagerly await the day when they can all take their diapers off.
If they'd started the Can in Game 7 they'd have won the '86 World Series.
February 23, 2006
OKAY, MAYBE IT'S NOT 4991 AFTER ALL:
Democrats' fund raising lagging, analysis shows (John Kennedy, 2/23/06, South Florida Sun-Sentinel )Despite a record-setting six months of raising cash, the finances of the Florida Democratic Party remain a wobbly house of cards that could collapse just when dollars are needed most this pivotal election year.
An Orlando Sentinel analysis shows that almost a quarter of the $3 million collected by state Democrats during the past six months came from other party organizations such as county executive committees, state legislative accounts, candidates and national Democratic groups.
The Democrats' trend of, in effect, moving cash from one party pocket to another not only casts a shadow over the party's fund raising, it raises questions about its ability to support a slate of candidates this fall, activists from both parties say. That's because much of the transferred money is reserved for legislative races and can't be used for statewide candidates.
By contrast, less than 1 percent of the $7.7 million the Florida Republican Party raised during the past half-year came from within GOP ranks. Instead, the Gov. Jeb Bush-led GOP, which controls the state House, Senate and congressional delegation, pulled in cash almost exclusively from corporate and individual contributions.
"The Democrats are going to have some tough resource issues this year," said Mac Stipanovich, a Tallahassee lobbyist and Republican strategist.
Democrat voters low on enthusiasm (Ralph Z. Hallow, 2/23/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
By objecting to virtually every initiative and proposal of the Bush administration and congressional Republican majority, Democrats are undermining their party's chances of regaining the majority this fall, the John Zogby poll of 1,039 likely voters suggests.
While House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and other visible Democrats in Washington pick fights with Republicans, the poll shows that 58 percent of rank-and-file Democratic voters say their leaders should "accept their lower position in Congress and work together with Republicans to craft the best legislation possible."
Only 6 percent of Democratic respondents say the No. 1 goal for their party's lawmakers in Congress should be to bury Republican bills.
The poll suggests that many Democratic voters accept their party's minority status. Nearly a quarter of Democrats -- 23 percent -- say Republicans do a better job running Congress.
"Democrats nationwide now seem to be adopting this minority-status mind-set," says Fritz Wenzel, Zogby International spokesman. "Democrats are tired of the warring and bitter partisanship that goes on inside the Washington Beltway."
ALLIES AND ADULTS:
UAE Company Agrees to Delay Ports Takeover (LIZ SIDOTI, 2/23/06, Associated Press)
A United Arab Emirates company offered Thursday to delay part of its $6.8 billion takeover of most operations at six U.S. ports to give the Bush administration more time to convince skeptical lawmakers the deal poses no security risks.The surprise announcement relieves some pressure from a standoff between
President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, which has threatened to block the deal because of the UAE's purported ties to terrorism.Under the offer coordinated with the White House, Dubai Ports World said it will agree not to exercise control or influence the management over U.S. ports pending further talks with the Bush administration and Congress. It did not indicate how long it will wait for these discussions to take place.
Uproar Surprised Dubai Firm (Ben White, February 24, 2006, Washington Post)
The rapid growth of DP World mirrors the swift expansion of Dubai into a commercial power that is less and less dependent on oil wealth, which is modest by Persian Gulf standards. The glittering city-state has the Middle East's leading airline, Emirates, and has been snapping up other foreign assets, including the Essex House hotel in New York.Dubai's leader, Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktum, known as Sheik Mo, is the driving force behind the city's foreign investments and domestic building projects that include man-made islands shaped like palm trees, the world's tallest tower, an underwater hotel and a theme park to dwarf Disneyland.
Strategically located on the Persian Gulf, Dubai emerged in the late 1990s as a major port. So when the city began its ambitious economic growth campaign, becoming a global port operator made strategic sense. Now the company wants to expand into a new market, the United States, a massive importer of foreign-made goods.
Though the U.S. ports are causing the current ruckus, they are in fact only a small piece of P&O's business. But they are an important part of the deal, because they would give DP World a presence in a critical market where the company currently has no assets. "It's a strategic value. That's what's important," Chief Operating Officer Edward H. Bilkey said on CNN Wednesday night.
The explosive fight over port security, direct investment in the United States by Arab countries and the secretive process by which the federal government reviews foreign purchases of potentially strategic domestic assets caught the company and others in the industry off guard. DP World and P&O executives and maritime industry analysts had expected that the deal, first reported and discussed in October, would continue its smooth and anonymous path to completion on March 2.
"We did not expect this to happen. No one foresaw this in any way," said Michael Seymour, president of P&O's North American operations. "P&O and DP World thought we had gone through the regulatory process in considerable depth, both from an antitrust and a security perspective, and frankly, we thought we were there."
Ehrlich Leans Toward Accepting Port Deal (Matthew Mosk, February 24, 2006, Washington Post)
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. said yesterday it is looking increasingly unlikely that he will try to block a United Arab Emirates company from taking over port operations in Baltimore.Ehrlich (R) said he is continuing a crash review of the security concerns raised by the proposed purchase by Dubai Ports World of the British company that currently oversees the movement of cargo containers at the busy mid-Atlantic port.
But when asked yesterday if he now agrees with President Bush and supports the sale, Ehrlich said, "Clearly, the facts are moving in that direction."
MAKING SENSE OF THE FRACTURES
LISTENING TO CD'S WITH: Andrew Hill: One Man's Lifelong Search for the Melody in Rhythm: The jazz composer and pianist selects his favorite tunes from albums by Charlie Parker, Dave Brubeck, Max Roach and Earl Hines. (BEN RATLIFF, 2/24/06, NY Times)
His first choice of music to listen to during my visit was Charlie Parker's most famous blues, "Now's the Time," from 1945. He calls it "the perfect record."Mr. Hill understood Parker's comment about melody as rhythm as a refutation of the "Eurocentric" music education he had grown up with — where melody is paramount, harmony accompanies it and rhythm is the last part to worry about. "It opened my mind up to many possibilities," he said. "If everything is rhythm, then you just have these rhythms on top of each other. But they're not polyrhythms or pyramids of rhythm: they're crossing rhythms."
