May 31, 2007
TUT-TUT, YOU ALREADY CRIED "WOLF!" ONCE...:
The right (wing) man for the World Bank job (Emad Mekay, 6/01/07, Asia Times)
"Replacing one Bush appointee with another will not resolve the fundamental governance problems of the World Bank," said Peter Bosshard, policy director of the International Rivers Network, a watchdog group that monitors bank projects and policies from San Francisco."Member governments should reject a back-door deal that leaves the bank's governance structure intact, and should press for an open, merit-based selection process," he said.
Zoellick's name also raised eyebrows among development groups for his close ties to the US establishment and corporate interests.
Until last July, Zoellick, now 53, was the US deputy secretary of state. He is best known, however, for his role as a former US Trade Representative (USTR), a job in which he campaigned, with mixed results, to force developing countries to open their markets to US businesses and goods.
He is credited with helping bring mainland China and Taiwan into the World Trade Organization, which, like the World Bank and the IMF, often promotes neo-liberal policies criticized as harmful to developing countries. Zoellick also launched the unpopular multilateral Doha Round of trade talks at the WTO, aimed at creating a laissez-faire trade environment, and increased the number of US free trade agreements.
Were they expecting Pat Buchanan?
THEIR INTERNAL DISAGREEMENTS ARE THE REAL STORY:
After the talks, Iran starts talking (Kaveh L Afrasiabi, 6/01/07, Asia Times)
[I]ranian liberals and reformists have uniformly reacted positively to the Baghdad meeting. For example, Ahmad Shirzad, a leading member of the Islamic Participation Front, said the dialogue is like passing a difficult and tall obstacle. "If the level of talks increases beyond the ambassadorial level, then we can be hopeful that both sides can reach common points and arrive at agreements on them.""Changing monologue to dialogue", reads the headline of a reformist paper, Shargh, recently resurrected after a temporary suspension. It states: "Perhaps the most important result of this talk was the pursuit of a common strategy toward resolving the major tensions in the Middle East ... It signaled the need for cooperation based on common grounds ... The continuation of these talks can itself to a large extent reduce or bracket the alternatives of war or absolute sanctions on the plate of American warmongers."
The Shargh editorial ends by optimistically hoping that "perhaps the Baghdad meeting can be a step for resolving the Lebanon crisis in the near future with the participation of Iran, France and other relevant countries".
Hardline groups, on the other hand, have been weary of the dialogue exceeding the limits set by Khamenei. Thus Lotfolah Forouzandeh, associated with the powerful Jamait-e Eesargaran, demanded that the government publish the details of the Baghdad meeting, to make sure it did not surpass the restrictions imposed by the leader.
Hussain Shariatmadari, the publisher of Kayhan and adviser to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, has minimized the significance of the Baghdad talks by calling it "just a talk".
In contrast, conservative groups have opted for a middle line between the reformists' "optimism" and the hardliners' "guarded cynicism". They say, for example, that the talks might result in nullifying the 1979 revolution's principles reflected in the late ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's comparison of the US and Iran as wolf and sheep.
Thus Foad Sadeghi, writing on the website Baztab.com, interpreted the Baghdad meeting as a "turning point in the third decade of the Islamic Revolution". According to Sadeghi, the United States' willingness to engage in diplomatic interaction with Iran means that "the scenario of regime change is closed and the substitution of soft power for the hard-power approach toward Iran".
The fact that the US government disbanded the anti-Iran "Iran Syria Policy and Operation Group" right after the Baghdad meeting has been hailed as a positive development by all Iranian pundits.
Note that they can't even achieve a high enough level of repression to force a party-line.
HOW'S THAT AL QAEDA RESURGENCE GOING?:
West Baghdad residents rise up against Al Qaeda (The Associated Press, May 30, 2007)
Heavy fighting raged Thursday in west Baghdad where residents reported U.S. troops backed by helicopter gunships moved in when residents called for American help against al-Qaida intimidation that kept students away from final exams and the people huddled indoors to escape blazing gunfire.U.S.-funded Alhurra television reported that non-Iraqi Arabs and Afghans were among the fighters. Residents said the gunbattles first erupted Wednesday. [...]
"The events of the past two days are promising developments. Sunni citizens of Amariyah that have been previously terrorized by al-Qaida are now resisting and want them gone. They're tired of the intimidation that included the murder of women," [Lt. Col. Dale C. Kuehl, Commander of 1st Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment] said. [...]
The heaviest fighting shuttered through the neighborhood at 11 a.m. when gunmen — identified by residents as al-Qaida fighters — began shooting randomly into the air, forcing residents to flee into their homes and students from classrooms.
They said the fighters drove through the streets using loudspeakers to claim that Amariyah was under the control of the Islamic State of Iraq, an al-Qaida front group.
Armed residents were said to have resisted, set some of the al-Qaida gunmen's cars on fire and called the Americans for help.
Casualty figures were not immediately available. But a district councilman said the al-Qaida leader in the Amariyah district, known as Haji Hameed, was killed and 45 other fighters were detained.
WHAT DOES LOU DOBBS CARE ABOUT WHITE FOLKS?:
Border Safety at Focus of TB Case (ROBERT BLOCK, 5/31/07, Wall Street Journal)
When news of the TB case first broke, it appeared that the patient had slipped into the country undetected. Andrew Speaker, 31 years old, drove as far as New York City before going to a hospital, despite an international manhunt by U.S. authorities. The Centers for Disease Control had caught up with Mr. Speaker in Rome, where it advised him that under no circumstances should he use commercial aircraft.In what appears to be a coincidence, Mr. Speaker is the son-in-law of Robert C. Cooksey, a microbiologist who works in the CDC's Division of Tuberculosis Elimination. In a written statement, Mr. Cooksey said Mr. Speaker's ailment "did not originate from myself or the CDC's labs, which operate under the highest levels of biosecurity." Dr. Cooksey said also that he wasn't involved "in any decisions my son-in-law made regarding his travel."
According to people familiar with the investigation, the CDC notified U.S. Customs and Border Protection -- part of the Department of Homeland Security -- last week that Mr. Speaker, a U.S. citizen, may have been attempting to gain entry into the country from Europe. The information was placed into Customs' nationwide database, which is available to agents at every airport, seaport and land-border crossing.
The advisory warned officers that Mr. Speaker was highly contagious. It cautioned them to wear protective masks and gloves and to detain him before notifying the CDC.
According to investigators, it appears that when Mr. Speaker arrived on May 24 at the crossing at Champlain, N.Y., his passport was swiped, activating the flag on his records and the warning. Records show that Mr. Speaker spent less than two minutes at the border post before being cleared to enter the country.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Kevin Corsaro earlier this week said that Mr. Speaker had passed through the Champlain crossing and didn't appear sick to agents.
Time to deport the natives.
FIRST THEY CAME FOR OUR CAVITIES:
Cervical cancer vaccine for all women could cut cases by half - study (Polly Curtis, June 1, 2007, The Guardian)
Vaccinating all women against cervical cancer could save hundreds of lives a year in the UK alone, according to the largest study of the vaccine. Government health advisers are considering whether to vaccinate pre-pubescent girls but the research published in Lancet suggests rates would be nearly halved if women in their 20s were offered a catch-up boost.The study of more than 20,000 women around the world was sponsored by Merck which makes the vaccine Gardasil. The Lancet said the research was peer-reviewed and fast-tracked for publication because it was "clinically important".
The vaccine protects women against the common human papilloma virus (HPV) which causes 70% of cervical cancers. The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation is due to meet in three weeks to continue their discussion of whether to recommend the vaccination.
The study finds that it protects against 99% of infections in women who have never had sex before vaccination and has a 44% protection rate in those who are sexually active and likely to have been exposed to an HPV virus. Around 1,000 women die a year in the UK from cervical cancer.
They conclude: "The results of this ... HPV vaccine programme provide strong evidence that implementation of HPV vaccination campaigns in pre-adolescent girls and young adult women will reduce rates of cervical cancer worldwide."
If it was the Commies who tricked us into fluoridation, presmably this is an Islamicist ploy?
WHAT IS THE SPEED OF CONJECTURE IN A VACCUUM?:
New theory rejects popular view of man's evolution (Ian Sample, June 1, 2007, The Guardian)
The team, led by Robin Crompton at Liverpool University and Susannah Thorpe at Birmingham University, claim our tree-dwelling ancestors learned to walk on two feet because it helped them edge along outer branches while having their hands free to grasp ripe fruit. The tactic also enabled them to clamber between neighbouring trees without having to descend to the forest floor.The scientists reached their conclusions after spending a year observing the movements of orang-utans in Sumatra. The great apes of the region are the only species to spend their entire lives in the trees. Footage of nearly 3,000 movements showed the apes consistently walked on two legs to reach the outer branches of trees, using their arms primarily for balance. Unlike gorillas and chimps, which bend their knees to walk on the ground, the orang-utans straightened their legs to adopt a more human-like gait.
Professor Crompton said such skills would have benefited early human ancestors enormously between 24m and 5m years ago, when eastern and central Africa experienced dramatic climatic cycles and the forests first thickened and then died back. "As the forests became sparse, the strategy of our human ancestors was more or less to abandon the canopies and come down to the ground, where they could use this bipedalism immediately to get around," he said.
The beauty of Darwinism is that your Just So story is no less plausible -- nor provable -- then the next guy's.
WHERE'S THEO FARON WHEN YOU NEED HIM?:
When drivers complained about children playing in a cul de sac, what did the council do? They banned the children (DAVID WILKES, 5/31/07, Daily Mail)
For generations, children with energy to burn have enjoyed a kickabout in the street.And the footballing youngsters of Utah Close, a small suburban cul de sac of 15 homes, are no exception.
Now, however, their simple pleasure has been outlawed by the local council which said their games of street soccer 'posed a danger' to the public.
