Ace Darvish holds Orix at arm's length (JASON COSKREY, 1-0/12/08, Japan Times)
Spot Yu Darvish a run and more times than not he's going to win. Give him a couple more and it's pretty much academic.Darvish kept the powerful Orix Buffaloes at bay and the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters strung together a couple of timely hits to win Game 1 of the first stage of the Pacific League Climax Series 4-1 on Saturday afternoon at Kyocera Dome.
"With Darvish pitching, there is no way we were going to lose if we scored four runs," Fighters manager Masataka Nashida said. [...]
Darvish struck out 14 and allowed an unearned run on nine hits in a complete-game effort. With the exception of Hiroyuki Oze, Darvish struck out every Orix batter, including two pinch hitters, at least once.
Dating back to last season's Japan Series, the Fighters ace has struck out at least 11 in each of his last three postseason starts.
Darvish passed former Seibu Lions hurler Daisuke Matsuzaka with his fourth career Climax Series victory and also passed Matsuzaka on the career Climax Series strikeout list.
Inside Hitler's library (Robert Fulford, 10/11/08, National Post)
Timothy Ryback has written one of the most interesting of recent books about him, Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (Knopf), based on books Hitler is known to have owned, including 1,200 volumes that ended up in the Library of Congress.As a reader, Hitler was a self-improver, a purposeful browser who believed in “the art of correct reading,” which seems to have been a method of searching through books for whatever would confirm views he already held. If a writer could give him fresh reasons for his opinions, all the better. An obvious case was Paul de Lagarde’s German Essays, in which Hitler underlined one passage: “Each and every irksome Jew is a serious affront to the authenticity and veracity of our German identity.” Another favourite book was The International Jew, by Henry Ford. “I regard Ford as my inspiration,” Hitler remarked early in his political career.
John Lewis, invoking George Wallace, says McCain and Palin 'playing with fire' (Jonathan Martin, 10/11/08, Politico)
Civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis is accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of stoking hate, likening the atmosphere at Republican campaign events to those featuring George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. McCain's campaign has responded with a statement in the candidate's name, urging Barack Obama to repudiate Lewis's comments."What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history," Lewis said in a statement issued today for Politico's Arena forum. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."
As Richard Cohen wrote in the Washington Post:
[The] Democratic Party . . . has found it impossible to move off the racial dime, often staying silent or complicitous when others waved the bloody shirt of ol' time racism -- usually just to propel African Americans to the polls.This is precisely what happened in the last presidential campaign when the NAACP all but placed the body of James Byrd Jr., the victim of a racial murder, at George W. Bush's doorstep. Byrd's daughter, Renee Mullins, narrated the commercial and said, "So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to support hate-crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again."
This tasteless ad, run just before the presidential election, was not denounced by a single prominent Democrat.
Radical Chic Resurgent (Timothy Noah, Aug. 22, 2001, Slate)
The astonishing luck of Bill Ayers, unrepentant former Weather Underground revolutionary, continues unabated. Today the state of New York refused to grant parole to Kathy Boudin, another Weather Underground radical, convicted 20 years ago of second degree murder for participating in a Brink's truck robbery in which two policemen and a security guard were killed. That's bad news for Boudin, who by all accounts has been a model prisoner. But it's great news for Ayers--who, with his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, jointly raised Boudin's son--because it's bound to help Ayers sell his new memoir, Fugitive Days.Chatterbox isn't sure he's ever read a memoir quite so self-indulgent and morally clueless as Fugitive Days. [...]