"Now's the Time" is driven by a short, syncopated melody with a strong rhythm, putting down a bounce in almost every beat. "In that period, one could pretend that one could hear," Mr. Hill said. "You didn't have to read it to understand it. It was all around you. And I guess because it had a blues sensibility, it was inclusive of more people."
I said that given his interest in this idea of melody as rhythm, I thought he would have suggested a bebop tune with a more complicatedly rhythmic line, like Miles Davis's "Donna Lee."
"There was something lovely about hearing those fast tempos," he replied, "like 'Donna Lee' or '52nd Street Theme.' But with the blues, one doesn't have to be a space scientist to get the harmony. 'Donna Lee' has more changes — bringing you in more than letting you out."
"And then there are the parts between the drums and the saxophones," he said as an afterthought. "Through the years, I've always said to myself that when the drums and the saxophone play together, that's a dance, which is an aspect of melody as rhythm. Mm?"
Next on his list was "Blue Rondo à la Turk," from Dave Brubeck's fluke-hit 1959 album, "Time Out." The song is famous for its meter shifts: it flicks between a fast 9/8 and an easy, midtempo 4/4 swing, though it doesn't try to make them flow into each other.
"I keep hearing the different rhythm-melodies," Mr. Hill said as the song played. "The rhythm-melody that the drummer plays, for example. But this also represents when people weren't as comfortable playing rhythms like that" — he meant the 9/8 — "all the way through numbers, as they are now."
With pieces like this, Brubeck made jazz seem sensible for many who came to it cold; it's a playful piece of music, and very schematic. He phrased almost right on the beat, and kept swing roped off in the song's four-four section. When Mr. Hill plays, on the other hand, he moves around the beat, never playing on it, and not consistently behind it or ahead of it, either.
"Yes, peaceful coexistence," Mr. Hill said when I brought up his relation to the beat. "It's always been like that."
SOMEONE HAS TO BE THE ADULT, MAY AS WELL BE THE POTUS:
The Boy Who Cried Wolf (WILLIAM GREIDER, February 23, 2006, The Nation)
David Brooks, the high-minded conservative pundit, dismissed the Dubai Ports controversy as an instance of political hysteria that will soon pass. He was commenting on PBS, and I thought I heard a little quaver in his voice when he said this was no big deal. Brooks consulted "the experts," and they assured him there's no national security risk in a foreign company owned by Middle East Muslims--actually, by an Arab government--managing six major American ports. Cool down, people. This is how the world works in the age of globalization.Of course, he is correct. But what a killjoy. This is a fun flap, the kind that brings us together. Republicans and Democrats are frothing in unison, instead of polarizing incivilities. Together, they are all thumping righteously on the poor President. I expect he will fold or at least retreat tactically by ordering further investigation. The issue is indeed trivial. [...]
So why is the fearmonger-in-chief being so casual about this Dubai business?
Because at some level of consciousness even George Bush knows the inflated fears are bogus.
Strange essay in that Mr. Greider wants to accuse the President of both fear-mongering and of acting responsibly when, as the author himself acknowledges, national security obviously isn't implicated.
THEY'LL FILL YOUR IPOD LICKETY-SPLIT:
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The Other Brother signed me up for Christmas and I started out with Roger Angell's The Summer Game and the first volume of Shelby Foote's Civil War trilogy. They've got some terrific stuff and I could use the credits if you want to try them out.
RATIONAL? THERE'S NO PLACE FOR THAT IN THIS HYSTERIA:
Why Dubai is good for US business: Dubai Ports World is exactly the kind of bridge the US needs to the Muslim world (Mansoor Ijaz, 2/24/06, CS Monitor)
In the battle of hearts and minds that defines America's struggle to combat terrorism, the emotional eruption from US politicians in the past week over the proposed takeover of six key American ports by a Dubai company is a big step backward for US national security. It is a uniquely un-American reaction that assumes the worst of an important Arab ally, pronounces its guilt, and seeks to paint its companies as enemies without one shred of evidence.A rational look at the facts tells a different story.
OOPS, NEVERMIND...:
Israeli Army Kills Top Militant (EMILIO MORENATTI, 2/23/06, Associated Press)
Israeli troops on Thursday killed five Palestinians, including a top militant who said just a day earlier that he would never be caught...
Technically correct.
RUN, IF YOU'RE ALIVE... (via Selina Kyle):
Quantum computer works best switched off (New Scientist, 22 February 2006)
Even for the crazy world of quantum mechanics, this one is twisted. A quantum computer program has produced an answer without actually running.The idea behind the feat, first proposed in 1998, is to put a quantum computer into a “superposition”, a state in which it is both running and not running. It is as if you asked Schrödinger's cat to hit "Run".
HOW DOES A SHRINKING, AGING NATION GROW ITS ECONOMY?:
Germany ‘cannot save its way out of deficit’ (Hugh Williamson, February 23 2006, Financial Times)
Germany must revive its economy and labour market if it is to resolve its crushing fiscal problems, the country’s finance minister said on Thursday, rejecting proposals to rely solely on budget cuts to reduce near-record borrowing.In remarks seen as a harsh rebuttal of economists in the Bundesbank – Germany’s central bank – and elsewhere, Peer Steinbrück said: “We can’t save our way out of our budget problems. That’s a hopeless prospect. There will only be progress if there is also movement on the economy, in the labour market and regarding our social security system.”
HARVARD'S A LOST CAUSE, BUT THERE'S HOPE FOR PRINCETON:
Princeton Tilts Right (MAX BLUMENTHAL, March 13, 2006, The Nation)
[T]here is another side to [Robert P.] George, less tolerant, ferociously partisan and intimately connected to wealthy organizations that wish explicitly to inject their politics into the universities--a side better known by Beltway Republicans and right-wing Christian activists than on the long green lawns of Princeton. He's been a presence at the White House over the past five years, stopping by no fewer than five times to counsel George W. Bush on such issues as the faith-based initiative, what he calls "Catholic social ethics" and Supreme Court nominations. He also serves on the President's Council on Bioethics, where he has worked to obstruct federal funding of stem cell research, and he helped write an amendment on behalf of the White House calling for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in 2004.With access and top-rank academic credentials, George has become a sought-after right-wing pundit, penning columns for National Review and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and recently guest-blogging on Judge Samuel Alito's nomination battle for the Family Research Council, the Christian right lobbying outfit that planned a series of televised rallies for Bush's judicial picks called "Justice Sunday."