The children can no longer put temporary goalposts in the street, and have even been told "jumpers for goalposts" must be "removed from the road immediately" because they are classed as obstructions.
A society that values cars over children deserves what it gets.
FOLKS WHO POOH-POOH DEMOGRAPHICS...:
German brain drain at highest level since 1940s (Tony Paterson, 01 June 2007, Independent)
For a nation that invented the term "guest worker" for its immigrant labourers, Germany is facing the sobering fact that record numbers of its own often highly-qualified citizens are fleeing the country to work abroad in the biggest mass exodus for 60 years.Figures released by Germany's Federal Statistics Office showed that the number of Germans emigrating rose to 155,290 last year - the highest number since the country's reunification in 1990 - which equalled levels last experienced in the 1940s during the chaotic aftermath of the Second World War.
The statistics, which also revealed that the number of immigrants had declined steadily since 2001, were a stark reminder of the extent of the German economy's decline from the heady 1960s when thousands of mainly Turkish workers flocked to find work in the country.
Leading economists and employers say the trend is alarming. They note that many among Germany's new breed of home-grown "guest workers" are highly-educated management consultants, doctors, dentists, scientists and lawyers.
OECD figures show that Germany is near the top of a league of industrial nations experiencing a brain drain which for the first time since the 1950s now exceeds the number of immigrants.
...always insist that the ambitious members of a society will be content to stay aboard the sinking ship.
...AND REDDER...:
Sarkozy heads for parliamentary landslide (John Lichfield, 01 June 2007, Independent)
President Nicolas Sarkozy, ever-present, hyperactive, and riding high in the polls, appears to be heading for an overwhelming victory in the French parliamentary elections this month.According to the most recent poll, M. Sarkozy's centre-right party and its centrist allies could take as many as 430 of the 577 seats in the national assembly in the two-round election on 10 and 17 June.
Such a tidal wave is not unprecedented. The right did even better in 1993. But an electoral landslide would place President Sarkozy in a commanding position - politically and morally - to force through his programme of social and economic reforms.
Because 200 hundred years of losing ground to the Anglosphere is enough?
FORTUNATELY, TRUMAN WASN'T IN CHARGE THIS TIME:
Iraq Is Korea?: Bush's latest appalling historical analogy. (Fred Kaplan, May 31, 2007, Slate)
In 1950, the United States beat back North Korea's invasion of South Korea, became embroiled in a Chinese-assisted guerrilla war, fought the Communists to a stalemate, and, in 1953, after suffering 54,000 combat deaths, negotiated a truce (but not a formal peace). Ever since, American troops—at present, 37,000 of them, stationed at 95 installations across the Korean peninsula—have remained on guard at the world's most heavily armed border.In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, overthrew its regime (which posed a hypothetical threat), and, in the four years since, has kept about 150,000 troops in the country to kill terrorists (who weren't in Iraq before the war), to train the Iraqi army (which the Bush administration, for still-mysterious reasons, dismantled at the occupation's outset), and to keep a "low-grade" sectarian civil war (which erupted amid a vacuum of authority) from boiling over.
In the half-century-plus since the Korean armistice of 1953, just 90 U.S. soldiers have been killed in isolated border clashes in Korea. In the mere four years since the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003, more than 3,000 American servicemen and women have been killed, and the number rises every day.
To sum up, we intervened in South Korea as a response to an invasion and as part of a broad strategy to contain Communist aggression.
It certainly is an interesting comparison, though imprecise: while we intervened in Iraq because it invaded its neighbors and as part of a broader policy to ensure that a state that sponsored terrorism couldn't hand out WMD, we have sustained almost no casualties in the intervening 16 years and rather than simply quarantining the evil regime and starving the people under its control have sought to provide liberal democracy to all. That's led to a state of affairs that is less quiet but substantially less lethal and entirely more consistent with our values than the one we've imposed on the Korean Peninsula. It does seem unlikely that the Iraqis will require or want a US troop presence for fifty years, but we'd hardly notice such a minimal one so should stay if they want us to.
IF DON IMUS NEEDED TO BE FIRED...:
It's Torture! It's Porn! What's Not to Like? Plenty, Actually: Movie Producers Are Abusing Woman and Making a Profit Off It (Lenore Skenazy, May 28, 2007, Ad Age)
It's enough to make you nostalgic for good ol', all-American porn. Hard core, soft core, Peace Corps -- doesn't matter. All I know is: Bed hopping beats head chopping.
If we start accepting 'Captivity' and other torture porn flicks as just 'extreme' horror, the baseline will change. What once seemed out of line will become mainstream.
But bed-hopping/head-chopping is the worst.
Unfortunately, that's what America is in for, thanks to the newest rage in Hollywood: torture porn.
You know -- movies where women are bound and gagged, have tubes shoved up their noses and blood spurting out. And then they're hung upside down with -- in hommage to Janet Jackson -- a single breast exposed.
And you thought "Wedding Crashers" was crass.
While it is indisputably great to live in a country where freedom of expression is guaranteed, it is also vomit-inducing to hear that this kind of movie is becoming, ho-hum, just another cinematic genre. Let's see, we've got musicals, comedies, dramas and, oh yes, that new category where the star gets raped and disemboweled.
As reported by this magazine, the latest upchuck of this genre is called "Captivity," by the company After Dark. Billboards for the movie, banned by the Motion Picture Association of America, went up all over L.A. in March, ostensibly by accident (as if billboards go around erecting themselves). The series of four photos featured a woman first with a gloved hand over her mouth, then in a cage, then with the bloody nose tubes, and then partly nude and totally dead. As Ethel Merman sang, "Who could ask for anything more?"
Me. Your local, resident school marm. But you know what? School marms speak the truth. Go marms!
...why do the folks in Hollywood who produce such stuff still have jobs?
DECENCY ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE CONVENIENT:
Don't expect inconvenient loyalty from our great friend (Owen Harries, 6/01/07, Quarterly Essay)
THE three great struggles of the 20th century were conflicts concerning the central balance of the international system. In each case dissatisfied revisionist powers were concerned to challenge the existing balance, and in the case of World War II and the Cold War those revisionist powers had totalitarian values and goals that were inimical to those held by Australians.In each of the three cases, but especially in the last two, victory for the revisionists would have had profound adverse significance for Australia, whether we were immediately and directly attacked or not. We would have been left a weak liberal-democratic country in an overwhelmingly hostile and menacing international environment. In those circumstances, it made perfectly good sense for Australia to support Britain and the US, the main upholders of the existing central balance, in these conflicts.
Does this then mean that the Howard Government has also been right in its support for the US in Iraq? No, it does not. This for two reasons. First, the Islamist terrorists do not threaten the central balance in the way that Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union did, and attempts to pretend that they do are ludicrous. Second, under George W. Bush a hegemonic US went out of its way to emphasise that its overriding concern was no longer to uphold a status quo but to alter the international system profoundly, and by force if necessary. It does not seem to me that this would serve the interest of Australia, a quintessentially satisfied, status quo country.
While Mr. Harries is certainly correct that Islamicism is not an existential threat to Australia, his formulation requires one of two ludicrosities of its own: either the values and goals of the Islamicistsa are consistent with those of Australia or else Nazism and Communism had to have been existential threats to Australia. The fact of the matter is that Nazism and Communism threatened Europeans peoples, with whom Australians, like Mr. Harries, felt some residual kinship. On the other hand, Islamicism only threatens Muslims, predominantly in Asia and Africa. You can see why a self-satisfied Australian wouldn't care about such others, but it would be a betrayal of Australia's historic values to be isolationist just because the nation isn't at stake.
THEY BREED HORSES, DON'T THEY?:
What I Think About Evolution (SAM BROWNBACK, 5/31/07, NY Times)
If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true. If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.There is no one single theory of evolution, as proponents of punctuated equilibrium and classical Darwinism continue to feud today. Many questions raised by evolutionary theory — like whether man has a unique place in the world or is merely the chance product of random mutations — go beyond empirical science and are better addressed in the realm of philosophy or theology.
The most passionate advocates of evolutionary theory offer a vision of man as a kind of historical accident. That being the case, many believers — myself included — reject arguments for evolution that dismiss the possibility of divine causality.
Ultimately, on the question of the origins of the universe, I am happy to let the facts speak for themselves. There are aspects of evolutionary biology that reveal a great deal about the nature of the world, like the small changes that take place within a species. Yet I believe, as do many biologists and people of faith, that the process of creation — and indeed life today — is sustained by the hand of God in a manner known fully only to him. It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.
Darwinists' precise objection to disbelievers is that they insist on empirical evidence, making the former ideologues and the latter scientific.
WHICH EXPLAINS THE SUDDEN POPULARITY OF SOAP-ON-A-ROPE IN THE YANKEE CLUBHOUSE:
As wife packs up, is A-Rod out at home? (ADAM LISBERG in Toronto KATHIE KLARREICH in Miami and DAVE GOLDINER in New York, 5/31/07, NY DAILY NEWS)
In New York, A-Rod used to be a regular at the VIP Club, where he always asked for a dancer who performs under the stage name Monique.Monique is 5-feet-5 with brown hair and brown eyes and has a well-toned, muscular figure, a pal said.
When the stripper jumped over to the Hustler Club, Rodriguez started going there to see her perform and buy sexy lap dances, a source said.
He even took her out for a pricey shopping spree at the Versace store on Fifth Ave., the source said.
A petite stripper at the Hustler Club said A-Rod "likes the she-male, muscular type. They brought me up to the champagne room one time. I spun around once and that was it. I'm not his type."
At the point where femininity turns you off, you've got issues.
THE PATH FORWARD IS NOT WITHOUT POTHOLES:
Real India: the slow road to Agra (Tom Plate, 5/31/07, Seattle Times)
If you want to understand as much as possible about India in a single day, maybe the best way to go is to take the slow bus to Agra. And by slow, I mean slow as in the speed of a backlash of taffy.There are no fast buses to Agra because the road to Agra more resembles a war zone in which countless people seem to be fleeing somewhere for their life. Someday the new highway will be up and running, but who knows how long that will take? It sometimes seems as if India goes out of its way to be inefficient.