Ayers periodically expresses mild regret for his crimes, in tones reminiscent of a middle-aged insurance executive who wishes he hadn't gotten drunk quite so often at his college fraternity. "We took ourselves so seriously--OK, a little too seriously, we were too earnest by half and way too insistent," he writes at one point. "[F]rom the edges, we were entirely inflexible, maybe even a bit goofy." But in the process of describing such youthful indiscretions, Ayers invariably winds himself up into a self-exculpating frenzy. Here he is talking about the Pentagon bombing:
The operation cost just under $500, and no one was killed, or even hurt. In that same time the Pentagon spent tens of millions of dollars and dropped tens of thousands of pounds of explosives on Viet Nam, killing or wounding thousands of human beings, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. Because nothing justified their actions in our calculus, nothing could contradict the merit of ours. ... I can't quite imagine putting a bomb in a building today--all of that seems so distinctly a part of then. But I can't imagine entirely dismissing the possibility, either.
In one truly flabbergasting moment, Ayers dares to compare Hugh Thompson, Lawrence Colburn, and Glen Andreotta--the heroic GIs who pointed their guns at fellow U.S. soldiers in order to halt the My Lai massacre--to his former girlfriend, Diana Oughton. Oughton was killed when explosives that she and other Weatherpeople were hoarding in a Greenwich Village townhouse unexpectedly detonated in 1970. They'd been planning to blow up Fort Dix.
Much of what Ayers self-interestedly leaves out of his book is more personally embarrassing than illegal. Ayers takes care not to dwell on his own Establishment credentials. (His father was chairman of the energy company Commonwealth Edison, a fact Ayers conveys only by writing, "My dad worked for Edison.") Ayers omits any discussion of his famous 1970 statement, "Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that's where it's really at." He also omits any discussion of his wife Bernardine Dohrn's famous reaction to the Manson killings, as conveyed by journalist Peter Collier: "Dig it. First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, then they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach! Wild!" (In a 1993 Chicago Magazine profile, Dohrn claimed, implausibly, that she'd been trying to convey that "Americans love to read about violence.") Nor does he address fellow radical Jane Alpert's charge that Ayers was "notorious for his callous treatment and abandonment of Diana Oughton before her death and for his generally fickle and high-handed treatment of women" (though Ayers does manage to get across the message, to those few who haven't heard it, that the late 1960s and early 1970s were a golden age for getting laid). [...]
Ayers is similarly dismissive of terrorists, a group to which he claims not to belong:
Terrorists terrorize, they kill innocent civilians, while we organized and agitated. Terrorists destroy randomly, while our actions bore, we hoped, the precise stamp of a cut diamond. Terrorists intimidate, while we aimed only to educate.
And, indeed, Ayers today is a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Take it away, Dinesh D'Souza.
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Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled? (Paul Vallely, 11 October 2008, Independent.co.uk )
The relationship between science and religion has had a long and chequered history since the settled days of the medieval consensus, which saw faith and the natural sciences as part of a cosmic whole. Galileo put paid to that with his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church, which saw man and his planet at the centre of the universe – and which already felt its authority threatened by the rise of Protestantism – locked horns with him. The clash became a metaphor for the irreconcilability of scientific materialism and biblical literalism.Things changed with Isaac Newton. His laws of physics led to a world view which relegated God to background status as the designer of a clockwork world which he wound up and then left to its own devices. Newton's celestial mechanics brought an advance in our scientific understanding but didn't really work for a faith that wanted to believe that, through the historical Jesus, God had become, in the words of the song "a slob like one of us".
Next came Darwin. At first many saw his theory of evolution as a threat to religion but mainstream Christianity soon accepted evolution as the answer to the "how" of creation, leaving the "why" questions of meaning and morality to faith. Science and religion exercised authority over two discrete compartments of life between which there could be no link.
But through the latter half of the 20th century a synergy developed. In cosmology the science of the expanding universe and the Big Bang chimed in with a moment of creation. The inherent uncertainty that quantum physics discovered at the subatomic level overturned Newton's mechanics and created room for a "God of the gaps". Process theology embraced evolution and said men and women are called to play a part in an ever-ongoing creation. Advances in neuro-science showed that mental and spiritual phenomena depend upon biological processes, undermining the old dualist notions about body and soul and offering a more holistic body-mind-spirit axis. [...]