George has brought his conservatism to bear at Princeton through the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, an academic center he founded in 2000 "to sustain America's experiment in ordered liberty." On the surface, the program appears modeled after institutions like Princeton's Center for Human Values and New York University's Remarque Institute. However, it functions in many ways as a vehicle for conservative interests, using funding from a shadowy, cultlike Catholic group and right-wing foundations to support gatherings of movement activists, fellowships for ideologically correct visiting professors and a cadre of conservative students.
George's program has become the blueprint for the right's strategy to extend and consolidate power within the university system. Stanley Kurtz described the plan for National Review this past April: "Princeton's Madison Program is a model for solving the political-correctness problem in the academy as a whole. We may not be able to do much about tenured humanities and social science faculties at elite colleges that are liberal by margins of more than 90 percent. But setting up small enclaves of professors with more conservative views is a real possibility."
The creation of the Madison Program would not have been possible without the acquiescence of Princeton's administration, which, after permitting its establishment, has embraced it. In doing so, Princeton has become a testing ground for the latest phase in the right's effort to politicize the academy. And while George maintains that his agenda at Princeton is above politics, even his friends describe him as a savvy right-wing operative boring from within the liberal infrastructure. As an article in Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine then published by George's ally Deal Hudson, pithily put it in 2003, "If there really is a vast, right-wing conspiracy, its leaders probably meet in George's basement."
TOO SMART TO BE SENSIBLE:
AJP Taylor: The historian AJP Taylor was one of the first "telly dons." But over the years, those of us who admired him, as a scholar, stylist and gadfly, have gradually been disabused (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, March 2006, The Prospect)
He was an intensely readable writer, from the attention-grabbing first sentences to the jokes and the epigrams ("If the Germans had succeeded in exterminating their Slav neighbours as the Anglo-Saxons in North America succeeded in exterminating the Indians, the effect would have been what it has been on the Americans: the Germans would have become advocates of brotherly love and international reconciliation"). [...]The Origins of the Second World War (1961) enraged critics who thought that Taylor had exculpated Hitler by portraying him as an adventurer and improviser with no consistent strategy, as well as "the sounding-board for the German nation." That continued the theme, set out in sometimes glib and vulgar fashion in The Course of German History, that the Germans were a nation of permanent conquerors. What he did get right in The Origins was his own country. From the time Taylor's friend Michael Foot and two confederates published their absurd squib Guilty Men in 1940, a myth had grown up that the evil appeasers had grovelled to Hitler against the wishes of the British people, determined under the brave leadership of the left to resist him. As Taylor showed, the British people were desperate to avoid war, as were almost all the London newspapers and the Labour party.
If you want to conjure up this epigrammatic and wisecracking writer it has to be a sentence or two at a time. The footnotes and asides are almost the best thing about The Struggle for Mastery. Taylor deftly reminds us of one reason why, in the decades before 1914, Britain was as unquestionably pacific as Germany was bellicose: "In England the taxpayers were also the ruling class; economy was of immediate benefit to them. In Germany the ruling class did not pay the taxes; economy brought them no advantage." Or again in English History, the Labour party's shibboleth of "the hungry thirties" is demolished in a few words: it was a time when, in truth, "most English people were enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours, higher real wages."
And yet there is another side to this. Looking back and re-reading the sparkling prose which delighted me when young, I can’t help feeling that it was indeed designed to appeal to adolescents. As the years went by, I learned more about Taylor and eventually met him. It is not a rare experience to find someone captivating as a public performer but then less so as a private person. This was true of Taylor to an unusual degree, and he was his own prosecuting counsel. A Personal History is one of the most horribly revealing autobiographies ever published. It’s not so much Taylor’s richly comical private life with—or at the hands of—three terrifying wives. What is so lowering is the self-pity and self-deception, the endless catalogue of spite and resentment. Old scores are settled, old enmities picked over, the squabbles of Magdalen common room regurgitated 40 years on. Here the pithy asides aren’t quite so pleasing: “like most Jews he was an elitist”; “like most homosexuals, he was neurotic”; “unscrupulousness—the usual characteristic of a homosexual.” And the nastiest moment in the book may be when he complains that although he did not win a Balliol scholarship 50 years before, he could now console himself with the thought that, “none of the boys who got scholarships at Balliol when I got none has been heard of since.” In his excellent biography of Taylor, Adam Sisman points out an explanation for this: two of those Balliol boys were killed in the 1939-45 war, in which Taylor prudently chose to keep the home fires burning.
Although he never stood for parliament, Taylor was active in politics, from the 1920s, when he ran messages for the TUC in the general strike and briefly joined the Communist party, to the 1950s when he was one of the most prominent figures in CND. He once said that Mill’s phrase about the Conservatives being the stupid party was not unfair since “to be stupid and sensible are not far apart. The Progressive party, radical and socialist, is clever, but silly.” That was a rare glimpse of self-knowledge since Taylor’s own politics were indeed silly.
He certainly has his own small part in the story of the great Soviet illusion. Taylor was more unattractive than most fellow travellers since he was not truly illusioned. He didn’t deny the barbarous nature of Stalin’s regime: he accepted and almost relished it. Many years later, he mentioned his friend Malcolm Muggeridge’s 1934 Winter in Moscow as one of the best of all books about Soviet Russia, but that was not what he had thought at the time. When Muggeridge had begun filing some of the rare truthful accounts of what was happening in the Soviet Union, Taylor rebuked him: “You can’t see clearly enough the ruthlessness and the necessity of the class war.” Private property had been abolished, “and that alone is to my mind worth unending sacrifices,” which were not, of course, made by history lecturers at Manchester, where Taylor was at the time, or any other Englishmen. “The Russian worker has a control over his work, through the factory committees, which no worker ever had before: he can criticise, he can control the management: what he says goes.”
It is easy, more than 70 years later, to condemn this as ignorant drivel, but it went further in Taylor’s case. “There was a danger that the urban socialism would be swamped by a new capitalism coming from the kulaks and that had to be fought, even at the cost of famine,” a bleak verdict on 2m dead. Even in his published writings Taylor exemplifies that “snobbish feeling” or racism of the left, which his contemporary WH Auden looked back on with shame, when appalling crimes in backward Russia were overlooked by intellectuals who would have been horrified by such things in a western country.