Most people go to Agra to get to the justly famed and fabulous Taj Mahal. From New Delhi, that's about a four-hour trip. The journey itself is worth at least as much as the destination. India itself is too great to rush through, even if that were remotely possible.
India is often touted as the next slam-dunk superpower, after emerging China, and of course, established United States. The big buildup mainly comes from the Western media, especially in the U.S. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations have imagined India as a kind of balancing superpower to China, should the latter get too feisty, aggressive or in any way profoundly obstreperous to U.S interests.
With more than a billion people (half of which are under the age of 25) and a tremendous science and technology base (the legacy of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru), India might not be a bad bet to make it. But it has a long way to go, perhaps much longer than Western hype or India's own best hopes would suggest.
Travel the road to Agra and you see what's out there in the real world of ancient India. You leave the fancy hotels and well-kept tourist sites in the nation's capital and discover reality.
The most basic reality is that its billion people have a per capita GDP of less than $4k. It's no more likely to ever be a superpower than China is, but its tilt towards the Anglosphere in both its national security politics and its economics suggests that it can have a reasonably good run as it boosts that GDP and it is certainly a nice counterweight to the Communists and Islamists its sandwiched between..
MORE:
Calm down, the rise of China's power is being exaggerated: Beijing's Leninist corporatism hobbles the nation's economic development (Will Hutton, June 01, 2007, The Australian)
THE China challenge is a mutual collusion of misunderstanding between East and West. China ardently wants the world's respect. And the West's political and business elites want to pin the blame for every ill, from job insecurity to the inability to finance a generous welfare state, on the unstoppable rise of China, so excusing themselves for any responsibility for Western capitalism's travails.Neither side has an interest in portraying China for what it is: a profoundly dysfunctional economy and society struggling to make the transition from communism to a form of capitalism that will almost certainly lead to political and economic upheavals.
PERHAPS NOT QUITE HOOVERESQUE:
Recovery complete, S&P finally clears dot-com high (Tomoeh Murakami Tse, 5/31/07, The Washington Post)
The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index hit a record high Wednesday, marking a four-year recovery of U.S. stocks battered by the burst of the tech bubble, the collapse of Enron and WorldCom, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.The Dow Jones industrials also climbed to a record, and Boeing shares cleared $100 to set an all-time high.
The S&P 500 is in many ways the key major market indicator because it includes a broader range of stocks. It reached its previous high of 1,527.46 on March 24, 2000, at the end of the tech boom that had big guys on Wall Street and college kids on laptops sapping up shares of Silicon Valley wonders that proved too good to be true.
The S&P 500 hit bottom, at 776.76, on October 9, 2002. It has been a long recovery since.
Not that anyone takes academics seriously anyway, but when you see these polls of historians and they rank George W. Bush as one of the worst presidents ever, it's helpful to look at his record.
GOD FORBID WE LEAVE MILLIONS OF IRAQIS IN THE SORT OF TYRANNY WE LEFT THE NORKS:
White House envisions "Korean model" in Iraq (Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press, 5/31/07)
President Bush would like to see the U.S. military provide long-term stability in Iraq as it has in South Korea, where thousands of American troops have been based for more than half a century, the White House said Wednesday.White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters Bush believes U.S. forces eventually will end their combat role in Iraq but will continue to be needed in the country to deter threats and to help handle potential crises, as they have done in South Korea.
The United States has kept forces in South Korea since war erupted with North Korea in 1950 and currently has about 30,000 troops there.
"At some point you want to get to a situation in which the Iraqis have the capability to go ahead and handle the fundamental matters of security ... so that if you need the ability to react quickly you can be there, but the Iraqis are conducting the lion's share of their business," Snow said.
SO WE'RE STUCK WITH LITTLE JOHNSONS?:
Arrest could bring big drop in spam (Kyung M. Song and Jennifer Sullivan, 5/31/07, Seattle Times)
With the arrest Wednesday of a Seattle man accused of sending out tens of millions of spam e-mails, federal prosecutors say that computer users across the globe should see a significant drop in spam messages.Robert Soloway, a 27-year-old dubbed the "Spam King" by Interim U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Sullivan, was arraigned Wednesday on 35 counts of mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, money laundering and fraud in connection with electronic mail.
Soloway is the first spammer federal prosecutors have charged with aggravated identity theft. The charge stems from his alleged theft of identities and business names for his widespread e-mail broadcasts -- which included advertisements for diplomas and penis enlargement, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathryn Warma.
BIGGER DIFFERENCES THAN SIMILARITIES:
The lessons of Vietnam: Iraq desperately needs a political solution in the short term to make the war more manageable for the next president (Henry A. Kissinger, May 31, 2007, LA Times)
[A] brief recapitulation of the Indochina tragedy is necessary.It must begin with dispelling the myth that the Nixon administration settled in 1972 for terms that had been available in 1969 and therefore prolonged the war needlessly. Whether the agreement, officially signed in January 1973, could have preserved an independent South Vietnam and avoided the carnage following the fall of Indochina will never be known. We do know that American disunity prevented such an outcome when Congress prohibited the use of military force to maintain the agreement and cut off aid after all U.S. military forces (except a few hundred advisors) had left South Vietnam. American dissociation triggered a massive North Vietnamese invasion, in blatant violation of existing agreements, to which the nations that had endorsed these agreements turned their backs.
Two questions relevant to Iraq are raised by the Vietnam War: Was unilateral withdrawal an option when Richard Nixon took office? Did the time needed to implement Nixon's design exhaust the capacity of the American people to sustain the outcome, whatever the merit?
When Nixon came into office, there were more than 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, and their number was increasing. The official position of the Johnson administration had been that U.S. withdrawal would start six months after a North Vietnamese withdrawal. The "dove" platform of Sens. Robert F. Kennedy and George McGovern, which was rejected by the Democratic Convention of 1968, advocated mutual withdrawal. No significant group then advocated unilateral withdrawal.
Nor was unilateral withdrawal feasible. To redeploy more than half a million troops is a logistical nightmare, even in peacetime conditions. But in Vietnam, more than 600,000 armed communist forces were on the ground. They might well have been joined by large numbers of the South Vietnamese army, feeling betrayed by its allies and working its way into the good graces of the communists. The U.S. forces would have become hostages and the Vietnamese people victims.
A diplomatic alternative did not exist. Hanoi insisted that to obtain a cease-fire, the U.S. had to meet two preconditions: First, the U.S. had to overthrow the South Vietnamese government, disband its police and army and replace it with a communist-dominated government. Second, it had to establish an unconditional timetable for the withdrawal of its forces, to be carried out regardless of subsequent negotiations or how long they might last. The presence of North Vietnamese troops in Laos and Cambodia was declared not an appropriate subject for negotiations.
Nixon correctly summed up the choices when he rejected the 1969 terms: "Shall we leave Vietnam in a way that — by our own actions — consciously turns the country over to the communists? Or shall we leave in a way that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable choice to survive as a free people?" A comparable issue is posed by the pressure for unilateral withdrawal from Iraq.
Of course, there is no North Iraq, its Viet Cong is even weaker, and there's no USSR or PRC. Shiastan & Kurdistan aren't loseable. A disorderly withdrawal would just exacerbate the internecine killing, though that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
WHAT'S THE HURRY:
Thompson wants to be 2008's outsider (Susan Page, 5/31/07, USA TODAY)
Politician-turned-actor Fred Thompson has been coy with audiences as he flirts with a bid for the Republican presidential nomination.In an interview with USA TODAY, however, the former Tennessee senator not only makes it clear that he plans to run, he describes how he aims to do it. He's planning a campaign that will use blogs, video posts and other Internet innovations to reach voters repelled by politics-as-usual in both parties.
"I can't remember exactly the point that I said, 'I'm going to do this,' " Thompson says, his 6-foot, 6-inch frame sprawled comfortably across a couch in a hotel suite. "But when I did, the thing that occurred to me: 'I'm going to tell people that I am thinking about it and see what kind of reaction I get to it.' "
His late start carries some problems but also "certain advantages," he says. "Nobody has maxed out to me" in contributions, he notes, and using the Internet already "has allowed me to be in the hunt, so to speak, without spending a dime."
Which is why, if he's serious about winning, he should just stay out of the official race until the fall and then concentrate on SC and after. The only reason to get in now is to organize in IA and NH, which is a waste of his resouces and energy since he can't catch up to McCain in either. After Maverick wins the first two, Mr. Thompson becomes the default "Stop McCain" candidate.
OUR FIRST AFRICAN PRESIDENT:
Bush seeks $30B for AIDS program (David Jackson, 5/31/07, USA TODAY)
President Bush asked Congress Wednesday to boost funding to fight AIDS and treat up to 2.5 million people with the disease around the world.His proposal for $30 billion over five years would extend an existing AIDS prevention program, which Congress first approved in 2003 and expires next year. The president often has touted the program, which also fights tuberculosis and malaria, as a key piece of his foreign policy.
"Villages in Africa now talk of the 'Lazarus Effect,' dying communities being brought back to life thanks to the compassion of the American people," Bush said in the Rose Garden.
LIFE OF JOHNSON THE E-Z WAY:
Caution: E-mail installments of 'Moby-Dick' may prove habit-forming (CECELIA GOODNOW, 5/31/07, Seattle Post Intelligencer)
Call me Ishmael.Whew -- that's enough literature for one day.
Fortunately, I can resume this fish tale when DailyLit sends my next "Moby-Dick" installment in tomorrow's e-mail. It's due to arrive at 8:30 a.m.
DailyLit, a free service created by a husband-wife team with roots in publishing and online networking, is like a One-A-Day vitamin for the literarily malnourished.
