ALL ABOUT CITIZENS RUNNING THEIR OWN STATES:

Middle East hot spots merging: The recent trips by President Bush and Secretary Rice signal a US push for a holistic, regional solution. (Joshua Mitnick, 12/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

A growing number of observers - most notably British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Jordan's King Abdullah - have advocated that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would boost stability. But others say the rise of radical Islam, Iran's push to become a nuclear and regional power, and the US initiative to promote democracy have created a complex web of forces that contribute to conflicts around the Middle East. [...]

President Bush said Thursday the US will speed a turnover of security responsibility to Iraqi forces but assured Mr. Maliki that Washington is not looking for a "graceful exit" from a war well into its fourth year. "One of his frustrations with me is that he believes that we've been slow about giving him the tools necessary to protect the Iraqi people," Bush said. "He doesn't have the capacity to respond. So we want to accelerate that capacity."

THIRTY WASTED YEARS:

On road to clean fuels, automakers cover some ground (Daniel B. Wood, 12/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

More than any time since the early '70s, automakers are thinking and designing "green," say many industry analysts. The trend is not moving as fast as environmental activists or most climate scientists would like - as protests here make clear - but it also may not be as slow as some critics claim.

Electric vehicles, gasoline-electric hybrids, diesels, and flex-fuel and hydrogen-powered cars are inching up the consumer on-ramp at a faster pace, judging from world debuts of 21 alternative-fuel vehicles.

AS "AUTISM" BECOMES "SPECIES":

How Many Kids Have Autism? (Carl Bialik, November 30, 2006, Wall Street Journal)

How important is it to accurately count the number of children with autism? Does the one-in-166 number seem too high, or too low, or accurate? Do you generally believe statistics on the number of people suffering from conditions? Do such numbers affect your opinions?

Autism experts told me that research broadly supports the estimate -- with two major caveats. Those caveats help explain why the stat, while alarming, doesn't support related claims by some advocates: that autism cases have been mushrooming with "epidemic speed," and that more than one million Americans have autism.

First, the stat comes from figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based on a review of several studies that came up with estimates. But the CDC was careful to point out that the studies produced a wide range of results. Indeed, the headline-grabbing number focuses on the worst-case scenario: The CDC said the number of children with autism was somewhere between one in 500 and one in 166.

Second, the numbers take into account a relatively modern definition of autism that includes a full range of disorders. The changing definition of autism has played a major role in influencing statistics.

MY MATH'S NOT SO GOOD....

Michigan man gets 3rd successful U.S. hand transplant (CNN, November 30, 2006)
..but two seems plenty.

THAT'S NOT HOW IT LOOKS FROM MY ARMCHAIR...:

Will the real Ramadi please stand up? (Michael Fumento, 11/30/06)

"The U.S. military is no longer able to defeat a bloody insurgency in western Iraq [Al Anbar Province] or counter al Qaeda's rising popularity there, according to newly disclosed details from a classified Marine Corps intelligence report," began a front-page article in yesterday's Washington Post by Dafna Linzer and Thomas E. Ricks. It concerned the so-called "Devlin Report," a five-page document allegedly filled with gloom and doom. It contrasts completely with my article Return to Ramadi, in the Nov. 27 Weekly Standard, in which I write that the largest city in the province is slowly being reclaimed from al Qaeda. By coincidence, the day my article hit the stands the Times of London published an extensive article coming to the same conclusion as mine. But for the timing, you'd practically think one of us had plagiarized the other.

Why such different conclusions between our articles and the Post's and whom to believe?

It helps to know that the Times writer and I both went to and reported from Ramadi. We didn't summarize classified documents or quote unnamed sources. Linzer and Ricks stayed home and reported from Washington, relying entirely on an unpublished document in addition to quoting a "senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity."

HELPED IMMEASURABLY THAT THE RIGHT JOINED THEIR ATTACK (via Bradley Schwartze):

Medicare Part D (Michael Barone, 11/30/06, US News)

It was an article of faith with Democratic politicians and political consultants that seniors would be dissatisfied with Part D. They would find the array of choices too complicated and hard to figure out. They would be angry at the "doughnut hole"–the fact that out-of-pocket drug costs from $2,250 to $3,600 are not covered. But it turns out that seniors, even if not as Internet-savvy as the rest of the population, were able to deal with the array of choices and were able to find plans they liked. There are even insurance policies available that cover the doughnut hole. Choice and competition turn out to work better, and more inexpensively, than centralized command and control. Don't take my word for it; the Post quotes a leading Democratic policy analyst:

Urban Institute President Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called that a remarkable record for a new federal program.

Initially, he said, people were worried no private plans would participate.

"Then too many plans came forward," Reischauer said. "Then people said it's going to cost a fortune. And the price came in lower than anybody thought. Then people like me said they're low-balling the prices the first year and they'll jack up the rates down the line. And, lo and behold, the prices fell again. And the reaction was, 'We've got to have the government negotiate lower prices.' At some point you have to ask: What are we looking for here?"

All of this is vindication for the people who in 2003 put Part D together–especially outgoing House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas and Thomas Scully, then head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Medicare-regulating agency–and for those who got Part D up and running: Mark McClellan, who recently resigned as head of CMS, and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. And it's a vindication of the Bush administration and the House and Senate Republican leaders who put together the just barely successful campaign to pass the 2003 Part D bill.

Interestingly, the Post notes that a couple of leading Democrats on healthcare issues, incoming health subcommittee Chairman Pete Stark and incoming Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, don't seem to be interested in the kind of sweeping changes Democrats called for during the campaign.

OR MAYBE WE WON'T EVER LEARN ANYTHING THEY DIDN'T ALREADY KNOW (via Brian Boys):

Ancient Moon 'computer' revisited: The delicate workings at the heart of a 2,000-year-old analogue computer have been revealed by scientists. (Jonathan Fildes, 11/30/06, BBC News)

The Antikythera Mechanism, discovered more than 100 years ago in a Roman shipwreck, was used by ancient Greeks to display astronomical cycles.

Using advanced imaging techniques, an Anglo-Greek team probed the remaining fragments of the complex geared device.

The results, published in the journal Nature, show it could have been used to predict solar and lunar eclipses.

The elaborate arrangement of bronze gears may also have displayed planetary information.

"This is as important for technology as the Acropolis is for architecture," said Professor John Seiradakis of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, and one of the team. "It is a unique device."

THE PARTY'S PAST VS. ITS FUTURE:

GOP Rep. Calls Miami 'Third World Country' (CBS/AP, 11/30/06)

[Gov. Jeb Bush], who plans to move to Miami after vacating the governor's office, said in his letter, said Tancredo's comments were "disappointing" and "naïve."

"Miami is a wonderful city filled with diversity and heritage that we choose to celebrate, not insult," Bush said.

MIGHT HAVE HAD THE MEETING OF THE MINDS A COUPLE YEARS AGO, BUT...:

U.S., Iraq Unified On Way-Forward Policy, Spokesmen Say (Gerry J. Gilmore, 11/30/06, American Forces Press Service)

Today’s meeting between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Amman, Jordan, was historic and demonstrated the two leaders’ accord on how to move forward in Iraq, a senior U.S. military officer told reporters at a Baghdad news conference today.

The two senior leaders had a very productive talk on how to best address the current security situation in Iraq, Army Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman, told Ali al-Dabbagh, a senior Iraqi government official who accompanied the general to the briefing. [...]

Bush and Maliki agreed to speed up the transfer of authority and responsibility for security matters in Iraq to the country’s government and its military and police forces, Caldwell said.

Dabbagh echoed Caldwell’s comments, saying Maliki’s meeting with Bush “paints the horizons of relations between Iraq and the United States.”

The Iraqi official added that his government “will make an all-out review for the security situation in Iraq and take necessary steps in order to make Iraqi security forces enabled to hold (increased) responsibilities.”

In addition, Dabbagh said, Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi recently met with Jordan’s King Abdullah, and discussed the mutual desirability of countries bordering Iraq to have a positive influence on the country’s internal affairs.

UNILATERALISM:

Marie Antoinette Pelosi? (Paul Bedard, 11/30/06, US News)

Looks like the Republicans in the House aren't planning to play nice-nice with the Democrats after all. The emerging House Republican plan on how to address the new Democratic majority is turning toward an aggressive effort to portray Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi and her team as out of touch and liberal.

"Come January, we'll take her head off every day," said a top GOP aide involved in the planning. "It will be a pure war of ideas over the next two years."

Leading the battle with be incoming House Minority Leader John Boehner and his conservative team. Insiders say that the goal is to pick at Democratic initiatives as pro-tax, pro-spending, or unworkable.

"We are going to re-establish that we are the party of ideas, that they got elected in a fluke, and we're going to make that known every day, every way," said the official.

HE'S THERE TOO, NO?:

Pope turns to Mecca at Istanbul (AFP, December 01, 2006)

AFTER offending the Muslim world by linking their religion with violence, Pope Benedict XVI, in an exceptional gesture, turned towards Mecca in an attitude of Muslim prayer at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul today, Turkish state television showed.

Benedict XVI, who became the second Pope in history - after John Paul II in Damascus in 2001 - to set foot in a Muslim house of worship, made the gesture at the suggestion of Istanbul Mufti Mustafa Cagrici, his guide for the occasion.

MORE:
Pope's outreach eases Muslim wariness: In Turkey, Pope Benedict XVI supported Turkey's bid to enter the European Union and visited a key mosque. (Scott Peterson, 12/01/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Throughout his days here, the pope has chosen language that appeals to Turks' deep sense of nationalism - this "noble land" and it's "glorious past," he said, yielded a "great modern state" - and its aspiration to be seen as equal to European nations.

Coupled with effusive papal praise of Islam, by which Turkey presided over a "remarkable flowering of Islamic civilization," the pope's attempt to prove his "great esteem for Muslims" has had some effect on a skeptical public.

REMEMBER BACK WHEN THEY WERE THE PEOPLE OF THE LAW?:

Much Lies Beyond the Grasp of Arrogant Atheism (David Klinghoffer, Nov 24, 2006, The Forward)

I’m no longer surprised by the cluelessness of Jewish educational institutions. Thus a friend studying at a certain Orthodox-affiliated college emailed me this week, asking for my definition of conservatism. He explained that he is taking a class in advanced psychology, the specific topic being the “authoritarian personality.”

That phrase encapsulates a highfalutin’ slur on religious and other conservatives, inspired by psychologist Robert Altemeyer. It holds that conservatism arises not from ideology, but from a personality deformation associated with “conventionalism,” “authoritarian aggression” and “authoritarian submission.” Since most of his fellow students, as Orthodox Jews, would likely rank as right-wing authoritarians on Altemeyer’s scale, my correspondent wrote with his earnest request for an outside perspective.

Interestingly, my young friend’s demanding course has exactly two required texts. One is by Altemeyer. The other is Watergate alumnus John Dean’s recent “Conservatives Without Conscience.” Dean claims that, especially on the “religious right,” conservatism has no meaningful definition but simply masks certain resentments and anxieties.

WHAT WOULD THE TONE BE?:

Soccer Fans’ Brawl Jolts French Jews (Marc Perelman, Dec 01, 2006, The Forward)

A deadly incident rife with racial and political overtones has roiled France for the past week and heightened a sense of siege among the country’s 600,000-strong Jewish community.

On November 23, a fan of the Paris Saint-Germain soccer team was shot and killed and another fan was seriously wounded by a plainclothes police officer who was rescuing a French Jew after a game between Paris and an Israeli team, Hapoel Tel Aviv.

The prosecutor in charge of the case said that the policeman, who is black, probably acted in self-defense to protect himself and the Jewish fan, Yanniv Hazout, from a group of a dozen enraged Paris supporters near the stadium after the game, which the Israeli team won 4-2.

HE'S GOTTA BE ILLUMINATI:

Flak: Richards Not a Jew, Just Jewish (Dan Levin, Dec 01, 2006, The Forward)

According to witnesses, Richards yelled anti-Jewish vitriol toward an audience member, saying: “You’re a f***ing Jew. Your people are the cause of Jesus dying.” [...]

“He is Jewish and he said, ‘I’m absolutely not anti-Semitic,’” the Post quoted [damage-control guru Howard Rubenstein] as having said. “He acknowledged that he said those things. He said that he was role-playing and playing a character. He said, ‘There is no way I’m anti-Jewish.’”

Trouble is, Richards, in fact, is not Jewish. An article published last week in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal quoted an unnamed television director as saying that the actor was raised Catholic and is “very involved in the Masons.”

Faced with evidence that Richards is not Jewish, Rubenstein hedged.

“He said to me he has adopted the Jewish religion as his belief, but he wasn’t born Jewish,” Rubenstein said, adding that while Richards does not practice Judaism, he has had some “Jewish advisers” in the past.

F'EM, THEY VOTE FOR US ANYWAY:

Jewish Groups To Challenge Ethics Reform (Nathan Guttman, Dec 01, 2006, The Forward)

Two of America’s most influential Jewish organizations are gearing up for their first direct confrontation with the incoming, Democratic-led Congress. The topic: Democratic proposals for congressional ethics and lobbying reform.

At issue are two key congressional perks, targeted for elimination, that Jewish organizations rely on to achieve community goals: overseas junkets, including dozens of trips to Israel each year, funded by Jewish organizations; and an estimated $25 million a year in earmarked funds for Jewish communal projects. Both the trips and the earmarked funding face possible elimination as part of the Democrats’ pledge to fight corruption on Capitol Hill.

Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi has said she plans to bring up the ethics reform legislation “within the first 100 hours of the 110th Congress,” which will begin its session in January 2007. Activists with several Jewish and pro-Israel groups said they will be working in the coming weeks to head off or soften the specific measures they fear most.

IT WAS UNREQUITED ANYWAY:

Costly fuel cools Americans' love for cars (Bruce Nichols , 11/30/06, Reuters)

High gasoline prices not only slowed fuel demand growth and cut sales of gas-guzzling vehicles in 2005, they also prompted Americans to drive less for the first time in 25 years, a consulting group said in a report Thursday.

GOD MADE NO BAD ONES:

Mashing matters: For standout spuds, you've got to master the technique (Kate Shatzkin, Baltimore Sun)

Baltimore International College chef instructor Greg Wentz weighs in with some timely tips. He says you should start by choosing the right potatoes. The higher the starch, the better they mash, he says, so look for russets, Yukon golds or fingerling potatoes if you want a smooth finish. If you prefer a chunkier, smashed version with peels on, lower-starch red potatoes work well and add color to the dish.

Look for potatoes that are consistent in size, and chop them in a large dice so they will cook uniformly. Bring cooking water to a gentle, not rapid, boil and cook until potatoes are tender but still hold their shape. When you add milk, butter or cream, it should be hot; cold liquid can make your potatoes gummy.

For smooth potatoes, you can use a hand masher or a mixer. Wentz suggests using a flat-topped potato masher with a plastic head so you can mash the drained potatoes right in the cooking pan. That way, you'll have a more immediate sense of when you've worked the potatoes enough. For a chunkier dish, a mixer can work well, too, but in either case remember that thoroughly cooked potatoes need to be mixed for only a short time.

THE OTHER MISTAKE...:

The Best Minor League Defenders (Jeff Sackmann, 11/30/06, Baseball Analysts)

Prospect analysis has always been one of the most contentious issues in the "stats vs. scouts" debates. However, for all the breakthroughs in statistical techniques, analysts have almost always had to rely on scouting to assign a value to the defensive contribution of a young player.

No longer. Through its website, Minor League Baseball has made available a play-by-play log of every game played in the affiliated minors, complete with some batted-ball information. A person with enough time, desire, and misdirected energy can track every ball that was pitched, hit, or caught by a bush leaguer in 2006.

For pitching and hitting, there's MinorLeagueSplits.com. We can turn our attention, then, to fielding. Using a statistic called Range, I came up with plus/minus ratings for every 2B, 3B, SS, and OF in the minors. (For more information on how Range is calculated, here's David Gassko's introduction to his creation.) [...]

Center Field

Player Level Org IP PAA PAA/150
Jacoby Ellsbury A+/AA Bos 914 44 65
Justin Upton A Ari 918.3 32 47
Brent Johnson A+ Sea 847.3 28 45
Dustin Majewski A+/AA Tor 856 28 44
Tony Gwynn Jr. AAA Mil 812.7 26 44
Antoan Richardson A Sfg 1000.7 29 39
Chris Amador A+/AA Chw 805.7 23 39
Sam Fuld A+ Chc 734 21 38
Yordany Ramirez A+ Sdp 638.7 17 37
Matt Young A+ Atl 747 20 36

I can't wait to work out MLB equivalents for these; if Ellsbury's true talent level is even half of his 2006 PAA/150, he could be one of the best defensive centerfielders in baseball right now. It's tough to get quite so excited about Justin Upton just yet, but Diamondbacks fans who would like to see him stick in center have to be encouraged by his ranking here.

CONSERVATIVE CONSERVATIONISM:

Report: Conservation efforts offset land lost to sprawl (Patrick O'Driscoll, 11/30/06, USA TODAY)

The National Land Trust Census, conducted every five years by an umbrella organization for land conservation groups, says private land under protective trusts and easements now total 37 million acres, a 54% increase from the last count in 2000.

Conservation of private land from 2000 to 2005 averaged 2.6 million acres a year — about half the size of New Jersey, according to the Land Trust Alliance, which represents 1,200 of the USA's 1,667 local, state and national land trusts.

This means additional land protected each year exceeds the 2.2 million acres that the Agriculture Department has estimated is converted annually to "developed land."

WINNING THE CULTURE WAR:

Half in New Health Plans Want to Switch, Poll Shows (Christopher Lee, 11/30/06, Washington Post)

The survey of 1,389 people by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71 percent of those in the new "consumer-directed health plans" said the policies prompted them to consider cost when seeking health care, compared with 49 percent of those with more traditional employer-sponsored coverage.

For instance, people in the new plans were more likely to ask about the cost of a doctor's visit and inquire about the availability of lower-cost alternatives in treatments and tests. More than half, 55 percent, who sought care said the new plans have changed their approach to using health care.

Such findings are in line with assertions by the Bush administration and other advocates who say that the new plans will check spiraling health-care spending by giving consumers a financial incentive to shop around for the best care at a reasonable price -- and to get only the care they need.

"It's a cultural shift," said Devon Herrick, a health economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas. "When you go to Wal-Mart you don't have to ask about price -- it's right there next to the good or service you are buying. Health care is not there yet, but it's getting that way. This is the early stages. We have the incentives to get people more responsible and asking about price."

In contrast with other plans that typically require $15 or $20 co-payments for visits to the doctor, the new plans can require consumers to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money for medications, physicians' services and hospital care before most coverage kicks in. The plans have high annual deductibles, but their premiums tend to be lower.

MAYBE WE DID LEARN SOMETHING FROM VIETNAM:

Study Group to Call for Pullback (Thomas E. Ricks and Robin Wright, 11/30/06, Washington Post)

Under the recommendations of the commission, led by former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), the emphasis of the U.S. military presence in Iraq would shift from fighting the insurgency and containing sectarian violence to backing up Iraqi security forces dealing with those problems.

This approach would place less emphasis on combat operations and more on logistics, intelligence and training and advising Iraqi units. Also, a large residual combat force would be required to protect all the personnel involved in those operations and to provide a security guarantee to the Iraqi government.

Thus, even if the combat forces were withdrawn, the person familiar with the group's thinking noted, the recommendation envisions keeping in Iraq a "substantial" U.S. military force.

Some people knowledgeable about the group's deliberations said it might be possible in a year or two to halve the U.S. military presence, to about 70,000 troops. Earlier reports that said that the group simply had decided to call for withdrawing combat forces from Iraq were "garbled," the source familiar with the panel's recommendations added. "It wasn't as specific as that, and it was a lot more conditional," he said. He declined to discuss those conditions.

"We reached a consensus, which in itself is remarkable," said another source close to the 10-member panel of prominent Republicans and Democrats. Divisions had been deep in the run-up to this week's final deliberations.

The findings dovetail with recommendations being considered by the military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, who are conducting their own review of Iraq policy. That group is leaning toward an option that involves a brief surge of troops in Iraq, followed by a partial drawdown and a shift from combat operations to training and advising, according to sources familiar with the process. Troops would remain in Iraq for five to 10 years under this option, which is known within the military as "go long."

President Bush said Thursday the United States will speed a turnover of security responsibility to Iraqi forces but assured Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that Washington is not looking for a "graceful exit" from a war well into its fourth violent year.

IT'S NOT AS IF ANYONE TOOK THEM SERIOUSLY:

Democrats Reject Key 9/11 Panel Suggestion (Jonathan Weisman, November 30, 2006, Washington Post)

It was a solemn pledge, repeated by Democratic leaders and candidates over and over: If elected to the majority in Congress, Democrats would implement all of the recommendations of the bipartisan commission that examined the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But with control of Congress now secured, Democratic leaders have decided for now against implementing the one measure that would affect them most directly: a wholesale reorganization of Congress to improve oversight and funding of the nation's intelligence agencies.

AREN'T BRITS ENTITLED TO HAVE A LEFT WING PARTY?:

The cost of privatisation will haunt us for years to come: New Labour's aversion to borrowing to invest is driven by corporate siren voices. It is time to ditch this irrational dogma (Kelvin Hopkins, November 30, 2006, The Guardian)

If Labour is to win the next general election a major change of direction across a wide range of policies is now vital. Simply changing the names on the doors in Downing Street will do nothing to dig the party out of its current depression, nor revive the enthusiasm of the millions of Labour voters yearning for that fundamental break with Thatcherism they expected in 1997.

Beyond the Iraq war, nothing has dismayed Labour supporters more than the government's relentless determination to privatise public services.

When New Labour was in opposition, it adopted a progressive stance on questions of crime and punishment. In 1993, Tony Blair famously spoke of the need to be tough, not only on crime but also "the causes of crime". When the former home secretary, Michael Howard, declared that "prison works", he was criticised for being dangerously over-simplistic.

But New Labour in office has been a very different beast. Since 1997 we have been subject to a succession of home secretaries, each wielding more reactionary policies on criminal justice than the last. New Labour's approach to criminal justice over the past decade has amounted to a crude demand that the courts lock more up people - and that they lock them up for longer. All those progressive intentions on crime and punishment have crumbled in the face of sustained hysteria whipped up by the populist press.

IT'S EVANGELICALS WHO ARE ZIONIST:

George Soros and Dangerous Political Currents (ZALMAN SHOVAL, November 30, 2006, NY Sun)

International money-manager and philanthropist George Soros hitherto has not been known as overly concerned with the fate of the Jewish state. But this now has changed — though in a somewhat perverse fashion.

As noted in The New York Sun, the Financial Times, and other news outlets, Mr. Soros is considering giving his support to a new initiative for an "influential alternative" that would be "a powerful voice to lobby for peace with the Palestinians." It could come to be seen as a counterweight to Aipac and other Jewish organizations.

For some obscure reason, there is no mention of a similar effort to create "a powerful voice" to lobby the Palestinians for peace with Israel. The insinuation is clear: The reason peace hasn't arrived isn't the Palestinians' refusal to compromise on anything or to adhere to the international "roadmap," their violation of every single agreement signed in the past, the ongoing terrorism against Israeli civilians, or even their rejection of the Jewish people's very right to a state in any part of its historic homeland — but is due to Israel's unyielding positions.

Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is using press outlets based here to appeal to "the American people," urging them to change regimes and rid themselves of "Zionist" impositions on the Bush administration.

Coming at the same time that the Bush administration is being urged by many in Washington to open up new diplomatic channels to Tehran, the letter from Mr. Ahmadinejad is laced with Old World anti-Semitism. It pushes hot-button issues like anger over Hurricane Katrina, warns newly elected Democrats to change Washington, and calls on Americans to reject President Bush and withdraw from Iraq.

WARRIORS, COME OUT AND PLAY....:

Winning Muslim hearts and minds: These wars will be won or lost not just by soldiers, spies, and policemen, but ultimately by the wider public (Michael Burleigh, 11/30/06, Daily Telegraph)

The widespread discredit into which the Left-liberal ideology of multi-culturalism has fallen should make us more, not less, cosmopolitan. This is not just a matter of recruiting people with Arabic, Dari or Urdu into the security services: we also need to expand the circle of what we take a sympathetic interest in. What happened, for example, to the 5,000 Africans maimed by al-Qa'eda bombs in 1998? Did the children blinded by flying glass get an education?

As in the Cold War we need to foster and respect cultural dissidence. This was brought home to me when I read Last Summer of Reason, whose author, Tahir Djaout, was murdered in 1993 by Algerian Islamists. Those who like pop music could try the Indonesian rock star Ahmad Dhani, whose hit Warriors of Love is a brave, moderate, Sufi challenge to the terrorists of that country. Everywhere in the Islamic world — 80 per cent of which is non-Arab — there are reasonable, cosmopolitan people who do not want, if they are Lebanese Shia, to be represented by Hizbollah or ruled by Syria, nor to have their tastes dictated by clerical zealots. Let's reach out to them, or at least create some forum where we can be reminded of their existence. So far the West's public diplomacy has been pathetic.

Rather, we lazily allow Islamist fundamentalists to equate our culture with trashy television programmes about penile implants, rather than Bach, Rubens or Mozart, Newton, Pascal or Einstein. As the philosopher Roger Scruton has written, we should be more careful about what image (and reality) of ourselves we project into more traditional societies.

Far too often we concede too much to the terrorists' vision, not only of us, but of themselves. How exactly would the caliphate of bin Laden's imaginings be governed? Hardly at all, judging by the carnage that enveloped Afghanistan under the Taliban. What precisely do the self-appointed emirs and imams know about Islam? How do you subvert the cultural supremacy of Arabic within it? Surely we should be encouraging authoritative voices that regard radical jihadists as heretics rather than kow-towing to useless so-called "community" leaders?

TANTRUM OVER, BRO?:

Pope calls divisions among Christians 'scandal to the world' (AP, 11/30/06)

Pope Benedict XVI called divisions among Christians a "scandal to the world" and recalled the faith's deep roots in Europe at a joint ceremony Thursday with the spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians at his ancient enclave.

"The divisions which exist among Christians are a scandal to the world," the pope said after joining Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I to mark the feast day of St. Andrew, who preached across Asia Minor and who tradition says ordained the first bishop of Constantinople, now called Istanbul.

The symbolism of the nearly three-hour Orthodox Liturgy was highly significant to Roman Catholics. Andrew was the brother of St. Peter, who was martyred in Rome and is considered the first pope.