WE'RE ALL EVANGELICALS NOW:
Conservative rabbis embrace non-Jews: `Intermarrieds' are courted to stem declining membership. (Tal Abbady, February 21, 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel)
Faced with a declining membership, Conservative Jews are trying a historically non-Jewish tactic: spreading the good news to interfaith couples.The Conservative movement, the second-largest Jewish denomination in the United States, announced in December an initiative to reach out to intermarried couples with a view to converting the non-Jewish spouse. Leaders say the objective is for children to be raised in households that are unambiguously Jewish, making them more likely to grow up to marry other Jews.
The idea of seeking converts may have evangelical undertones alien to Judaism, but leaders say this push is not outright proselytizing.
IT'S A PURITAN NATION, NOT AN INTELLECTUAL ONE:
No more heroes: Leo Strauss, father of neoconservatism, is not the fascist thinker of left-wing caricature. But neither is he a figure with whom democrats can feel comfortable. He believed in virtue rather than liberalism (Edward Skidelsky, March 2006, The Prospect)
Strauss's central theme is excellence, both moral and intellectual. Excellence is the supreme end of political life. The classical philosophers judged regimes according to their ability to foster excellence. The best regime is the one in which the best men rule. It is government by the wise. But because they constitute a small and unpopular minority, the wise must, for practical purposes, work in collaboration with the "gentlemen," or enlightened aristocracy. Gentlemen are the "political reflection" of the wise; they share their elevation of spirit and add to it wealth, savoir-faire and a "noble contempt for precision." Only a government of gentlemen can win the consent of the vulgar while at the same time remaining open to the influence of the wise.The ancient philosophers described the best regime as one embodying "natural right." By this they meant that it is grounded not merely in custom or convention, but in the natural order of things. The idea of natural right reappears in the work of the founders of modern liberalism. But it is not quite the same idea. Whereas the ancients viewed human nature in the light of its end or perfection, the moderns, inspired by the new science of mechanics, sought out its lowest common impulse. This they discovered in the will to live, or the fear of violent death. The regime most truly in accordance with nature is, then, that which best satisfies its citizens' desire for security. It is a regime consisting of a strong secular state with a monopoly on the use of force, whose citizens enjoy rights guaranteed by law and, in some versions, a share in government. It is the regime with which we are all familiar today.
But what about the ancient concern with excellence? How does that fare in the modern liberal state? Strauss's answer is gloomy. Liberalism shifts the accent from the question "is it good?" to the question "is it within my right?" This latter question tends over time to occlude or absorb the former, so that in the end all moral problems are reduced to problems of law. Liberal theory is concerned not with virtue, but with the construction of institutions that will secure citizens their rights even in the absence of virtue. Nor is it concerned with truth. In its eyes, all opinions are of equal value, provided they do not disturb the peace. Ultimately, liberalism degenerates into relativism, a standpoint from which different moral and religious convictions appear as mere items on a menu. There is an inevitable if ironic progression from the original meaning of liberalism to the derogatory sense it has acquired in America today.
Liberalism expresses the mundanity of the modern age, its mistrust of heroes and ideals. In Strauss's words, it deliberately "lowers the goal" of political life to increase the chances of its attainment. But liberalism's neglect of excellence is in the long run self-destructive. No regime, not even a liberal one, is mechanically self-perpetuating. Each rests ultimately upon the wisdom and courage of its leaders. In neglecting this, liberalism jeopardises its own survival. Liberalism suffers a further, specific disadvantage in comparison with its totalitarian rivals: it extends to them a tolerance which they do not reciprocate. The collapse of the Weimar republic was confirmation for Strauss of this shortcoming. Churchill demonstrated that only the residually heroic element in liberal democracy could save it from destruction.
How can the levelling tendency of the modern age be counteracted? How can greatness be restored? Unlike many European conservatives, Strauss did not look to the hereditary nobility, a class non-existent in America. His was an aristocracy of spirit, not of rank. Hence the vital importance he attached to education. "Liberal education," he wrote, "is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but 'specialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart.'… Liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear, of human greatness."
This brief summary makes it clear, I hope, that Strauss was not the "profoundly tribal and fascistic thinker" described by Drury. But neither is he a figure with whom liberal democrats can feel entirely comfortable. His support for them is at best pragmatic and provisional; it amounts to little more than the recognition that "at present democracy is the only practicable alternative to various forms of tyranny." Nowhere does Strauss acknowledge freedom or equality as intrinsic goods. Their value, for him, is instrumental; they create a space in which excellence can flourish. "We cannot forget… that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence. No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone." Strauss, in short, is an unashamed elitist, in the best tradition of the German professoriat. This in itself is enough to mark him as a fascist in the eyes of some commentators.
The fatal flaw of Straussianism and the thing that prevents it from mattering overmuch in America, was, interestingly, on display in a recent "victory" of the neocons: the Miers dust-up. The neocon objection to Ms Miers was that she was insufficiently educated and intellectual. The defense was that she'd do the right thing because of her Evangelical Christianity. The President--who neocons despise for his own lack of intellectualism--was able, in that instance, to compromise by naming a conservative Catholic with academic cred to replace her.
LET'S SEE THEM PUT OUR MONEY WHERE THEIR MOUTHS ARE:
Big Problem, Dubai Deal or Not (DAVID E. SANGER, 2/23/06, NY Times)
Only 4 percent or 5 percent of those containers are inspected. There is virtually no standard for how containers are sealed, or for certifying the identities of thousands of drivers who enter and leave the ports to pick them up. If a nuclear weapon is put inside a container — the real fear here — "it will probably happen when some truck driver is paid off to take a long lunch, before he even gets near a terminal," said Mr. Flynn, the ports security expert. [...]"I'm not worried about who is running the New York port," a senior inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency said, insisting he could not be named because the agency's work is considered confidential. "I'm worried about what arrives at the New York port."
That port, along with the five others Dubai Ports hopes to manage, are the last line of defense to stop a weapon from entering this country. But Mr. Seymour, head of the subsidiary now running the operations, says only one of the six ports whose fate is being debated so fiercely is equipped with a working radiation-detection system that every cargo container must pass through.