Choose from among the 370 public-domain works at dailylit.com, specify when and how you want to receive installments -- e-mail or RSS feeds -- and you're good to go.
Each day's fare is sized to be read in five minutes or less. That's about a screenful of single-spaced text -- not quite as pithy as "Call me Ishmael," but less daunting than staring down Herman Melville's 700-page masterpiece in its entirety.
DailyLit creators Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger said the service is designed largely for harried techies who can't break away from the tube long enough to read the books they studiously avoided in high school.
Except that they just read Atlas Shrugged and Star Trek books (in Klingon).
NOT SO ANONYMOUS LAWYER:
Blogger unmasked, court case upended (Jonathan Saltzman, May 31, 2007, Boston Globe)
It was a Perry Mason moment updated for the Internet age.As Ivy League-educated pediatrician Robert P. Lindeman sat on the stand in Suffolk Superior Court this month, defending himself in a malpractice suit involving the death of a 12-year-old patient, the opposing counsel startled him with a question.
Was Lindeman Flea?
Flea, jurors in the case didn't know, was the screen name for a blogger who had written often and at length about a trial remarkably similar to the one that was going on in the courtroom that day.
In his blog, Flea had ridiculed the plaintiff's case and the plaintiff's lawyer. He had revealed the defense strategy. He had accused members of the jury of dozing.
With the jury looking on in puzzlement, Lindeman admitted that he was, in fact, Flea.
The next morning, on May 15, he agreed to pay what members of Boston's tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement -- case closed.
May 30, 2007
AND THEY WON'T BE MISSED:
Iraq-friendly Foreign Minister closes lid on Chirac era (Jim Nolan, 31 May 2007, Online Opinion)
The contrast spoke volumes. Last week I mentioned the name Bernard Kouchner to a friend. This well-connected university academic was puzzled and asked who he was. Two days later I asked Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari his thoughts on the appointment by new French President Nicholas Sarkozy of Kouchner as his Foreign Minister, the co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières having been a minister in the Mitterrand socialist government, the UN governor of Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and still one of France's most popular politicians.Zebari, a Kurd and a genuine resistance fighter against Saddam Hussein, greeted the name warmly because he well knew what a local sophisticate had no idea about: that Kouchner was a true friend of all Iraqis. Visits to Iraqi Kurdistan were early examples of the heartburn which Kouchner regularly created for those who are now under him.
Richard Holbrooke, the former US ambassador to the UN, told The New York Times: "It's an amazing appointment, a stunning event in French foreign policy ... He's motivated by an anti-totalitarian drive whether he sees injustice from the Left or the Right."
He added: "It will be very positive for US-French relations, because he does not come with a visceral anger towards the American 'hyperpower'."
Should Hilary Benn become deputy Labour leader and Britain's deputy prime minister, as seems likely, it is hard to imagine Britain and French will not continue to support the democratically elected Iraqis. What has been a pathetic deference to Jacques Chirac's "realism" in the "liberal" West will no longer be a convenient fig leaf. The "sophisticated" Europeans (read France) have just left the building.
THE A-380 WON'T BE LANDING IN DEMOCRACIES:
Budget airlines and green activists unite to fight airport plan (Dan Milmo, May 31, 2007, The Guardian)
Budget airlines and green activists, normally on opposite sides of the argument on climate change, called a truce yesterday as they united to oppose the expansion of Stansted airport.The makeshift alliance was formed at the start of a public inquiry into allowing more flights at Britain's third largest airport. Environmental groups described it as the sternest test of government aviation policy since climate change became a major political issue.
Ryanair, whose chief executive, Michael O'Leary, regularly refers to climate change campaigners as "tree huggers", joined with other no-frills carriers and green organisations in calling for the plan to be thrown out.
Stansted's owner, BAA, is seeking permission to increase the maximum number of passengers flying in and out of rural Essex from 25 million to 35 million people a year.
ALL ELSE FOLLOWS:
1688 and All That: Michael Barone explains how the "Glorious" Revolution led to the American one. (ANDREW ROBERTS, May 29, 2007, Opinion Journal)
When the English-speaking peoples consider the forces that have made them the global hegemonic political culture since the mid-19th century--representative institutions, the rule of law, religious toleration and property rights among them--they look back to Britain's "Glorious" Revolution of 1688. What at first looks merely like a minor coup d'état that replaced the Catholic King James II with his Protestant Dutch nephew and son-in-law, King William III, was much more than that. It heralded nothing less than a complete realignment of worldview for the Anglosphere. It changed everything.Michael Barone, the distinguished political commentator and co-author of "The Almanac of American Politics," demonstrates both an encyclopedic knowledge of late 17th-century European politics and a keen appreciation of their long-term implications. He sees in the Glorious Revolution--which he dubs The First Revolution--the genesis of "changes in English law, governance and politics that turned out to be major advances for representative government, guaranteeing liberties, global capitalism, and a foreign policy of opposing hegemonic powers." He argues that it was essentially in defense of the rights won in 1688 that the American colonists rose against George III in 1776.
The handful of Whig aristocrats who secretly invited Prince William of Orange over from Holland to overthrow their anointed monarch, James, were undeniably rebels and traitors, as were, of course, the American colonists who signed the Declaration of Independence. Yet they both acted in the name of an ancient, inherent, legitimate and noble cause: liberty. English common-law rights dating back to Magna Carta were perceived to be under threat from King James, and they trumped whatever allegiance might have been owed him. The Founding Fathers were thus repeating 88 years later, and in an American and republican context, largely what the "first" revolutionaries had done in 1688.
Which, of course, is why forcing the King to agree to the Magna Carta was our ur-revolution.
WHEN YOU HONEYMOON AT SPRING TRAINING YOU'VE GOTTA KNOW WHAT'S COMING:
My Overactive Fantasy Life: What happens when you love your fantasy baseball team a little too much. (David Roth, May 30, 2007, Slate)
It's already building by the time the players start showing up in Florida and Arizona. When the first drowsy spring training games appeared on television, I could feel it. And so it was with great excitement and anticipation that I did what countless other baseball fans did as Opening Day approached: I turned on my computer and started studying. About a week before the big leaguers began their season, I began mine. Not in sunshine but in the lonely blue glow of my computer, and not with the crack of the bat but with the click of the keyboard.I am far from alone in this pursuit: Sixteen million people played fantasy baseball in 2006. In basements that smell like pizza and dudes, in conference rooms on the company clock, or in notional, Java Applet-powered online "draft rooms," we fantasy baseball GMs build the teams over which we will obsess for the next six months. And I have no problem with that. The strange part, I have come to realize, is that the baseball team I care about the most this summer will be my fantasy squad. This doesn't mean that I've stopped caring about my favorite big-league team. But it's a certainty that I'll spend more time worrying about a team named "Garkness Visible" (after Indians first baseman Ryan Garko) than about my beloved New York Mets.
I'm sure this indicates that I have any number of problems. But, once again, it's not just me. Over the last decade, fake sports, be they fantasy sports or video-game sports, have come to rival in popularity the professional sports they reference and emulate. Fantasy newbies and nonbelievers are well within their rights to ask why.
The Wife and I were at one of the Tom Clancy movies and Jack Ryan has a techie helping him hack into someone's computer. The kid says: "Don't worry, everybody uses his wife or kids name or one of their birthdays."
The Wife: "So, do you use me name?"
The Husband: "Um, not quite..."
The Wife: "What do you use?"
The Husband: "Um, the name of the centerfielder on my Rotisserie team..."
The Wife: "#@$#@%"
UNFORTUNATE CLARITY:
Barron Staffer: Assassinate Leroy Comrie's Ass (Azi Paybarah, May 30, 2007, NY Observer)
“If it takes an assassination of his ass, he will not be borough president in the borough where I live.”That was the chief of staff to Charles Barron speaking about another City Council member, Leroy Comrie, who is black and voted to abstain today on a failed proposal today to rename a street after black nationalist Sonny Carson. [...]
Plummer’s “assassination” remark was very much in the tradition of the sort of militant language employed by Carson himself. (“I’m not anti-Semitic, I’m anti-white,” he once said.) Carson's supporters have said that it's unfair to judge his entire life by his most extreme comments.
Of course, you can't be for the street renaming and upset about the comment.
IT WORKED CSO PERFECTLY IT MAY EVEN HAVE BEEN ACCIDENTAL:
Expert: Sadr gaining ground among Shiites (UPI, 5/30/07)
Mahdi Army leader Moqtada Sadr appears to be gaining ground at the expense of other Iraqi Shiite leaders, a U.S. expert says."If reports that (Abdul-Aziz al-) Hakim (leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) is truly ill with lung cancer are true, this could seriously shift the balance of power," Anthony H. Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington think tank, said in a statement.
"SCIRI does seem to be losing political influence and strength in the oil-rich southeast, while Sadr's Mahdi Army remains a major force. Coming back (to Iraq from Iran) allows him to reassert control and game U.S.-led security operations," Cordesman said.
"The Sadrists have also shown that they can cooperate just enough with the United States and the Iraqi Security Forces to take the credit for improvements for local security in the areas where the Sadr militia already plays the role, and get away with claiming the credit for any successes in aid while still blaming the United States and government for the overall lack of progress," the analyst said.
It's hard to believe this wasn't the point of the surge--even down to moving him off-site while we whacked the extremists he'd fingered--except that it's rare for government to function with quite such precision.
WHERE THERE'S WILL, THERE'S W'S WAY:
A politically-charged question for the candidates (George F. Will, May 30, 2007, Daily News Tribune)
Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.Liberals tend, however, to infer unequal opportunities from the fact of unequal outcomes. Hence liberalism's goal of achieving greater equality of condition leads to a larger scope for interventionist government to circumscribe the market's role in allocating wealth and opportunity.
Liberalism increasingly seeks to deliver equality in the form of equal dependence of more and more people for more and more things on government.