CAN'TCHA FEEL THE PUNCH-DRUNK-LOVE?:

Pausing for breath: A partial Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire is underway (Economist.com, Nov 28th 2006)

There is little doubt that both Israel and the Palestinian leaders are under pressure to make some sort of change. Since its luckless escapade against Hizbullah in Lebanon this summer, Israel has seemed to be floundering. The war in Lebanon damaged Mr Olmert’s credibility and undermined his long-term plan, a unilateral withdrawal of settlements from the West Bank. Since then, shelling Gaza has failed to halt the Qassams and has not procured the release of a kidnapped Israeli soldier. Worse, it has provoked international condemnation for the slaughter of Palestinians.

On the other hand, the Israeli shelling has battered Hamas, killing some of its members and piling pressure on the movement to find its own new strategy. The various branches of the Palestinian leadership are in much the same bind as Israel. Gazans are starting to notice that the carnage they are suffering has something to do with the radicals in their midst, who insist on popping home-made tubes of explosives at Israel. Although few of these do any damage (many don’t even fly far enough to avoid falling on Gaza) they have caused outrage and despair in southern towns in Israel. Hamas, which runs the PA and whose refusal to recognise Israel has earned the PA an eight-month-long international boycott, is under growing pressure to do something, anything, to relieve the misery. Mr Abbas, the president, who is from Fatah, brokered the ceasefire with the other factions and called the Israelis to get them to agree too. He, like Mr Olmert, is eager to attract Mr Bush’s attention.

Their desperation may be enough to keep the ceasefire going.

OOPS, WRONG COUNTRY (via Bryan Francoeur):

New Congress must show courage (Lou Dobbs, 11/29/06, CNN)

Victorious Democrats will, with the opening of the 110th Congress, have a historic opportunity to right the course of a country that has been hell-bent on permitting free-trade corporatists and faith-based economics to bankrupt the nation.

As the New Year approaches, newly elected Democrats in the House and Senate will be battered by calls, even demands, to stay the course, rather than right it. And we can only hope they and their new leadership in both houses will have the courage and character to be rationalists and realists and overcome their partisan political debt to corporate America, and U.S. multinationals in particular.

DOES ANYONE EDIT SLATE?:

The N-Word: Unmentionable lessons of the midterm aftermath. (Diane McWhorter, Nov. 28, 2006, Slate)

The gist of this essay would appear to be that America is already pretty nearly Nazi Germany--as demonstrated by the fact that you're not allowed to say that in public and people are willing to persecute Islamic terrorists even though each of us might be one--but that Republicans lost the mid-term because W isn't as effective a fuhrer as we demand.

TAX AND CUT DEMOCRATS?:

We must alter Soc Sec, Rangel says (Celeste Katz, 11/29/06, NY Daily News)

Raising retirement age or reducing benefits can't be ruled out if the Social Security system is to be saved from going bust, Rep. Charles Rangel said yesterday.

"All of these things are on the table to find some way to make certain that Social Security is solvent," said Rangel, who is poised to take control of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee.

YOU CAN LIFT THE PILLOW NOW, MR. BERNANKE:

US economic growth beats forecasts (Eoin Callan and Krishna Guha, November 29 2006, Financial Times)

The US economy grew at a rate of 2.2 per cent in the third quarter, faster than previously thought, while wage growth earlier this year was revised down on Wednesday, adding to evidence that the economy is on track for a soft landing.

This picture was reinforced by the latest Fed Beige Book survey of economic conditions, which offered little sign of a deterioration in the US economy during October and early November.

BECAUSE SOME THINGS ARE JUST UNPUTUPWITHABLE (via Gene Brown):

This Christmas, Give the Gift that Keeps On Giving: Grammar. (Henry Edmondson, November 27, 2006, Townhall)

There is nothing more elegant than a well - turned phrase, a persuasive paragraph or an evocative sonnet. Without an appreciation of beauty, though, nothing is beautiful, nor is anything ugly. The moral implications of such linguistic poverty are frightening to contemplate.

What might make a nice grammatical gift for the holidays? The best books on grammar are both a delight to read and also follow the rubric "less is more." The ones to avoid take a shoehorn and cram so many rules into the text that the reader may be driven in despair to sign language. Entertaining grammar need not be an oxymoron.

In my view, until the day that James J. Kilpatrick decides to combine his weekly syndicated column "The Writers Art" into a text, we'll just have to settle for second best.

Lynne Truss's cleverly titled "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", now a classic, is out in paperback for the holidays. A Grammar Book for You and I (Oops, Me): "All the Grammar You Need to Succeed", by C. Edward Good, is as practical as it is witty.

Going on two decades, William Safire's "How Not To Write: The Essential Misrules of Grammar", is just the right size to stuff the stocking. Safire advises, "In their writing, everyone should make sure that their pronouns agree with its antecedent." My favorite this year is "The Mountain Man's Field Guide to Grammar: A fearless Adventure in Grammar, Style, and Usage." The examples fit the theme nicely. In respect to the conjunction "but", it is redundant to say, "Zeke Hatcher had no doubt but that Parker Daniels deserved to hang." Better in this case to omit the conjunction and get on with justice: "Zeke Hatcher had no doubt that Parker Daniels deserved to hang."

Finally, if your interest is more in style than in grammar, consider either the perennial favorite by Strunk and White, "The Elements of Style", and the newer contender, "Write Tight" by William Brohaugh. None of these recommendations is likely to be returned on December 26.

NATIONALISM CAN ALWAYS MAKE ROOM FOR NEW GROUPS TO HATE (via Bryan Francoeur):

Racism on the rise in Europe, new study says (Lucia Kubosova, 11/28/06, EUOBSERVER)

Although there is a lack of objective data on discrimination and racist violence in several EU member states, a new study suggests that racism has increased in Europe, particularly towards the Roma community, Muslims, Jews and immigrants. [...]

"Roma are a particular target for racist violence and crime, both at the hands of the general public and public officials. Members of the Jewish community continue to experience anti-Semitic incidents. Rising Islamophobia is an issue of particular concern," noted Anastasia Crickley, chair of the EUMC management board.

"In effect, in spite of some heartening examples of good practice, I stand here today unable to say that there has been a substantial improvement with regard to racism and xenophobia in the EU member states," she added.

Within the countries that have filed data on the issue, eight countries - Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia and UK - have recorded a rise in racist crimes or violence.

NOR DID HE RENOUNCE CHRIST:

Bush reaffirms push for Mideast democracy: His speech cited 'freedom' as region's most pressing need. (Howard LaFranchi, 11/29/06, The Christian Science Monitor

[President George W.] Bush did not use the word "stability" - the watchword of foreign-policy realists - even one time in his speech Monday. Many foreign-policy experts have speculated that in the coming months the US would shift from an emphasis on democracy to a focus on stabilizing the country - even at the cost of some individual freedoms. Leaders in the region have appeared to favor a renewed focus on stability. Notably, Jordan's King Abdullah, who will host Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for talks Wednesday and Thursday, warned earlier this week of three civil wars in the region: in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories.

While Bush did refrain from heralding Iraq as a potential beacon to other Middle Eastern countries struggling for freedom - an image he has employed in the past - he did speak of Iraq as one focal point of the 21st- century's defining struggle: freedom's battle with totalitarian extremism.

MORE:
President Bush Discusses NATO Alliance During Visit to Latvia (George W. Bush, Grand Hall Latvia University, Riga, Latvia, 11/28/06)

The most basic responsibility of this Alliance is to defend our people against the threats of a new century. We're in a long struggle against terrorists and extremists who follow a hateful ideology and seek to establish a totalitarian empire from Spain to Indonesia. We fight against the extremists who desire safe havens and are willing to kill innocents anywhere to achieve their objectives.

NATO has recognized this threat. And three years ago, NATO took an unprecedented step when it sent allied forces to defend a young democracy more than 3,000 miles from Europe. Since taking command of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, NATO has expanded it from a small force that was operating only in Kabul into a robust force that conducts security operations in all of Afghanistan. NATO is helping to train the Afghan National Army. The Alliance is operating 25 Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are helping the central government extend its reach into distant regions of that country. At this moment, all 26 NATO allies, and 11 partner nations are contributing forces to NATO's mission in Afghanistan. They're serving with courage and they are doing the vital work necessary to help this young democracy secure the peace.

We saw the effectiveness of NATO forces this summer, when NATO took charge of security operations in Southern Afghanistan from the United States. The Taliban radicals who are trying to pull down Afghanistan's democracy and regain power saw the transfer from American to NATO control as a window of opportunity to test the will of the Alliance. So the Taliban massed a large fighting force near Kandahar to face the NATO troops head on. It was a mistake. Together with the Afghan National Army, NATO forces from Canada and Denmark and the Netherlands and Britain and Australia and the United States engaged the enemy -- with operational support from Romanian, Portuguese, and Estonian forces. According to NATO commanders, allied forces fought bravely and inflicted great damage on the Taliban.

General David Richards, the British commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan, puts it this way: "There were doubts about NATO and our ability to conduct demanding security operations. There are no questions about our ability now. We've killed many hundreds of Taliban, and it has removed any doubt in anybody's mind that NATO can do what we were sent here to do."

Taliban and al Qaeda fighters, and drug traffickers and criminal elements and local warlords remain active and committed to destroying democracy in Afghanistan. Defeating them will require the full commitment of our Alliance. For NATO to succeed, its commanders on the ground must have the resources and flexibility they need to do their jobs. The Alliance was founded on a clear principle: an attack on one is an attack on all. That principle holds true whether the attack is on our home soil, or on our forces deployed on a NATO mission abroad. Today Afghanistan is NATO's most important military operation, and by standing together in Afghanistan, we'll protect our people, defend our freedom, and send a clear message to the extremists the forces of freedom and decency will prevail.

Every ally can take pride in the transformation that NATO is making possible for the people of Afghanistan. Because of our efforts, Afghanistan has gone from a totalitarian nightmare to a free nation, with an elected president, a democratic constitution, and brave soldiers and police fighting for their country.

Over 4.6 million Afghan refugees have come home. It's one of the largest return movements in history. The Afghan economy has tripled in size over the past five years. About two million girls are now in school, compared to zero under the Taliban -- and 85 women were elected or appointed to the Afghan National Assembly. A nation that was once a terrorist sanctuary has been transformed into an ally in the war on terror, led by a brave President, Hamid Karzai. Our work in Afghanistan is bringing freedom to the Afghan people, it is bringing security to the Euro-Atlantic community, and it's bringing pride to the NATO Alliance.

NATO allies are also making vital contributions to the struggle for freedom in Iraq. At this moment, a dozen NATO allies, including every one of the Baltic nations, are contributing forces to the coalition in Iraq. And 18 NATO countries plus Ukraine are contributing forces to the NATO Training Mission that is helping develop the next generation of leaders for the Iraqi Security Forces. To date, NATO has trained nearly 3,000 Iraqi personnel, including nearly 2,000 officers and civilian defense officials trained inside Iraq, plus an additional 800 Iraqis trained outside the country. NATO has also helped Iraqis stand up a new military academy near Baghdad, so Iraqis can develop their own military leaders in the years to come. And NATO has contributed $128 million in military equipment to the Iraqi military, including 77 Hungarian T-72 battle tanks. By helping to equip the Iraqi Security Forces and train the next group of Iraqi military leaders, NATO is helping the Iraqi people in the difficult work of securing their country and their freedom.

Tomorrow, I'm going to travel to Jordan where I will meet with the Prime Minister of Iraq. We will discuss the situation on the ground in his country, our ongoing efforts to transfer more responsibility to the Iraqi Security Forces, and the responsibility of other nations in the region to support the security and stability of Iraq. We'll continue to be flexible, and we'll make the changes necessary to succeed. But there's one thing I'm not going to do: I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete.

The battles in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a struggle between moderation and extremism that is unfolding across the broader Middle East. Our enemy follows a hateful ideology that rejects fundamental freedoms like the freedom to speak, to assemble, or to worship God in the way you see fit. It opposes the rights for women. Their goal is to overthrow governments and to impose their totalitarian rule on millions. They have a strategy to achieve these aims. They seek to convince America and our allies that we cannot defeat them, and that our only hope is to withdraw and abandon an entire region to their domination. The war on terror we fight today is more than a military conflict; it is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And in this struggle, we can accept nothing less than victory for our children and our grandchildren.

We see this struggle in Lebanon, where last week gunmen assassinated that country's Industry Minister, Pierre Gemayel, a prominent leader of the movement that secured Lebanon's independence last year. His murder showed once again the viciousness of those who are trying to destabilize Lebanon's young democracy. We see this struggle in Syria, where the regime allows Iranian weapons to pass through its territory into Lebanon, and provides weapons and political support to Hezbollah. We see this struggle in Iran, where a reactionary regime subjugates its proud people, arrests free trade union leaders, and uses Iran's resources to fund the spread of terror and pursue nuclear weapons. We see this struggle in the Palestinian Territories, where extremists are working to stop moderate leaders from making progress toward the vision of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

In each of these places, extremists are using terror to stop the spread of freedom. Some are Shia extremists, others are Sunni extremists -- but they represent different faces of the same threat. And if they succeed in undermining fragile democracies, and drive the forces of freedom out of the region, they will have an open field to pursue their goals. Each strain of violent Islamic radicalism would be emboldened in its efforts to gain control of states and establish new safe havens. The extremists would use oil resources to fuel their radical agenda, and to punish industrialized nations, and pursue weapons of mass destruction. Armed with nuclear weapons, they could blackmail the free world, spread their ideologies of hate, and raise a mortal threat to Europe, America, and the entire civilized world.

If we allow the extremists to do this, then 50 years from now history will look back on our time with unforgiving clarity, and demand to know why we did not act. Our Alliance has a responsibility to act. We must lift up and support the moderates and reformers who are working for change across the broader Middle East. We must bring hope to millions by strengthening young democracies from Kabul to Baghdad, to Beirut. And we must advance freedom as the great alternative to tyranny and terror.

I know some in my country, and some here in Europe, are pessimistic about the prospects of democracy and peace in the Middle East. Some doubt whether the people of that region are ready for freedom, or want it badly enough, or have the courage to overcome the forces of totalitarian extremism. I understand these doubts, but I do not share them. I believe in the universality of freedom. I believe that the people of the Middle East want their liberty. I'm impressed by the courage I see in the people across the region who are fighting for their liberty.

We see this courage in the eight million Afghans who defied terrorist threats and went to the polls to choose their leaders. We see this courage in the nearly 12 million Iraqis who refused to let the car bombers and assassins stop them from voting for the free future of their country. We see this courage in the more than one million Lebanese who voted for a free and sovereign government to rule their land. And we see this courage in citizens from Damascus to Tehran, who, like the citizens of Riga before them, keep the flame of liberty burning deep within their hearts, knowing that one day its light will shine throughout their nations.

There was a time, not so long ago, when many doubted that liberty could succeed in Europe. Here in the Baltics, many can still recall the early years of the Cold War, when freedom's victory was not so obvious or assured. In 1944, the Soviet Red Army reoccupied Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, plunging this region into nearly five decades of communist rule. In 1947, communist forces were threatening Greece and Turkey, the reconstruction of Germany was faltering, and mass starvation was setting in across Europe. In 1948, Czechoslovakia fell to communism, France and Italy were threatened by the same fate, and Berlin was blockaded on the orders of Josef Stalin. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear weapon -- and weeks later, communist forces took control in China. And in the summer of 1950, seven North Korean divisions poured across the border into South Korea, marking the start of the first direct military clash of the Cold War. All of this took place in the six years following World War II.

Yet today, six decades later, the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is no more, and the NATO Alliance is meeting in the capital of a free Latvia. Europe no longer produces armed ideologies that threaten other nations with aggression and conquest and occupation. And a continent that was for generations a source of instability and global war has become a source of stability and peace. Freedom in Europe has brought peace to Europe, and freedom has brought the power to bring peace to the broader Middle East.

Soon after I took office, I spoke to students at Warsaw University. I told them America had learned the lessons of history. I said, "No more Munichs, and no more Yaltas." I was speaking at the time about Europe, but the lessons of Yalta apply equally across the world. The question facing our nations today is this: Will we turn the fate of millions over to totalitarian extremists, and allow the enemy to impose their hateful ideology across the Middle East? Or will we stand with the forces of freedom in that part of the world, and defend the moderate majority who want a future of peace?

My country has made its choice, and so has the NATO Alliance. We refuse to give in to a pessimism that consigns millions across the Middle East to endless oppression. We understand that, ultimately, the only path to lasting peace is through the rise of lasting free societies.

Here in the Baltic region, many understand that freedom is universal and worth the struggle. During the second world war, a young girl here in Riga escaped with her family from the advancing Red Army. She fled westward, moving first to a refugee camp in Germany, and then later to Morocco, where she and her family settled for five-and-a-half years. Spending her teenage years in a Muslim nation, this Latvian girl came to understand a fundamental truth about humanity: Moms and dads in the Muslim world want the same things for their children as moms and dads here in Riga -- a future of peace, a chance to live in freedom, and the opportunity to build a better life.

Today, that Latvian girl is the leader of a free country -- the Iron Lady of the Baltics, the President of Latvia. (Applause.) And the lessons she learned growing up in Casablanca guide her as she leads her nation in this world. Here is how she put it earlier this year, in an address to a joint meeting of the United States Congress: "We know the value of freedom and feel compassion for those who are still deprived of it. Every nation on Earth is entitled to freedom," your President said. She said, "We must share the dream that some day there won't be a tyranny left anywhere in the world. We must work for this future, all of us, large and small, together."

Like your President, I believe this dream is within reach, and through the NATO Alliance, nations large and small are working together to achieve it.

We thank the people of Latvia for your contributions to NATO, and for the powerful example you set for liberty. I appreciate your hospitality at this summit. America is proud to call you friends and allies in the cause of peace and freedom. May God bless you, and may God continue to bless America. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

OOPS...HE JUST LOST ALL THE ISLAMOPHOBES AGAIN...:

From Foe to Friend in Turkey (Der Spiegel, 11/28/06)

It didn't take long for Pope Benedict XVI to transform himself from one of Turkey's worst enemies to one of the country's best friends. Already on Wednesday, the pope was being given praise for his attempts to bridge the gaps between Christians and Muslims -- and mend the fence that he crashed through in September with comments that many Muslims took to be insulting to the Prophet Muhammad. His comments on Tuesday saying that Islam was a religion of peace was well received.

But that wasn't all. The pope came bearing a surprise gift as well: support for Turkish membership in the European Union. "This trip is important for Turkey's EU membership," wrote the daily Milliyet. "This is a big warning for conservative politicians who think the EU is a Christian club."

SPEAKING OF "ADAPTATION" AND "INVASIVE":

Mystery bird from Africa graces Los Altos Hills (Lisa M. Krieger and Linda Goldston, 11/29/06, San Jose Mercury News)

Found: One East African crowned crane. Serious inquiries only.

The tall and majestic bird, 9,000 miles from its native home, has settled into an old Los Altos Hills apricot orchard, where it shares corn with quail, intimidates cats and thrills neighbors.

``I said to my husband: `Do you see what I see?' not really believing my eyes,'' said Sandra Humphries, who with neighbor Colette Cranston is keeping a watchful eye on the crane, which is the national bird of Uganda.

It doesn't seem to know that it's lost. It strolls contentedly through the fall foliage, scratching for seeds. It yields to passing cars. While wary of humans, it is not alarmed by them. It notes displeasure by flapping its wings.

TELL JONATHAN CHAIT TO STOP TRYING TO DIG UP MARCOS:

Is the Philippines Finally Turning Around?: Growth is up. The deficit is down. President Arroyo has survived impeachment threats. The service sector is thriving. Yet much remains to be done (Assif Shameen , 11/22/06, Business Week)

[T]he fact that the center is even close to completion is significant. It is all part of a concerted rebranding effort underway under Arroyo's leadership for this sprawling archipelago—long viewed as a politically unstable economic underachiever. "We want the region and the world to see that the Philippines has arrived," Arroyo said during an exclusive interview with BusinessWeek.com on Nov. 20.

Maybe Arroyo has arrived too, in a way. That she is even around to host the summit is nothing short of a miracle. A year ago, Arroyo's five-year-old administration was under siege. Almost daily street demonstrators called for her ouster in what was billed as "People Power III." That was not a good place to be, considering two previous people power waves of protest led to the removal of dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and Joseph Estrada in January 2001.

Amid rumors of military coups (that never transpired), Arroyo also managed to narrowly avoid an impeachment trial in the Congress over allegations of government corruption and vote fraud. Along the way, though, she stayed focused on economic reforms, pushing through tax hikes to cope with the country's massive fiscal problems and ushering in other revenue-boosting measures. The economy is now in the best shape it has been since the 1950s. "I have said all along there is no gain without pain," she points out.

Economists have boosted growth forecasts this year to 5.6%—and to more than 6.5% in 2007. Chronic budget deficits have almost been eliminated in a nation that was under scrutiny from credit agencies as a government-default candidate. Moreover, foreign investors are testing the waters again. Foreign direct investments hit $1.2 billion last year and likely will grow to $2 billion this year based on preliminary data. "We are now ready for a take-off," Arroyo insists.

Analysts enjoy the Philippines turnaround story even though they say much more needs to be done. "Stronger economic fundamentals and growth are starting to feed off one another," notes Rob Subbaraman, an economist for Lehman Brothers in Hong Kong.
Long Way to Go

Indeed, he is so impressed with the turnaround that Subbaraman says "credit rating agencies should start rewarding the Philippines for its economic growth" with upgrades. "The reforms have reached a critical point where virtuous spirals are developing," he thinks.

Not long ago, the Philippines was in political turmoil, suffering from a huge budget deficit, weak currency and worries the country couldn't compete with China or India. Today the International Monetary Fund praises the country. What has changed?

I am glad that people are seeing that we've finally arrived. There is no looking back from here. Clearly, because of the steps we took, the days of huge deficits are gone. Gone, too, are the days of stagnation and poor economic growth. We fought hard for economic reforms. The first phase was to raise the revenues needed to invest in our infrastructure and our people so that Philippines is a more competitive place to do business and have a better standard of living. Those first battles have been won.

The budget deficit is under control, we are on our way to having a balanced budget by 2008, the stock market is up, the peso is strong, poverty rate is down, per capita income is up, investors are coming in again, growth is robust, new revenues can now be invested in long-overdue repair and rebuilding of our infrastructure, education, health, and job creation. The IMF and credit-rating agencies recognize this and so we are getting constant upgrades. We believe we are now in a virtuous cycle where one good thing leads to another.

Still, the Philippines has an image problem. How do you counter this image issue and tell investors this time it's for real?

Well, they can see the difficult economic reforms that we've undertaken. They can see the revenues that we've raised in order to make investments in infrastructure and education. They can also see that I was even willing to pay a political cost to get these through. Now the results are coming in. I am happy the investors are more forthcoming.

The IMF and credit rating agencies reflect the image that we have in the world and we are getting accolades from them for the improvements we have made. Investments are coming in a range of sectors from business process outsourcing to mining. We've made it clear that we only encourage mining investments that are ecologically responsible so that there is sustainable development.

Because we now have money to invest, I have announced a trillion peso (nearly $20 billion) infrastructure program for the medium term. The money will come from our new revenues, from government corporations as well as the private sector. A lot of private-sector companies and foreign investors have shown interest and we are now trying to move on the infrastructure projects.

CAN YOU SPELL KEVIN MCREYNOLDS...:

Sox reportedly getting closer to deal with Drew (SEAN McADAM, 11/29/06, Providence Journal)

According to industry sources throughout baseball, the Red Sox are nearing completion of a multi-year deal for free-agent outfielder J.D. Drew.

Drew stands ready to sign a four-year contract, with the two sides still at work on a fifth year that would offer the Red Sox some protection with the injury-prone Drew.

It's unknown whether the fifth year will be in the form of a vesting option -- under which Drew could guarantee the final year by reaching minimum numbers of games played and at-bats recorded -- or a straight team option.

EACH ISM WAS JUST A FUNCTION OF THE BEARDED PROPHET'S PSYCHE:

Freud's Will to Power (RONALD W. DWORKIN, November 29, 2006, NY Sun)

Legend has it that Freud, although educated in the philosophies of his day, studiously avoided the work of Nietzsche to preserve the originality of his ideas against external influence. Nietzsche's analysis of the human psyche, how values were supposedly projections of people's unspoken jealousies and fears, ran dangerously close to Freud's idea (still a work in progress at the end of the 19th century) that the roots of conscious behavior lay in unconscious desires.

But after reading Dr. Peter Kramer's outstanding new biography of Freud (HarperCollins, 213 pages, $21.95), one wonders if Freud feared something else, not influence but self-knowledge, for Dr. Kramer's Freud is practically the living embodiment of Nietzsche's will to power. It's not simply that Freud was incredibly ambitious. (At age four, after soiling a chair, he reassured his mother that he would grow up to be a great man and buy her another.) Rather, it was Freud's determination to systematize the world, to bring order to chaos, and to impose his theory of life on life itself — a determination so intense that one of Freud's colleagues called it a "psychical need."

This criticism of Freud the systematizer runs throughout Dr. Kramer's book, highlighted by Freud's irritating tendency to generalize whole theories of human nature from a handful of personal observations.

AREN'T THOSE FEARS ACTUALLY HOPES?

Iraq violence a threat to region (Miami Herald, 11/29/06)

The worst fears about U.S. intervention in Iraq are now true: The nation liberated from Saddam Hussein has devolved into ethnic warfare that cannot be distinguished from civil war. No matter how the United States shifts its Iraq policy, there are no good answers for stopping the violence or leaving the country. Even the high-powered Iraq Study Group, which plans to issue its report next month, has no sure-fire fix-it formula.

Whether the United States stays in Iraq or leaves, the threat persists that sectarian violence will spill over and destabilize the region.

LEGAL PROTECTION, NOT SOCIAL SANCTION:

N.J. bill calls for rights for gays, siblings (Associated Press, November 28, 2006)

Conservative groups in New Jersey are pushing a proposal that would grant the rights of marriage - but not the title - to gays, siblings and others involved in domestic partnerships. The plan comes in reaction to a landmark Supreme Court ruling last month that said gay couples in New Jersey should have access to the same rights and benefits as married couples. Whether to call those rights marriages, civil unions or something else was left up to lawmakers.

Under the conservatives’ plan, rights would be available to gay couples, relatives and other twosomes who are not eligible to marry, said Len Deo, president of the New Jersey Family Policy Council. Unrelated opposite-sex couples, who can legally marry, would not be eligible for the designation.

ADAPTATION BEING BUNK:

From pigs to horses and cattle, animals brought to Hawaii flourish with mixed results (Associated Press, November 29, 2006)

In Hawaii’s warm, moist environment, interlopers have flourished.

Known as invasive species, they pillage native forests, screech through the night in suburban neighborhoods and root around in rural taro patches.