Closing that gaping hole is the federal government's responsibility, he noted, and is not affected by whether the United Arab Emirates or anyone else takes over the terminals.
We've got a book for the first person to accurately predict which Republican critic of the port deal will be the first to offer legislation that funds inspection of 100% of the cargo coming into our ports, including the enormous expansion of the federal workforce required, and includes the tax hikes to pay for it, this being such a vital issue to them and all....
HE CAN SEE THE CART, BUT CAN'T DISCERN THE HORSE:
Hope for Health Care?: HHS's Leavitt Sees an Opportunity in New Orleans (David S. Broder, February 23, 2006, Washington Post)
On Tuesday afternoon Mike Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, made another of his frequent trips to New Orleans on a mission that speaks volumes about his approach to what is arguably the most important domestic policy job in the federal government.In an interview hours before his departure, the former Utah governor told me that his purpose was to exchange ideas with local officials about how to make the hurricane-stricken city "a model of a new design for delivering health care in this country." [...]
Steps such as the health savings accounts that President Bush has recommended, and others being discussed in Congress, can nibble at the problem, Leavitt says, but far more fundamental changes must be made if costs are to be brought under control without sacrificing quality care.
Leavitt is attacking the problem at two levels. At the top, he has assigned his department the task of developing, by the end of this year, national standards for four "breakthrough projects" applying 21st-century information technology to medical offices and hospitals. One would standardize systems for registering patients and listing their prescriptions and other basic medical data so they would not have to be entered on separate clipboards with each visit. A second would set standards for equipment allowing remote monitoring of chronic illnesses, such as the blood sugar tests required by diabetes patients.
A third would focus on systems for exchanging medical test results from office to office. And the fourth is a "biosurveillance system," designed to alert public health officials to any change in the pattern of reported illnesses that could be an early warning of a pandemic.
Once the standards are set, he said, they will be applied in the purchase of systems by Medicare, Medicaid and the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, creating a market that the private sector is likely to follow.
Such information systems, along with better measures of health care quality, could empower people to become much smarter consumers of health care, Leavitt says, an essential step to ensuring care at more reasonable costs without burdensome government regulation.
Here's an exquyisite illustration of how little a supposedly bright analyst understands that stupid George Bush. Note that Mr. Broder thinks that giving consumers better information is more important than the HSA revolution by which the Administration is making us into health care consumers again?
NO REALITY, PLEASE, WE'RE EMOTING.... (via Kevin Whited):
Panel Saw No Security Issue in Port Contract, Officials Say (ELISABETH BUMILLER and CARL HULSE, 2/23/06, NY Times)
The Bush administration decided last month that a deal to hand over operations at major American ports to a government-owned company in Dubai did not involve national security and so did not require a more lengthy review, administration officials said Wednesday.The decision was made by an interagency committee led by Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt. The group included officials from 12 departments and agencies, including the Departments of Defense, Justice, State and Homeland Security, as well as the National Security Council and the National Economic Council.
In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Mr. Kimmitt said that the company, Dubai Ports World, had been thoroughly investigated by the administration, including by intelligence agencies, and that on Jan. 17 the panel members unanimously approved the transfer.
"None of them objected to the deal proceeding on national security grounds," he said.
Port deal poses no concern for security, Ridge says (Jay Marks, 2/23/06, The Oklahoman)
There is no reason to be concerned about a deal that would put an Arab company in charge of shipping operations at six U.S. ports, the nation’s first homeland security czar said Wednesday.Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said it is important to separate perception from reality....
Chris Matthews had a couple shipping experts on Hardball last night and was totally flummoxed that both said the deal would have absolutely no effect on security. This is one of those perfect illustrations of how thoughtless the chattering class is when it gets itself wound up.
IS ANYONE LESS REALISTIC THAN A REALIST? (via Kevin Whited):
There is no silver medal for second in race for Iraq (CRAGG HINES, 2/21/06, Houston Chronicle )
Some analysts believe that neighboring, technically noncombatant Iran has already won and, being just next door, is prepared to wait out U.S. troops to fully claim the prize. With a view to hurrying things along, weaponry from Iran, especially the deadly improvised explosive devices, is said to be finding its way to both Shia militias and Sunni insurgents.A leg up for Iran would be yet one more wildly unintended (although not necessarily unforeseeable) consequence of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein and establish a democratic foothold in the Islamic Middle East.
If any international development is scarier than voraciously revolutionary Iran consolidating its dream of regional supremacy as Islamic (Shia branch) hegemon, it's difficult to imagine.
"This would be an unmitigated disaster," British analyst Allister Heath writes in the Spectator, under a menacingly accurate headline: "A monster of our own making."
As always, the Realist view is completely unrealistic. Let us accept for the moment that Muslims are uniquely biologically incapable of evolving towards democracy. If that's the case then the best we can hope for is an internecine bloodbath, in which case pitting Shi'a vs. Sunni and Arab against Persian is the most desirable outcome in the Middle East. The bloodier the fight within, the less time and energy for bothering those of us without, Shrine attack deals blow to anti-US unity (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 2/24/06, Asia Times):
The aim of these people in Iran is to establish a chain of anti-US resistance groups that will take the offensive before the West makes its expected move against Tehran.Iran has been referred to the UN Security Council over its nuclear program, which the US and others say is geared towards developing nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency is due to present a final report to the Security Council next month, after which the council will consider imposing sanctions against Tehran. Many believe that the US is planning preemptive military action against Iran.
With Wednesday's attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra in Iraq, home to a revered Shi'ite shrine, the dynamics have changed overnight.
Armed men detonated explosives inside the mosque, blowing off the domed roof of the building. Iraqi leaders are trying to contain the angry reaction of Shi'ites, amid rising fears that the country is on the brink of civil war. At least 20 Sunnis have been killed already in retaliatory attacks, and nearly 30 Sunni mosques have been attacked across the country.
The potentially bloody polarization in the Shi'ite-Sunni world now threatens to unravel the links that have been established between Shi'ite-dominated Iran and radical Sunni groups from Afghanistan and elsewhere. [...]