Hence liberals' hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education's semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual's Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of Health Savings Accounts (individuals who purchase high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses - just as car owners do not buy automobile insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals' advocacy of government responsibility for - and, inevitably, rationing of - health care, which is 16 percent of the economy, and rising.
Steadily enlarging dependence on government accords with liberalism's ethic of common provision, and with the liberal party's interest in pleasing its most powerful faction - public employees and their unions.
Conservatism's rejoinder should be that the argument about whether there ought to be a welfare state is over. Today's proper debate is about the modalities by which entitlements are delivered.
Mr. Will was one of the ,more vocal sufferers of Conservative Derangement Syndrome, but the midterm appears to have sobered him up. He sounds like a W flack these days.
IT'S NO EASY THING, DISABUSING SUCH VOLK OF THEIR HYGIENE THEORIES:
Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs (DAVID LEONHARDT, 5/30/07, NY Times)
Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.That’s where leprosy comes in.
“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” Mr. Dobbs said on his April 14, 2005, program. From there, he introduced his original report that mentioned leprosy, the flesh-destroying disease — technically known as Hansen’s disease — that has inspired fear for centuries.
According to a woman CNN identified as a medical lawyer named Dr. Madeleine Cosman, leprosy was on the march. As Ms. Romans, the CNN correspondent, relayed: “There were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”
“Incredible,” Mr. Dobbs replied.
Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Romans engaged in a nearly identical conversation a few weeks ago, when he was defending himself the night after the “60 Minutes” segment. “Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy,” she said, again attributing the number to Ms. Cosman.
To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.
The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137.
“It is not a public health problem — that’s the bottom line,” Mr. Krahenbuhl told me. “You’ve got a country of 300 million people. This is not something for the public to get alarmed about.” Much about the disease remains unknown, but researchers think people get it through prolonged close contact with someone who already has it.
What about the increase over the last six years, to 137 cases from 76? Is that significant?
“No,” Mr. Krahenbuhl said. It could be a statistical fluctuation, or it could be a result of better data collection in recent years. In any event, the 137 reported cases last year were fewer than in any year from 1975 to 1996.
The only surprising this is that he hasn't reported about their using Christian babies to make tortillas.
WELCOMING THE SHEEP-CLOTHED:
Bush's Quiet Idealist: Robert Zoellick has been designated the new president of the World Bank following Paul Wolfowitz's departure. Many Germans remember him as the likeable mediator who helped bring about German reunification. But Zoellick's maxim is still "America first." (Marc Pitzke, 5/30/07, Der Spiegel)
Robert Zoellick will be the first World Bank president to take office already decorated with the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's distinguished state honorary badge. His predecessors John McCloy and Jim Wolfensohn also received the Cross -- but only later. Zoellick already wears it, in recognition of his efforts to help bring about German reunification. As the main United States mediator in the "Two Plus Four Agreement" -- the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany that emerged from the 1990 talks between the two German states and the four World War II victors, and which led to German reunification -- he vigorously championed German self-determination. The Germans thanked him by awarding him the order.On Wednesday, US President George W. Bush will nominate Zoellick as the successor to controversial World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz. In Germany, Zoellick is considered a friend, an "Atlanticist" and a bridge-builder. He once described his bond with Berlin in a speech here as a common, German-American vision of the future, a transition to "prosperity, security and hope for hundreds of millions of people."
An outstanding choice and welcome news for Australia (Greg Sheridan, May 31, 2007, The Australian)
THE confirmation that Bob Zoellick will be the new president of the World Bank, as predicted by The Australian last week, is good news for the World Bank and very good news for Australia.Treasurer Peter Costello yesterday spoke to US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson about Zoellick's appointment and Costello welcomed his accession to the leadership of the World Bank.
Zoellick is outstandingly qualified to head the World Bank and a long-time friend of Australia. It was Zoellick, as US trade representative in George W.Bush's first administration, who negotiated the free trade agreement between the US and Australia.
The FTA was an idea that Zoellick had first suggested a decade earlier when he was the shadow of Jim Baker, who was successively White House chief of staff, secretary of the treasury, secretary of state and then chief of staff again, under first Ronald Reagan and then George HW Bush.
Zoellick held senior positions in all those agencies when Baker was in charge of them. Zoellick is one of those ludicrously over-achieving Americans, fuelled by endless ingestions of Diet Coke and with an insane work ethic, who got into a senior position young and has been at the centre of policy almost ever since.
He's Paul Wolfowitz without the demonization.
THE PROBLEM IS THE MONEY THEY'RE SPENDING, NOT THE MONEY THEY AREN'T:
All the wrong moves: Yankees are paying price for refusing to play hardball (John Donovan, May 30, 2007, Sports Illustrated)
Hindsight being as eagle-eyed as it is, it's easy to see just where the present-day Yankees went wrong. They tried to restock their farm system and compete at the big league level at the same time. They pulled away from what they do best -- nobody bullies people in baseball with a checkbook quite like the guys in the pinstriped front office, whether it's in the free-agent market or at the trade table -- and that's costing them now.Face it: These Yankees are dead meat. They might not be completely done, at 14½ games out of first place in the AL East and 8½ behind the wild-card leader with June 1 peeking around the corner. But if I'm looking for medium-well done, this thing already is too far gone. I'm sending it back.
Let's look, with some of that unerring hindsight, at just some of the ways that the Yankees have burned this baby... [...]
4) They forgot just how old they really were. The Yankees saw the aging of their roster coming. They were trying to get younger. That's the whole idea of re-stocking the farm system. It's an admirable goal, and it's needed. But they might have waited too long.
At 29.9 years old the Yankees are among the majors' oldest teams, ranking in the bottom third in average age. That's showing up in a lot of ways: Bobby Abreu's slow start, Johnny Damon's sore wheels, Jason Giambi's heel spurs, Mike Mussina's creaky legs and Mariano Rivera's sudden mortality.
The Michael/Torre/Jeter teams that won were actually built around a nucleus of home-grown talent -- Jeter, Posada, Rivera, Pettite, Mendoza, etc. -- and second-tier stars and seeming scrubs whose skills they evaluated better than others had--Scott Brosius, Paul O'Neill, Tino Martinez, Mike Stanton, Jeff Nelson, etc. -- so they were getting bargains. Now they have a wholly unproductive farm system and they pay premium dollar for guys who command that sort of money because they are exactly at or past their peaks. The perception that the Yankees have been unlucky this year is exactly wrong. In fact, they were especially lucky the past couple seasons when this same breakdown was always imminent.
IF SOMEONE IS GOING TO GOUGE, IT OUGHT TO BE US:
A Full Tank of Hypocrisy (Robert J. Samuelson, May 30, 2007, Washington Post)
It's one of those delicious moments when Washington's hypocrisy is on full and unembarrassed display. On the one hand, some of America's leading politicians condemn high gasoline prices and contend that they stem from "gouging" by oil companies. On the other, many of the same politicians warn against global warming and implore us to curb our use of fossil fuels that emit carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas. [...]In late May, gasoline prices hit a national average of $3.22 a gallon, which, after correcting for inflation, is roughly as high as in early 1981, the recent peak. This elicited the usual expressions of outrage. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested breaking up big oil companies that he says may be to blame for "the sky-high gas prices." By a vote of 284 to 141, the House passed the Federal Price Gouging Prevention Act, which would make it illegal during an "energy emergency" (to be declared by the president) to sell gasoline at a price that is "unconscionably excessive."
The legislation, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), would "punish those who are cheating America's families by artificially inflating the price of gasoline."
The problem is that left alone the prices will come back down or stay this low. You have to impose a consumption tax (offset by income tax cuts) to get prices high enough to matter much.
CQ Radio: John McCain (Ed Morrissey, 5/29/07, Captain's Quarters)
Update: We got a chance to continue the conversation past the end of the live stream. Be sure to download the podcast in order to hear Senator McCain's full interview!Today, on CQ Radio (2 pm CT), we'll talk live with Senator John McCain regarding the immigration bill, his campaign for President, and the Iraq War. Senator McCain will join us in the second half of the show, and before that, we'll tackle the stories of the day.
THE SOCIETY WHERE POVERTY IS VOLITIONAL:
The Rise Of the Bottom Fifth: How to Build on the Gains Of Welfare Reform (Ron Haskins, May 29, 2007, Washington Post)
Imagine a line composed of every household with children in the United States, arranged from lowest to highest income. Now, divide the line into five equal parts. Which of the groups do you think enjoyed big increases in income since 1991? If you read the papers, you probably would assume that the bottom fifth did the worst. After all, income inequality in America is increasing, right?Wrong. According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study released this month, the bottom fifth of families with children, whose average income in 2005 was $16,800, enjoyed a larger percentage increase in income from 1991 to 2005 than all other groups except the top fifth. Despite the recession of 2001, the bottom fifth had a 35 percent increase in income (adjusted for inflation), compared with around 20 percent for the second, third and fourth fifths. (The top fifth had about a 50 percent increase.)
Even more impressive, the CBO found that households in the bottom fifth increased their incomes so much because they worked longer and earned more money in 2005 than in 1991 -- not because they received higher welfare payments. In fact, their earnings increased more in percentage terms than incomes of any of the other groups: The bottom fifth increased its earnings by 80 percent, compared with around 50 percent for the highest-income group and around 20 percent for each of the other three groups.
When considering this explosion of work among those in the bottom fifth, remember that they all had children to take care of, that more of these households were headed by single mothers than households in the four better-off groups, and that they had the least money to, say, fix their cars or tide them over if they got sick. Those who do not admire this performance should live for a year on $16,800 and see if they could increase their earnings by 80 percent.
Now imagine if the singles just married, like normal people.
SYNCHRONICITY:
Justices’ Ruling Limits Suits on Pay Disparity (LINDA GREENHOUSE, 5/30/07, NY Times)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday made it harder for many workers to sue their employers for discrimination in pay, insisting in a 5-to-4 decision on a tight time frame to file such cases. [...]Workplace experts said the ruling would have broad ramifications and would narrow the legal options of many employees.