Stealthy, unwelcome species such as hybrid Polynesian pigs and a newly discovered gall wasp have eluded eradication efforts and taken hold in an ecosystem that was once home to only one terrestrial mammal, an insectivorous bat. [...]

Still, despite the annoyances and ecological upheaval these introduced animals and plants have caused here, not everyone feels they all need to be wiped out.

“I think semantics plays a big role in this. The term ’invasive species’ makes one think that the hordes are at our gates and threatening to destroy life as we know it, when actually the animals who are considered invasive for the most part had no say in coming to Hawaii,” said Cathy Goeggel, Animal Rights Hawaii director.

COULD?:

Fancy long-range 777s fit Singapore's swank service (Dominic Gates, 11/29/06, Seattle Times)

The chief executive of Singapore Airlines, Chew Choon Seng, picked up two lavishly appointed long-range 777 jets in Everett on Tuesday.

On a rare Seattle visit, the influential playmaker in the world of commercial aviation offered his views on the fierce competition between Boeing and Airbus across the range of their products.

Chew gave a strong endorsement of the hot-selling twin-engine 777. And comments by key General Electric executives here for the event indicated Airbus could have trouble delivering a choice of engines for a proposed jet that would compete against the Boeing airplane.

WHY NOT JUST TOILET PAPER THE NATIONAL REVIEW OFFICES?:

Bush wants more countries in visa-waiver program (Mimi Hall, 11/29/06, USA TODAY)

President Bush said Tuesday that he wants more countries in a program that allows foreigners to stay in the USA without visas, despite criticism that the move could open the door to terrorists.

"We want people to come to our country," Bush said in Tallinn, Estonia, one of several European countries that have asked to be included in the visa-waiver program, in which 27 foreign countries now participate. "It's in our nation's interest that people be able to come and visit."

Bush said his administration aims to add more countries to the program, created to facilitate tourism and business travel 15 years before the 9/11 attacks increased fears of terrorism.

YOU MEAN CONSUMERS RESPOND TO PRICES?:

Amtrak ridership increases (Oren Dorell, 11/29/06, USA TODAY)

Tighter airport security and higher gas prices appear to be boosting Amtrak ridership in the Northeast, the South and Midwest.

Trains in North Carolina, Pennsylvania and New England saw double-digit jumps in ridership.

BACK TO FLAK-CATCHING:

The Man, Movie, and Legend (ANDREW FERGUSON, November 29, 2006, NY Sun)

Biographers agree that in his last years Bobby Kennedy developed a sensitivity to poverty and race that he earlier lacked. Yet even here his liberalism is pretty sketchy.

In 1966, by now a senator from New York, Kennedy talked several friendly businessmen into funding a pilot anti-poverty program in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of New York.

The program drew much more from the conservative ideals of private enterprise and individual initiative than from the big-government liberalism of his rival Johnson. Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California at that time, for one, was delighted with Kennedy's approach. "He's talking more and more like me," Reagan said approvingly.

Kennedy called for "doing away as much as possible with the welfare system, the handouts and getting people jobs by giving the private sector tax incentives."

That quote comes from a debate, held a few days before the California primary, with Senator Eugene McCarthy, one of Kennedy's rivals for the Democratic nomination (and no relation to Joe).

Eugene McCarthy was a genial man in his later years, but at the mention of Bobby's name he would grimace and say only, "an awful man."

Part of the reason for McCarthy's distaste was that last debate. When the moderator asked about poverty and race, McCarthy said that the black ghettos should be broken up by dispersing subsidized housing around the country, beyond the inner cities.

Kennedy, on camera, looked horrified, and with his eye trained on the then all-white suburbs of Los Angeles, he said: "We have 10 million Negroes who are in the ghettos at the present time. … You say you are going to take 10,000 black people and move them into Orange County. It is just going to be catastrophic."

McCarthy never quite recovered. Kennedy's distortion made his opponent look like a despoiler of white suburbia, a sentimentalist at best, and a radical at worst.

But it worked. This bit of ruthless race-baiting — "political thuggery," as the otherwise worshipful reporter Jules Witcover called it — frightened enough white suburbanites into voting for Kennedy to hand him the California primary and to send him, in triumphant good humor, into the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of June 4, 1968.

SLUMP? IT'S JUST BEN:

End of housing decline near?: Drops in price and sales moderate, hinting market may be starting to stabilize (Kimberly Blanton, November 29, 2006, Boston Globe)

Price drops and declining sales in the Massachusetts housing market moderated in October, two housing reports showed yesterday, suggesting that the monthslong slump in the real estate market may be nearing its end.

The median price for a single-family home fell 2 percent in October to $341,000 compared to the same month in 2005, according to data compiled by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Sue Hawkes, managing director of Collaborative Cos., a real estate marketing firm, was heartened by October's results.

"In the scheme of things," she said, a 2 percent price drop "is quite low. People think prices have dropped 10 or 15 percent, but the statistics aren't showing that. That's very encouraging news."

HER FIRST SMART MOVE:

Hastings, Harman Rejected for Chairmanship: Pelosi Decides Against Both of House Intelligence Panel's Top Two Democrats (Jonathan Weisman and Peter Slevin, November 29, 2006, Washington Post)

House Speaker-elect Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has decided against naming either Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the House intelligence committee, or Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (Fla.), the panel's No. 2 Democrat, to chair the pivotal committee next year. [...]

The fight over the top spot on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has exposed the kind of factional politics that bedeviled House Democrats before they were swept from control in 1994. Harman, a moderate, strong-on-defense "Blue Dog" Democrat, had angered liberals with her reluctance to challenge the Bush administration's use of intelligence. Hastings, an African American, was strongly backed by the Congressional Black Caucus but was ardently opposed by the Blue Dogs, who said his removal from the bench disqualifies him from such a sensitive post.

Complicating the matter was Pelosi's relationship with black Democrats. Earlier this year, she enraged the Black Caucus by removing one of its members, Rep. William J. Jefferson (La.), from the Ways and Means Committee after court documents revealed that federal investigators looking into allegations of bribery had found $90,000 in cash neatly bundled in his freezer.

THE SENATOR FROM SELF:

In Following His Own Script, Webb May Test Senate's Limits (Michael D. Shear, 11/29/06, Washington Post)

At a recent White House reception for freshman members of Congress, Virginia's newest senator tried to avoid President Bush. Democrat James Webb declined to stand in a presidential receiving line or to have his picture taken with the man he had often criticized on the stump this fall. But it wasn't long before Bush found him.

"How's your boy?" Bush asked, referring to Webb's son, a Marine serving in Iraq.

"I'd like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President," Webb responded, echoing a campaign theme.

"That's not what I asked you," Bush said. "How's your boy?"

"That's between me and my boy, Mr. President," Webb said coldly, ending the conversation on the State Floor of the East Wing of the White House.

SON KNOWS BEST:

Banana breads by the bunch (ANN LOVEJOY, 11/28/06, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

My sons' favorite is the most basic of all. Sturdy and simple, Boston Banana Bread makes the best toast ever and is fantastic when used for French toast. It's also great sliced warm with sweet butter. If there is a secret to great banana bread, it's fresh baking soda and baking powder. Toss out your old ones each fall and you'll discover that fresh leavening makes a positive difference. [...]

BOSTON BANANA BREAD

* 3 ripe bananas, mashed
* 2 eggs, beaten until fluffy
* 1 teaspoon vanilla
* 1 cup unbleached white flour
* 1 cup whole-wheat pastry flour
* 3/4 cup sugar
* 1 teaspoon baking soda
* 1/2 teaspoon salt
* 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Butter a large loaf pan, dust with flour; set aside.

Combine bananas, eggs and vanilla; set aside.

Sift dry ingredients together and blend with banana mixture. Fill pan 2/3 full. Bake until a toothpick comes out clean (55-60 minutes).

I DON'T THINK WE'RE IN BARCELONA ANYMORE:

Night of soccer violence in France reveals an ugly underside (Elaine Sciolino, November 28, 2006, The New York Times)

What's the overside?

CRUEL TO BE COMIC:

Borat's humour is immoral (Marcel Berlins, November 29, 2006, The Guardian)

The humour of humiliation has become distressingly popular. The success of the film Borat is the latest example. I disliked it and was angered by it. I admit to laughing quite often because parts of it are very funny...

MORE:
‘Borat’ blowup Rocked Pam’s marriage (Boston Herald wire services, November 29, 2006)

Did “Borat” blow up Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock’s chance to make it to their first wedding anniversary?

Pals of the newly estranged couple told the New York Post that Anderson filed for divorce from Rock after just fourth months of marriage because his “male insecurity and major anger issues,” came to light at a “Borat” screening two weeks ago.

Apparently the redneck rocker (born Robert Richie) lost his cool at Universal Studio chief Ron Meyer’s Beverly Hills home after viewing the Sasha Baron Cohen comedy.

“Ron Meyer held a screening of “Borat” at his house for a bunch of people, including Pam and Bob,” dished the Anderson friend. “It was the first time Bob had seen the movie, and, well, he didn’t like it.”

SEE GEORGE PANIC--PANIC, GEORGE, PANIC:

Kei Igawa (Rotoworld, Nov. 28, 2006)

According to SI.com, the winning bid for Japanese left-hander Kei Igawa was for about $25 million.

Incredible. Igawa's stuff has drawn mixed reviews, and while he might be well ahead of MLB hitters in his first season in the U.S., it seems unlikely that he'll settle in as more than a third or fourth starter. If it costs a total of $40 million to bring him in for three years, we have a new candidate for the biggest bust of the winter. It's expected that we'll know tonight who won the bidding for Igawa.

The New York Yankees won the bidding for Japanese pitcher Kei Igawa when the Hanshin Tigers accepted their offer of about $25 million Tuesday.

JUST WAIT FOR THE CHAPTERS WE HAVEN'T WRITTEN YET...:

Once upon a time in the west: a review of DANGEROUS NATION: America and the World 1600-1898 by Robert Kagan (Robert Cooper, Sunday Times of London)

The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 — that the US would not accept European interference in the Western hemisphere — was unilateral, like all subsequent American “doctrines”. But America also retained an ideological preference for Britain over the continental powers; if not a republic, it was at least a liberal monarchy. This was not the special relationship that the British still like to imagine. Britain was the superpower of the day; and it is this that accounts for the remarkable survival of Canada on a continent where the United States took everything else within reach. Dealing with America is always easier if you are powerful.

Why was the nation dangerous? Because it believed in itself and in its cause. America, Kagan tells us, was never a status quo power. It wanted to remake the world in its own image; and because its cause was righteous it saw no reason to limit its power. Reacting to the American wish to be rid altogether of the French and Indians, Edmund Burke argued for a balance of power in America. The idea that you could feel secure “only by having no other Nation near you was alien and repulsive to the European mind”. The search for absolute security — which was American policy then and now — represented, like the search for absolute power, immoderation; and that was dangerous.

So are idealism and democracy. The unnecessary wars that America fought in the 19th century — in 1812 against Britain, and in1898 against Spain — began on a wave of popular enthusiasm. (By contrast, America entered the necessary wars of the 20th century with reluctance.) Throughout this period the United States was long on ambition but short on the power to impose its ideals. But by the end of the century it had taken over most of the continent, settled the question of slavery, and was sending gunboats to Samoa, Brazil and Korea.

Dangerous Nation’s emphasis on democracy as a constant goal, accompanied occasionally by regime change (starting 200 years ago, during the war on piracy, with an attempt to overthrow the Pasha of Tripoli), make this a neoconservative history. Perhaps, but the case is well put and is beautifully written. This reader could not put it down, and cannot wait for part two.

MORE:
Back to the Future (Fouad Ajami, November 26, 2006, US News)

The sin of George W. Bush, to hear his critics tell it, is that he unleashed the forces of freedom in Arab-Islamic lands only to beget a terrible storm. In Iraq and in Lebanon, the furies of sectarianism are on the loose; and in that greater Middle East stretching from Pakistan to Morocco, the forces of freedom and reform appear chastened. Autocracy is fashionable once again, and that bet on freedom made in the aftermath of the American venture into Iraq now seems, to the skeptics, fatally compromised. For decades, we had lived with Arab autocracies, befriended them, taken their rule as the age-old dominion in lands unfit for freedom. Then came this Wilsonian moment proclaimed in the course of the war on Iraq. To the "realists," it had been naive and foolhardy to hold out to the Arabs the promise of freedom. We had bet on the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, thrilled to these young people in Beirut's plazas reclaiming their country from Syrian tyranny. But that promise, too, has been battered, and in the shadows, the old policy of ceding Lebanon to the rule of Syria's informers and policemen now claims a measure of vindication. On the surface of things, it is the moment of the "realists," then: They speak with greater confidence. The world had lived down, as it were, to their expectations. And now they wish to return history to its old rhythm.

But in truth there can be no return to the bosom of the old order. American power and the very force of what had played out in the Arab-Islamic lands in recent years have rendered the old order hollow, mocked its claims to primacy and coherence. The moment our soldiers flushed Saddam Hussein from his filthy spider hole, we had put on display the farce and swindle of Arab authority.

Primacy and power. We can't shy away from the very history we unleashed. We had demonstrated to the Arabs that the rulers are not deities; we had given birth to the principle of political accountability. In the same vein, we may not be comfortable with all the manifestations of an emancipated Arab Shiism--we recoil, as we should, from the Mahdi Army in Iraq and from Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut--but the Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world have been given a new claim on the Arab political order of primacy and power. In the annals of Arab history, this is nothing short of revolutionary. The Sunni Arab regimes have a dread of the emancipation of the Shiites. But American power is under no obligation to protect their phobias and privileges. History has served notice on their world and their biases. We can't fall for their legends, and we ought to remember that the road to all these perditions, and the terrors of 9/11, had led through Sunni movements that originated in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

UH-OH:

Follies of youth: Year-After Effect could strike many young arms in '07 (Tom Verducci, November 28, 2006, Sports Illustrated)

I've been tracking the [Year-After Effect] for about a decade now. It's based on a general rule of thumb among executives and pitching coaches: young pitchers should not have their innings workload increased by more than 25 or 30 innings per year. It's the same principle as training for a marathon; you get to 26.1 miles incrementally, not by jumping directly from a 10K. The body cannot easily withstand being pushed so far behind its previous capacity for work, at least not without consequences. Typically, those consequences occur the next season, not the year in which the body is pushed.

When I've looked at major league pitchers 25-and-younger who were pushed 30 or more innings beyond their previous season (or, in cases such as injury-shortened years, their previous pro high), I've been amazed how often those pitchers broke down with a serious injury the next season or took a major step backward in their development. (The season total includes all innings in the minors, majors and postseason. )

For example, let's look at the YAE for the Class of 2005, the young pitchers who were pushed beyond the 30-inning threshold that season: Matt Cain (+33.1 innings at age 20), Francisco Liriano (+34.2 at 21), Gustavo Chacin (+35.2 at 24), Zach Duke (+44.1 at 22), Scott Kazmir (+51.2 at 21) and Paul Maholm (+98.1 at 23). Liriano (elbow), Chacin (elbow) and Kazmir (shoulder) all suffered significant injuries. Cain (+1.82), Duke (+2.66) and Maholm (+2.58) all saw dramatic rises in their ERAs.

The bottom line: a dramatic increase in innings on a young pitcher elevates the risk of injury or a setback to their development. This has been true for years. The Kansas City Royals were negligent with young pitchers for years, pushing young arms such as Chad Durbin (+49 in 2001), Runelvys Hernandez (+92 in 2002) and Zack Greinke (+33.2 in 2004). Even breakout young stars took a step back because of the YAE, such as Kevin Millwood (+78.1 in 1999), Dontrelle Willis (+52 in 2003), Horatio Ramirez (+34 in 2003) and Mark Prior (+67 in 2003).

Like any rule of thumb, there are exceptions, especially for big-bodied pitchers. C.C. Sabathia (+40 in 2001) and Carlos Zambrano (+72.1 in 2003) proved the YAE is not one-size-fits-all.

Now the bad news for the Class of 2006. I can't remember more young pitchers getting pushed this hard in all the years I've been tracking the YAE. I found 11 pitchers 25-and-under who went more than 30 innings beyond their 2005 log, or (where marked with an asterisk) their previous professional high.

YET MS MERKEL THINKS A GERMAN COMPANY SHOULD DUMP MONEY INTO AIRBUS?:

Air Berlin orders 60 Boeing jets (AP, Nov 28, 2006)

German budget carrier Air Berlin said Tuesday it is ordering 60 new Boeing 737 jets as it works to secure its future growth.

JINGO BELLS:

Colorado congressman calls Miami a 'Third World country': A critic of citizenship opportunities for illegal immigrants says 'Third World' Miami shows America's future if immigration isn't checked. (LESLEY CLARK, 11/27/06, MiamiHerald.com)

Rep. Tom Tancredo, the leader of the anti-illegal immigration faction in the U.S. House, spent a recent weekend at The Breakers in Palm Beach.

Ninety miles to the south, he found a symbol to bolster his belief that unfettered immigration is endangering the United States: Miami, he told a conservative online news site, ``has become a Third World country.'' [...]

The remarks drew an instant rebuke from Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who called Tancredo ''flat out wrong'' and extended an invitation for him to come and judge the city for himself.

''I invite my friend, Tom, to visit beautiful Miami, my hometown, and experience firsthand our hospitality,'' Ros-Lehtinen said. ``Come on down, Tom, the water's fine!''

DID THEY LET DER STURMER WRITE THEIR KRISTALLNACHT DISPATCHES?:

It's Official: Media Body Burning Story is Bogus (Greg Sheffield, November 27, 2006, Newsbusters)

The news that six Sunnis were captured by Shiites, doused with kerosine and burned alive, was too sensational to not be picked up by the mainstream media. But it turns out that the event never happened. Furthermore, the Iraqi "spokesman" relied on to give all information regarding this event is as fictional as the story itself.

Jamil Hussein, the man news reports called "police Capt. Jamil Hussein," was the source for all information regarding the burning. Although he is mentioned by USA Today, the Associated Press, CBS News, and other outlets, Central Command says no such person exists. Centcom also asked the Associated Press to retract the story unless it has proof beyond Jamil Hussein's word.

MILK, COOKIES, FACTOIDS:

-EXCERPT: from The Intellectual Devotional By David Kidder and Noah Oppenheim

Daily Devotionals have long been a favored tool of those looking for a regular dose of spiritual growth. Bedside volumes, read upon waking in the morning or before retiring at night, Devotionals consist of 365 exercises in learning and reflection. One easily digestible entry is tackled each day.

The Intellectual Devotional is a secular compendium in the same tradition. It is one year's worth of daily readings that will refresh your spirit, stimulate your mind, and help complete your education. Each entry is drawn from a different field of knowledge: History, Literature, Visual Arts, Science, Music, Philosophy, and Religion. Read one passage a day and you will explore each subject once a week.

These readings offer the kind of regular exercise the brain requires to stay fresh, especially as we age. They represent an escape from the day-to-day grind into the rarefied realm of human wisdom. And, they will open new horizons of intellectual discovery.

A brief summary of the journey ahead . . .

Monday -- History

A survey of people and events that shaped the development of Western civilization.

Tuesday -- Literature

A look at great writers and a synopsis of their most important works -- poems and novels that continue to inspire readers today.

Wednesday -- Visual Arts

An introduction to the artists and artistic movements that yielded the world's most influential paintings, sculptures, and works of architecture.

Thursday -- Science

From the origin of black holes to a description of how batteries work, the wonders of science are simplified and revealed.

Friday -- Music

What inspired our greatest composers, how to read a sheet of notes, and why Mozart is so revered -- a comprehensive review of our musical heritage.

Saturday -- Philosophy

From ancient Greece to the twentieth century, the efforts of mankind's greatest thinkers to explain the meaning of life and the universe.

Sunday -- Religion

An overview of the world's major religions and their beliefs.

We hope your progress through this collection of knowledge inspires your curiosity and opens new areas of exploration in your life.

--David S. Kidder and Noah D. Oppenheim

Week 1

History

Monday, Day 1

The Alphabet

In circa 2000 BC, the Egyptian pharaohs realized they had a problem. With each military victory over their neighbors, they captured and enslaved more prisoners of war. But the Egyptians could not pass down written orders to these slaves as they could not read hieroglyphics.

Early writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, were extremely cumbersome and difficult to learn. These systems had thousands of characters, with each symbol representing an idea or word. Memorizing them could take years. Only a handful of Egyptians could actually read and write their complicated script.

Linguists believe that almost all modern alphabets are derived from the simplified version of hieroglyphics devised by the Egyptians four thousand years ago to communicate with their slaves. The development of an alphabet, the writing system used throughout the Western world, changed the way the ancients communicated.

In the simplified version, each character represented only a sound. This innovation cut back the number of characters from a few thousand to a few dozen, making it far easier to learn and use the characters. The complicated hieroglyphic language was eventually forgotten, and scholars were not able to translate the characters until the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1799.

The alphabet was extremely successful. When the Egyptian slaves eventually migrated back to their home countries, they took the writing system with them. The alphabet spread across the Near East, becoming the foundation for many writing systems in the area, including Hebrew and Arabic. The Phoenicians, an ancient civilization of seaborne traders, spread the alphabet to the tribes they encountered along the Mediterranean coast. The Greek and Roman alphabets, in turn, were based on the ancient Phoenician script. Today most Western languages, including English, use the Roman alphabet.

Additional Facts

1. Several letters in modern-day English are direct descendents of ancient Egyptian characters. For instance, the letter B derives from the Egyptian character for the word house.
2. The most recent edition of the Oxford English Dictionary contains 171,476 words in current usage, among the most of any language.

Literature

Tuesday, Day 2

Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is widely regarded as the greatest novel written in English in the twentieth century. It retells Homer's Odyssey in the context of a single day -- June 16, 1904 -- in Dublin, Ireland, recasting Homer's great hero Odysseus in the unlikely guise of Leopold Bloom, an aging, cuckolded ad salesman who spends the day running errands and making various business appointments before he returns home at long last.

Though Bloom seems unassuming and ordinary, he emerges as a heroic figure, displaying compassion, forgiveness, and generosity toward virtually everyone in the odd cast of characters he meets. In his mundane and often unnoticed deeds, he practices an everyday heroism that is perhaps the only heroism possible in the modern world. And despite the fact that he always feels like an outsider -- he is a Jew in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland -- Bloom remains optimistic and dismisses his insecurities.

Ulysses is celebrated for its incredibly rich portraits of characters, its mind-boggling array of allusions to other literary and cultural works, and its many innovations with language. Throughout the course of the novel, Joyce flirts with literary genres and forms ranging from drama to advertising copy to Old English. The novel is perhaps most famous for its extensive use of stream-of-consciousness narrative -- Joyce's attempt to render the inner thoughts of his characters exactly as they occur, with no effort to impose order or organization. This technique became a hallmark of modernist literature and influenced countless other writers, such as Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, who also experimented with it in their works.

Not surprisingly, Ulysses poses a difficult journey for the reader, especially its famous last chapter, which recounts the thoughts of Bloom's wife, Molly. Molly's reverie goes on for more than 24,000 words yet is divided into only eight mammoth sentences. Despite the challenge it poses, the chapter shows Joyce at his most lyrical, especially in the final lines, which reaffirm Molly's love for her husband despite her infidelity:

and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Additional Fact

1. Ulysses was banned for obscenity in the United States for nearly twelve years because of its (mostly indirect) sexual imagery.

Visual Arts

Wednesday, Day 3

Lascaux Cave Paintings

The cave paintings at Lascaux are among the earliest known works of art. They were discovered in 1940 near the village of Montignac in central France when four boys stumbled into a cave. Inside they found a series of rooms with nearly 1,500 paintings of animals that were between 15,000 and 17,000 years old.

There are several theories regarding the function of the paintings. A natural feature of the cave may have suggested the shape of an animal to a prehistoric observer who then added highlights to relay his vision to others. Since many of the paintings are located in inaccessible parts of the cave, they may have been used for magical practices. Possibly, prehistoric people believed that the act of drawing animals, especially with a high degree of accuracy, would bring the beasts under their control or increase their numbers in times of scarcity.

The animals are outlined or portrayed in silhouette. They are often shown in what is called twisted perspective, that is, with their heads in profile but their horns facing front. Many of the images include dots, linear patterns, and other designs that may carry symbolic meaning.

The most magnificent chamber of the cave, known as the Great Hall of the Bulls, contains a painted narrative. From left to right, the pictures depict the chase and capture of a bison herd.

As soon as the paintings had been examined and identified as Paleolithic, the caves were opened to the public in 1948. By 1955, however, it became increasingly evident that exposure to as many as 1,200 visitors per day was taking its toll on the works inside. Although protective measures were taken, the site closed in 1963. In order to satisfy public demand, a life-sized replica of the cave was completed in 1983, only 200 meters from the original.

Additional Facts

1. The cave painters were conscious of visual perspective; they painted figures high on the wall, styled so that they would not appear distorted to the viewer below.
2. The only human figure depicted in the cave appears in the Shaft of the Dead Man. The fact that it is drawn more crudely than the animals suggest that they did not think it was endowed with magical properties.

Science

Thursday, Day 4

Cloning

In 1997, a baby sheep named Dolly introduced the world to reproductive cloning. She was a clone because she and her mother shared the same nuclear DNA; in other words, their cells carried the same genetic material. They were like identical twins reared generations apart.

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland created Dolly by a process called nuclear transfer. Taking the genetic material from an adult donor cell, they transferred it into an unfertilized egg whose genetic material had been removed. In Dolly's case, the donor cell came from the mammary gland of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe. The researchers then gave the egg an electric shock, and it began dividing into an embryo.

One of the reasons Dolly's creation was so astounding was that it proved to the scientific community that a cell taken from a specialized part of the body could be used to create a whole new organism. Before Dolly, almost all scientists believed that once a cell became specialized it could only produce other specialized cells: A heart cell could only make heart cells, and a liver cell could only make liver cells. But Dolly was made entirely from a cell extracted from her mother's mammary gland, proving that specialized cells could be completely reprogrammed.

In many ways, Dolly was not like her mother. For example, her telomeres were too short. Telomeres are thin strands of protein that cap off the ends of chromosomes, the structures that carry genes. Although no one is sure exactly what telomeres do, they seem to help protect and repair our cells. As we age, our telomeres get shorter and shorter. Dolly received her mother's six-year-old telomeres, so from birth, Dolly's telomeres were shorter than the average lamb her age. Although Dolly appeared to be mostly normal, she was put to sleep in 2004 at the age of six, after suffering from lung cancer and crippling arthritis. The average Finn Dorset sheep lives to age eleven or twelve.