Both the Ansar al-Sunnah Army and the Mujahideen Shura Council - an alliance that includes Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda-affiliated group - are suspected of perpetrating the attack. Both groups have insurgents operating in Samarra, and have claimed responsibility for attacks against US and Iraqi forces there in recent weeks. No group has claimed responsibility for the Samarra attack.
Given that the sensibilities of both Shi'ites and Sunnis have been violated by the attack, the foreign factor in the Iraqi resistance could be curtailed.
At the same time, escalating sectarian strife will hamper the national resistance movement in cities such as Basra in the south and Baghdad, which have strong Shi'ite populations. People in these areas could quickly turn against what is perceived as a largely Sunni-led resistance, with a strong al-Qaeda link.
Blast at Shiite Shrine Sets Off Sectarian Fury in Iraq (ROBERT F. WORTH, 2/23/06, NY Times)
A powerful bomb shattered the golden dome at one of Iraq's most revered Shiite shrines on Wednesday morning, setting off a day of sectarian fury in which mobs formed across Iraq to chant for revenge and attacked dozens of Sunni mosques.The bombing, at the Askariya Shrine in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad, wounded no one but left the famous golden dome at the site in ruins. The shrine is central to one of the most dearly held beliefs of Shiite Islam, and the bombing, coming after two days of bloody attacks that have left dozens of Shiite civilians dead, ignited a nationwide outpouring of rage and panic that seemed to bring Iraq closer than ever to outright civil war.
Shiite militia members flooded the streets of Baghdad, firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns at Sunni mosques while Iraqi Army soldiers who had been called out to stop the violence stood helpless nearby. By the day's end, mobs had struck or destroyed 27 Sunni mosques in the capital, killing three imams and kidnapping a fourth, Interior Ministry officials said. In all, at least 15 people were killed in related violence across the country.
Thousands of grief-stricken people in Samarra crowded into the shrine's courtyard after the bombing, some weeping and kissing the fallen stones, others angrily chanting, "Our blood and souls we sacrifice for you, imams!"
Iraq's major political and religious leaders issued urgent appeals for restraint, and Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari called for a three-day mourning period in a televised address. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric, released an unusually strong statement in which he said, "If the government's security forces cannot provide the necessary protection, the believers will do it."
Iran's Gift: New Unity In the West (Jim Hoagland, February 23, 2006, Washington Post)
The fog of negotiation is not for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He prefers to confront the United States and Europe directly over Iran's nuclear and political ambitions. The ex-mayor of Tehran thus sets history's tectonic plates moving faster toward a new era of global conflict.Two visible changes suggest how far-reaching this conflict is becoming: First, Europeans, not Americans, are the primary immediate targets of Iran's recent gauntlet-hurling. Second, the Europeans are tossing the gauntlets back at Ahmadinejad.
The Iranian firebrand seems to believe that intimidating Britain, France and Germany provides a surer path to nuclear weapons, hegemony over Iraq and the destruction of Israel than did the softer-shoe approach of his ayatollah predecessors. Ahmadinejad is the gift to President Bush's diplomats that keeps on giving.
INDEPENDENCE FOR BLACKS IS THE END OF BLUE:
"Republicans for Black Empowerment Announces it's Creation"
During this month of February, commemorating black history, thousands of political activists take great pleasure in celebrating the return of an increasing number of African-Americans to their political home, the Republican Party.In the same spirit, Republicans for Black Empowerment, after several months of communicating and rapidly growing into a viable network recently became an official organization, creating its Executive Committee on January 17, 2006.
Before the 2004 presidential elections, through the wonders of the Internet, activists from across the country began sharing ideas on how to encourage blacks to join the GOP and relating their own experiences within the Republican Party.
Republicans for Black Empowerment will strive to offer an association for independent minds whose primary mission is to liberate African-Americans from an ideology that over four decades has restricted their economic and political progress.
Among the major goals of Republicans for Black Empowerment are to provide cohesion for conservative thinking people and educate the black community to the political virtues of free enterprise, limited government and personal responsibility.
Its expanding coalition of grassroots activists will advocate for federal policies to reduce black dependency on government and protect traditional family values. Republicans for Black Empowerment plans to seek and support the candidacy of individuals who adopt these ideals.
Since education will be paramount to achieving these goals, Republicans for Black Empowerment will periodically convene public forums across the country to inform the black community of proposed legislation affecting their lives. The organization will also aggressively mentor young people by starting College Republican chapters at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
Visit the website of Republicans for Black Empowerment for more information:
http://www.theblackgop.com
FROM LUNACY TO TRUISM:
Smile if (and Only if) You're Conservative (George F. Will, February 23, 2006, Washington Post)
[O]ne cannot -- yet -- be prosecuted for committing theory without a license, so consider a few explanations of the happiness gap.Begin with a paradox: Conservatives are happier than liberals because they are more pessimistic. Conservatives think the Book of Job got it right ("Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward"), as did Adam Smith ("There is a great deal of ruin in a nation"). Conservatives understand that society in its complexity resembles a giant Calder mobile -- touch it here and things jiggle there, and there, and way over there. Hence conservatives acknowledge the Law of Unintended Consequences, which is: The unintended consequences of bold government undertakings are apt to be larger than, and contrary to, the intended ones.
Conservatives' pessimism is conducive to their happiness in three ways. First, they are rarely surprised -- they are right more often than not about the course of events. Second, when they are wrong, they are happy to be so. Third, because pessimistic conservatives put not their faith in princes -- government -- they accept that happiness is a function of fending for oneself. They believe that happiness is an activity -- it is inseparable from the pursuit of happiness.
The right to pursue happiness is the essential right that government exists to protect. Liberals, taking their bearings, whether they know it or not, from President Franklin Roosevelt's 1936 State of the Union address, think the attainment of happiness itself, understood in terms of security and material well-being, is an entitlement that government has created and can deliver.
Geez, no one even argues the point anymore.