In an opinion by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., the majority rejected the view of the federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that each paycheck that reflects the initial discrimination is itself a discriminatory act that resets the clock on the 180-day period, under a rule known as “paycheck accrual.”
“Current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination,” Justice Alito said in an opinion joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas once headed the employment commission, the chief enforcer of workers’ rights under the statute at issue in this case, usually referred to simply as Title VII.
Under its longstanding interpretation of the statute, the commission actively supported the plaintiff, Lilly M. Ledbetter, in the lower courts. But after the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case last June, the Bush administration disavowed the agency’s position and filed a brief on the side of the employer. [...]
As with an abortion ruling last month, this decision showed the impact of Justice Alito’s presence on the court. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, whom he succeeded, would almost certainly have voted the other way, bringing the opposite outcome.
It's nice to be the natural party of government in America, but you have to control the Court to realize the full potential.
WHEN EVEN THE STATIST BUREAUCRATS AREN'T BUYING...:
Airlines Balking at Latest A350 Design: More bad news for Airbus as clients call for a redesign of the widebody. New technology and infrastructure would send costs soaring (Business Week, 5/29/07)
Aircraft manufacturer Airbus, already struggling with delays to its A380 superjumbo, now faces problems with its A350 long-range widebody aircraft due to customer dissatisfaction with the current design.The first version of the new A350 was rejected out of hand, now the second version hasn't come up to scratch either. A number of important customers are demanding changes in Airbus' technology, which could cause further delays at the troubled aircraft manufacturer.
The latest incarnation of the A350 has been found wanting by Emirates, Singapore Airplines, Qatar Airways and the leasing company ILFC, Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reports on Tuesday. "In my opinion the current Airbus proposal represents an intermediate stage," the newspaper quotes Emirates boss Tim Clark.
The customers have called on Airbus to modify its design of the fuselage by baking the body, made out of carbon-fiber composites, on a huge mold, as Boeing does with its 787 Dreamliner, instead of riveting sections together.
...you're really in trouble.
AT A MINIMUM...:
A two-state solution could work (Rafi Dajani and Ori Nir, May 30, 2007, Boston Globe)
One alternative is perpetual conflict. Israeli and Palestinian hard-liners say there will be peace only when the other side is defeated. Surrender is not an option for either side, as we have seen in 20 years of on-again-off-again violence. But repeated Israeli attempts to defeat the Palestinians militarily have not brought Israel security. And Palestinian violent resistance has hurt the Palestinian economy, people, and cause rather than force Israel to end the occupation. Neither side can defeat the other, make the other disappear, or drive the other away.The other alternative is propounded by those, mainly on the Palestinian (and Israeli) far left, who support a "one-state solution," the revival of the old chimera of a binational Israeli-Palestinian state. This two-headed monster is as unrealistic and undesirable today as it ever was. A binational state means, for all practical purposes, dismantling the state of Israel. Would Israeli Jews ever accept that? Would Palestinians -- or anyone else, for that matter -- ever be able to impose it? Why should Israelis give up on their dream and why should Palestinians give up on their yearning for a national homeland? And how would the two communities share in government and administration? [...]
The two-state solution stipulates a historic compromise, a grand deal that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians have repeatedly said they support. It involves an end to Israeli territorial claims in the West Bank and an end to Palestinian claims inside Israel. It requires a Palestinian recognition that those refugees from the 1948 war choosing to return will largely do so to a new Palestinian state rather than to what is now Israel, and an Israeli recognition that a fulfillment of the right they believe they have to settle in the West Bank will be either in a Palestinian state or as part of a negotiated minor West Bank land swap. It requires complex compromise-formulae to both divide and share the holy city of Jerusalem as the capital of two states, to divide and share resources such as water.
We are used to dynamics on the ground making it increasingly difficult for both sides to consider such compromises. But that is not always the case. Now, for example, the League of Arab States is urging Israel to consider a substantial incentive for compromising: full peace and normal relations with all 22 members of the Arab umbrella-organization, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from the territories it occupied 40 years ago. Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his defense and foreign ministers, have lately expressed interest in exploring the Arab League's initiative.
...one has to acknowledge that the single state solution isn't working to well for the Israelis.
PEOPLE'S WHO HATE PEOPLE:
China's culture of abortion (Kent Ewing, 5/30/07, Asia Times)
What will it take to jar Chinese leaders out of their long-standing fiasco of a family-planning strategy?Not that it was really needed, but the past two months have provided further evidence that the State Population and Family Planning Commission needs a new game plan - and the sooner, the better. Instead, however, once again the response has been to suppress dissent and soldier on with a policy that has provoked violent protests in the countryside and exacted a terrible price in human life.
Riots in the southern province of Guangxi this month over the one-child policy - implemented in 1979 to curb China's runaway population growth - are only the latest manifestation of that policy's inherent inhumanity. The unrest also serves as a reminder of its erratic and sometimes brutal implementation, which has led to forced abortions and sterilizations. At the same time, there are signs that because of the woeful lack of sex education in China, young women are increasingly turning to abortion - often multiple times - as a favored form of contraception.
While officials seem to note all this with due gravity, they don't pledge to do much about it. The recent riots in Guangxi provide a textbook case in point.
According to a report last month on National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States, dozens of women in Guangxi have been forced to have abortions as late as nine months into their pregnancies. The report, which ran on NPR's Morning Edition, described the harrowing ordeal of Liang Yage and his wife, Wei Linrong. The couple already had one child but wanted a second. But, according to Wei, in the seventh month of her pregnancy, family-planning officials forced her to abort her child in a Baise city maternity hospital. The Christian couple do not believe in abortion.
An unmarried 19-year-old woman, He Caigan, told NPR that her forced abortion occurred just days before her scheduled delivery. The report also cited an anonymous witness who counted 41 occupied beds on one floor of the same Baise city hospital and said he believed all the women on that floor were there against their will.
Corruption in China: The anger boils over (Carl Minzner, May 29, 2007, International Herald Tribune)
The vicious nature of the Guangxi enforcement campaign is all the more striking because it directly conflicts with the orders of China's top leaders.In January, Communist Party and government officials in Beijing issued a joint directive ordering stronger enforcement of China's population planning laws - precisely the aim of the Guangxi authorities. But the national directive clearly emphasized the need to rely on positive financial incentives to reward compliance with birth control policies - not coercive measures.
Indeed, national officials touted the directive as a move away from "administrative" controls on population growth. The director of China's national family planning council even suggested that the authorities would waive fines for poor citizens.
So how can there be such disconnect between the bright ideas coming out of Beijing and the hard reality of the Guangxi streets?
One reason is that the central authorities are not in full control of their country. This may seem difficult to believe, particularly to outsiders accustomed to images of Chinese security forces dragging away protesters in Tiananmen Square. But Beijing actually has major difficulties supervising local officials.
Sure, you can demand that the local authorities meet designated birth control, tax revenue or economic development targets. But how do you supervise this? How do you ensure that local officials don't simply falsify data? Or that they don't rely on their own private goon squads to brutalize local residents into meeting whatever targets have been set?
In other countries, a range of independent, bottom-up channels help monitor and check the behavior of local officials. A free press exposes government corruption. Independent judicial institutions evaluate whether the actions of the local authorities accord with national law. Open elections allow citizens to remove officials engaged in unethical behavior.
These channels don't exist under China's one-party system. Local Chinese party secretaries exercise sweeping control over the local media, legislatures and courts.
Naturally, this breeds corruption and abuse of power. It also means that local party officials can effectively choke off information to Beijing, blinding the central authorities as to exactly how their mandates are carried out.
Some localities have degenerated into private fiefdoms run by local party officials. This has serious consequences for people whose rights have been violated by local officials. Citizens are far from passive. They resort to any and all channels to get redress - lawsuits, petitions, foreign media. But these often don't work.
Always amusing, if chilling, to hear folks claim that China has developed an effective alternative to Western liberal democracy.
WHY CAN'T THEY JUST LEARN YIDDISH...:
In Queens, Classes in Mandarin Are Also Lessons in Adaptation (ELLEN BARRY, 5/29/07, NY Times)
[M]an-Li Kuo Lin’s weekly Mandarin class — arranged by Ms. Harrison’s successor, Councilman John C. Liu — provides a different view of Flushing. Ms. Lin’s students filter in after finishing a day’s work as paramedics or elementary school teachers. They set up chairs under pipes labeled “hot kitchen/bath” and “chilled water supply,” which are periodically traversed by mice. Some eat supper discreetly out of paper bags. Then they stumble, with boisterous good humor, over the basics of Mandarin grammar.In the center of the front row, every Wednesday, sits an old man with a freckled scalp and a frizz of white hair. This is Frank Sygal, 85, a retired stockbroker whose enthusiasm in pursuit of Mandarin amazes and amuses his classmates.
His first question of the night during one recent class, delivered in the accent of his native Poland, was followed rapidly by several dozen follow-ups: “Why do you say two words for ‘bladder’? I have one bladder! For one bladder it’s two words? What is word for state of Israel? What is word for ‘oral surgeon’? If I go to study medicine in China, what do they teach me?”
“Nobody taught you in Poland to speak Chinese,” Mr. Sygal said.
Mr. Sygal grew up outside Krakow and lost his parents on an August day in 1942 when German soldiers rounded up Jews, stripped off their jewelry and machine-gunned them. His facility with languages helped him survive: He spoke Russian with the Russian soldiers, Ukrainian with the Ukrainians and German with the Germans, reserving Hebrew for private spaces. Once he arrived in New York in 1949, there were two more languages to learn — English and Spanish.
Now, at 85, he has embarked on his last great linguistic effort. His progress has been maddeningly slow; at one point, Mr. Sygal approached “dozens” of Chinese people, he said, in a fruitless attempt to translate the word “ka-ching,” a term he had seen in a headline in The New York Post and assumed to be Chinese. He hopes that he will be able to carry on a conversation in Mandarin by the time he is 95.