Additional Facts

1. Since 1997, cattle, mice, goats, and pigs have been successfully cloned using nuclear transfer.
2. The success rate for cloning is very low in all species. Published studies report that about 1 percent of reconstructed embryos survive birth. But since unsuccessful attempts largely go unreported, the actual number might be much lower.
3. Before she died, Dolly was the mother of six lambs, all bred the old-fashioned way.
4. A group of Korean researchers claimed to have cloned a human embryo in 1998, but their experiment was terminated at the 4-cell stage, so there was no evidence of their success.

Music

Friday, Day 5

The Basics

Music is organized sound that can be replicated through imitation or notation. Music is distinct from noise in that the sounds of a door creaking open or fingernails on a blackboard are irregular and disorganized. The sound waves that map these noises are complex and cannot be heard as identifiable pitches.

Some of the basic ways that we analyze musical sounds are:

Pitch: How high or how low a sound is to the ear. Pitch is measured technically by the frequency of a sound wave, or how often waves repeat themselves. In western music there are twelve unique pitches (C, C-sharp or D-flat, D, D-sharp or E-flat, E, F, F-sharp or G-flat, G, G-sharp or A-flat, A, A-sharp or B-flat, and B). The pitches followed by sharps or flats are called accidentals, and they are most easily described as the black keys on the piano keyboard. They are located musically, one half step between the two pitches on either side of them. For example, D-sharp and E-flat have the same pitch. When referring to pitches in the context of notated, or written music, they are called notes.

Scale: A stepwise arrangement of pitches (for example, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) that often serves as the basis for a melody. A piece, or a portion of a piece, will often use only notes found in a particular scale. Western music primarily uses the major scale or the minor scale, in one form or another. To most people, the major scale, because of its particular arrangement of pitches, has the quality of sounding "bright," "happy," or "positive." A minor scale, likewise, is usually described as "dark," "sad," or "pessimistic."

Key: An arrangement or system of pitches, usually based on one of the major or minor scales, that is meant to serve as a reference point and a guiding force of a melody. The tonic of a key is often the starting and ending point for a piece written in a particular key -- so if a piece is in E major, then the pitch E will serve as the piece's tonal center.

Additional Facts

1. All of these basic elements can be notated on the staff, which is a repeating of five parallel horizontal lines. Often it is divided into measures to indicate metric divisions in the piece and marked at the beginning of each staff of the page with a clef to indicate reference points for identifying pitches.
2. When a piece strays from its basic key, this is called modulation. Keys are indicated in written music by a key signature at the beginning of each staff.
3. There are hundreds of scales used in the world's many different musical cultures. In India, music played on the sitar and other instruments chooses pitches from a collection of twenty-two possibilities, with the distances between scale steps sometimes larger and sometimes smaller than those used in Western music. This can make differences between pitches extremely subtle and demands a high virtuosity from Indian classical musicians.

Philosophy

Saturday, Day 6

Appearance and Reality

Throughout its history, one of the great themes of philosophy has been the distinction between appearance and reality. This distinction was central to the thought of the earliest philosophers, called the Presocratics, because they lived before Socrates.

The Presocratics believed that the ultimate nature of reality was vastly different from the way it ordinarily appeared to them. For instance, one philosopher named Thales held that appearances notwithstanding, all reality was ultimately composed of water; Heraclitus thought the world was built from fire. Further, Heraclitus maintained that everything was constantly in motion. Another thinker, Parmenides, insisted that nothing actually moved and that all apparent motion was an illusion.

The Presocratics took seriously the possibility that all of reality was ultimately made up of some more fundamental substance. And they suspected that uncritical, everyday observation tends to present us with a misleading picture of the world. For these reasons, their thinking is often considered a precursor to modern science as well as philosophy.

Many later philosophers -- including Plato, Spinoza, and Leibniz -- followed in this tradition and presented alternative models of reality, which they claimed were closer to the truth than ordinary, commonsense views of the world.

Additional Facts

1. The distinction between appearance and reality is also central to the venerable philosophical tradition known as skepticism.
2. Immanuel Kant also addressed the difference between appearance and reality. He distinguished between things we experience and what he called a "thing-in-itself."

Religion

Sunday, Day 7

Torah

The Torah is the name generally given to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or the Five Books of Moses. Christians refer to these books as the Old Testament. The word Torah can also refer to the entire breadth of Jewish law encompassing several texts as well as oral traditions.

The Five Books of Moses are the basis for the 613 laws that govern the Jewish faith, and they are the foundation for the world's three great monotheistic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They are as follows:

Genesis: Tells the story of creation as well as the history of the Israelites, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and their families
Exodus: Recounts the exodus from Egypt to Canaan, including Moses receiving the Ten Commandments
Leviticus: Contains the rules and practices of worship
Numbers: Relates the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness
Deuteronomy: Consists of speeches made by Moses at the end of his life that recount Israelite history and ethical teachings

The five books are traditionally believed to have been given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Alternative theories claim the beginning of the Torah was given on Mount Sinai but that the revelation continued throughout Moses's life.

Historically, archaeologists have argued that the Torah was written sometime between the tenth and sixth centuries BC. Proponents of the Documentary Hypothesis, which according to Orthodox Jews is heretical, claim that the original five books came from four sources, eventually compiled into one by a fifth author or redactor. The arguments in favor of this theory are the multiple names used for God, varying styles of writing. and the repetition of stories.

From the beginning, the Torah was accompanied by an oral tradition, which was necessary for its complete understanding. Although it was thought to be blasphemous to write the oral tradition down, the necessity for doing so eventually became apparent, leading to the creation of the Mishna. Later, as rabbis discussed and debated these two texts, the Talmud was written in order to compile their arguments.

The Jewish tradition uses the text of the Torah to derive innumerable laws and customs. Rabbinic scholars have spent entire lifetimes parsing every word for meaning.

Additional Facts

1. Torah scrolls written in Hebrew by hand, contain 304,805 letters and may take more than a year to produce by hand. If a single mistake is made, the entire scroll becomes invalid.

KNOWN BUT STILL LIKED:

Giuliani, McCain, Obama rank highest with voters, poll finds (Associated Press, November 27, 2006)

The Quinnipiac University poll’s “thermometer reading,” taken the week after Nov. 7 election, asks voters to rate their feelings for 20 leaders on a scale of 0 to 100.

Giuliani, a Republican weighing a presidential bid in 2008, scored the highest at 64.2. Obama and McCain, who are also considering a 2008 campaign, finished next at 58.8 and 57.7.

Another possible Democratic contender, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, scored ninth of the 20 leaders with a score of 49. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee who was roundly criticized before this month’s election for suggesting that students who don’t study could end up stuck in Iraq, came in last at 39.6.

BUT WE'RE EXCEPTIONAL EVEN WITHIN THE ANGLOSPHERE:

The Exceptionally Entrepreneurial Society (Arnold Kling, 27 Nov 2006, Tech Central Station)

Edmund Phelps is the 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. Shortly after his award was announced, Phelps published an essay on how capitalism in the United States differs from the system in Continental Europe. Phelps wrote,

There are two economic systems in the West. Several nations -- including the U.S., Canada and the U.K. -- have a private-ownership system marked by great openness to the implementation of new commercial ideas coming from entrepreneurs, and by a pluralism of views among the financiers who select the ideas to nurture by providing the capital and incentives necessary for their development. Although much innovation comes from established companies, as in pharmaceuticals, much comes from start-ups, particularly the most novel innovations...

The other system -- in Western Continental Europe -- though also based on private ownership, has been modified by the introduction of institutions aimed at protecting the interests of "stakeholders" and "social partners." The system's institutions include big employer confederations, big unions and monopolistic banks.

In Continental Europe, large banks control the bulk of investment. The United States has a more vibrant stock market, many more banks, venture capital firms, and other financial channels.

In Continental Europe, large established firms have access to funds from the large banks, but newer enterprises have a much more difficult time raising money. In the United States, the more competitive financial system gives more opportunity for entrepreneurs to raise start-up capital. [...]

If the United States is exceptional because of our entrepreneurial culture, then our natural allies may not be in Continental Europe, in spite of its democratic governments and high levels of economic development. China seems more dynamic than Europe, but I would argue that China's government-controlled financial system ultimately is not compatible with American-style entrepreneurship. Instead, we may have more in common with other nations of the Anglosphere, as well as such entrepreneurial outposts as India, Israel, and Singapore.

For the half century following World War II, the United States focused on democracy as the cornerstone of foreign policy. Democratic nations were our allies, and promoting democracy abroad was a top priority. However, it may be that American exceptionalism mostly reflects entrepreneurship. In that case, we have less in common with European social democracy than we thought previously. And, if our goal is to have more countries that look like America, then having them adopt a democratic political system may not be necessary and will certainly not be sufficient.

MORE:
The War of All Against All (Chuck Colson, 11/28/2006, Breakpoint)

Whatever it’s called, the evolutionary “explanation” for altruism is basically the same: It’s really selfishness in disguise. When the son offers to give away half of his food, it’s not goodness—it’s a kind of enlightened self-interest. We do what we perceive as “good” for others so that they, in turn, might do the same for us and, thus, increase both of our chances for survival.

Of course, the transaction being described isn’t “altruism” at all; it’s called “cooperation.” It’s the stuff of zebras and baboons, both of which live in large groups for mutual protection and neither of which would knowingly sacrifice its life to save another’s.

But in the Darwinian scheme, true altruism “has no place in nature.” When you start from the assumption that our behavior is the product of “selfish genes,” then you must agree with the sociobiologist who wrote “scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a hypocrite bleed.”

Little wonder that Stove called Darwinism, especially sociobiology, a “ridiculous slander on human beings.” Darwinism not only cannot account for what is most essentially human—that is, things like altruism and music—it insists on denigrating them, as well.

In contrast, Christians understand that while we are born with the capacity for selfishness and even cruelty, we are also capable of caring for others. Because we are created in the image of God, we not only don’t have to be at war with our neighbors, we can willingly die for them, as well.

ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE PANZER:

To Make Catholics Fit Into America: We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. By John Courtney Murray (Thomas Storck, November 2006, New Oxford Book Reviews)

John Courtney Murray, a Jesuit and Professor of Theology at Woodstock College in Maryland, spent much of the 1950s writing articles whose aim was to overturn the then-reigning Catholic doctrine that, all things being equal, the best situation for Catholics was to live in a Catholic state with an explicitly Catholic government -- a government that was distinct from the Church to be sure, but not separate in the sense that the two powers pursued their own aims without reference to each other. Because of this, Murray got into some trouble with his Jesuit superiors and was prohibited from attending the first session of the Second Vatican Council. But he did eventually attend, and, according to the generally accepted account, Murray's views were then embodied in the Council's decree of religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae. But this is not the place to discuss that document. Suffice it to say that Dig­nitatis Humanae need not be understood as reflective of Murray's position, and can be read as consistent with the traditional teaching of the Church.

Although Pope Leo XIII had reminded American bishops in 1895 that "it would be very erroneous to draw the conclusion that in America is to be sought the type of the most desirable status of the Church" and that the Church here "would bring forth more abundant fruits if, in addition to liberty, she enjoyed the favor of the laws and the patronage of the public authority," this teaching was never very popular, or even very much known, among American Catholics. Laboring under an inferiority complex and desiring above all to fit in, Catholics in general enthusiastically embraced the messianic nationalism that most often passes for patriotism in the U.S. Murray's dissatisfaction with Pope Leo's teaching seems to have stemmed from that same root, namely, his desire to be a good American above all. And so We Hold These Truths is in the main a book about Catholics fundamentally embracing what he calls the "American proposition." Yes, Murray is nuanced; yes, he writes with more of a sense of theological tradition and of the shortcomings of American Protestantism than the Catholic neoconservatives of today. But at bottom his aim is to explain and justify America as a Catholic project, or at least one that can be made Catholic.

We Hold These Truths is a collection of essays that appeared during the 1950s in various journals of opinion, Catholic and secular. Like most such compilations, it addresses a variety of themes. He deals with the questions of public support for parochial schools, the ethics of nuclear warfare, and our policy toward Communism, both at home and abroad. But a fundamental theme runs through the book, especially the first five chapters and the concluding two: How Catholic thought, and especially the Natural Law tradition, can justify and enrich the "American proposition."

We may question what Murray seems to take for granted -- the assertion that America is a proposition. In the very first sentence of his own Preface, Murray states that it "is classic American doctrine…that the new nation which our Fathers brought forth on this continent was dedicated to a ‘proposition.'" But why this should be so, Murray never says. Why a nation should be more an idea than a place, and why America, more than Spain or Argentina or Australia, should be dedicated to an idea are questions most Americans have never asked. Nor does Murray ask them. He simply accepts that we are as much a proposition as a nation and goes on from there. [...]

This discussion of the Church and the American political tradition leads to Murray's principal error: America is bigger than the Catholic Church. We must unite in a political community whose boundaries are set not by Catholic doctrine but by American tradition. The First Amendment is an "article of peace," prescribing agreement about how we are to act without agreement about ultimate truths. But how can we have anything except accidental agreement unless we agree about ultimates? And where does this lead in the end? Murray writes: "in a pluralist society no minority group has the right to demand that government should impose a general censorship, affecting all the citizenry…according to the special standards held within one group." Although Murray wrote this with regard to censorship, who cannot see here almost the same words that are used with reference to the legal prohibition of abortion or same-sex unions? The Catholic Church, the Universal Church, is now simply a "minority group," and her teachings, guaranteed by the protection of Almighty God, are now only "special standards held within one group." Moreover, Murray's constant appeal to Natural Law means little if the voice of the Catholic Church, the guarantor of both natural and revealed truth, is excluded from a final determination of what is and is not moral. While it is certainly the case that we are in no practical position to insist that Catholic morality -- which is mostly Natural Law -- reign supreme over American political and cultural life, that does not mean that we should simply acquiesce in our status as a "minority group" or admit in principle that American pluralism is either good or inevitable.

Murray's project, then, is to make Catholics fit into America. He is correct that, with Natural Law, Catholics can provide the best intellectual framework for the "American proposition," but he errs when he subordinates the Church to what he sees as a larger project. We become, in the end, simply another "minority group." Murray has reversed Chesterton's dictum that the Church is larger than the world, and has made America the framework within which the Church must act and even understand herself.

KASSTING CALL (via Mike Daley):

The Hard Stuff (Phil Bowermaster, November 24, 2006 , The Speculist)

Lacking the controversy of Borat and the hype of Casino Royale (hype which we have enthusiastically been a part of here at The Speculist), the new Will Ferrell / Emma Thompson film Stranger than Fiction has not received an awful lot of attention. And that’s too bad. Stranger than Fiction entertains an idea that we have largely scorned here at The Speculist: a proposition often cited by opponents to life-extension research. In fact, it’s an idea that has been endorsed by no less than Leon Kass himself.

Simply put, the idea is this – the eventuality of death gives life meaning and beauty that it would not otherwise have. In a paradoxical way, death is what makes life meaningful. So it would be a great loss, Kass and others have argued, to delay death in any substantial way. To do so is to cheapen life, and it’s just not worth it.

Up to now, you could count me among the supremely unconvinced. But this movie – that’s right, a Will Ferrell movie – has given me cause to rethink this significant philosophical question and I find that, upon reflection, my views on the subject have changed. Somewhat.

TECHNOLOGY IS TO SCIENCE AS ASTRONOMY IS TO ASTROLOGY (via JD Watson):

Dr, Nail vs. the Monster (Tom Clynes, Popular Science)

In 1995 a Clemson University graduate student named Ed Sutt took off for a spur-of-the-moment trip to the Caribbean. But beaches and rum drinks weren’t on the agenda for this civil engineer. Hurricane Marilyn had just torn through St. Thomas, and Sutt was part of a team examining how and why 80 percent of the island’s homes and businesses had collapsed in the storm’s 95mph winds.

“The destruction was so complete in places that it was almost surreal,” Sutt recalls. “There were troops in the streets and military helicopters hovering overhead.” As Sutt moved through the wreckage of roofless and toppled-over houses, he was struck by the sense that much of the destruction could have been avoided. “In house after house,” he says, “I noticed that it wasn’t the wood that had failed—it was the nails that held the wood together.” [...]

During the HurriQuake nail’s six years of development, 14 major hurricanes and tropical storms destroyed hundreds of thousands of houses in the U.S. and inflicted an estimated $166 billion in damages. The U.S. hasn’t had a major earthquake since parts of the Los Angeles area were leveled in the Northridge quake of 1994, but around the world, thousands of people have lost homes and family members as wooden structures collapsed.

Although there are no precise statistics, Sutt’s research indicated that nail failure accounted for a substantial percentage of the destruction in these catastrophes. And when nails fail, it’s for one of three reasons. Either the nail rips its head through the sheathing, its shank pulls out of the frame, or its midsection snaps under the lateral loads that rock a house during high winds and earthquakes. Sutt’s job was to design a nail that resisted all three. “With the first prototypes,” Sutt says, “we proved that a bigger head has substantial advantages in terms of stopping the nail from pulling through the sheathing. But it couldn’t be too big, because it needed to fit into popular nail guns.”

As the Bostitch team tweaked the head-to-shank ratio, Sutt and metallurgist Tom Stall worked on optimizing high-carbon alloys, trying to find the highest-strength trade-off between stiffness and pliability—the key to preventing snapped nails. “Meanwhile,” Sutt says, “we were focusing on how to keep the nail from pulling out.” The team machined a series of barbed rings that extend up the nail’s shaft from its point, experimenting with the size and placement of the barbs. “You want the rings to have maximum holding power,” he says, “but if they go up too high, it creates a more brittle shank that shears more easily.”

The team tested hundreds of designs, looking for the best compromises. The late prototypes held fast, and Bostitch came out with a barbed nail with a larger head in 2005 called the Sheather Plus. But the solutions created problems of their own: As the barbs pierced the sheathing, they generated a hole that was slightly bigger than the shank, resulting in a loose, sloppy joint.

“We needed a way to lock the top of the shank into the sheathing,” says Sutt, who attacked the problem in a series of brainstorming sessions with his engineers. Their solution: a screw-shank, a slight twist at the top of the shaft that locks the nail in place. The combination of the screw-shank, barbed rings, fatter head, and high-strength alloy added up to an elegant solution to the failures that had plagued nails for more than two centuries. Sutt’s team had, in effect, reinvented the nail.

WHEN YOU HOLD AN ELECTION THE MAJORITY WINS:

Alarm at Shia gains in Bahrain's elections (Kim Sengupta, 28 November 2006, Independent)

A radical Shia Islamist group has made significant gains in Bahrain's national elections, raising serious concern among neighbouring conservative Sunni monarchies in the region.

Al-Wefaq National Islamic Society has won 16 of the 40 seats in parliament and the party declares that its gains are even more significant than the figures suggest, because it had won all but one of the seats it had contested.

HISTORY ALWAYS CATCHES UP:

The revolutionary dream in Latin America is fading away (Maria Zaldivar, HACER)

The revolutionary dreams that encouraged indigenous-Bolivarian populisms in South America are decolouring at a high speed. Evo Morales’ authority in Bolivia is deteriorating at a vertiginous rate, and he is not able to avoid the secessionist attempts that are under way. Fidel Castro’s imminent death further obstructs any support for a regime characterized by systematic illegitimacy and the despise and systematic violation of basic human rights, and this is how, thanks to God, Castro’s utopia is dying with its founder.

The hegemonic dream of the Argentinean president is not doing any better. Néstor Kirchner is being hacked by the same reality that helped him appear to be leading a successful administration during the first years of government. At that time the general conditions of global economy, China’s opening and its wide demand of commodities, the sustained growth of the whole region and a gross devaluation of Argentine currency were the framework in which the current administration started. However, things have changed. The valuation of commodities is down from the sidereal values of 2004 and 2005; oil and gas reserves are exhausted due to a disinvestment that is starting to hit home; regional economy is drifting apart from the profitability margins of the last two years, and inflation has started to devour the benefits of the currency devaluation. Besides, Argentineans keep more than 100,000 million dollars abroad because the country does not offer the necessary guarantees for the capital to stay. President Kirchner himself is among those holding millionaire deposits outside national frontiers.

WHEN YOU'VE NOTHING TO ASSIMILATE THEM TO:

Hostility at home: A strong showing for a far-right party in the Dutch elections (Economist.com, Nov 23rd 2006)

ONCE a country renowned for tolerance of minorities of all stripes, the Netherlands now risks being known for an ugly debate over its growing Muslim population. As preliminary results emerged from general elections on Wednesday November 22nd, it became clear that a previously insignificant far-right party, the Party For Freedom, may claim as many as nine seats in a parliament of 150. The party had campaigned for a halt to all immigration, and in particular was hostile towards Muslims, calling for a ban on the building of religious schools and mosques and for a ban on veils worn by Muslim women. [...]

Instead the Dutch might look across the Atlantic. A slew of recent books by smug, mostly conservative American authors might be unhelpful. (Some with titles like “While Europe Slept”, “America Alone” and “The Death of the West”, argue that Europe has allowed immigration and Islam to undermine Western values from within). But there is something to learn from America. American laws on freedom of expression and religion are more permissive than those in Europe. Only those who mask their faces explicitly to hide themselves and intimidate others—like the Ku Klux Klan—are forbidden to cover their faces in public forums like marches. A law banning the burqa would be flatly unconstitutional. So, probably, would be a ban on headscarves in schools. And America’s success with its Muslims probably also owes something to the flexible American labour market, which gives minorities of all kinds the hope (if not the reality) of climbing the social ladder.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Online traffic surge downed some retailers' websites (Jayne O'Donnell and Jon Swartz, 11/27/06, USA TODAY)

Deal-hungry shoppers flocked to the Internet on Monday, beating last year's post-Thanksgiving pace and overwhelming a retail industry website offering hundreds of special offers.

North American retail website traffic reached 2,145,558 visitors per minute at 2 p.m. ET Monday, says Internet service provider Akamai Technologies. That's up 19% from the peak on Cyber Monday last year. Although traffic dipped around 5 p.m. ET, it was still over 2 million visitors per minute at 9 p.m.

The Monday after Thanksgiving, when workers are back at their desks with their employers' fast Internet connections, is considered the start of the online holiday shopping season. It was the second-busiest Internet shopping day in 2005, surpassed only by Dec. 12, the last day many online retailers offered free shipping by Christmas.

ANTI-NATIVE NATIVISM:

Fence plan alarms landowners (Kevin Johnson, 11/28/06, USA TODAY)

From his perch on the front lines of the battle against illegal immigration, Moody would seem to be the type of person who would embrace the federal government's most provocative effort to stop illegals from entering this country: a plan to build 700 miles of fence along the 2,100-mile Southwest border, including Moody's land. Instead, Moody is a powerful voice in a growing alliance of border landowners and local law enforcement officials who oppose a fence.

"They're not gonna build it," Moody says flatly. "We darn sure don't need a wall. Everybody knows the Great Wall of China wasn't worth a damn."

Most everyone here agrees that more border security is needed to curb illegal immigration. Ranchers such as Moody and Dob Cunningham, who has a 700-acre spread north of here with 2 miles of river frontage, say they often give Border Patrol agents access to their land to help the agents track down illegals.

However, the fence plan — the centerpiece of an immigration bill President Bush signed last month — has come to reflect the disconnect between many landowners here and officials in Washington who see the project as a key part of the nation's strategy to slow illegal immigration. Here, where the impact of illegal immigration is greatest, the fence is widely viewed as an economic and environmental threat. In Eagle Pass, a city of 25,000 that is 95% Hispanic, it's also seen as a rejection of the region's tradition of shared cultures and open ranges.

HOW LONG WILL WE LET SYRIA BE THE STUMBLING BLOCK?:

Sides work on extending cease-fire to West Bank (Herb Keinon, 11/27/06, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Both Olmert's and Abbas's staffs were exploring ways to expand the agreement to include the West Bank, government officials said. They added that it was easier to deal with the Palestinians on this issue than on the release of Shalit, because the decision to free Shalit needed the approval of Hamas's Damascus-based leader Khaled Mashaal, while cease-fire issues needed PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh's okay.

According to these officials, since Haniyeh lives in Gaza and is in touch with the daily plight of the people there, he was more apt to want to take actions that could alter the difficult situation on the ground.

Officials in the Prime Minister's Office said Olmert's decision to directly address the Palestinian people and say he would release numerous Palestinian prisoners, "including ones who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms," was meant to go over Mashaal's head and tell the Palestinians that Mashaal was the obstacle standing in the way of a reunion with their relatives.

"I hereby declare that when Gilad Shalit is released and returned to his family, safe and sound, the government of Israel will be willing to release numerous Palestinian prisoners - including ones who were sentenced to lengthy prison terms - to increase the trust between us and prove that our hand is truly extended in genuine peace," Olmert said.

"I said it before Gilad Shalit was abducted, and I have not changed my position," he added. "I know that many Palestinian families yearn for the day when their loved ones will return home. This day could be very close."

The unstated subtext, a senior official in the Prime Minister's Office said, was that Mashaal was keeping this from happening.

The official also said Olmert would be willing to release a large amount of prisoners, "larger than they probably think."

THOUGH JONATHAN CHAIT THINKS THEY SHOULD BE RULED BY GENOCIDAL TOTALITARIANS INSTEAD... (via Mike Daley):

Rwanda Redux (Mauro De Lorenzo, November 21, 2006, American)

A decade after the genocide, Rwanda, with help from two Chicago financiers, has been spreading the idea that it’s a good place to do business, not just a place for do-gooders to come help. Now, it’s the most improved country in Africa. [...]

[F]or those in the know, Rwanda is hot. After fighting two wars in neighboring Congo, resettling more than a million refugees, and designing a system of justice for several hundred thousand imprisoned genocide suspects, Rwanda’s leaders are now turning their energy to making the country hospitable to business. Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, a charismatic former guerrilla leader who earned a diploma in business studies by correspondence after he took office (his exams were proctored by the British ambassador), has a vision of Rwanda as a service economy integrated into the global marketplace through information technology—a sort of Dubai in the highlands of Central Africa.

This year, the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom recognized Rwanda as the most improved country in Africa over the past ten years (and seventh most improved in the world) in terms of economic freedom. The World Bank’s annual Doing Business survey, which measures regulation around the world, notes Rwanda’s impressive gains in contract enforcement, tax administration, and ease of starting a business.

BUT HE SURE IS PURTY:

John Edwards' folly: A book signing gone wrong (Manchester Union-Leader, 11/27/06)

[Former Sen. John] Edwards would not be caught dead inside a Wal-Mart. Saying that the company pays its employees too little, Edwards has embarked on an anti-Wal-Mart crusade. He instructs his staff members and all Americans not to shop at Wal-Mart.

"Wal-Mart makes plenty of money. They need to pay their people well," Edwards said at a Pittsburgh anti-Wal-Mart rally in August.