MORE:
The devil's sourdough and the decline of nations (Spengler, 2/22/06, Asia Times)
"The personal is political," said the feminists of the 1960s. They were on to something. Countries go to war because those who inhabit them cannot bear their individual lives. Entire cultures die out because the individuals who comprise them no longer wish to live, not because (as author Jared Diamond claims) they cut down too many trees. Bulgaria and Belarus have plenty of trees, yet we observe in such countries a demographic catastrophe unseen in Europe since the Thirty Years' War.What is it that makes life livable? And why should life be bearable in some nations but not in others? Unlike Sigmund Freud, I do not think mankind suffers from a universal death wish, any more than it benefits from a universal instinct for self-preservation. Some people have a death wish, and others don't. Considering how disappointing life can be, and how hard it is to credit divine justice in the face of so much suffering, it is not surprising that so many peoples fail of their will to live. It is hard to digest the ancient sourdough, as Mephisto told Faust. More remarkable is that some nations remain cheerful about life notwithstanding.
Birth rates rise and fall with religious faith (see Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003, and Death by secularism: Some statistical evidence , August 2, 2005). People do not have babies because religious doctrine instructs them to procreate, though, but because religion makes them happy. With the end of traditional society, religion becomes a personal, not a communal, matter, and the fate of nations is fought out at the level of individual souls. Communism suppressed religion in Eastern Europe, and the demographic data in consequence seem to bear out the cliche of the melancholy Slav. By mid-century most of the Eastern European countries will lose 20-40% of their people and be left with a geriatric remnant.
US Christians, by contrast, have one of the highest birth rates in the West. Conservative, mostly evangelical Christians have a plurality, soon to be a majority, in US politics (see Power and the evangelical womb, November 9, 2004, and It's the culture, stupid , November 5, 2004). Their burgeoning power stems from a personal message that has made converts of tens of millions of liberal Protestants. Evangelicals are political only when circumstances force them into politics, for example proposals in several US states to legalize same-sex marriage. Their identification with Israel has drawn them into foreign policy.
Who will begrudge the unhappy secular Left its decision to die off?
PUT DOWN THE CAPE, KID:
Ames Gives Woods Wrong Kind of Pep Talk (Leonard Shapiro, 2/23/06, Washington Post)
It's never a good idea to provoke Tiger Woods, even with a seemingly innocent remark.Stephen Ames learned that lesson the hardest way possible on Wednesday, absorbing a 9-and-8 first-round drubbing, the worst loss in the eight-year history of the World Match Play Championship at La Costa.
On Tuesday, Ames, the lowest-seeded player in the elite 64-man event, told reporters that, "anything can happen, especially where he's hitting the ball," referring to Woods's recently somewhat erratic driving. [...]
Afterward, Woods smiled ever so slightly and said he had been aware of Ames' comment. When someone wondered about his reaction to it, the smile was gone when he answered, "9 and 8."
GREEN CARDS TO GREEN STUFF:
Nebraska Meatpacking Workers Claim Jackpot (Associated Press, February 23, 2006)
Eight workers at a Nebraska meatpacking plant are really bringing home the bacon now: They stepped forward Wednesday to claim the biggest lottery jackpot in U.S. history -- $365 million.The seven men and one woman bought the winning Powerball ticket at a convenience store near the ConAgra ham-processing plant where they worked. At least three of the winners are immigrants -- two from Vietnam and one from the Congo Republic.
"This is great country!" said Quang Dao, 56, who came to the United States in 1988.
He demonstrates that, not his winnings.
THE ECONOCONS WILL RECOGNIZE THE DANGER SECOND:
Good for America (James K. Glassman, 23 Feb 2006, Tech Central Station)
Just last week, the shareholders of P&O, that venerable relic of the British Empire, agreed to sell their company to a group called Dubai Ports World, for $6.8 billion. DP World won a bidding war with another company from a developing country, Temasek Holdings of Singapore.Pacific & Oriental Steam Navigation was created in the 1830s and, by 1868, had the largest steamship fleet in the world. But the days of Kipling and Maugham (who, by the way, wrote a wonderful short story called "P&O") are over. Today, four-fifths of P&O's revenues come not from ships but from ports.
The irony is that, while the British understand that empire has given way to globalization, many Americans -- especially protectionist politicians like Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and xenophobic TV hosts like Lou Dobbs -- do not.
As a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, the congressional leadership will yield when business starts complaining about their proposed intervention in a private business deal overseas.
PLAYING A BAD HAND:
Concession averts CUPE strike (KERRY GILLESPIE, 2/23/06, Toronto Star)
In the end, it took a very small concession to clinch a deal and avert a province-wide strike of more than 100,000 civil servants.All the government had to do was agree to review its pension reform legislation by 2012 for Sid Ryan to call off today's Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) strike.
"It's a vindication for my members putting on the fight that they did," Ryan, CUPE Ontario president, said last night.
But in reaching a deal, the government did not waver from its refusal to change pension reform legislation in the face of an illegal strike threat.
Should have fired them before they could fold.
February 22, 2006
NOT MUCH OF AN INNOVATOR, BUT HE KNEW GOLD WHEN HE SAW IT (via Pepys):
The Bush Legacy: President Bush will likely be remembered as an innovator whose ideas just didn't pan out in the end. (Matthew Yglesias, 02.22.06 , American Prospect)
The interesting question is not whether Bush has a higher commitment to his career than to conservatism -- all presidents do -- but why Bush's opportunistic instincts have rendered him, if not more liberal, than at least less conservative, than Ronald Reagan. Answering the question in detail would be difficult, but the broad answer is easy to see: Public opinion changed and became more friendly to the concept of activist government. Bush's immediate predecessors as conservative leaders, Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, hewed much closer to the Reagan legacy and wracked themselves on the shoals of an electorate that no longer had an appetite for stern budget cutting or libertarian rhetoric. Fundamentally, most Americans agree that the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that people receive a decent education, adequate health care, and a secure retirement, and that government simply can't achieve those things with large cuts in federal spending. [...]What Bush is trying to do -- whether it be called "compassionate conservatism," "big government conservatism," "pretend conservatism" or whatever else -- is fundamentally the right direction for the Republican Party. Indeed, it's fairly common in Europe, where they call it "Christian democracy," a label that probably wouldn't fly in a United States that is simultaneously more religious and less sectarian than the Old World. He's made a hash of it, but one of these days someone will get it right.