“If I be around,” he said, “I be able to speak.”
To his left was Cathy Stenger, driven to this class by the stubborn silence in her building’s elevator. She bought an apartment in a Flushing co-op in 1986 and has since seen 90 percent of the units go to Korean and Chinese families. She has a mute bond with a woman from the sixth floor, who embraces her every time they meet, and with an elderly man who soulfully grabs her hand.
“The fact of the matter is, I can’t talk to them,” said Ms. Stenger, 65, whose parents immigrated from Hungary.
Her interest is not casual. Her co-op board is threatened by a breakaway group of Asian tenants, she said, who are challenging bylaws about subletting or dividing units. A downstairs neighbor manufactures medicinal herbs, and though the woman added ventilation after Ms. Stenger complained, the scent sometimes wafts up through her radiator connections. And when gas leaked into a hallway recently, Ms. Stenger said, one of the neighbors hesitated to call 911 because she was afraid that she would be charged for the service.
Still, none of the changes have made her consider leaving Flushing.
“A lot of my friends it bothers,” she said. “My friends moved.”
The Mandarin classes, now in their second 10-week session, were the brainchild of Donald Henton, 73, a retired city bus driver who has lived in Flushing since 1968.
Mr. Henton asked Councilman Liu to sponsor the lessons last year during a community meeting at which most of the comments were made in Mandarin. He feels a responsibility for the classes’ success; on Tuesday nights, he calls 40 people just to remind them to come.
There have been moments of disappointment for Mr. Henton, who expected the classes to be standing-room-only. He has met cold shoulders among his own neighbors in the Bland Houses, where 78 percent of the tenants are black or Hispanic. On a sunny afternoon in the housing project’s courtyard, Robert Winston, whose family moved to New York from Jamaica, responded to the idea of studying Mandarin with a long belly laugh. Anita Garcia, whose parents moved from Puerto Rico, practically spat.
“I was born here,” said Ms. Garcia, who is 44. “Why should I learn their language?”
"Why can't I be the last one into the lifeboat?"
May 29, 2007
W, AND NO ONE BUT:
Bush tightens squeeze on Sudan: His new sanctions Tuesday seek to press the regime but not deepen the Darfur crisis. (Peter Grier and Scott Baldauf , 5/30/07, The Christian Science Monitor)
Economic sanctions announced May 29 are an expansion of existing US financial restrictions and reflect US impatience with continued obstinacy on the part of Sudan's president, Lt. Gen. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on allowing international peacekeepers into his country.At the same time, the US may not want to alienate other nations crucial to any eventual Sudan settlement, such as China. Nor do officials wish to precipitate a further military and humanitarian crisis to which the world community may be ill-equipped to respond.
HERE'S ONE THAT'LL KEEP YOU READING FOR THE WEEK:
Who's Afraid of Tariq Ramadan?: The Islamist, the journalist, and the defense of liberalism. (Paul Berman, 05.29.07, New Republic)
Everyone knows by now that Al Qaeda can trace its roots to a splinter tendency within the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during the 1960s and even earlier, and this history raises an awkward question, which Ramadan has had to answer more than once in the years since September 11. He answered the question one more time in Buruma's Times magazine profile in February. He acknowledged that, yes, Al Qaeda emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood. But not from Grandfather al-Banna's legacy. Al Qaeda drew its inspiration, instead, from Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), who enlisted in the Muslim Brotherhood only after al-Banna's assassination. About al-Banna and Qutb, Ramadan said, "They didn't even know each other"--which is true, narrowly speaking. Buruma quoted the remark and had every reason to do so (though it was odd of him not to mention how misleading was Ramadan's observation, seen from a broader angle--a point to which I will return). Still, Buruma did go on to quote Ramadan's account of his grandfather's un-Qutb-like political goals. Al-Banna, in Ramadan's phrase, "was in favor of a British-style parliamentary system, which was not against Islam."This second observation, though--is it equally correct, from a narrowly factual angle? In the Times magazine, Buruma elected to be wryly noncommittal. "This may or may not be an accurate representation of Hassan al-Banna," he observed--which is the mark of Buruma's charm as a writer, his gift for understatement and indirection. Even so, understated indirection is not always the best way to inform the public. He might have pointed out that Ramadan, in his book Aux Sources du Renouveau Musulman, or The Roots of the Muslim Revival, in 1998, devotes some two hundred pages to al-Banna and his visionary ideas. Ramadan concedes that al-Banna did want to replace the multi-party system in Egypt with a single national council, which might appear to be a one-party state--but Ramadan explains that, because of the fundamentally democratic nature of Islam, al-Banna's proposal was tantamount to a multi-party system. Such is the interpretation in The Roots of the Muslim Revival. And Buruma might have pointed out one of the principal alternative interpretations of al-Banna and his ideas, if only to offer a little perspective on Ramadan and his way of thinking. According to this second interpretation, al-Banna is best described as a fascist.
This used to be a fairly common judgment on the Arab left, not to mention among European Marxists--maybe in some cases because "fascist" is every left-winger's favorite insult, and for no larger reason. Still, something called "clerico-fascism" (to use the traditional term) is an old concept on the left, dating back to the 1920s in Italy, where it used to refer to the militant wing of the Catholic extreme right. And the applicability of that sort of label to al-Banna's new movement in Egypt did seem, at least to some people in the past, hard to miss--an obvious applicability based on the populism and demagogic emotionalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, together with its authoritarianism, intolerance, violence, invasiveness, and a certain kind of giddy twentieth-century-style utopianism, not to mention some of the direct influences that wended across the Mediterranean Sea from fascism's original home in Europe. Then, too, in the eyes of a fair number of scholarly and journalistic observers today, a fascist label, or some reasonably similar term, seems faintly applicable--or more than faintly--even now.
You can see a sophisticated political-theory presentation of this analysis in the writings of Bassam Tibi, the Syrian-German scholar, though in regard to al-Banna and his legacies, Tibi, in his precision, prefers the loftier Arendtian word "totalitarian" (which, anyway, was coined by Mussolini) to the label "fascist" (likewise coined by Mussolini). A discussion of al-Banna's fascism turns up repeatedly in the current literature on Tariq Ramadan. Paul Landau, in The Saber and the Qur'an, describes al-Banna, in his position as chief guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, as a figure comparable to Il Duce and the Führer. Landau attributes a lot of importance to al-Banna's friendship with Haj Amin al-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem--who, as Hitler's ally, helped organize a Muslim division of the Waffen-SS and then, after the war, when he was wanted for war crimes (owing to his SS division), succeeded in escaping to Egypt, thanks to help from al-Banna himself. Ian Hamel reprises Landau's point about al-Banna and the mufti of Jerusalem in The Truth About Tariq Ramadan--though Hamel's purpose is normally to knock down everything said by Landau, if he can. Even Hamel describes al-Banna as a man with a "totalitarian organization and an extremist program."
Caroline Fourest offers a more striking observation in Brother Tariq by pointing to al-Banna's Epistle to the Young. The epistle lays out, under the six clauses of his slogan ("God is our goal; the Prophet is our guide; the Qur'an is our constitution; struggle is our way; death on the path of God is our ultimate desire; God is great, God is great"), the five stages of his program. To wit: the creation of a properly Muslim individual person, in thought and belief; of a properly Muslim family; of a properly Muslim people or community; of an Islamic state; and, finally, the resurrection of the ancient Islamic Empire--which al-Banna describes by referring admiringly to what he calls the "German Reich" and to Mussolini's dream of a resurrected Roman Empire, though naturally al-Banna regards his own resurrected Islamic Empire as vastly preferable and theologically more legitimate than anything Mussolini could have contemplated.
Back in the early 1940s, the British authorities in Egypt took this sort of sentiment seriously enough and, in the hope of avoiding anything resembling the pro-Axis coup d'état that took place in Iraq in 1941, presided over al-Banna's arrest more than once. But the pointed aspect of Fourest's discussion of al-Banna and his Epistle lies in her observation that Ramadan, in presenting the Epistle in one of his own popular audio recordings, has omitted the fascist references--which raises anew the question about forthrightness.
Among the present-day commentaries on al-Banna and fascism that I have lately stumbled on, the most eye-opening turns up in an essay by the Iranian scholars Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, which appears in an anthology called Islam and Democracy in the Middle East, edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Daniel Brumberg. The Boroumands (who are sisters) arrive at a grim evaluation: "The man who did more than any other to lend an Islamic cast to totalitarian ideology was an Egyptian schoolteacher named Hassan al-Banna." By "totalitarian ideology," the Boroumand sisters have in mind the doctrines of the Italian Fascists and the German Nazis, whose influence on al-Banna they underline. And they point out the disastrous consequences: "From the Fascists--and behind them, from the European tradition of putatively transformative' or purifying' revolutionary violence that began with the Jacobins--Banna also borrowed the idea of heroic death as a political art form."
There is nothing especially novel or bizarre in noticing that al-Banna displayed an eager interest in the aesthetic cult of death. The classic history of the Muslim Brotherhood, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, by Richard P. Mitchell, which appeared in 1969, was quite lucid on this topic even then. Al-Banna came up with a double phrase about the importance of death as a goal of jihad--"the art of death" (fann al-mawt) and "death is art" (al-mawt fann). This phrase became, in Mitchell's description, a famous part of al-Banna's legacy. Stringing together his own paraphrases with al-Banna's words, Mitchell wrote: "The Qur'an has commanded people to love death more than life" (which, I might add, is a phrase that we have heard more than once in terrorist statements during the last few years, for instance in the videotape that was made by the Islamist group that attacked Madrid in 2004). And al-Banna continued, in Mitchell's presentation: "Unless the philosophy of the Qur'an on death replaces the love of life which has consumed Muslims, they will reach naught. Victory can only come with the mastery of the art of death."