So naturally Edwards is holding his book signing at Barnes & Noble instead of Wal-Mart. Which is too bad for his anti-low-wages campaign, because in Manchester Wal-Mart pays hourly employees more than Barnes & Noble does.

The Barnes & Noble where Edwards will hawk his book pays $7 an hour to start. The Wal-Mart that sits just yards away pays $7.50 an hour.

Oh, the humanity!

WHY MUST BLACKS ALWAYS BEAR THE BRUNT OF THE LEFT'S PSYCHOSES?:

Haiti's Trade Push Hits New Political Head Wind (GREG HITT, November 27, 2006, Wall Street Journal)

Haiti's struggle to persuade Congress to help its apparel makers underscores a new reality: In the political climate on Capitol Hill, even small trade gestures face big hurdles.

Haiti is trying to secure passage of an initiative that would allow the Caribbean country to use non-American-made material in garments destined for the U.S., while still qualifying for duty-free access. Currently, Haitian garments must be made from material produced in the U.S., or in some cases from the Caribbean region, to get duty-free treatment. Using foreign-made fabric, such as from China, could significantly lower production costs for Haitian garments makers and make their goods more competitive in global markets.

Haiti exported $447 million in goods to the U.S. in 2005, a fraction of total U.S. imports. Haitian officials say the deal could create as many as 40,000 sorely needed jobs there. [...]

But with voter concern over globalization having tipped important races in midterm elections and helped Democrats retake Congress, Haiti now faces an even-tougher environment, trade experts said.

"There's going to be a pronounced change of tone, from a period of accommodation and negotiation to litigation and enforcement," said Dan Ikenson, associate director of the Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a free-market think tank.

THE BEST IS YET TO COME:

Top 10 Prospects: Detroit Tigers (Jon Paul Morosi, November 27, 2006, Baseball America)

The most impressive thing here isn't just the quality of the prospects they still have coming but the number of guys from their projected 2010 roster who are already contributing in the majors despite their youth, including almost the whole pitching staff.

TO ACCEPT NEGOTIATIONS IS TO ACCEPT STATEHOOD:

Olmert offers 'serious' plan for new state (Stephen Farrell, 11/27/06, Times of London)

Twenty-four hours after Palestinian militants began a ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s Prime Minister sought to maintain the momentum yesterday by offering peace talks leading to the creation of a Palestinian state.

Ehud Olmert said that Israel would release prisoners, withdraw from West Bank Jewish settlements and ease checkpoints if Palestinians abandoned violence.

WHITE SOUTH AFRICA WAS SAFER TOO (via Ed Driscoll):

Bring back Saddam Hussein: Restoring the dictator to power may give Iraqis the jolt of authority they need. Have a better solution? (Jonathan Chait, November 26, 2006, LA Times)

THE DEBATE about Iraq has moved past the question of whether it was a mistake (everybody knows it was) to the more depressing question of whether it is possible to avert total disaster. Every self-respecting foreign policy analyst has his own plan for Iraq. The trouble is that these tracts are inevitably unconvincing, except when they argue why all the other plans would fail. It's all terribly grim.

So allow me to propose the unthinkable: Maybe, just maybe, our best option is to restore Saddam Hussein to power. [...]

Here is the basic dilemma: The government is run by Shiites, and the security agencies have been overrun by militias and death squads. The government is strong enough to terrorize the Sunnis into rebellion but not strong enough to crush this rebellion.

Meanwhile, we have admirably directed our efforts into training a professional and nonsectarian Iraqi police force and encouraging reconciliation between Sunnis and Shiites. But we haven't succeeded. We may be strong enough to stop large-scale warfare or genocide, but we're not strong enough to stop pervasive chaos.

Hussein, however, has a proven record in that department. It may well be possible to reconstitute the Iraqi army and state bureaucracy we disbanded, and if so, that may be the only force capable of imposing order in Iraq.

Let us though start a bit earlier, with WWI, since it is our failure there that is still playing itself out in the Middle East. It would seem eminently fair to say that a successful conclusion to WWI would, from an American perspective, have tracked with Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points. Consider just one--far the most important--of them: "A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined." The fact is that in a considerable portion of the post-colonial world we still haven't given proper weight to the interests of the population concerned. Indeed, the liberalization we are currently forcing on the Middle East is simply a realization of this aim, though it comes ninety years late. George W. Bush is just writing the final chapters of WWI.

As regards WWII, it would seem fair to consider our war aims to have been ably laid out by FDR and Churchill in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. It includes language not dissimilar to Wilson's: "they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them." Leave us not take quite so universalist a view as we did over WWI and consider just Poland. The Poles got to choose a government in 1990, some 49 years after the Allied leaders met and set as their goal its liberation.

By contrast to these obviously failed wars--WWI was inarguably a mistake while WWII was noble enough in principle but in practice utterly misconceived--the people of Iraq already get to choose their own government and have for a couple years now. The war aims that President Bush laid out for Iraq (and like nations) in the 2002 National Security statement have been effected there: "the United States will use this moment of opportunity to extend the benefits of freedom across the globe. We will actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world"--though, admittedly, imperfectly. Development and stable freedom are works in progress -- untidy ones at that -- but Kurdistan and Shi'astan are already well on their way. The question now is what sort of state will emerge in Baghdadistan. If the people get to choose freely it is likely to be a Shi'a dominated democracy--even after carving out a Shi'a state in the South of the original Iraq. If the Ba'athists, al Qaedists, and Realists were to prevail it would be some kind of totalitarian Sunni rgime whose main purpose would be the subjugation or extermination of the Shi'a. This is the solution (Final?) that Mr. Chait is pimping for here.

It seems pretty unlikely that we, Mookie al Sadr and the Shi'a in the South, or Iran would tolerate such a result, but there are always going to be folk who prefer "security" at any cost to freedom. Indeed, it was the illusion of security/stability that led us to betray our own war aims in WWI and WWII and that leave us still completing the unfinished work of those prior wars today. If Mr. Chait's intention is merely to be shocking, there's a far more sensible suggestion he might make that would still shock many. It builds off of his own notion that we are strong enough to stop full-scale warfare/genocide. The question is why are we stopping it? Since it is the Sunni who are causing the instability he so fears, why not allow the Shi'a to repress or expel them? Just as Indian freedom led to an exodus of Muslims to Pakistan and Hindus to India, so too might an exodus of Sunni from Iraq be a logical outcome of decolonization/liberation. At any rate, reimposing Saddam would appear to be the least effective idea for the long term, however much schaudenfreude it might stir up in those who dislike W and the war.

LOGIC DOESN'T GET MUCH MORE CIRCULAR:

In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning (BEN STEIN, 11/26/06, NY Times)

The fourth argument in response to my suggestion was that “deficits don’t matter.”

There is something to this. One would think that big deficits would be highly inflationary, according to Keynesian economics. But we have modest inflation (except in New York City, where a martini at a good bar is now $22). On the other hand, we have all that interest to pay, soon roughly $7 billion a week, a lot of it to overseas owners of our debt. This, to me, seems to matter.

Besides, if it doesn’t matter, why bother to even discuss balancing the budget?

MORE:
Save and invest (Kansas City Star, 11/27/06)

Over the past decade, total assets in 401(k) plans have grown from $864 billion to $2.4 trillion, according to the Investment Company Institute.

PITY THE FOOL WHO THINKS DEMOCRATS ARE INTERESTED IN REFORM:

A Fix for Social Security?: How Personal Accounts Could Please Both Sides (Sebastian Mallaby, November 27, 2006, Washington Post)

Democrats may be allergic to personal Social Security accounts, but they are enthusiastic about other ideas for personal retirement accounts that just don't have "Social Security" in the title. For example, Gene Sperling, a former Clinton adviser, has called for a "Universal 401(k)" that would extend the benefits of 401(k) saving to workers whose companies don't offer such accounts. In Sperling's vision, everyone would get the chance to contribute to an account and receive a government contribution as a match, with the most generous match going to low-income workers. To pay for this program, the government could prune the existing $150 billion patchwork of tax breaks for saving. This patchwork is extraordinarily, scandalously regressive: 90 percent of the tax breaks go to the richest 40 percent of taxpayers.

Sperling is motivated by a desire to help low-income people. As he writes in his book, "The Pro-Growth Progressive," 85 percent of workers in the bottom fifth of the labor force have no access to a company 401(k), nor do 75 percent of Hispanic workers or 60 percent of black workers. Globalization, which has boosted the volatility of family incomes, makes it especially important to help workers build assets that can cushion them against job loss, illness or the financial fallout from divorce. Although the Universal 401(k) would be primarily aimed at retirement security, there could be limited earlier withdrawals at times of misfortune.

So while Republicans have been pushing personal retirement accounts as part of an entitlement fix, Democrats have been pushing personal retirement accounts because they worry about worker insecurity. By enlarging the debate so that it's about savings in the era of globalization rather than just Social Security, negotiators can conjure up the common ground that was missing during the 2005 train wreck. Personal accounts need not be merely the alternative to the traditional Social Security benefit. They can simultaneously be the alternative to the nation's outrageously regressive system of tax breaks for saving and a way to help ordinary people build nest eggs. When personal accounts become both of these things, perhaps Republicans and Democrats alike will back them.

LATE BREAKING TIDE:

Deborah Pryce Wins Reelection (Eve Mueller and Eric James, Nov 27 2006, 10TV)

A winner has finally declared in the race between Republican Deborah Pryce and Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, 20 days after the election.

Incumbent Deborah Pryce will still represent Ohio's 15th Congressional District, but this story is far from over.

The provisional ballots are in and the Board of Elections declared Pryce the winner.

PRAY FOR RAIN:

MAN VERSUS MACHINE: Kramnik and 'Deep Fritz' Vie for Chess Supremacy (Der Spiegel, 11/27/06)

[W]ith his IQ boosted by countless gigabytes, Fritz has been granted a rematch against Kramnik, whose brain capacity is presumably unchanged. Fritz has been overhauled and improved, and is now able to look into the future to the tune of nine moves for both players. He can calculate 8 million positions per second.

And Kramnik? His only hope is to discover the computer's weaknesses. That, in fact, is exactly what he tried to do in the first match of the series, being played in the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany in Bonn. In Saturday's opener, he chose a strategy which the computer had not been trained for -- and seemed to have the upper hand for awhile. But the computer fought back and the match ended in a draw.

Even that, though, should be seen as something of a success for Kramnik, what with the improvements made to "Deep Fritz." This is, after all, the first time in the history of man vs. machine matches that the machine entered the duel as the favorite. And the question remains: Have the machines overtaken us?

On SPIEGEL ONLINE International you can watch the series live -- every match, every move and with audio commentary by Yasser Seirawan, a four-time US chess champion, a one-time world junior chess champion and author of numerous chess books.

WE'RE WITH MOOKIE:

Crush the Sunnis (James Kurth, 11.25.06, New Republic)

Before it leaves Iraq...the United States must inflict a dramatic and decisive defeat upon the Sunni insurgents--one that will demonstrate the unbearable cost and utter futility of the Islamist dream of establishing a Muslim umma under the rule of a global Sunni caliphate. That defeat must be more than military; it must also be political: The United States should divide Iraq into two parts, leaving the Kurds in control of the north, the Shia in control of the south--and the Sunnis stateless in between.

The Sunni Arabs of Iraq have much to answer for. Since they have always made up a rather small minority--about 15 to 20 percent of the country's total population--the regimes they created were historically authoritarian ones. They compensated for their small base by employing especially brutal methods against their Kurdish and Shia neighbors. Successive Sunni governments became steadily more repressive, leading eventually to the rule of the Baath Party and culminating in the ferocious regime of Saddam Hussein.

Baathist Iraq was often compared to Nazi Germany: Saddam was said to play the role of Adolf Hitler and the Baath Party that of the Nazi Party. A more accurate comparison, however, would analogize the Baath Party to the Waffen S.S., the Nazi Party's elite unit, and the Sunni Arab community to the Nazi Party as a whole, which eventually made up as much as 15 percent of Germany's population.

But, unlike their Nazi counterparts in Germany in 1945, the Sunni Arabs in Iraq in 2003 were not totally defeated, devastated, and demoralized by the time their government was toppled. Consequently, they were soon able to initiate and support a vicious insurgency.

VICTORIA IS DEAD:

Revealed: rise of creationism in UK schools (James Randerson, November 27, 2006, The Guardian)

Dozens of schools are using creationist teaching materials condemned by the government as "not appropriate to support the science curriculum", the Guardian has learned.

The packs promote the creationist alternative to Darwinian evolution called intelligent design and the group behind them said 59 schools are using the information as "a useful classroom resource".

A teacher at one of the schools said it intended to use the DVDs to present intelligent design as an alternative to Darwinism. Nick Cowan, head of chemistry at Bluecoat school, in Liverpool, said: "Just because it takes a negative look at Darwinism doesn't mean it is not science. I think to critique Darwinism is quite appropriate."

MORE:
Atheists Agonistes (RICHARD A. SHWEDER, 11/27/06, NY Times)

[T]he popularity of the current counterattack on religion cloaks a renewed and intense anxiety within secular society that it is not the story of religion but rather the story of the Enlightenment that may be more illusory than real.

The Enlightenment story has its own version of Genesis, and the themes are well known: The world woke up from the slumber of the “dark ages,” finally got in touch with the truth and became good about 300 years ago in Northern and Western Europe.

As people opened their eyes, religion (equated with ignorance and superstition) gave way to science (equated with fact and reason). Parochialism and tribal allegiances gave way to ecumenism, cosmopolitanism and individualism. Top-down command systems gave way to the separation of church from state, of politics from science. The story provides a blueprint for how to remake and better the world in the image and interests of the West’s secular elites.

Unfortunately, as a theory of history, that story has had a predictive utility of approximately zero. At the turn of the millennium it was pretty hard not to notice that the 20th century was probably the worst one yet, and that the big causes of all the death and destruction had rather little to do with religion. Much to everyone’s surprise, that great dance on the Berlin Wall back in 1989 turned out not to be the apotheosis of the Enlightenment.

YEAH, BUT THEY'RE NUTS...:

Conspicuous Proliferation: a review of War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today by Max Boot (William H. McNeill, December 21, 2006, NY Review of Books)

War Made New begins with a crisp introduction, sketching four revolutions in warfare since 1500 around which Max Boot chose to organize his book. It ends in a fog of acronyms for weapons still on the drawing boards, uncertainty about future military revolutions, and "The Danger of Too Much Change—and Too Little." In between Boot found many persuasive things to say about how changes in military technology and management affected the course of European and world history, illustrating each of his military revolutions with detailed accounts of three specific battles or campaigns. [...]

Boot skips over World War I just as he skipped the advances in weaponry and ideological mobilization between 1750 and 1866, although that conflict introduced many new weapons, and raised the intensity of mobilization on the home front to previously unimagined heights. But Boot prefers to make his "Second Industrial Revolution" in military affairs coincide with World War II and emphasizes three innovations—tanks, aircraft carriers, and heavy bombers—by focusing on the defeat of France in 1940, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and the American firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

As always, these narrative chapters are well written and make a good case for the importance of the three new weapons he chose to discuss. At the same time, he recognizes the partiality of his approach, and acknowledges that other innovations—radar, code breaking, amphibious landings, and improvements in older technologies like submarine warfare and industrial production lines—also affected the outcome.

I quite concur with his summing up of "What Produced Victory?" Here are some of his observations:

The Germans outthought their enemies in the interwar period, which is why in 1939–41 the Third Reich was able to outfight the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.... On paper, at least, this gave the Third Reich the potential to compete against the US and USSR.... Japan, too, grabbed a vast empire for itself in Asia that should have given it greater ability to hold its own. Yet by 1942 the US was outproducing all of the Axis states combined. The USSR, too, staged a remarkable recovery...and was soon outproducing Germany....

He continues:

On the whole, however, the Allies pulled off the difficult feat of war management far better than the Axis. Nazi Germany was plagued by the erratic and often irrational decision-making of Adolf Hitler, who fostered an atmosphere of bureaucratic chaos and infighting. While Japan had no single leader of comparable power, it was handicapped by the lack of coordination between its army and navy. The British and Americans, by contrast, set up a Combined Chiefs of Staff Committee that, despite some inevitable friction, capably coordinated their joint war effort....

This underscores a theme running throughout this volume: Having an efficient bureaucracy is the key determinant of whether a country manages to take advantage of a military revolution.... The reason German armies were able to reach the gates of Moscow and Japanese armies the borders of India before being defeated was that the Axis had done a better job of organizing beforethe war. This gave them an important initial advantage that they allowed to slip away through catastrophic miscalculations—which once again goes to show that the early movers in a military revolution are not necessarily the long-term winners.

This last observation strikes me as a useful warning for American policymakers who are dealing with the ongoing "Information Revolution" that Boot dates from the 1990s, which has transformed warfare with high-tech advances such as cruise missiles, computer-guided targeting and navigation systems, and stealth planes invisible to radar. "While much is still murky," he declares, "one impact of the Information Age so far is reasonably clear: Even while decreasing the importance of traditional nation-states, it has given a substantial boost to the American position in relation to that of other states." More particularly, "American weaponry remains at the cutting edge of military developments."

NOW AREN'T YOU GLAD YOU WERE WAITING FOR THE DVD'S?:

The Nine: On Hiatus? Canceled? (Buddy TV, November 27, 2006)

On Saturday, the powers-that-be at ABC announced that they would be pulling The Nine from their schedule. Much-hyped and critically acclaimed coming into the season, The Nine failed to gain a wide viewership, even with it's cushy time slot. You'd think that an edgy, high-concept serial drama would thrive in the post-Lost time slot, but, obviously, this was not the case. The Nine regularly retained less than half of Lost's audience.

SAME SIDE:

A Day When Mahdi Army Showed Its Other Side: Militia Seen as Heroic In Aiding Bomb Victims (Sudarsan Raghavan, 11/27/06, Washington Post)

Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, Fartoosi has been a militiaman with the Shiite Muslim Mahdi Army of firebrand cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. Last week, he also served as a relief worker, a policeman, a traffic controller and a guard.

So did thousands of his militia comrades who mobilized to assist victims of the deadliest attack on Iraqis since the invasion, highlighting the power associated with the Mahdi Army's less-publicized roles in Iraqi society.

"We do even more than what the government should do," said Fartoosi, 21, as he recalled the eight grueling hours after a barrage of car bombs, mortars and missiles killed more than 200 people in Baghdad's Shiite heartland.

For U.S. officials, dismantling the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias that have fomented sectarian strife in Iraq is a cornerstone of their calculus to stabilize Iraq and bring U.S. troops home. They view it as a crucial step toward isolating the Sunni Arab insurgency and reconciling the nation.

But the attacks Thursday illustrated the immense difficulties involved in tackling the Mahdi Army, the country's largest and most violent militia, in today 's Iraq. The militiamen were heroes that day, Sadr City residents said in interviews. They did everything that Iraq's fragile unity government did not, or could not, do. In the days since, their actions have boosted Sadr's popularity and emboldened him.

"The Mahdi Army are the people who helped us after the explosion," said Shihab Ahmed, 24, a salesman who was wounded by flying shrapnel. "They saved us."

HAD ENOUGH?:

Here Come the Economic Populists (LOUIS UCHITELLE, 11/27/06, NY Times)

FOR years, the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, exercising a lock on the party’s economic policies, argued that the economy could achieve sustained growth only if markets were allowed to operate unfettered and globally.

Overcoming protests from labor unions, a traditional constituency, the Clinton administration vigorously supported free trade agreements like Nafta and agreed to China’s admission into the World Trade Organization. If there was damage to workers, then the Clinton camp proposed dealing with it after it occurred — through wage insurance, for example, or worker retraining and other safety-net measures.

This approach coincided with a period of economic prosperity, low unemployment and falling deficits. Over time, this combination — called Rubinomics after the Clinton administration’s Treasury secretary, Robert E. Rubin — became the Democratic establishment’s accepted model for the future.

Not anymore.

DITCH ALL THE DEDUCTIONS:

America the charitable: a few surprises (Mark Trumbull, 11/27/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

Charitable giving plays an even larger role in the economy than is suggested by some $260 billion in annual contributions. Each dollar of giving appears to create $19 of extra national income, according to a book released this past weekend. [...]

One thing that's long been known: The US leads the world in levels of charitable activity. The pattern runs from the rich, steeped in long tradition of philanthropy, to the poor. Those making $20,000 or less a year give away more, as a share of their income, than do higher income groups.

DON'T BLINK OR YOU'LL MISS IT:

New Hampshire Is Middle America (DAVID SHRIBMAN, November 27, 2006, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Only a few weeks ago, when summer still seemed visible in the rear view mirror, this was a Republican state — not quite as conservative as it had been a generation ago, when Barry Goldwater felt comfortable enough in New Hampshire to put forward ideas on privatizing Social Security that go even further than President Bush's, but Republican enough to have a certain party purity to it. The congressional delegation was 100% Republican, the state House was 100% Republican, and the state Senate was 100% Republican.

That's gone. New Hampshire's voters elected two Democratic House members for the first time since 1912, and at the same moment, for the first time since 1911, these same voters installed Democrats in both the state Senate and state House. States turn over their political complexions all the time and we hardly notice. When it happens in New Hampshire, we can't afford not to notice.

Sobering thought, but true: The New Hampshire primary, the nation's first, is only 14 months away. It is here, amid the pines and birches and the newly ascendant Democrats, that candidates will test their messages and then be tested themselves. And though you know that Iowa's caucuses come first, and the caucuses in Nevada, a newcomer to early presidential politics, now come next, remember that New Hampshire's primary has a special quality that makes it a model for the national contest in November 2008: Independents can vote here.

That's important. The Democratic caucuses in Iowa are almost certainly going to be dominated by the left. The United Auto Workers are an important force in the state, skewing the trade debate, and anti-war forces in Ames and Iowa City are going to draw the Democrats leftward. The Republican caucuses in Iowa are almost certainly going to be dominated by the right, and almost certainly by religious conservatives, who since 1988 have mastered the rhythm of these peculiar Monday evening contests. Senator Santorum may have won only about 40% of the vote in his re-election fight in Pennsylvania, but 40% in the Iowa caucuses is a very big number. He may be out of the Senate beginning in January, but he's still a political giant.

The message of the midterm congressional elections is that the middle counts, and New Hampshire is well-positioned to move the campaign back toward the center.

GLOBALIZATION PRODUCES SMARTER CONSUMERS:

Spending up 19% in holiday kickoff (Mary Jane Credeur, 11/27/06, Bloomberg News)

Shoppers spent 18.9 percent more over the Thanksgiving weekend than in 2005, kicking off holiday gift buying with purchases of discounted widescreen televisions and clothes, the National Retail Federation said Sunday. [...]

Shoppers limited much of their spending to sale items such as Wal-Mart Stores' $997 37-inch LCD TV and Sears Holdings' discounted jewelry and toys, said consultant Howard Davidowitz.

Discounts may threaten profit margins in a quarter when retailers collect a third of their annual earnings.

"How much money can retailers be making on half-priced TVs?" said Walter Todd, who helps manage $850 million at Greenwood Capital in Greenwood, S.C. [...]

Laura Brown, 38, an Atlanta nurse, bought a 42-inch Panasonic plasma TV for $1,000 at Best Buy the day after Thanksgiving. The set was marked down from $1,700 and was "my gift to me," Brown said.

"It was shocking, because people were only buying doorbusters. You can't have people just come in and buy doorbusters and leave," said Davidowitz.

YET THE GOP RAN ON PERPETUAL WAR:

Medicaid spending sees first decline (Dennis Cauchon, USA TODAY)

Medicaid spending has declined unexpectedly this year, the first drop since the health program for the poor was created in 1965. [...]

Medicaid spending fell 1.4% in the first nine months of the year compared with the same period a year ago, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The drop was even greater — an unprecedented a 5.4% decline — after adjusting for the rate of health care inflation. [...]

"States have made really aggressive changes in how care is managed in Medicaid," Arizona Medicaid Director Anthony Rodgers said. "Every state has taken a different approach, but the success can be seen almost everywhere."

ANGLOER THAN THOU:

Canada pushes Beijing on rights (Rowan Callick, November 27, 2006, The Australian)

UNDER the former Liberal government of Paul Martin, Canada was for a long time out of step with the rest of the Anglosphere on international affairs and the war on terrorism.

The election of conservative Stephen Harper as Prime Minister in February changed that - with one large exception: China.

While Australian Prime Minister John Howard finds much in common with Mr Harper in other matters, the two leaders could scarcely be further apart on China.

Mr Harper has chosen to hitch his China policy to human rights - which Mr Howard tends to leave to the discreet annual dialogues on the contentious issue, and other quiet diplomatic representations.

ANDELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR:

We are in a war to the death – craven concessions won't win it (Janet Daley, 27/11/2006, Daily Telegraph)

What Islamic fundamentalism plans to achieve (and it has made no secret of it) is a righting of the great wrong of 1492, when the Muslims were expelled from Spain: a return of the Caliphate, the destruction of corrupt Western values, and the establishment of Sharia law in all countries where Muslims reside. That is what we are up against.

The Pope characterised it as a battle between reason and unreason. Scholars may debate the theological and historical soundness of his analysis. But what is indisputable is that this is not an argument that is within the bounds of diplomatic give and take, the traditional stuff of international policy argy-bargy. What we could plausibly offer to the enemy, even at our most craven, would never be sufficient.

What is being demanded is the surrender of everything that Western democracy regards as sacred: even, ironically, the freedom to practise one's own religion, which, at the moment, is so useful to Muslim activists. We are forced to accept the Islamist movement's own estimation of the conflict: this is a war to the death, or until Islamism decides to call a halt.

But we do not have to accept all that Islamism claims for itself: most importantly, the idea that it alone embodies the true principles of its faith. The argument that the Islamic religion is inherently violent, which the Pope was thought to have supported in his Regensburg lecture, is academic, in both the literal and metaphorical senses.

What matters for us now is that a great many Muslims – including some enthusiastic converts who cannot even lay claim to a life history of persecution or injustice for their beliefs – are prepared to use their religious affiliation as a justification to commit mass murder. How are we to deal with this? There is only one way: we must, with the co-operation of the Muslim majority, separate the faith from its violent exponents.

Liberal democracy reached an understanding with religion a long time ago: your right, as a citizen, to observe your faith without persecution will be explicitly protected by the state. In return, you will agree to make your peace with the civil law and respect the rights of others to pursue their beliefs. That's the deal. We cannot make exceptions either by removing Muslims who accept their side of the bargain from that protection, or by permitting those who refuse to accept it to flout our law (on, say, sexual equality or the overt slavery of forced marriages).

As Caroline Cox and John Marks argue in their book The West, Islam and Islamism, republished in a new edition by Civitas this week, it is imperative that we distinguish between the Islamic faith and Islamist ideology. If we accept – or even countenance – the view that the two are indistinguishable, we will either be paralysed by our own democratic commitment to religious freedom or forced to engage in all-out religious war.