It is perhaps significant here that the two main instigators of the campaign to have Reiss ousted from his Royal Society job, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, are now based in the United States where creationism is a major phenomenon. Polls suggest that around 45 per cent of Americans are creationists with 40 per cent believing that God worked through evolution and just 10 per cent saying it was nothing to do with a God.
The experience of being a secularist in the US is clearly a radicalising one. "I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television," Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, has said, adding darkly: "The Royal Society does not appreciate the true nature of the forces arrayed against it."
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US critics savour first taste of Life on Mars: Britain's latest TV export is a hit, despite Gene Hunt's 'over-ripe' one-liners (Helen Pidd, 10/11/08, The Guardian)
It is always a gamble transposing a hit British TV show to an American setting. Basil Fawlty did not survive the flight across the Atlantic despite three attempts to remake Fawlty Towers, though the US version of the Office continues to be a enormous success, even without Ricky Gervais in the David Brent role.The latest character to be given an American accent is Detective Chief Inspector Gene Hunt, the bluff Mancunian chauvinist who was taken to the nation's hearts in the BBC's tremendously popular police series Life On Mars, which has just been remade for America. The pilot episode had its debut on the ABC network on Thursday night in a prime-time slot, and was largely well-received. The New York Times described it as "strange and exhilarating ... the show's back-to-the-future feel ... lifts it above the ordinary and adds Scorsesian pizazz".
The Boston Globe said: "They've pulled together a vivid cast and evoked the ideal tone - not comedy, not psychodrama, not sci-fi, but an intriguingly evasive blend of them all." USA Today's critic went further, declaring it "one of the best new hours of TV this fall".
US retains top competitiveness ranking (Frances Williams, October 8 2008, Financial Times)
The US has again topped a widely-watched index ranking country competitiveness, despite the financial crisis that has left it and other highly ranked nations facing market meltdown and a prolonged economic downturn.Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden retain their second, third and fourth places respectively in the league table compiled by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum.
Among the world’s economic heavyweights only two apart from the US feature in the top ten – Germany, ranked seventh and Japan, ranked ninth. The UK has dropped three places from ninth to twelfth. Singapore, Finland, the Netherlands and Canada take the remaining top ten places.
Subprime scapegoats (Boston Globe, October 11, 2008)
[T]he Community Reinvestment Act has nothing whatsoever to do with the subprime mess.The law applies specifically to commercial banks, which in recent months have been the least volatile part of the financial-services industry. The measure was passed in 1977 to combat redlining, the practice of banks refusing to write mortgages in poor neighborhoods - even when they were taking deposits from residents of those neighborhoods.
To meet Community Reinvestment Act requirements, banks do make loans to low-income homebuyers - often in concert with community groups that provide financial advice and other crucial training. While banks at first had to be "dragged into participating," said Tom Callahan, executive director of the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, loans made under the auspices of the reinvestment law have performed remarkably well. One key initiative of this sort, the state's SoftSecond mortgage program, has a delinquency rate of 1.8 percent - compared with about 5 percent for all mortgages in Massachusetts.
The subprime mortgages that have failed left and right are the antithesis of the carefully designed, well-supervised loans provided by tightly regulated banks. No law forced a mob of unregulated lenders to make loans in poor neighborhoods. Rather, mortgage companies and Wall Street financiers saw a business opportunity in subprime lending, where the risk of default was high but so were the interest rates.
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Amtrak's ridership sets record: Growth boosted by gas and airline prices, road congestion (Sarah Karush, 10/11/08, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Amtrak carried a record 28.7 million people last year, with each of its routes seeing gains, the national passenger railroad said Friday.The company has posted six years of ridership and revenue growth, recently benefiting from high gas and airline prices. The number of trips in the past year increased 11 percent over the 25.8 million taken in fiscal 2007.