But what might strike some people as novel or controversial is the Boroumand sisters' observation that al-Banna borrowed these grisly ideas from Europe, instead of deriving them, as al-Banna himself claimed to have done, from Qur'anic tradition. Hassan al-Banna, seen in this light, did something dreadful to Islam. He founded the modern vogue for suicide terror--the cult of death as political art form par excellence--and he attached this cult to Islam. This interpretation of al-Banna corresponds to Bassam Tibi's view, though Tibi emphasizes that al-Banna served mostly to clear the way for Sayyid Qutb, and it was Qutb who played the crucial role. [...]
Ramadan's various opinions and interpretations ought not to be conflated with Islam itself--and this point, as I have learned from experience, requires emphasis, and even double emphasis. When I wrote about Ramadan some years ago, I noticed that all too many non-Muslim readers are quick to seize on any disagreeable or troubling statement by a Muslim thinker and pin it on Islam as a whole--even if these readers are warned not to do anything of the sort. So I stress the point. Nor does Ramadan himself claim to be speaking for every last Muslim on the planet. He identifies several modern currents of Islamic thought or Muslim self-identification, even apart from the ancient denominations that have transfixed everybody's attention right now, and he knows that all these currents do not accord with one another. In the Times magazine, Buruma very properly asked Ramadan to specify which of the currents is his own, and Ramadan answered with a simple phrase. His own current of Islamic thought is the one that goes under the paradoxical-sounding label of "salafi reformist."
Which means? Buruma came up with a definition by plucking a sentence out of Ramadan's Western Muslims and the Future of Islam. A "salafi reformist," Buruma explained, quoting Ramadan's book, is someone who aims at the following goals: "to protect the Muslim identity and religious practice, to recognize the Western constitutional structure, to become involved as a citizen at the social level, and to live with true loyalty to the country to which one belongs." This quotation is accurate, in a fashion--I have located it on page 27 of Ramadan's book, as well as in a slightly different setting in To Be a European Muslim--but, then again, less than accurate because of the way that Buruma has severed the quoted words from some other remarks on the same page and the previous one. Taken by themselves, the quoted words make salafi reformism sound like an earnest and slightly dowdy do-good effort to adapt Islam to the modern liberal world. But that is a mistake. It is an old mistake, too, that journalists persist in making, as both Fourest and Landau point out with a lot of exasperation in their respective books. In a footnote on the topic of "reformism" in his book The Roots of the Muslim Revival, back in 1998, Ramadan himself halfway acknowledges the potential for misunderstanding, though he thinks he is justified in using the term anyway.
Salafi reformism, in his usage, signifies something precise, which has nothing to do with liberal reformism in the conventional sense. Buruma asked Ramadan to list his two favorite Muslim philosophers. Ramadan duly named Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh--the late nineteenth-century figures whom Ramadan regards as the progenitors of Hassan al-Banna's Islamic revival and the Muslim Brotherhood (though other people would insist rather sharply that al-Banna's Islamism, in its radicalism and rigidity, departed fundamentally from those nineteenth-century thinkers). Anyway, not many readers of the Times magazine are likely to have recognized these nineteenth-century names. And yet if Buruma had thought to ask Ramadan about some more recent thinkers in the salafi reformist mode, Ramadan could have gone on listing names, and some of those additional names would, in fact, be recognizable to a good many readers. Ramadan has already listed the names in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam--has done this, as it happens, in the paragraph directly preceding the one from which Buruma has plucked his misleading definition.
Here, on page 26, is Hassan al-Banna; and Abul Ala Mawdudi from the South Asian subcontinent, whose activities Tariq's father, Said Ramadan, coordinated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and Ali Shariati, Ayatollah Khomeini's fellow thinker in Iran. And here is Sayyid Qutb, one more influential reformist among the others, listed without comment--even if Qutb's legacy, in one of its offshoots, did lead to Al Qaeda. In Ramadan's usage, salafi reformism turns out to be the philosophical underpinning for modern Islamism in the sundry versions that descend from al-Banna's (and Mawdudi's) original idea. Naturally, these sundry versions do not always chime with one another, and this, too, Ramadan carefully spells out. In Western Muslims and the Future of Islam, he divides the descendants of the original reformist idea into subcurrents or tendencies--though in order to distinguish among these tendencies, you have to inspect his account rather closely, unto the fine print, meaning the footnotes. And this kind of close inspection is worth undertaking, not just to shed a little light on Ramadan's philosophy but also to cast an extra glance at the related but different theme of Ramadan's image in the press.
So, then, the subcurrents of salafi reformism, as per Tariq Ramadan. One of these subcurrents turns out to be his own: the outspokenly Western variant, the version whose particularities Ramadan defines with the attractive language that Buruma has mistakenly applied to the entire movement--a language of preserving Muslim identity and becoming loyal citizens of democratic countries. Ramadan's subcurrent is not the principal one, however. The principal subcurrent flourishes only in the Muslim world (and, in Ramadan's book, only in the footnotes)--though "flourishes" may give the wrong impression, since, as he observes with a touch of bitterness, the organizations and movements within this subcurrent "are almost everywhere, though in different degrees, subjected to imprisonment, torture, and persecution." Plainly, Ramadan is writing here about the Muslim Brotherhood, together with (I suppose) its several national and sectarian variations and offshoots--the Muslim Brotherhood in the Muslim countries themselves, where martyrdom has come to figure as part of the movement's identity. The intention of this, the most prominent current of the salafi reformists, is fully revolutionary: it is to establish an Islamic society.
And then, in his honesty, Ramadan somewhat ruefully cites still another sub-current that flows from the salafi reformist source--though, in his view, this final tendency has emptied salafi reformism of almost all of its original content. This final tendency, he tells us, has gone over to "strictly political activism," joined to "a literalist reading" of the sacred texts, leading to "radical revolutionary action." Ramadan describes this tendency as "political literalist Salafism"--which Buruma in the Times magazine mentions by name, though without identifying it as an offshoot of the salafi reformist idea. Ramadan explains that political literalist salafism has attracted "a lot of public attention"--though it is represented in the Western countries only "by structures and factional networks." This last phrase is incomprehensible to me, but it communicates an impression that, in spite of the public attention, political literalist salafism does not count for much. Ramadan disapproves of this tendency, owing to its textual literalism and its unspecified departures from salafi reformist principles--though he also rushes to ascribe the tendency's errors not to any elements intrinsic to its salafi reformist roots but to the ghastly way that Muslim governments have suppressed the mainstream salafi reformists.
As to why the political literalist salafists should have attracted "a lot of public attention," Ramadan says nothing at all in his main text. Only in a footnote does he mention "violent and spectacular actions," and not even there does he remark on any sort of radical departure from basic morality. Nor does he define any relation that might exist between this sort of thing and the legacies of Qutb. A veil of timidity and euphemism hangs over the entire discussion, which could lead a sleepy reader to miss his meaning altogether.
And yet it is obvious what Ramadan is talking about in this particular passage. Political literalist salafism is the doctrine underlying the terrorism that has emerged from salafi reformism--the vast wave of random murder, the vogue for "violent and spectacular actions," that has swept across so many regions of the Muslim world and beyond. That is what he means by "radical revolutionary action." He does refer somewhat cautiously in a footnote to "a section" of the Islamic Salvation Front of Algeria, by which he must have in mind the people who went about slaughtering whole villages in Algeria during the 1990s and who are evidently not finished yet. But mostly he is the sphinx. At least Ramadan does not deny the estranged sibling relation between his own wing of salafi reformism and the champions of "radical revolutionary action"--these different currents that descend from the same source. Ramadan is, on this particular theme, more straightforward than his Times profiler.
Still, Ramadan has left out a few details, and these do add up to something. On the topic of al-Banna and Qutb, for instance, it is true, yes, that in spite of being exact contemporaries, the two men never did meet in person. Al-Banna was a salafi reformist from the start, but Qutb, in his younger years, was a secular intellectual, a poet, and a literary critic--which meant that al-Banna and Qutb disapproved of each other. Still, they did not live on opposite sides of the earth. Qutb, as I learn from a biography by Adnan A. Musallam called From Secularism to Jihad: Sayyid Qutb and the Foundations of Radical Islamism, adhered to a school of Romantic poetry in Egypt, influenced by Coleridge among others, and his ideas about poetry led him to seek truth in his own heart (as opposed to following the traditions of established schools) and at the same time to yearn romantically for death. Qutb's poetry took an apocalyptic turn as well--which, though his biographer does not make the point, could be compared stanza for stanza with some of the apocalyptic poetry of the fin-de-siècle European Symbolist poets. And all of this, the Romantic and Symbolist literary impulses, mirrored al-Banna's Islamic thinking pretty closely.
What was salafi reformism, after all, if not a belief that truth could be obtained directly from the Qur'an and the seventh century (as opposed to following the traditions of the established schools of Islamic jurisprudence)? And what was al-Banna's phrase about "the art of death" and "death is art" if not an Islamic variation on Qutb's Romantic-poetry yearning for the eternity of the tomb? As for Qutb's Symbolist-poetry apocalyptic fantasies--well! This was Islamism itself, in its Mussolinian, Third Reichstyle yearning for the final showdown. Seen from this angle, Qutb's Romantic secularism and al-Banna's Romantic Islamism were variations on a theme.
THE ONLY STATES THAT MATTER:
Presidential Preferences (American Research Group, Inc., May 29, 2007)
John McCain continues to receive support from independents who are likely Republican primary voters/caucus goers in Iowa (48%), New Hampshire (40%), and South Carolina (41%).
JUST TELL THEM THE RESULT YOU WANT AND THEY'LL FAKE THE SCIENCE (via Jim Yates):
I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train (David Evans, 5/28/2007, Mises.org)
I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened that case. I am now skeptical.In the late 1990s, this was the evidence suggesting that carbon emissions caused global warming:
1.
Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.
2.Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.
3.Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure tempe