AUGUSTO AND EVERYTHING AFTER:

Pinochet shows no remorse (Jeremy McDermott, 27/11/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, used the occasion of his 91st birthday at the weekend to accept, for the first time, responsibility for the crimes committed by his military junta.

Yet there was no remorse for the 1973 coup and the subsequent killings of suspected Left-wing sympathisers and activists, some 3,000 of whom were murdered by military death squads.

"Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbour no rancour against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all and that I take political responsibility for everything that was done," said his wife, reading out a statement while the visibly frail Gen Pinochet held her hand. The coup that overthrew the Socialist president Salvador Allende had "no other motive than to make Chile a great place and prevent its disintegration", the general insisted.

He condemned the continuing trials of military officers and the charges against him, stating that his regime had saved Chile and made it one of the richest and most stable nations in Latin America.

"Thanks to their courage and decision, Chile moved from the totalitarian threat to the full democracy which we restored and which all our compatriots enjoy."

DUST THE TOMB:

OBIT: Robert Lockwood Jr (Daily Telegraph, 27/11/2006)

Robert Lockwood Jr, who died on November 21 aged 91, was one of the last of the Mississippi Delta blues guitarists.

A contemporary of Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim and Johnny Shines, he learned his trade from the genre's founding father and continued playing until shortly before his death.

Robert Lockwood Junior was born on March 27 1915 at Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, a farming hamlet some 25 miles from Helena. His first interest in music was in playing the family harmonium – his father had been a local preacher – but after his parents' divorce he took up the guitar, when he was aged 11.
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He received lessons from his mother's on/off live-in boyfriend, Robert Johnson, the most important influence on the Delta style and, according to Eric Clapton, "the most important blues musician who ever lived".

AT LAST, SOME PEACE AND QUIET:

The Giant, Helpless, Pitiful Democratic Majority (DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN, November 24, 2006, Vote.com)

For all of the dire warnings and pre-election commotion about the impact of a Democratic majority in Congress, the fact is that - now that it is upon us - it can do little or nothing but harass the administration.

There is no real danger of any legislative action emerging from this Congress. Yes, the president has a veto the Democrats cannot override, but nothing will ever make it as far as the desk at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., are just spinning their wheels.

In the Senate, there is no such thing as a majority. Ever since the elder Bush's administration, the filibuster has become routine. No longer reserved for civil-rights issues or for egregious legislation, it now is used to counter even motions for recess and adjournment. Members of the Senate are no longer subjected to the indignity of standing on their feet and reading a telephone book. Rather, the gentlemen's filibuster applies.

The majority leader phones the minority leader and asks if a filibuster is in effect. With his feet up on his desk, the Republican replies that it is and the Democrat, despite his majority, does not even think about bringing up his bill for consideration unless he has a good shot at the 60 votes required to shut off debate. In the Senate, 51 votes determine who gets the corner office, but to pass legislation, one needs 60.

THINGS HAVE NEVER BEEN BETTER, BUT...:

Would a drop in population be a positive or a negative? (Jonathan Last, 11/26/06, Philadelphia Inquirer)

The Danish economist Ester Boserup upended the classical Malthusian model of agriculture in 1965 by proposing that population increase fosters agricultural innovation, which, in turn, spurs leaps in production. Her theories have been borne out.

What about overcrowding? Everywhere you go today, you find traffic jams and sprawl, with people packed into condominiums and crowded malls. But this is a problem of density, not population. There's plenty of land available out there. The problem is that people who used to live in the countryside have relocated to cities: There are fewer people living in the Great Plains today than there were in the 1920s.

Environmental concerns are more interesting. However, such end-of-the-world warnings are not new. In the 1970s, many scientists were concerned about a new Ice Age. But leave aside global warming, on which science is conflicted, and take the other concern principally cited by environmentalists: that the Earth has a finite supply of resources that we shall surely soon deplete.

This, too, is an argument we have heard before. As Massimo Livi-Bacci explains in his Concise History of World Population, more than 100 years ago, economists "feared that coal supplies would be used up, and about 30 years ago the Club of Rome made similar predictions regarding other raw materials." Instead, markets and human innovation stepped in to provide greater efficiency.

For instance, in the America of 1850, you needed an average of 4.6 tons of petroleum equivalent to produce $1,000 of goods and services. By 1950, you needed only 1.8 tons, and, by 1978, 1.5 tons. Markets are exceptional engines of conservation.

Which leaves us with the economy. In 1971, Simon Smith Kuznets won the Nobel Prize in economics for his theory of "tested knowledge." As Kuznets explained: "More population means more creators and producers, both of goods along established production patterns and of new knowledge and inventions."

Kuznets was codifying what others had noticed before. Adam Smith remarked that "the most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants." As Livi-Bacci observes, "All things being equal, population increase leads to increased per capita production."

So the proposed "benefits" of population decline are, at the very least, suspect.

On the other hand, there are worrying potential costs of population decline. Of course, this worry is theoretical because we've never seen population decline on the massive scale that's coming our way. Or rather, we've never seen it in the modern world. There are, however, two historical examples.

Between 400 B.C. and the birth of Jesus, world population increased from about 153 million to 252 million. For the next 200 years, growth slowed almost to a halt. Then, between A.D. 200 and 600, population shrank from 257 million to 208 million. It took 400 more years for the population to recover to the level it had attained in Jesus' time.

The other drop in population occurred between 1340 and 1400, when the Black Death ravaged the world. Global population fell from 442 million to 375 million. Neither of these moments were particularly pleasant periods in human history.

Or, as Mark Steyn notes in America Alone, "There is no precedent in human history for economic growth on declining human capital."

HABIT FORMING:

Dreams of an investment in future drive voters (Habib Toumi, 11/26/06, Gulf News)

Luqman Al Qassab said that he was confident that the Council of Representatives will not be as weak as its predecessor. "We look forward to a bright future because I am convinced that living conditions and housing schemes will be improved," said Al Qassab who did not vote in 2002.

"Boycotting the elections then was significant to maintain unity within the ranks, but this year we are all convinced that participation would help enhance our lives," he said while carrying his young child.

Like many of the people who thronged the Jid Hafs polling station, Al Qassab saw the exercise as a manifestation of strong support for Shaikh Ali Salman and an investment in the future.

"I am overwhelmed by the sight of thousands of people lining up to cast their ballots," the Al Wefaq leader told Gulf News three hours into the one-day vote.

Many voters had younger members with them in front of the stations where vivacious children and adolescents were distributing pictures under the smiling oversized posters of the candidates.

WHEREAS THEY HAVE TO BE LUCKY EVERY DAY:

Abu Sayyaf in American’s beheading in 2001 nabbed in Basilan: Suspect ‘most dangerous Abu Sayyaf’ (Julie Alipala, 11/25/06, Inquirer)

Military intelligence agents have arrested the Abu Sayyaf leader who allegedly decapitated American hostage Guillermo Sobero in June 2001, the military said Saturday.

Major Eugene Batara, spokesperson of the Western Mindanao Command (Westmincom), said Annik Abbas alias Abu Anek was arrested on Friday evening in Colonia village in Lamitan, Basilan.

Abbas’s victim, Sobero, was among 21 persons -- including American couple Martin and Gracia Burnham -- taken from the Dos Palmas resort in Palawan during a raid by the group of bandits in May 2001. [...]

Akbar said Abbas was previously arrested but managed to escape from prison during the 2004 jail break in Basilan. He rejoined the Abu Sayyaf and was named commander of the group previously under Hamsiraji Sali, who was killed by soldiers in 2003, according to Akbar.

"I am giving P1 million to the civilian informants who helped the Army's 103rd Infantry Brigade in his arrest," the Basilan governor said.

On Thursday evening, police intelligence operatives also killed an Abu Sayyaf member during an operation here.

FIDEL'S DYING AND HUGO'S CAUGHT A COLD:

Hundreds of thousands rally to back Venezuelan opposition leader in presidential vote (The Associated Press, 11/26/06)

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans packed a major highway on Saturday in one of the largest demonstrations in years, waving flags as presidential candidate Manuel Rosales vowed to unseat incumbent Hugo Chavez in elections next weekend.

Shouts of "Dare to change!" arose from the crowd that filled the highway and nearby overpasses and streets. [...]

"They are scared," Rosales shouted, pumping his fists in the air and prompting loud applause from the crowd. "We are going to win on Dec. 3."

A dense crowed spilled for several kilometers along a broad highway beyond the major intersection where Rosales spoke. Some journalists estimated the crowd at roughly 800,000, but there were no official estimates.

THE BOOK, NOT THE ORGANIZATION:

How the Yes Man Learned to Say No (ALAN EHRENHALT, 11/26/06, NY Times)

Wherever he looked, Whyte found what he called the “social ethic,” a set of values that “makes morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.” In the boardroom, in the office cubicles, in the Park Forest cul-de-sacs, in the schools and churches, the young adults of the 1950s were being trained to think and act in unison, to absorb the values of the team, to suppress any truly innovative ideas in the interest of harmony. “In our attention to making organization work,” he complained, “we have come close to deifying it.”

Not only that, but the American middle class was transmitting the ethic of mindless conformity to the children it was raising. When parents in Park Forest were asked what they thought the schools there should emphasize, most responded that schools should teach children “how to get along with other people.”

One might spend an interesting evening debating whether Whyte really captured midcentury American culture with the precision that most critics applauded — or whether he simply defined it in terms so vivid that they achieved a status as intellectual dogma impervious to challenge.

What we can say with confidence half a century later is that Whyte got the future almost entirely wrong.

YOUR PORK IS MY GOOD PUBLIC POLICY:

As Power Shifts in New Congress, Pork May Linger (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 11/26/06, NY Times)

[Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii] routinely deliver to their states more money per capita in earmarks — the pet projects lawmakers insert into major spending bills — than any other state gets. This year, Alaska received $1.05 billion in earmarks, or $1,677.27 per resident, while Hawaii got $903.9 million, or $746.05 per resident, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan group that tracks such figures.

Representative Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, and many Democratic candidates have railed for months against wasteful “special interest earmarks” inserted into bills “in the dark of night.” Now their party’s electoral victories mean that Mr. Stevens will hand Mr. Inouye the gavel of the Senate defense appropriations subcommittee, which presides over the largest pool of discretionary spending and earmarks. But if the Democratic leaders are talking about “earmark reform,” that may be news to Mr. Inouye.

“I don’t see any monumental changes,” Mr. Inouye said in a recent interview.

DID THEY NOT REALIZE THIS BEFORE THE ELECTION?:

Success of Drug Plan Challenges Democrats: Medicare Benefit's Cost Beat Estimates (Lori Montgomery and Christopher Lee, 11/26/06, Washington Post)

Drug-company lobbyists, Bush administration officials and many congressional Republicans are preparing to block any effort to increase federal control over drug prices, saying the Medicare benefit is working well. They contend that instead of saving money, government negotiations could raise drug prices for all consumers while limiting choices for people on Medicare.

"This is going to be much more of a morass than people think," said Marilyn Moon, director of the health program at the American Institutes for Research and a former trustee of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. Negotiating drug prices is "a feel-good kind of answer, but it's not one that is easy to imagine how you put into practice."

The Medicare drug benefit, one of the Bush administration's signature domestic programs, was created in 2003 and took effect in January. It has enrolled 22.5 million seniors, some of whom had no previous drug coverage.

Polls indicate that more than 80 percent of enrollees are satisfied, even though nearly half chose plans with no coverage in the doughnut hole, a gap that opens when a senior's drug costs reach $2,250 and closes when out-of-pocket expenses reach $3,600. By the latest estimates, 3 million to 4 million seniors will hit the doughnut hole this year and pay full price for drugs while also paying drug-plan premiums.

The cost of the program has been lower than expected, about $26 billion in 2006, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. The cost was projected to rise to $45 billion next year, but Medicare has received new bids indicating that its average per-person subsidy could drop by 15 percent in 2007, to $79.90 a month.

Urban Institute President Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, called that a remarkable record for a new federal program.

Initially, he said, people were worried no private plans would participate. "Then too many plans came forward," Reischauer said. "Then people said it's going to cost a fortune. And the price came in lower than anybody thought. Then people like me said they're low-balling the prices the first year and they'll jack up the rates down the line. And, lo and behold, the prices fell again. And the reaction was, 'We've got to have the government negotiate lower prices.' At some point you have to ask: What are we looking for here?"

AMERICA HAS NO FATE THERE--IT'S THEIR COUNTRY:

Sword of the Shia: He can deal out death through his black-clad followers and roil the government any time he chooses. Why Moqtada al-Sadr may end up deciding America's fate in Iraq. (Jeffrey Bartholet, 12/04/06, Newsweek)

Sadr is a unique force in Iraq: a leader from the majority Shiites who has resisted American occupation from the start. He's a populist, a nationalist and an Islamic radical rolled into one. Part of his power is simply that he's powerful. Large numbers of impoverished Shiites view Sadr as their guardian—the one leader who is willing not just to stand up for them but to strike back on their behalf. "People count on the militias," says Lieutenant Hartley, who deals with Sadr's thugs on a regular basis. "It's like the mob—they keep people safe."

The longer Sadr has survived, the greater his prestige has grown. Iraqis and foreigners who meet him are impressed by the transformation. He's more diplomatic and commands more respect. He used to greet visitors at his Najaf office sitting on pillows on the floor. Now he has a couch set. His concerns are high-minded: he speaks of fuel shortages and cabinet politics. In the past, Sadr was shrugged off as a rabble-rouser and a nuisance. Now he is undeniably one of the most popular leaders in the country. He is also its most dangerous, for he has the means to wage political or actual war against any solution that is not precisely to his liking. He is driven by forces America has long misread in Iraq: religious sentiment, economic resentment and enduring sectarian passions.

And he is now a primary target of Sunni insurgents bent on provoking all-out civil war. Last Thursday, Sunni militants carried out their deadliest attack since 2003. Multiple car bombs, accompanied by mortars, killed more than 200 people in Sadr City, a Shiite slum of 2 million people in Baghdad that is dominated by the Mahdi Army. Shiite forces responded immediately by firing mortars at a revered Sunni mosque in Baghdad, and by torching other holy places. Only the presence of U.S. troops—and a wide curfew over the city—prevented far bloodier revenge attacks.

More than anyone, Sadr personifies the dilemma Washington faces: If American troops leave Iraq quickly, militia leaders like Sadr will be unleashed as never before, and full-scale civil war could follow. But the longer the American occupation lasts, the less popular America gets—and the more popular Sadr and his ilk become.

THE THIRD WAY IS STILL ONLY ABOUT A THIRD OF THE WAY HERE:

Putting Parents First: A new approach to domestic policy for conservatives. (Yuval Levin, 12/04/2006, Weekly Standard)

We are beginning to get used to national security elections in America. The 2006 election cycle was the third in a row focused almost exclusively on the war on terror and Iraq. Apart from immigration and the vague odor of corruption, it is hard to find a single domestic issue that candidates consistently stressed on the stump this year. Indeed, neither party has campaigned on anything that might be called a domestic policy vision or platform since September 11.

But there is reason to think the 2008 election will be different. The war on terror will surely still be crucial, but if we are indeed in a generational struggle, then concerns of war and peace will come to coexist with more familiar social and economic issues in the public's mind, as was the case during the Cold War. And in the absence of George W. Bush, the next presidential election will also be less taken up with disputes over the minutiae of every administration decision. Polls already show voters increasingly concerned again with familiar domestic priorities like education and health care.

For conservatives, this presents a challenge and an opportunity. It is a challenge because conservatives today lack a coherent domestic policy vision that would either build upon or move beyond the Bush agenda. Those who approve of "compassionate conservatism," or of Bush's tax or education policies, are hard pressed to point to a logical next step. And those who complain about the president's direction--about spending, government programs, a new entitlement, and so
on--have been short on realistic alternatives.

WHY SHOULD ANY NON-DEMOCRATIC REGIME BE ADMITTED?:

Kick him out: UN must expel Ahmadinejad's murderous regime, says one of the world's leading moral voices (ELIE WIESEL, 11/25/06, NY Daiy News)

[E]ven in the domain of evil, differences and degrees exist. Certain dictators are worse than others, and their hateful actions have consequences more dangerous.

For the reader who has not yet guessed, I am speaking of the current president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: More than so many others who abuse their position if not their power, this one represents the darkest of political action. [...]

This is why I maintain that such a figure does not have a place within the community of international leaders. Persona non grata, an undesirable individual, this is what he should become, because of what he is doing to his country, to his people, to all of humanity. This is why he deserves to be turned away everywhere. I'll go even further: The country he leads and embodies should be excluded from the United Nations as long as he is its ruler and symbol. On what grounds? It is quite simple: One member state of the United Nations that threatens to destroy another member state of these same United Nations violates its very charter and conventions.

Is something like this possible? I am not naive enough to believe that this could really happen. What state would introduce such a UN resolution? And how many delegates would vote to adopt it? I know all too well: very few. But at least they won't feel so comfortable in their fear. At least they'll learn from lessons of the not-so-distant past: We know with whom a dictator will begin; but he will not stop there. If Iran were to have a nuclear weapon, do we really think that Israel would remain its only target?

Some will say: What about North Korea? Why aren't we doing something about them? Don't they have the same atomic ambitions? Yes, they do. But there is still quite a difference. North Korea has never threatened to wipe away another state.

WHEN YOU'VE AGREED, WHY HAGGLE?:

In Washington: What's your solution? (MJ Rosenberg, Nov. 23, 2006, THE JERUSALEM POST)

[My colleague] said that all you have to do is ask the status-quo supporters, "So, how is your solution doing?" That is a perfect response.

There is no reason for those of us who support negotiations to feel defensive or to give a point-by-point rebuttal to those who champion the status quo. Just tell them to read the newspapers.

The Oslo process collapsed in the fall of 2000 and, ever since, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has intensified with a vengeance. Compare the half dozen civilians killed inside Israel between the fall of 1997 and the fall of 2000, and the 1,125 Israelis and 4,286 Palestinians killed since.

The only people who should be defensive about the diplomatic process are those who oppose it.

Of course, no one ever flat-out says they oppose negotiations.

MORE:
Israel accepts ceasefire offer (Herb Keinon, Yaakov Katz and JPost staff, Nov. 25, 2006, THE JERUSALEM POST)

Israel announced on Saturday, following a telephone conversation between Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, that it would accept the Palestinian factions' offer of a ceasefire.

According to the Prime Minister's Office, Abbas phoned Olmert and told him he had received an agreement from all the different Palestinian factions to the cease-fire, and in response "requested that Israel would stop all military operations in the Gaza Strip, and withdraw all its forces from there."

The statement said that after speaking to his senior ministers and top security officials, Olmert told Abbas that Israel would respond favorably "since Israel was operating in the Gaza Strip in response to the [Palestinian] violence."

Olmert, according to the statement, told Abbas that "the end of the violence could bring about the end of Israeli operations, and his hope that this would bring stability to both sides."

ANTI-AMERICAN IS ENOUGH FOR THEM:

Venezuela's great divider (Ana Julia Jatar, November 26, 2006, Boston Globe)

ON DEC. 3, Venezuelans will decide whether to elect President Hugo Chávez to another six-year term. Many American liberals will be rooting for Chávez to win because they see him as a champion of Venezuela's poor and admire his fierce opposition to President Bush. However, they should recognize him for who he is and not for who they wish him to be.

HARRYHAUSEN WANNABES:

Brothers grim: Masters of animated fairy tales, twins Stephen and Timothy Quay create live-action fable in 'Piano' (Damon Smith, November 26, 2006, Boston Globe)

Masters of stop-motion animation in the vein of Jan Svankmajer ("Lunacy ") and Walerian Borowczyk, the Brothers Quay (who are 58-year-old identical twins from Philadelphia) have previously directed one feature, "Institute Benjamenta ," in addition to numerous shorts, like their enchanting 1986 allegory "Street of Crocodiles ," which was nominated for the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Despite the critical accolades, however, their new live-action fable, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes ," was dead in the water for 10 years until "Brazil" director Terry Gilliam signed on as executive producer.

"We went to [Britain's] Channel 4 with this project," says Stephen, who like his brother has chiseled features and a rakish mane of sandy-brown hair, "and they made a lot of stipulations about accessibility." Since their idea was partly inspired by Jules Verne's tale "The Carpathian Castle ," the Quays decided to pitch it as "poetic science fiction." But in the end, despite repeated rewrites, no one would fund the production until Gilliam threw his weight behind the project in 2004.

Set on an eerie, forested island, "The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes" -- which opens Thursday at the Museum of Fine Arts -- tells the story of Dr. Droz (Gottfried John), a mad genius who kidnaps gorgeous opera singer Malvina (Amira Casar) with the intention of turning the bride-to-be into a musical automaton. Assisted by Assumpta (Assumpta Serna), his succubus-like helpmate, Droz lures Felisberto (Cesar Sarachu ) to the isle, where the gaunt piano tuner begins to fine-tune the mechanisms that will, unbeknownst to him, eventually imprison her.

Watching this elliptically structured fantasy, which won a special mention for "visual atmosphere" at the 2005 Locarno International Film Festival , one gets the sense of "living in someone else's imagination," as a dazed Filisberto intones at one point. But the Quays -- who scripted, directed, and designed special effects for "Piano Tuner" -- say evoking that kind of intersubjective consciousness isn't their goal.

"We tend to hold the mirrors out," says Stephen, "toward life, toward a kind of theoretical beyond."

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO:

Lower bill? Thank a careful driver (Bruce Mohl, November 26, 2006, Boston Globe)

Safer cars and a boomlet of more cautious drivers are nudging auto insurance rates down across the nation, but industry officials say prices appear to be falling even faster in Massachusetts.

WHAT ABOUT BOBBY FLAY AND THAT SOUTHERN CHICK?

Hatred of Rachael Ray can be a powerful uniting force (Rob Walker | November 26, 2006, Boston Globe)

Consumer culture and indeed popular culture revolve in large part around shared admiration, shared likes: Fandom, in a word, is a thing that can bring us together.

But what about shared dislikes? Can a community form around that? What is the opposite of a fan club? The answer is the Rachael Ray Sucks Community.

Gathering by way of the blogging and social-networking site LiveJournal, this group has more than 1,000 members, who are quite active in posting their latest thoughts and observations about the various shortcomings, flaws, and disagreeable traits of Rachael Ray, the television food personality.

"This community," the official explanation reads, "was created for people that hate the untalented twit known as Rachael Ray." The most important rule for those who wish to join: "You must be anti-Rachael!"

As with any community, the key to attracting members is not just a clear core idea but one that can be fulfilled in a variety of ways. Members of the Rachael Ray Sucks Community certainly do this, criticizing her cooking skills, her over-reliance on chicken stock, her kitchen hygiene, her smile, her voice, her physical mannerisms, her clothes, her penchant for saying "Yum-o," and so on.

THE CITY NEEDS LESS BUILDING, NOT MORE:

The (Naked) City and the Undead (TOM WOLFE, 11/26/06, NY Times)

CHIN up, tummy out, Aby Rosen, the 46-year-old German developer, owner of the Seagram Building and Lever House, was posing for pictures in front of 980 Madison Avenue barely one month ago when he grew so bold as to boast: “I have zero fear. Fear is not something I have.”

Easy for you to say, braveheart! The courage-crowing tycoon knows very well that in the current battle over 980 Madison, a five-story Art Moderne building stretching from 76th Street to 77th Street, the contest is already completely snookered in his favor.

On top of this block-long low-rise he intends to build one of his Aby Rosen jumbo glass boxes full of commercial space and condominiums, rising straight up a sheer 30 stories. His big problem — or, to be more accurate, “problem” — is that 980 Madison is in the heart of the Upper East Side Historic District, and it would be hard to dream up anything short of a Mobil station more out of place there than a Mondo Condo glass box by Aby Rosen.

The writer Tom Wolfe and other neighbors have taken to lobbing objections in the direction of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, the city’s official watchdog for landmarked areas. The commission has already held a hearing and could stop Aby Rosen dead in his tracks at a moment’s notice, just like that.

But what, him worry? Like every major developer in town, he knows that the Landmarks Preservation Commission has been de facto defunct for going on 20 years. Today it is a bureau of the walking dead, tended by one Robert B. Tierney.

UPPER BUNK:

REVIEW: of Another Place by Bunky Green (Norman Weinstein, All About Jazz)

This release is a welcome reminder that Bunky Green is alive and well—and one of the dozen most important alto sax players in the country. In spite of notable associations with bands led by Charles Mingus, Sonny Stitt and Yusef Lateef, Green's available catalog until this release consisted of a single disc, Healing the Pain (Delos, 1990). But Green was befriended by Steve Coleman, and we have this recording as a result. Part of Coleman's genius is getting talent, ranging from a young Cassandra Wilson to an elderly Von Freeman, to be noticed by labels and audiences. Coleman produced this impressive session and introduced Green to perhaps the greatest rhythm section of his career: pianist Jason Moran, bassist Lonnie Plaxico and drummer Nasheet Waits.

To say that Green has “his own sound” is just one way of noting his achievement. He has flawless control of the alto's upper registers and his own form of the blues cry: piercingly passionate, yet always integrated within exquisitely crafted solos that are teeming with ideas.

LONGER HOURS FOR PUBS, SHORTER FOR BUSINESSES & LOW PRODUCTIVITY--GO FIGURE...:

Tories look into the 35-hour work week (Melissa Kite, 25/11/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

A controversial 35-hour working week is under consideration by a group of David Cameron's key advisers.

The Quality of Life policy group has been consulting on whether the Conservatives should bring in European-style working hours for the "general wellbeing" of the population.

John Gummer, chairman of the panel, said: "It is a pretty peculiar situation that we work many more hours than many other countries but our productivity is not very high."

WRONG HORSE:

US diplomatic initiative in Middle East (Harry De Quetteville, 25/11/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

America has launched a week-long, high-stakes diplomatic offensive for control of the Middle East, rallying allies against Iranian influence sweeping through the region.

Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, began the battle to stop the rising tide of Iranian power with a visit yesterday to Saudi Arabia, America's key oil-producing ally in the Gulf.

NEVERMIND THE EU, THERE IS NO U.K.:

England wants its independence (Patrick Hennessy and Melissa Kite, Sunday Telegraph)

The United Kingdom should be broken up and Scotland and England set free as independent nations, according to a huge number of voters on both sides of the border.

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.

There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.

IF YOU COULDN'T FREELOAD YOU WOULDN'T DRIVE:

Tolls could cut congestion, test shows (Eric Pryne, 11/25/06, Seattle Times)

For about eight months, drivers in 275 Seattle-area households agreed to pay for something the rest of us get for free: The right to drive on the region's freeways and streets.