In point of fact, on every one of these questions, George W. Bush is more conservative than Ronald Reagan or Bob Dole and not much different ideologically than Newt Gingrich, just more successful. And his successors will merely pass whatever remains to be enacted of his legacy. Where Ronald Reagan proposed no fundamental changes to education, Medicare or Social Security, George Bush has begun the voucherization of education, passed HSA's and laid the intellectual groundwork for the inevitable personalization of SS.
Not that the President deserves overmuch credit for the revolution he's leading--after all, Gingrich and Bill Clinton had already effected Welfare Reform more conservative than anything Reagan ever did and the whole panoply of Third Way reforms has been enacted in whole or in part places like Chile, New Zealand, Britain, and Australia. The thing about George W. Bush that his critics--and even his allies--generally can't grasp is that he ran on and has governed on a systematic set of ideas for transforming the relationship of the citizen to his government, one that is going to be the norm throughout at least the Anglosphere. He didn't necessarily dream it all up, but he understood it -- its functionality, its political appeal, and its inevitable nature -- more quickly and more thoroughly than did any of his political peers or predecessors and, therefore, he is going to get credit for being the conservative revolutionary in the long run.
The dirty little secret is that he's the smartest politician of his generation and maybe the smartest president we've had. That's why intellectuals, of Left and Right, hate him so.
MORE (via Mike Daley):
Haters help Howard (Andrew Bolt, 22feb06, Herald Sun)
EVERY politician has enemies. John Howard's fantastic luck in his decade as Prime Minister is that these are his.Look at them -- shrill artists, damn-Australia mandarins, group-think academics, stuff-you activists, sour journalists, gimme-rights ethnic bosses and the other discords of this cacophony of hate.
When Howard on March 2 celebrates his 10th anniversary in power, he owes these yammerers, now almost toxic with impotence, a silent prayer of thanks.
For they have helped him to win four elections by demonstrating a truth few non-politicians know and even fewer politicians dare to exploit: that your enemies advertise your strengths better than can your friends.
They're not likely capable of it, but those partisans who hate[d] Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Howard, Tony Blair, and George W. Bush ought to consider how alike the politics of the group is and how disimilar those who hate each. When the most successful leaders of the past thirty years are all singing from the same songbook, you might try listening.
POLITICS IS TRANSITORY, THE MONARCHY ETERNAL:
Politicians never learn anything, laments Charles (Caroline Davies, 23/02/2006, Daily Telegraph)
"But they are all in such a hurry, so never really learn about anything. Then they take decisions based on market research and focus groups, on the papers produced by advisers and civil servants, none of whom will have experienced what it is they are taking decisions about."
YET HE ACTED LIKE IT SIGNALLED INFLATION:
Gold sales hit record as India piles up the jewellery (Tom Bawden, 2/23/06, Times of London)
GOLD sales soared to a record $53.6 billion (£30.7 billion) last year as a weak dollar, concern about terrorism and rapid expansion in India diverted investment away from shares and bonds.The rise was revealed two weeks after Alan Greenspan blamed terrorism for pushing the price of gold beyond its underlying strength as a commodity, in his first private sector speech since stepping down as chairman of the US Federal Reserve.
Jewellery accounts for about three quarters of gold sales and last year’s rise in total gold revenues was driven by a 25 per cent increase in sales relating to Indian jewellery.
India now accounts for 23 per cent of global “consumer” gold sales — jewellery, medals, bars and investment funds — by volume, followed by America at 12 per cent.
Gold is used extensively in India, where it is seen as an important adornment for women as well as being a status symbol. Growth in India’s economy in the past 13 years has created a vast, relatively wealthy middle class increasingly keen to spend its extra income on gold as its rising price boosts its appeal as an investment.
GOOD ENOUGH FOR MAGGIE & J.K. ROWLING:
Why the switch to metric could be olympic task (Ben Webster, 2/23/06, Times of London)
BRITAIN must convert all road signs to metric in time for the 2012 Olympics or risk being seen as a backward nation clinging to an awkward and outmoded measurement system, according to a report published today.
As backwards as the world's most advanced country anyway.
FLAT...ROUND...FLAT:
President Addresses Asia Society, Discusses India and Pakistan (George W. Bush, Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Washington, D.C., 2/22/06)
Thank you all. Madam President -- it's got a nice ring to it. (Laughter.) Thank you for your kind introduction; thank you for inviting me here. I'm honored to be here with the members of the Asia Society as you celebrate your 50th anniversary.I came here today to talk about America's relationship with two key nations in Asia: India and Pakistan. These nations are undergoing great changes, and those changes are being felt all across the world. More than five centuries ago, Christopher Columbus set out for India and proved the world was round. Now some look at India's growing economy and say that that proves that the world is flat. (Laughter.) No matter how you look at the world, our relationship with these countries are important. They're important for our economic security, and they're important for our national security.
I look forward to meeting with Prime Minister Singh in India, and President Musharraf in Pakistan. We will discuss ways that our nations can work together to make our world safer and more prosperous by fighting terrorism, advancing democracy, expanding free and fair trade, and meeting our common energy needs in a responsible way.
I appreciate Ambassador Holbrooke. I appreciate your service to our country. Thanks for being the Chairman of the Asia Society. Leo Daly is the Chairman of the Asia Society of Washington. Leo, thank you. It's good to see you. I appreciate the members of the Diplomatic Corps that have joined us today, in particular, Ambassador Sen from India, and Ambassador Karamat from Pakistan. Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedules to come and here the President give a talk.
Fifty years ago, many Asian nations were still colonies; today, Asians are in charge of their own destinies. Fifty years ago, there were only a handful of democracies in Asia; today there are nearly a dozen. Fifty years ago, most of Asia was mired in hopeless poverty; today its economies are engines of prosperity. These changes have been dramatic, and as the Asian continent grows in freedom and opportunity, it will be a source of peace and stability and prosperity for all the world.
The transformation of Asia is beginning to improve the lives of citizens in India and Pakistan, and the United States welcomes this development. The United States has not always enjoyed close relations with Pakistan and India. In the past, the Cold War and regional tensions kept us apart, but today, our interests and values are bringing us closer together. We share a common interest in promoting open economies that creates jobs and opportunities for our people. We have acted on common values to deliver compassionate assistance to people who have been devastated by natural disasters. And we face a common threat in Islamic extremism. Today I'm going to discuss America's long-term interests and goals in this important