Crucibles: THE ENEMY WITHIN: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World By John Demos (GERMAINE GREER, 10/12/08, NY Times Book Review)
The institution of what we would call a “witch hunt” is only tangentially related to the practice of witchcraft. Demos understands that any group can be demonized; he mentions the cases of the Knights Templar, the Waldensians and the Cathars, but he could have mentioned many more. He makes a strange muddle of the fact that belief in witches was considered heresy by the fathers of the early church, partly because he appears not to understand that medieval witch hunts directed themselves toward the detection of heretics as the real enemies within and paid scant attention to charlatans. Only people baptized as Roman Catholics could be prosecuted as heretics; the enemies the Inquisitions addressed themselves to were those that infiltrated believers’ most secret souls. The Dominican order, known punningly as “domini canes,” or hounds of the Lord, was founded in the 13th century specifically to hunt down Cathars. [...]In the last portion of “The Enemy Within” Demos includes a series of brief essays on American witch hunts — the various anti-Masonry scares, the persecution of the Bavarian Illuminati, the anarchists following the Haymarket riot, the different Red scares and McCarthyism, and the child sex-abuse panic. The discussion of all of these is brief and superficial. Demos keeps asking himself whether these episodes could be correctly described as witch hunts, which of course they can.
YouTube to offer full-length classic TV shows: The video site hopes the move will pump up its advertising revenue. (Swati Pandey, 10/11/08, Los Angeles Times)
YouTube surfers weary of webcam rants and lo-fi homemade dance routines will now be able to watch real celebrities in professionally produced shows on the popular Google Inc.-owned video site.Partnering with CBS Corp., YouTube announced on its blog Friday that it would post full-length episodes of old fan favorites such as "MacGyver" and the original "Beverly Hills 90210," along with newer hits including "Dexter" and "Californication," in a bid to bring more advertisers to its highly trafficked site. YouTube is also in talks to add shows from other networks and feature-length films.
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Pakistan Tribes Raze Taliban Houses after Bombing (Reuters, 10/11/08)
Angry Pakistani tribesmen traded fire with Taliban militants and demolished their houses in a northwestern tribal region after a car suicide attack killed at least 40 people, residents and officials said on Saturday. [...]"Everyone is angry and upset here. The tribesmen attacked houses of the Taliban in Khadizai after the bombing. Two houses have been demolished," Noorzad Orakzai, a resident of the Khadizai area where attack took place, told Reuters by telephone.
"There have been exchanges of fire throughout the night. It's still going on," he added.
A Short Banking History of the United States: Why our system is prone to panics. (JOHN STEELE GORDON, 10/10/08, Wall Street Journal)
We are now in the midst of a major financial panic. This is not a unique occurrence in American history. Indeed, we've had one roughly every 20 years: in 1819, 1836, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1929, 1987 and now 2008. Many of these marked the beginning of an extended period of economic depression.How could the richest and most productive economy the world has ever known have a financial system so prone to periodic and catastrophic break down? One answer is the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson.
There's Something About Sarah (Suzanne Fields, 10/11/08, Real Clear Politics)
Despite everything John McCain and Barack Obama can do, Sarah Palin continues to be the liveliest of the candidates, now starting the clubhouse turn and about to race down the homestretch.There's only one more presidential debate to endure. By this time in a campaign, both presidential candidates are so programmed, their talking points so tested and trite if not necessarily true, that viewers long for a refreshing gaffe. But all we get is a Tuesday-night debate where both men seem terrified of saying something interesting and new. Tom Brokaw tried.
Sarah Palin, on the other hand, is something else. She's clearly relishing the assigned role of the candidate for vice president -- going out to rough up the top of the other ticket, saying the things that a presidential candidate eager to appear presidential thinks and believes but would never say. She's the real deal with the gloves off and the bright red high heels on. Though this exacts a price, she's the proof that feminism, like her or not, has achieved its long-sought goal: Girls can take it just like boys, and they can dish it out, too. This may be remembered as John McCain's greatest gift to the ladies.