They were guinea pigs in a pioneering study that explored how motorists' behavior might change if they had to pay tolls — not just on a few bridges or highways, but on almost every road with a yellow center line.

Researchers established virtual tolls ranging from a nickel to 50 cents a mile. They gave participants pre-paid accounts of between $600 and $3,000, and told them they could keep whatever the tolls didn't eat up.

The experiment ended in February. Preliminary results, released this month, suggest that if such so-called "road pricing" were widespread, it could make a significant dent in traffic.

BACK TO THE 70'S?:

The economic challenge facing Democrats (Robert Kuttner, November 25, 2006, Boston Globe)

Clearly the voters are sick of an economic system that allows moguls to make annual incomes running into the hundreds of millions, for manipulating commerce in ways that leave ordinary people worse off. In an election billed as a referendum on Iraq and Republican corruption (which it certainly was), the sleeper issue was the economy as it affects regular Americans.

But transforming this reality will require a lot more than a higher minimum wage or even universal health insurance. BusinessWeek is right: The current rules of globalism do weaken government's ability to use instruments that once allowed prosperity to be more widely shared -- tighter regulation of finance, a more progressive tax system with the proceeds invested in ordinary people, and a stronger labor movement.

As Rubin's role attests, the partisans of a globalized casino economy are almost as influential in the Democratic Party as the Republican Party. As Barney Frank takes a closer look at the abuses and risks of the new wave of speculation on Wall Street, he may find that the financial economy requires more regulation, not less, to deliver on the promise of an America with more broadly shared prosperity.

IT AIN'T ALSACE:

Paris goes to war for bigger slice of Airbus (Russell Hotten, 25/11/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Shareholders in the Franco-German aerospace group EADS are at war after the Paris government said it wanted to increase its stake in the company to fund development of a new long-range A350 aircraft for its Airbus division.

EADS cancelled a board meeting yesterday when France indicated it would block a proposal by the company's two main industrial investors to raise a substantial amount of the aircraft's €10bn (£6.78bn) launch aid from the capital markets.

Giving France a higher stake in EADS risks upsetting the delicate political and commercial balance. The French state and Lagardère own 29.99pc through a holding company. DaimlerChrysler owns 22.9pc, and the Spanish government 5.48pc. The rest of the shares are in free float.
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A source said France wants to raise its holding by up to 15pc. DaimlerChrysler has already said it wants to reduce its stake and the Bonn government is trying to ensure the shares are placed with German institutions. The German government has said it does not want to buy a direct stake in EADS.

OR AT LEAST POLITICALLY RETARDED:

Female hopefuls counter traditional roles (Habib Toumi, 11/25/06, Gulf News)

They are smart, ambitious and highly educated. They also have a growing sense about the role of literate women in confronting traditions and working on par with men to create a more positive reality for them.

They are women whose exceptional fortitude has brought vociferous female voices to male-dominated campaigns in the last five weeks.

Dr Jameela Al Sammak did it with extraordinary panache. In fact, she took the battle to a public ground and did not hesitate to tell the people about the relentless onslaught on her and on her team.

"When I announced my decision to run in the polls, I was subjected to tremendous pressure to withdraw my candidature for the sake of another candidate. I was told that by running in the elections, I was dispersing the votes in the constituency which, they claimed, was theirs," she said.

Jameela said that her critics should have understood that imposing choices on people was not condoned by religion Jameela insisted that her "crime" was that she was not a member of a large society.

"I have never opposed religious scholars. But when for instance they say that Al Wefaq is the Bloc of the Believers, does that make me an atheist?" she wondered.

"You are mentally retarded for opposing women's political rights," blurted a woman inside the overcrowded tent as she addressed one of Bahrain's best known preachers and newspaper columnists.

It takes exceptional audacity and daring nerve to utter such an accusation in the overcrowded tent of the candidate. Huda Al Mutawa has both and much more.

NO ONE MESSES WITH THE OTHER RELIGION OF PEACE:

Stores revert to 'Merry Christmas' (Tricia Bishop, November 24, 2006, Chicago Tribune)

Christmas is back at Wal-Mart - not that it really ever left.

After testing out a generic, yet all-inclusive, "happy holidays" theme last year, the nation's largest retailer announced this month that Christmas will dominate its seasonal marketing in the U.S.

"We've learned our lesson," said Wal-Mart spokeswoman Marisa Bluestone. "This year, we're not afraid to say, 'Merry Christmas.'"

Neither are Walgreens, Target, Macy's, Kmart and Kohl's, among others. In interviews this week, spokesmen from those major retailers said that their stores acknowledge the Christmas holiday, hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's backlash led by conservative Christian groups.

THERE ARE NO GOOD ELDERLY WHITE GUYS:

Progress made in talks between Drew and Sox (Gordon Edes, November 25, 2006, Boston Globe)

One possible hurdle, according to a source with direct knowledge of the talks, is that no Sox player has been given a contract for longer than four years by the current ownership. Drew, who turned 31 Monday, is seeking a deal for more years, according to the source, and with Soriano signing for eight years and Matthews and Pierre getting five-year deals, he would appear to have the leverage.

His asking price, according to sources, is at least $14 million. That's $4 million a year more than the Sox offered last winter to Johnny Damon before he signed a four-year, $52 million deal with the Yankees. Bobby Abreu, the right fielder the Sox passed on in July because of luxury-tax ramifications before he was dealt by the Phillies to the Yankees, is due $15 million in 2007, with the Yankees holding an option of $16 million for 2008.

Manny Ramírez, who is due $18 million next season ($4 million deferred), ranks as the Sox' highest-paid position player. David Ortiz, who this spring signed a four-year, $50 million deal, is next at an average salary of $12.5 million. The club holds an option year of $12.5 million in 2011; offering Drew option years could be one way Epstein may be able to circumvent Drew's desire for a deal longer than four years.

Statistically, Drew ranks among the game's best players. In the last three seasons, he has an OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) of .946, which ranks 11th among players with at least 1,200 plate appearances, just ahead of Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees (.945). Only four outfielders had a higher OPS: Ramírez (1.014), Lance Berkman of the Astros (1.000), Vladimir Guerrero of the Angels (.961), and Edmonds of the Cardinals (.947).

Drew's on-base percentage of .415 over the last three seasons ranked sixth overall, and third among outfielders, trailing only Berkman (.428) and Abreu (.419).

Last season, Drew led the Dodgers with 100 RBIs, 89 walks, 34 doubles, and a .393 OBP, and tied Nomar Garciaparra for the team lead in home runs with 20, despite a 43-game span between June 2 and July 26 in which he failed to hit one. His best season in the majors came in 2004, with the Atlanta Braves, when he hit .305 (.436 OBP) with 31 home runs and 93 RBIs, and finished sixth in the National League MVP voting.

Defensively, he's considered an above-average outfielder who can play both right and center field.

"If you get him on the field, he's the best free agent outfielder of the bunch," said an executive with a team that signed one of this offseason's other prime targets.

PAUL, NOT POLLY:

Cameron invites Toynbee to join conference (Toby Helm, 25/11/2006, Daily Telegraph)

In a speech on social policy yesterday, the Conservative leader ditched the Thatcherite idea that poverty was best tackled through free market policies that made society richer as a whole, enabling wealth to "trickle down" to the most needy.

His daring in endorsing traditional Left-wing thinking is reminiscent of Tony Blair's willingness to praise aspects of Margaret Thatcher's legacy after he entered No 10.

He argued that it was time to move on from promoting "economic liberalism" to a new phase of Conservatism where government and the voluntary sector was freed, via tax reform and deregulation, to help the poorest in society.
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His move is designed to take the Tories directly on to ground traditionally regarded as Labour's preserve and rid it of its uncaring image.

"Economic liberalism is necessary – but it is not sufficient," he said in an address to mark the 25th anniversary of the Scarman Report into the Brixton riots. "State welfare is also necessary – but it is not efficient. 'Trickle-down' economics is not working."

Mr Cameron, who has already angered the Right by refusing to promise tax cuts before the next election, said John Moore, a social security minister under Margaret Thatcher, had been "wrong to declare the end of poverty", in the late 1980s.

"Even if material want did disappear, that would not be the 'end of the line for poverty'. Because as well as absolute poverty, there is relative poverty."

WHILE THEY'D OPPOSE, BUT BE FORCED TO ACCEPT THIS ONE:

Coup d'État In Venezuela: Made In The USA (Chris Carlson, 25 November, 2006, Gringoinvenezuela.com)

In 1999, when the U.S.-led bombing campaign in Serbia didn't get rid of Slobodan Milosovic, Washington changed its strategy. U.S. intelligence organized a $77 million effort to oust Milosovic through the ballot box. They sent in CIA front organizations funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Instead of guns and bombs, these U.S. forces were armed with fax machines, computers, and perhaps most importantly, sophisticated surveys done by the Washington-based polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland.(1) Their mission: to take down Milosovic by strengthening opposition groups.

Milosovic is now long gone, as the U.S. effort to mobilize the opposition and produce mass protests was successful in unseating him in the 2000 elections. This victory was a landmark for U.S. intelligence agencies. They had developed a new way to overthrow unfriendly regimes, and it was much easier than a violent overthrow, or a messy invasion. Penn, Schoen & Berland had played an important role; so important that the U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright commended them, saying "This may be one of the first instances where polling has played such an important role in setting and securing foreign policy objectives."(2) They did, indeed, secure their foreign policy objectives. Milosovic was out, and the U.S.-backed opposition took power.

Since 2000, this smooth new strategy to influence elections and topple regimes has been implemented in many other countries. Dubbed as the "post-modern coup" by Jonathan Mowat, the same brilliant techniques were used in Belarus in 2001, in Georgia in 2003, and in the Ukraine in 2004, to name a few. Although it ultimately failed in Belarus, in Georgia the U.S. effort produced the "Rose Revolution" which overthrew President Eduard Shevardnadze. In the Ukraine it was the "Orange Revolution" that installed Victor Yushchenko in 2004.(3) Each time, groups financed by the NED, and USAID worked inside the country to build popular support for the opposition candidate. Each time they constructed an appealing campaign image using the modern marketing tactics that they have perfected along the way. And each time, they used Penn, Schoen & Berland election "polls" to shape the public's perception. [...]

These days the U.S. has a new arch nemesis; Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Surely Washington would be delighted to get rid of him in the same fashion as all the rest. But there is one small problem; Hugo Chavez is no Slobodan Milosovic. He is immensely popular among the masses in Venezuela and throughout Latin America. Pro-Chavez parties have continued to win democratic elections over the last 8 years, and will most certainly win again in the December 3rd presidential contest. This time U.S. forces have their work cut out for them. They know that it is basically impossible to beat Chavez at the ballot box; he's too popular. It looks like they will have to go to plan B: a coup d'etat.

The U.S. has already set up camp in Venezuela, and all the original cast members are here. We've got NED, USAID, and yes, once again, Penn, Schoen & Berland. Just like in Serbia, or Ukraine, the objective of the U.S. forces is to remove Chavez from power. Therefore they have teamed up with major opposition groups to map out and implement their strategy. The strategy in Venezuela takes from many of the important lessons that they first learned in Serbia, and have since been carried to many other nations. The goal is to create a situation like in Ukraine in 2004: huge protests against the elections and against the government in order to cause chaos and instability.

AND DEMOCRATS WILL RUSH TO SUPPORT HIM:

US Could Bomb Iran Nuclear Sites In 2007: Analysts (25 November, 2006, Agence France Presse)

President George W. Bush could choose military action over diplomacy and bomb Iran's nuclear facilities next year, political analysts in Washington agree.

"I think he is going to do it," John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a military issues think tank, told AFP.

"They are going to bomb WMD facilities next summer," he added, referring to nuclear facilities Iran says are for peaceful uses and Washington insists are really intended to make nuclear bombs, or weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

"It would be a limited military action to destroy their WMD capabilities" added the analyst, believing a US military invasion of Iran is not on the table.

FOLLOWING THE CRUSADERS:

Empire's Ally: Canadian Foreign Policy (Greg Albo, 25 November, 2006, Socialistproject.ca)

Since the coming into power of the Stephen Harper Conservative government in January of this year, there has been much gnashing of teeth over the foreign policy stance of Canada. In particular, Canada's relation with the U.S. on a phalanx of fronts has been at the centre of controversy. One has been the softwood lumber deal cut by Ambassador Michael Wilson, which limits Canadian lumber exports to the U.S. and allows the Americans to keep $1 billion in duties ruled by trade tribunals as illegal. This has been judged by the government as a necessary step to re-establishing 'good' bilateral relations to secure and deepen economic integration. A second has been Canada's Middle East policy, in terms of the deployment of Canadian troops into a major combat position in southern Afghanistan, and the uncompromising support for the Israeli and U.S. positions on the summer assault of Lebanon and Gaza by Israel. These stances have been celebrated by the Right, especially the cynics w! ho dominate the national media in defending U.S. policies at every turn, as bringing a new 'ethical realism' to Canadian foreign policies.

IF WE'RE MAJORITARIAN, WE'RE PRO-SHI'A:

Discord Accompanies Bahrain Vote: Charges Against Ruling Sunni Minority Mar Run-Up to Election Today (Faiza Saleh Ambah, November 25, 2006, Washington Post)

Friction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in this strategic Persian Gulf kingdom, which is holding its second parliamentary elections in three decades, has clouded the voting set here for Saturday.

The campaign for the National Assembly's 40-member lower house has been marred by an alleged plot by a senior government official to rig the elections in favor of the ruling Sunni minority.

A 214-page report disclosed in September accused a senior official of secretly plotting to sideline the country's majority Shiites. The report, released by a former government adviser, is the latest in a series of events that have exacerbated Sunni-Shiite discord in this nation of 700,000, home to the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet.

THEREBY PUTTING CONSERVATIVES AT ODDS WITH EVEN THE BUSINESSES THEY CLAIM TO REPRESENT:

Energy Firms Come to Terms With Climate Change (Steven Mufson and Juliet Eilperin, November 25, 2006, Washington Post)

While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nation's largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable.

The Democratic takeover of Congress makes it more likely that the federal government will attempt to regulate emissions. The companies have been hiring new lobbyists who they hope can help fashion a national approach that would avert a patchwork of state plans now in the works. They are also working to change some company practices in anticipation of the regulation.

"We have to deal with greenhouse gases," John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., said in a recent speech at the National Press Club. "From Shell's point of view, the debate is over. When 98 percent of scientists agree, who is Shell to say, 'Let's debate the science'?"

SENSORS TRUMP SENSE:

Sensing You’re Too Drunk to Drive (NY Times, 11/25/06)

There aren’t many social problems that can be solved with a “technical fix,” but drunken driving may be one of the most amenable. Technologies that are already in limited use can lock the ignitions of cars whose drivers have high alcohol levels in their breath, thus preventing them from turning their vehicles into lethal unguided weapons.

These existing technologies and more futuristic devices still under development are the cornerstones of a new phase in the campaign that was announced this week by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The initial goal, which is backed by associations of state highway officials and car manufacturers, is to have all states do what New Mexico has already done: require that all convicted drunken drivers, even first-time offenders, have devices installed in their cars that measure alcohol in the breath and immobilize the car if levels exceed set limits.

THAT RAREST OF CREATURES--A LOVEABLE FRENCHMAN:

Philippe Noiret, an Actor of Elegance and Dry Humor, Dies at 76 (ALAN RIDING, 11/25/06, NY Times)

Philippe Noiret, a much-loved French character actor who gained international renown through the movies “Il Postino” and “Cinema Paradiso,” died on Thursday at his home on the Left Bank in Paris. He was 76.

A REMINDER THAT THIS WAS THE LEAST SIGNIFICANT ELECTION SINCE THE 70s:

Despite a Year of Ire and Angst, Little Has Changed on Wiretaps (ERIC LICHTBLAU, 11/25/06, NY Times)

When President Bush went on national television one Saturday morning last December to acknowledge the existence of a secret wiretapping program outside the courts, the fallout was fierce and immediate.

Mr. Bush’s opponents accused him of breaking the law, with a few even calling for his impeachment. His backers demanded that he be given express legal authority to do what he had done. Law professors talked, civil rights groups sued and a federal judge in Detroit declared the wiretapping program unconstitutional.

But as Democrats prepare to take over on Capitol Hill, not much has really changed. For all the sound and fury in the last year, the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program continues uninterrupted, with no definitive action by either Congress or the courts on what, if anything, to do about it, and little chance of a breakthrough in the lame-duck Congress.

USE IT BEFORE YOU LOSE IT:

Flexing Your Flex Account (Carrie Coolidge 11.17.06, Forbes)

Most people know the pre-tax payroll contributions they have made over the year to a flexible spending account are used to pay for medical expenses not covered by insurance. These accounts offer great tax benefits by reimbursing plan participants for out of pocket expenses ranging from insurance deductibles and doctor co-payments to medications.

Many participants, however, don't realize that flex spend accounts can also be used to pay for medical services that don't require prior physician approval or that may not be covered by their company health plan. Indeed, flex spend accounts can be used to pay for a wide range of things including laser eye surgery, dental expenses, acupuncture, speech therapy, psychiatric care, vision expenses (including prescription eyeglasses), vaccinations and immunizations and dermatology services (as long as they aren't for cosmetic purposes). Lesser known reimbursable expenses include learning fees to special schools for a child with severe learning disabilities, transportation costs incurred to get medical treatment and, for the vision-impaired, Braille books and magazines as well as guide dogs.

And that's not all. In 2003, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service announced that certain over-the-counter drugs could be paid for with flexible spending account money. OTC products are reimbursable if they are used to alleviate or treat personal injuries or sickness and are generally accepted as falling within the category of medicine or drugs. Over-the-counter drugs that are now eligible include such products as Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol, aspirin and cough and flu medications. Even allergy and sinus drugs, such as Claritin, which is manufactured by Schering-Plough, can be reimbursed through a flex spend account. Dietary supplements, including vitamins, minerals, herbals and botanicals, are covered when used to treat a current illness but not when used for general health purposes.

Drugstore.com, an online health and beauty retailer, called upon some of the largest U.S. benefits administrators to create a list of items that are eligible for reimbursement under most plans. On its Web site, Drugstore.com offers some 2,000 OTC items deemed likely to be eligible at its "FSA Store."

CAN'T BLAME A FELLA FOR LOVIN' THE RAILS:

Steam Train Maury, 5-Time Hobo King, Is Dead at 89 (DOUGLAS MARTIN, 11/23/06, NY Times)

Steam Train Maury, who started life as Maurice W. Graham until a train whistle’s timeless lament compelled him to hop a freight to freedom and, much later, fame, as the first and only Grand Patriarch of the Hobos, died on Nov. 18 in Napoleon, Ohio, near Toledo.

Mr. Graham was 89 and chief caretaker of the hobo myth, a cornerstone of which is the hobos’ term for death: “taking the westbound.” In his case, that last westbound freight left the yard when he suffered the last of several strokes and slipped into a coma, Phyllis Foos, manager of Walter Funeral Home in Toledo, said.

Mr. Graham wrote a book about his life on “the iron road,” was a founding member of the Hobo Foundation and helped establish the Hobo Museum in Britt, Iowa. At the National Hobo Convention in Britt, he was crowned king five times — in 1973, 1975, 1976, 1978 and 1981 — and, in 2004, was anointed grand patriarch.

No one else has ever been named a hobo patriarch. Mr. Graham also had the title Life King of the Hobos East of the Mississippi.

THE ONLY GUY WHO MATTERS ISN'T A REALIST:

Nothing but woes for Baker group (TIMOTHY M. PHELPS, 11/22/06, Newsday)

Internal strife within the Baker commission, outright opposition from President George W. Bush and Tuesday's assassination of a cabinet member in Lebanon are complicating the prospect of U.S. overtures to Syria and Iran over Iraq, informed sources say.

A source who spoke recently to a leader of the Iraq Study Group said he complained bitterly about internal dissension and partisanship among members of the supposedly bipartisan group, and was worried about reaching consensus on the key issues. [...]

[L]ast week the president strongly endorsed his administration's past tough line with both countries. On Iran he said: "Our focus of this administration is to convince the Iranians to give up its nuclear weapons ambitions ... And so we have made it very clear, our position regards Iran, and it hasn't changed."

Accusations that Syria was behind Tuesday's assassination of Lebanese Christian cabinet minister Pierre Gemayel are expected to make an opening to Syria more difficult.

Phebe Marr, an Iraq expert who advised the Baker group, said that while she favors approaching Iran and Syria for help, the United States would have to make concessions to each country. "There is a price for that, and it is not clear to me the Bush administration is willing to pay it," she said.

THE SUBOPTIMAL INEVITABLE:

Dividing Iraq might multiply problems (JAROSLAV TIR AND PAUL F. DIEHL, 11/24/06, Chicago Sun-Times)

As efforts to stabilize Iraq fail and the Iraq Study Group ponders new directions in U.S. policy, partitioning that country into separate Kurdish, Shiite, and Sunni mini-states has been advanced as a panacea that will resolve conflict and allow U.S. troops to withdraw. In reality, however, the likely outcomes are far less certain, with potential for both conflict de-escalation and expansion.

Our research indicates that the best time to divide a country along ethnic or religious lines is before tensions escalate to civil war or large-scale violence. Since 1900, mini-states that emerge from peaceful breakups of countries have a 95 percent success rate in avoiding militarized confrontations with each other.

The bad news is that the optimal time to partition Iraq has passed. The months soon after Saddam Hussein's removal from power in 2003 -- that is, before Iraqi politics came to be dominated by extremist leaders advocating sectarian violence -- provided a window of opportunity for dividing the Iraqi state. Of course, partitioning the country while things appeared to be going well did not seem necessary.

The partition scenario that now faces Iraq is not as desirable as it once was, but neither is it hopeless.

FUN FACTOR:

In the Wii-PS3 Playoff, Nintendo Upsets Sony on the Fun Factor (Mike Musgrove, November 23, 2006, Washington Post)

There was a showdown between the Nintendo Wii and the Sony PlayStation 3 at The Post's game testing lab last weekend.

Here's how it went down: I invited a bunch of my friends, five guys and three gals, over to check out the new systems. Few of them play or care about video games, but they were all curious to see the PlayStation 3, the cutting-edge game console that sparked real-world mayhem on its release Friday.

By comparison, most of my friends arrived having heard little about Nintendo's new system. But, as it turned out, that device was the hit of the party. [...]

While the people in my group preferred looking at the PS3's games, they preferred playing the Wii.

My friends played the Wii's sports games against each other all weekend, using goofy, cartoony avatars called "Miis" that they constructed to represent themselves in the game. Give a couple of newlyweds a pair of Wii controllers, pop in the boxing game and the entertainment value is priceless. We started out playing the game sitting down, but eventually we took to our feet to get a better range of motion with the controllers.

I have never seen a bunch of non-gamers get into this stuff like this, and I have never heard anybody laugh so much while playing any video game. A few of them now say they plan to buy the system for themselves.

My friend Andy has always seemed to dislike video games, but he was immediately taken by the Nintendo system in a way that I -- and he -- did not expect. "I'm surprised by how much I like it," he said. "The controller is so intuitive."

MUST GO GOOD WITH BOILED MEAT:

Three cheers, er, make that five cheers, for Hanukkah (Rebekah Denn, 11/24/2006 Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

No matter what (or if) your religion, get in the holiday spirit of silliness with a tasting of "HE'BREW -- The Chosen Beer." [...]

The shtick is funny, but Time Out New York recently wrote that the goods are "not just a marketing ploy." Samples will include "Jewbelation," named best winter beer by Pacific Brewing News last year. (It wrote, "We think it is safe to say this was a surprise for most of us, but this beer had it all.") Also featured: Genesis 10:10, made with pomegranate juice, and Bittersweet Lenny's R.I.P.A, in honor of Lenny Bruce, and "brewed with an obscene amount of malts and hops."

LIONEL SMILES:

Finding his place in the jazz lineage (Siddhartha Mitter, November 24, 2006, Boston Globe)

To properly unpack the layers of musical and cultural meaning in ‘‘African Tarantella,’’ the latest album from the brilliant vibraphonist and bandleader Stefon Harris, it would require a longer article than these columns permit.

So here’s a summary. A tarantella is an Italian dance whose frenzied execution was once believed to cure a tarantula’s bite — hence, supposedly, the name. Indeed, the album’s cover photo shows Harris bent forward to display a hairy arachnid perched on his head. ‘‘African Tarantella’’ is Harris’s attempt to express the dual European and African paternity of jazz — and with it, in some ways, of American culture itself.

If that sounds abstract, have no fear. ‘‘African Tarantella,’’ which Harris brings this weekend to the Regattabar, is wholly accessible, a beautiful program of movements from suites by Duke Ellington and Harris himself, interpreted on the album by a thoughtfully constructed ensemble that includes, among other instruments, viola, cello, trombone, and flute.

For Harris, 33, who only found jazz in college but in just over a decade has become the top vibraphonist and one of the most original bandleaders of his generation, ‘‘Tarantella’’ is a triumph of lyricism that marks, to use a dreaded term, an arrival at a certain maturity.

MORE:
-AUDIO: Stephon Harris on Raphsody
-VIDIO: Stefon Harris & Blackout (You Tube)
-Stefon Harris (Marian McPartland Jazz Piano, NPR)
-AUDIO INTERVIEW: Stefon Harris Does the Vibes (The Connection, 2/15/02)
-Archives: Stephon Harris (NPR)
-Stefon Harris (Blue Note Records)
-Stefon Harris (Wikipedia)
-Stefon Harris Dukes it out at Jazz Bakery: Jazz, metal and wildlife (GREG BURK, October 25, 2006, LA Weekly)
-Stefon Harris taps faith roots for jazz (William R. Wood, 10/01/06, kalamazoogazette.com)
-Strikingly good vibes from Stefon Harris (Don Heckman, October 30, 2006, LA Times)

THERE IS NO CANADA:

Inside Story: how the Quebec motion was hatched: When Mr. Harper's press secretary approached him about 6 p.m. on Tuesday with the Bloc motion in hand, it didn't take him long to decide on action: defining Québécois as a nation within Canada (GLORIA GALLOWAY, 11/24/06, Globe and Mail)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was surprised by the Bloc Québécois motion calling for the recognition of Quebeckers as a nation. But he'd been pondering the subject for some time — at least since the question was put to him by a reporter in the province last spring.

Over the summer, the Prime Minister discussed the concept with Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

And when the Liberals waded into the quagmire after leadership candidate Michael Ignatieff supported a party motion stating that Quebec was a nation within Canada, Mr. Harper knew the issue would eventually confront the Conservatives.

So when his press secretary, Dimitris Soudas, approached him about 6 p.m. Tuesday with the Bloc motion in hand, he didn't take long to decide that action must be taken, Conservative insiders said Thursday. [...]

He and his staff drafted a motion identical to the one to be put forward by the Bloc Québécois but for four critical words added on to the end, reading: “That this House recognize that the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada.”

TOO DELUSIONAL TO HEAD A NATION...:

Ségolène win fires up 'grandfather' Chirac (John Lichfield, 24 November 2006 , Independent)

President Jacques Chirac has convinced himself that he is the only politician on the French right who can defeat the Socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, in next year's presidential election.

Although he has not yet decided whether to run for a third term,M. Chirac, who is 74 next week, believes that only a "grandfather figure" can take on and deflate the pretensions of the "mother figure", Mme Royal. [...]

In an opinion poll this week, only 1 per cent of likely voters for M. Chirac's governing party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), said they thought the President should stand again. M. Sarkozy scored 67 per cent.

Nevertheless, M. Chirac has convinced himself that Mme Royal's emergence will overturn the board game.

FLIP RACHEL THE BIRD:

Nothing But Nets (Rick Reilly, 4/25/06, Sports Illustrated)

I've never asked for anything before, right? Well, sorry, I'm asking now.

We need nets. Not hoop nets, soccer nets or lacrosse nets. Not New Jersey Nets or dot-nets or clarinets. Mosquito nets.

See, nearly 3,000 kids die every day in Africa from malaria. And according to the World Health Organization, transmission of the disease would be reduced by 60% with the use of mosquito nets and prompt treatment for the infected.

Three thousand kids! That's a 9/11 every day!

Put it this way: Let's say your little Justin's Kickin' Kangaroos have a big youth soccer tournament on Saturday. There are 15 kids on the team, 10 teams in the tourney. And there are 20 of these tournaments going on all over town. Suddenly, every one of these kids gets chills and fever, then starts throwing up and then gets short of breath. And in seven to 10 days, they're all dead of malaria.

We gotta get these nets. They're coated with an insecticide and cost between $4 and $6. You need about $10, all told, to get them shipped and installed. Some nets can cover a family of four. And they last four years. If we can cut the spread of disease, 10 bucks means a kid might get to live. Make it $20 and more kids are saved.

So, here's the ask: If you have ever gotten a thrill by throwing, kicking, knocking, dunking, slamming, putting up, cutting down or jumping over a net, please go to a special site we've set up through the United Nations Foundation. The address is: UNFoundation.org/malaria. Then just look for the big SI's Nothing But Net logo (or call 202-887-9040) and donate $20. Bang. You might have just saved a kid's life.

YOU ARE WHAT YOU TOLERATE:

The hate factory: N-word outburst adds to the denigration that passes as entertainment (Stanley Crouch, 11/22/06, NY Daily News)

This was another moment to question what the ongoing vulgarization of our popular culture has actually come to mean. Two groups - women and black people - are disdainfully addressed and demeaned constantly. Only one has made any protest against being the constant butt of overstated vulgarity. White women have stood up against the misogyny in popular entertainment, but black people have not had much to say about the denigration.

Rap producers and others in the business of selling anything that gives a little spice to the minstrel content of our popular culture have been known to claim that the N-word has become a common means of expression and has taken on a universal understanding through rap. We can now be treated to young people of all ethnic groups referring to each other when using the word.

Does that prove anything? I think not. When Richard Pryor first made liberal use of the N-word, he could not have imagined what emerged in the wake of his performances. But when Pryor himself took a position against minstrel updates, no one listened to him. He had passed out the right of irresponsibility and could not take it back.

YOUR MINUTE'S OVER, MEN:

Schwarzenegger gains among Latinos: His election strategy pays off in best GOP showing since 1990 (Aurelio Rojas, 11/21/06, Sacramento Bee)

One day last summer, as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to step into a meeting with the editorial board of a Spanish-language newspaper, he received a briefing from a campaign aide.

They discussed issues that could come up, potential land mines in the governor's efforts to woo Latino voters, such as the Minutemen and Proposition 187.

After conferring with other aides, the governor went into the meeting and for the first time disavowed his previous support for the civilian border patrol brigade President Bush has branded as "vigilantes" -- and reaffirmed that he was wrong to vote for the 1994 measure to ban public services to illegal immigrants.

More vocal opponents of illegal immigration criticized Schwarzenegger for his statements to the editorial board of La Opinion. But the governor's change in tone marked the beginning of his turnaround with Latino voters.

At the time, a Field Poll showed only 22 percent of them supported Schwarzenegger. In cruising to a 17-point re-election victory this month over Democrat Phil Angelides, the governor received 39 percent of their vote, according to exit polling done for The Bee.

That threshold has not been reached by a GOP gubernatorial candidate in California since 1990. And it was reached as Republicans with more strident views on illegal immigration were being punished by voters around the country. [...]

Perhaps troubling for the future of the GOP in California was how poorly two conservative Republicans running for constitutional offices fared with the fastest-growing share of the state's electorate.

State Sens. Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, and Chuck Poochigian, R-Fresno, tallied only 23 percent and 20 percent of the Latino vote, respectively, in their losing bids for lieutenant governor and attorney general.

The lone bright spot for the Republican Party in down-ballot races was Steve Poizner, the Silicon Valley billionaire who easily beat Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante to become the state's insurance commissioner.

Running against the state's high-ranking Latino officeholder, Poizner -- a social moderate who spent more than $13 million of his fortune on his campaign -- received 35 percent of the Latino vote, according to GOP pollster Steve Kinney.

For the GOP to hold on to the Governor's Office in 2010, after the centrist Schwarzenegger moves on, Republicans may have to turn to a candidate who is more like Poizner and less like McClintock and Poochigian.

No GOP candidate for governor since the 1970s has won in California without getting at least one-third of the Latino vote.

ENDING EVERYWHERE:

MAURITANIA: Another step in democratic transition (IRIN, 11/23/06)

Provisional results from historic legislative and municipal elections in Mauritania indicated on Thursday that opposition parties that had defied the country's previous military regime had made a strong showing.

The Rally of Democratic Forces (RDF), which struggled against former military ruler Maaouya Ould Sid Ahmed Taya, won 12 of 43 National Assembly seats in the 19 November polls. Sixty-three percent of municipal posts went to opposition parties, mainly in urban areas.

Other parties that opposed the Taya government won seven assembly seats. They include the Progressive Popular Alliance, which represents former slaves who say they remain marginalised. Slavery was formally abolished in Mauritania in 1981.

Mauritania follows in the footsteps of West African neighbours Mali, Niger and Nigeria in introducing elections as part of a transition to democracy after military officers ousted authoritarian regimes or took over after their leader died.

BACK TO IDEAS:

"The Fountain": Beautiful, imaginative, sometimes mystifying (Moira Macdonald, 11/22/06, Seattle Times)

In the making for seven years, the film has a three-tiered structure. Its main story is set in the present, with a scientist named Tommy (Hugh Jackman) racing to discover a cure for the cancer that is killing his wife Izzi (Rachel Weisz). Meanwhile, in 16th-century Spain, Queen Isabel (Weisz) sends a conquistador, Tomas (Jackman), through battle to find the Fountain of Youth. And far into the future, a man (Jackman) travels to a distant planet to find the Tree of Life. [...]

All of this is the stuff of fantasy; even the contemporary segment seems to take place in another world, of strangely dark operating rooms and picturesque dustings of blue-tinged snow. But Tommy and Izzi's tale resonates as romantic tragedy, so much so that it's almost painful to watch. [...]

"The Fountain" would likely reward multiple viewings; at 96 minutes it's curiously short, as if its wings were slightly clipped. But it's refreshing to be in the hands of a filmmaker with a unique vision, and a pleasure to be challenged by a film's flights of imagination.

MORE:
: That Darren Aronofsky sure is ambitious. Too bad his movie makes no sense. (J. Hoberman, November 21st, 2006, Village Voice)

What The Fountain lacks in coherence it makes up in ambition. Aronofsky has not only aspired to make the most strenuously far-out movie of the 21st century, but the greatest love story ever told. Lest anyone imagine The Fountain to have been written by Madonna's kabbalah teacher after a week pondering El Topo and dancing to the Incredible String Band, the words "By Darren Aronofsky" are twice inscribed during the final credits. The third inscription will reveal itself in 500 years.

UNBURDENED:

The Stuff of Democratic Life: Lincoln, Gettysburg and Thanksgiving. (ALLEN GUELZO, November 23, 2006, Opinion Journal)

In 1863, the United States was the only significant democracy in the world. The French Revolution had drowned itself in blood; the democratic uprisings of the 1820s and 1840s had been easily and successfully repressed by kings and emperors; and everywhere, it was power and hierarchy rather than liberty and equality which seemed the best guarantee of peace and plenty. Americans remained the one people who defined themselves by a natural proposition, that all men are created equal, so that no one was born with a superior entitlement to command. But this republic of equal citizens had two basic weaknesses. The first was its tolerance of slavery, which drew the line of race across the line of equality. The second weakness was the question of authority in a democracy. In a society where every citizen's opinion carried equal weight, decisions would have to be made by majority rule. But a citizen whose opinion carries such weight might find it difficult to submit to the countervailing vote of a majority which thinks differently, and the result is likely to be a simple truculent refusal to go along. Refusals make for resistance, and resistance makes for civil war. Is there, Lincoln asked in 1861, some deep flaw in popular government, some weird centripetal force, which inevitably condemns popular government to whirl itself into pieces "and thus practically put an end to free government upon the earth"? To that question, every king and autocrat in 1861--and every fuehrer, duce and president-for-life since--has answered, smirkingly, yes. And the American Civil War looked like the chief evidence that this was so. Which is why, as Lincoln looked out across the thousands who had gathered on that November day, it seemed to him that what he was viewing was more than just another noteworthy battlefield. It had fallen to him to argue that the Civil War signaled not a failure, but a test, to determine once and for all whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

We pass this test, Lincoln said, not by dedicating cemeteries, but by dedicating ourselves. That dedication lies first in seeing that equality is an imposition of self-restraint. It means refusing to lay upon the backs of others the burdens we do not wish laid on our own.

YET THE GOP RAN ON IRAQ?:

Strong outlook for holiday retail: Most forecasts run 5 to 6 percent above 2005, promising a lift for the US economy. (Ron Scherer, 11/24/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The nation's holiday spending, even adjusted for inflation, sets a record every year, and this year will be no exception. Surveys and analysts predict holiday spending will rise about 5 to 6 percent over last year, which was 6.1 percent higher than 2004. If this level of spending prevails, it will give merchants - and the economy as a whole - a solid foundation going into 2007. [...]

Americans will be entering the holiday period with enough cash in their pockets, or room on their credit cards, to happily hit the malls, some economists and retail experts say. "Every month this year, all the way back to last October, there has been an increase in real disposable income," says Richard Feinberg, a researcher at the Purdue Retail Institute in West Lafayette, Ind.

EQUAL, NOT SAME:

Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans: Scientists hail genetic discovery that will change human understanding Steve Connor, 11/23/06, Independent)

Scientists have discovered a dramatic variation in the genetic make-up of humans that could lead to a fundamental reappraisal of what causes incurable diseases and could provide a greater understanding of mankind.

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome - the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual " letters" of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or "book of life", is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

The findings mean that instead of humanity being 99.9 per cent identical, as previously believed, we are at least 10 times more different between one another than once thought... [...]

Another implication of the finding is that we are more different to our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, than previously assumed from earlier studies.

THE ENDS MEET:

Dutch Voters Favor Prime Minister's Christian Democrats: Extremists Also Gain Power in Parliament (Molly Moore, 11/23/06, Washington Post)

Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's right-of-center Christian Democratic Appeal party, which has led efforts to curtail Muslim immigration at a time of growing xenophobia in the Netherlands, won the most seats in parliamentary elections Wednesday, but voters voiced strong discontent with his government by giving unprecedented support to extremist parties at both ends of the political spectrum.

After half a decade of politically motivated murders and some of Europe's most acrimonious debate over the rapid influx of immigrants into this once homogenous country, election results reflected a public schizophrenia over how to resolve the country's problems and laid a political minefield for creating a coalition that can effectively govern the country.

As expected, no party won enough seats for a majority in the lower house of parliament. The erratic voting patterns shifted significant numbers of seats to parties with extremist views and robbed moderate parties of influence -- a result that stunned government officials and political analysts.

"It's a new signal from the voters," said Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party, which won the third-highest number of seats in one of the biggest upsets of the day. The party promotes an anti-globalization, anti-European platform and advocates greater public spending on the poor and elderly.

OUT OF STEP WITH THE WORLD ALREADY:

Latin Americans Wonder If Democrats Are Traders: Anxiety High Over Stance of Incoming Congress (Sibylla Brodzinsky and Peter S. Goodman, 11/23/06, Washington Post)

Here in Colombia and next door in Peru, which awaits congressional approval for its own trade treaty, anxiety runs high.

"We watch the news and we're nervous about what might happen with what we send to the United States," said Janeth Palacio Ramirez, 35, who supports her 15-year-old daughter and her elderly parents by punching zipper stops onto 7,000 pairs of jeans a day, earning about $200 a month. "Everything we make here goes there, so if there are problems with exports, we'll all lose our jobs."

As Democrats prepare to reshape U.S. trade policy, the impact is being felt far from the Carolina mill towns and rust-belt factories that are a perennial focus of domestic concern.

Addressing fears that too many jobs are being sacrificed at home, the new Democratic leadership wants to slow the worldwide effort, which the United States has led since 1947, to lower import tariffs that hinder trade.

THE FICTION IS PARTICULARLY WEAK:

100 Notable Books of the Year (NY Times Book Review, 12/03/06)

THEY MAKE TRINKETS FOR US AND WE MAKE SECURITIES FOR THEM:

Fed Chief’s Help Enlisted for Trip to Press China (STEVEN R. WEISMAN, 11/23/06, NY Times)

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has enlisted Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, to join an unusual delegation of cabinet members to China next month that will press for changes in Chinese economic policies long criticized by the administration and Congress, officials said Wednesday.

The trip in mid-December, to be led by Mr. Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs chairman with extensive experience in China, escalates the pressure on the Beijing leadership to crack down on piracy, open up its economy to outside investors and allow the value of the Chinese currency to fluctuate more freely, Treasury officials say. [...]

Mr. Bernanke, along with Mr. Paulson, shares responsibility for overseeing the United States economy and the major role that China now plays in it. He is expected to repeat what he and other central bankers have said in recent years: that the huge borrowing from China by the United States to finance its trade imbalance is not sustainable in the long run. Mr. Bernanke, who would not comment on his plans, has in the past urged the Chinese to be more flexible with the yuan and their economy.

PSSST...IT'S NOT A PARODY:

If Cameron can climb on my caravan, anything is possible: For the Tories to admit that ignoring relative poverty was a terrible mistake represents a real breakthrough (Polly Toynbee, November 23, 2006, The Guardian0

When David Cameron, the Tory leader, speaks on poverty tomorrow, he will, according to his advisers, accept much of Clark's analysis of Margaret Thatcher's policies: "Ignoring the reality of relative poverty was a terrible mistake." The Churchillian idea that all the state need do is provide a basic safety net to stop the poor starving is over. Poverty is measured internationally in relative terms, because that is how people feel it. To be poor is to fall too far behind what most ordinary people have in your own society.

Clark cites an analogy from my book, Hard Work: Life in Low Pay Britain, in which I described society as a caravan moving across a desert. All may move forward, but how far behind do the poor at the back have to fall before they cease to be part of the same caravan at all? Political parties will differ on how far that stretch can be - but at least now they agree all must travel at the same speed to stay within the same society.

Relative poverty has been a hard message to get across, so will the Tories now do some of the heavy lifting in engaging voters? Asked cold, the public tend to make a number of contradictory responses. They think the out-of-control greed at the top is obscene, and they think the gap between rich and poor is far too great. But the focus group of middling waverers used by the Fabian commission on life chances suggests that, at first, most people don't think real poverty exists. Then they think it is the fault of the poor themselves - feckless addicts or scroungers; if they have a phone and a TV, is that really poor?

But presented with facts about poor children having so much less than ordinary children like their own, focus group members changed their minds. When they considered the quarter of children who never go on a summer holiday and have no money to go swimming, have a birthday party or a sleepover or take school trips, let alone own a computer or a mobile phone, they thought it unjust.

THEY'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO HELP THEM, JUST CONTROL THEM:

Proof Is Scant on Psychiatric Drug Mix for Young (GARDINER HARRIS, 11/23/06, NY Times)

[A] growing number of children and teenagers in the United States are taking not just a single drug for discrete psychiatric difficulties but combinations of powerful and even life-threatening medications to treat a dizzying array of problems.

Last year in the United States, about 1.6 million children and teenagers — 280,000 of them under age 10 — were given at least two psychiatric drugs in combination, according to an analysis performed by Medco Health Solutions at the request of The New York Times. More than 500,000 were prescribed at least three psychiatric drugs. More than 160,000 got at least four medications together, the analysis found.

Many psychiatrists and parents believe that such drug combinations, often referred to as drug cocktails, help. But there is virtually no scientific evidence to justify this multiplication of pills, researchers say. A few studies have shown that a combination of two drugs can be helpful in adult patients, but the evidence in children is scant. And there is no evidence at all — “zero,” “zip,” “nil,” experts said — that combining three or more drugs is appropriate or even effective in children or adults.

“There are not any good scientific data to support the widespread use of these medicines in children, particularly in young children where the scientific data are even more scarce,” said Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

TELL THE FRENCH CHICK NO ONE WILL CHOOSE EUROPE:

Merkel mulling German push for EU-US trade zone (Financial Express, 11/22/06)

Chancellor Angela Merkel is considering pushing for a transatlantic free trade zone when Germany takes on the European Union presidency next year. The idea could gain momentum when Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) votes on it next week.

Despite scepticism in some European capitals, the vote at a CDU party congress in Dresden may trigger a new drive by Berlin for a notion long cherished by some conservatives keen to improve relations with Washington. “We want to start considering a common market between Europe and America,” Merkel told Bild newspaper on Wednesday.

WE'RE GONNA NEED MORE BICYCLES...:

His world records are house of cards: Professional card stacker comes back to his home state for festival of storytellers, magicians and jugglers (MARY CHALLENDER, 11/22/06, Des Moines REGISTER)

Architect Bryan Berg spends weeks, sometimes even months, building some of the largest, most elaborate structures of their kind in the world.

Then the Iowa native typically picks up a leaf blower and sends his creations fluttering to the ground.

It's all in a day's work when you're a professional card stacker. [...]

As a kid growing up in the Okoboji area, Berg said he liked stacking cards but was just average until one day, during an Iowa blizzard, when he stumbled upon the honeycomb formation that became the trick behind his trade.

That day, he said, he built a house of cards that touched the ceiling of his parents' house. He hasn't looked back since.

In 1992, as a 17-year-old high school senior, Berg captured his first Guinness record for tallest card tower when he carefully arranged 400 decks of cards to build a house 14 1/2 feet tall.

Unsure card stacking was considered a normal pursuit, he told everyone he had taken on the card challenge as a math project.

"I had no idea that incident would basically derail my entire life," he said.

FROM THE THANKSGIVING ARCHIVES: THE SHINING:

Pilgrims' Progress; Let's Talk Turkey (Clifford D. May, November 25, 2004, Scripps Howard News Service)

In his masterful volume, �A History of the American People,� British historian Paul Johnson describes the Puritans who landed at New Plymouth on December 11, 1620 this way: �They were the zealots, the idealists, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them, or perhaps one should say the most extreme of them, were fanatical, uncompromising and overweening in their self-righteousness.�

But, he concedes, they also were �immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.� They and their heirs were to weave one of the most vibrant designs in the American tapestry.

It was a Puritan leader, William Bradford, who first called this community Pilgrims. But �they were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine, and then returning home to resume everyday life,� Johnson writes. �They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly toward a millenarian goal. They saw themselves as exceptions to the European betrayal of Christian principles, and they were conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.�

They left Europe to escape religious persecution -- not quite the same as saying they came for religious freedom -- and �to create His kingdom on earth.� John Winthrop, whom Johnson calls �the first great American,� considered Europe �a lost cause,� both irreligious and badly governed. Winthrop said of Europe: �This land grows weary of its Inhabitants.�

In a very real sense, the Puritans were Judeo-Christians. They saw themselves as the spiritual progeny of Moses' tribe, fleeing from Egypt (17th century Europe) to the Promised Land (the New World, in particular New England).

On the Mayflower � a cramped old ship built not to carry passengers across the Atlantic but only barrels of wine between Bordeaux and London � they signed a social compact �based upon the original Biblical covenant between God and the Israelites.� Also influenced by early-17th-century social-contract theory, they drafted �just and equal laws� that were firmly anchored in the teachings of the church.

Their piety did not diminish their thirst for education � quite the contrary. Nor did their faith deter them from a keen interest in science. Indeed, among the most famous of the Puritans was Cotton Mather (1663-1728) who entered Harvard at the age of 12, learned seven languages and wrote 450 books. He popularized the Copernican system of astronomy. He also believed in witchcraft. He was concerned, too, with the rights of slaves and Indians, not big issues in those days.

The Puritans considered it their mission to create a better society than any the world had seen before. Winthrop wrote: �We must consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.�

Boston became the Pilgrim's capital, but by 1638, the Rev. John Davenport concluded that corruption had set in there, so he led a congregation to what is now New Haven, Conn. Among those who went with him was David Yale, �a learned gentleman,� whose descendent, Elihu Yale was to found an institution of higher learning that would educate many future American presidents, as well as many others who merely aspired to that office.

It is tempting to theorize that the Puritan/Pilgrim spirit has, over the past few hundred years, moved further inland, far from Massachusetts and other coastal communities, to what we now call the Red states. But that would be simplistic. As Johnson points out, the Puritans were eventually joined by adherents to other religious traditions, and over time, �the Puritan merged into the Yankee, �a race whose typical member is eternally torn between a passion for righteousness and a desire to get on in the world.'�

(originally posted: 11/25/04)

FROM DE FACTO TO DE JURE:

English & Allies (Daniel Mandel, 11/23/06, Front Page)

[A] formal "Anglosphere" alliance among Australia, Britain and the United States could be an idea whose time has come. [...]

In his book "The Anglosphere Challenge: Why the English-speaking nations will lead the way in the 21st century," James C. Bennett speaks of "network commonwealths," groupings based on technological integration but short of formal alliance. But the objective of a formal Anglosphere alliance would be to achieve not only technological integration but also military - especially naval - integration.

For such a purpose, Australia, Britain and the United States have much in common. Each has stood apart politically in its region. Each is based on traditions of political liberty anchored in representative, secular government and free trade. Each has fought steadfastly alongside the other two during the past century.

And all three share strong naval traditions and modern naval forces. Common language and advanced levels of technology would make naval integration, if not easy, at least achievable. (Compare this to the widening technological gap between the United States and its continental NATO allies). Last but not least, each is under attack by jihadist terrorists.

An Anglosphere alliance would also have a striking geographic advantage in its global naval coverage of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Mediterranean Sea. The countries surrounding these waters include almost all of the nations threatened by or engaged in jihadist terrorism. [...]

Such an alliance would be a vigorously sovereign, free-market, democratic antidote to the politically centralizing, bureaucratic collectivism of the United Nations and the European Union, two organizations that consistently are more part of the problem than the solution to jihadist terror.

TERROR ALWAYS WORKS AGAINST OCCUPIERS:

Homegrown Terror: a review of Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War by Nicholas Lemann (Steven Hahn, New Republic)

Colfax, Louisiana was scarcely a town in 1873. It was more a collection of buildings on a plantation owned by William Calhoun. As much as any site in the former Confederate South, however, Colfax came to embody the complex political dynamics of Reconstruction, and the troubling relation of terror and democracy in the history of the United States. [...]

What the white supremacists scorned was the most breathtaking democratic revolution in the nineteenth-century world. In the cauldron of the Civil War, the largest and most powerful slave regime in the Americas was defeated militarily, and slavery was abolished without direct compensation to slaveowners. This alone distinguished the American experience from every other servile society of the time, save for Haiti. Then, responding to the wartime service of black soldiers, the demands of radicals of both races, and the political needs of the Republican Party, the federal government extended civil and political rights to former slaves on the same basis as those rights were enjoyed by whites, and set the stage for the reorganization of politics and government in the former Confederacy.

This revolution is known as Radical Reconstruction. The Republican Party, for the first time, moved into the Southern states. African Americans registered to vote in overwhelming numbers and, through the vehicles of Union Leagues, churches, and Republican Party clubs, mobilized new political communities. State constitutions, which created new civil and political societies and new public sectors, were written and ratified. And elections were held with a dramatically expanded electorate, resulting in Republican governments at the state and local levels. Most of the officeholders were white men who had been on the political margins before the Civil War; but in the Deep South states of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana and in the plantation districts stretching from Virginia to Texas, African Americans -- many of whom had just been freed from slavery -- came to serve as state representatives and senators, and as magistrates, county commissioners, surveyors, treasurers, and occasionally sheriffs.

Before long, the Republican regimes were rebuilding the economic infrastructures of the South, establishing systems of public education open to blacks and whites (separately, for the most part), setting up new social services, reforming the tax structure (sometimes with a view to making land available to former slaves), and, when possible, attacking various forms of racial discrimination. Equally consequential, in the counties and the parishes, the regimes constructed judicial systems in which blacks could bring suits, testify in courts, and serve on juries, and thus in which black laborers could resist the exploitative practices of their employers through legal means. Never in the history of the United States, and rarely in the history of any other nation, were the balances of power shifted so markedly away from the propertied elite and toward the working class.

Had the former Confederates accepted the new rules of the political game, something amounting to a genuine democracy, involving both races, might have taken root in the South. But instead they regarded the civil enfranchisement and the political empowerment of African Americans as the grossest of illegitimacies and the direst of threats, and they mobilized militarily in opposition. Initially through vigilante bands such as the Ku Klux Klan, and eventually through paramilitary organizations closely tied to the Democratic Party, they sought to destroy blacks' capacity to engage in politics. They broke up Union Leagues, harassed black voters, assassinated black leaders, and, when Republicans won local elections, tried to prevent them from taking office or to drive them out once they began to serve. This was what the white supremacists were up to in Colfax in 1873, and this was how they decided to put an end to Republican rule more generally in Louisiana and Mississippi in what Lemann calls "the last battle of the Civil War."

ONLY AQ LOSES:

Iraqi leader calls insurgents for talks to end the violence (Ned Parker, 11/23/06, Times of London)

The Prime Minister of Iraq will sit down for the first time next week with representatives of insurgent groups in his most concerted effort yet to quell the country’s sectarian war.

Nouri al-Maliki’s