O FOR 4 (via Tom Morin)

Freud Lives! (Slavoj Zizek, 5/25/06, London Review of Books)

In recent years, it’s often been said that psychoanalysis is dead. New advances in the brain sciences have finally put it where it belongs, alongside religious confessors and dream-readers in the lumber-room of pre-scientific obscurantist searches for hidden meaning. As Todd Dufresne put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals – with the exception of Marx, some would add. The Black Book of Communism was followed last year by the Black Book of Psychoanalysis, which listed all the theoretical mistakes and instances of clinical fraud perpetrated by Freud and his followers. In this way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now there for all to see.

A century ago, Freud included psychoanalysis as one of what he described as the three ‘narcissistic illnesses’. First, Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth moves around the Sun, thereby depriving humans of their central place in the universe. Then Darwin demonstrated that we are the product of evolution, thereby depriving us of our privileged place among living beings. Finally, by making clear the predominant role of the unconscious in psychic processes, Freud showed that the ego is not master even in its own house. Today, scientific breakthroughs seem to bring further humiliation: the mind is merely a machine for data-processing, our sense of freedom and autonomy merely a ‘user’s illusion’. In comparison, the conclusions of psychoanalysis seem rather conservative.

MORE:
-REVIEW: of Mind: A Brief Introduction by John R. Searle (Maria Antonietta Perna, Ph.D. on May 23rd 2006, Metapsychology Online)

Granted, as an introductory text Mind: A Brief Introduction might be said to be particularly brief. However, if Searle keeps his introduction brief, this is because the present book does much more than introducing the reader to a fascinating philosophical subject in clear and accessible language. What Searle aims to do is far more ambitious: along the lines of his previous publications on the philosophy of mind, especially those dealing with consciousness and language, he argues for a radical break with the entire post-Cartesian tradition and its conceptual framework in which the entire discipline is steeped. In fact, it is the main thesis of the book as stated in the Preface that

the philosophy of mind is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects, in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false (p.1).

By 'theories' Searle means all kinds of dualist positions as well as the various existing materialist approaches.

A BIT OF THE ROUGH:

Tiger Woods: Bill Clinton Cheats at Golf, Too (News Max, 6/01/06)
In Arkansas for a children's golf clinic, Tiger Woods was asked about playing golf with former President Bill Clinton.

"Interesting math," Woods said, drawing a laugh before telling a story about a round the two played in February before the opening of the Tiger Woods Learning Center in Anaheim, Calif.

Woods described a hole on the back nine.
The story's pretty funny, but if the guy didn't grope you in the locker room you got off easier than most....

YOUNG FLOOD:

Greene's story, Day 4: 'There is war,' and Rhode Island responds (GERALD M. CARBONE, May 31, 2006, Providence Journal)

These are the orders that started the American Revolution:

"You will march with the Corps of grenadiers and Light Infantry put under your Command with the utmost expedition and secrecy to Concord, where you will seize and destroy all the Artillery, Ammunition, provisions, Tents & all other military stores you can find."

Thomas Gage, the general commanding the British garrison at Boston wrote those orders; Francis Smith, a fat lieutenant colonel, received them at 8 p.m. on April 18, 1775.

For secrecy, Smith was to march his soldiers in small groups to the Boston Common, where they would rendezvous at 10 p.m. From the Common the 700 men would row across the bay to Lechmere's Point on Charlestown, to begin their long march to Concord, where British spies had determined that the rebels had a large store of gunpowder, artillery and shot.

The secret of Smith's nighttime mission was poorly kept. As the troops stepped into their transport boats under cover of darkness, the city's apothecary, Dr. Joseph Warren, dispatched Patrick Dawes and the silversmith Paul Revere to carry the alarm to Concord.

A friend of Revere's bravely carried two lanterns up the narrow stairwell in the steeple of the North Church. Here he hung the lighted lanterns as a signal that the British were coming via the bay to Charlestown. The British in Boston weren't stupid; they knew that lanterns burning in the belfry were some sort of a signal. They hustled over there to catch the messenger, but he had already doused his lanterns and run.

Dawes spurred his mount along Boston Neck, through Roxbury and Brookline; two men silently rowed Revere past the British warship Somerset to the Charlestown shore.

Revere wrote: "It was then young flood, the ship was winding, and the moon was rising."

In Charlestown Revere borrowed Deacon John Larkin's horse, a mount the deacon would never see again. The horse thundered across a bridge spanning the Mystic River to Medford.

"The regulars are out!" Revere called into the moonlit night. "The regulars are out!" [...]

On the way to Concord lay the town of Lexington, a sleepy crossroads of 750 people. Warned by Revere and Dawes before their capture by British troops, a band of 70 minutemen awaited the arrival of Smith's soldiers.

Leading the minutemen was Capt. John Parker, at 45 a veteran of the French and Indian War. Only 38 of Parker's men brought arms and ammunition with them; these he formed in a line across the Lexington Green.

At dawn the British troops came in view from the south. John Pitcairn, 53, a captain in the Royal Marines led the advance guard as the British swept on toward Lexington.

Pitcairn ordered his men to form the battle line; his troops smartly moved into formation, pointing their muskets and yelling "Huzzah! Huzzah!"

Pitcairn spurred his mount toward the small line of rebels; he drew up before them with his troops bristling at his back. "Lay down your arms, you damned rebels, and disperse!"

There was no way 38 farmers could hold off a battle line of the British Army, Parker knew that. He ordered his minutemen to leave the green. They began to break up, but they refused Pitcairn's demands to drop their muskets. As the rebels left the field, somebody's gun flared. No one will ever know for certain who fired this, "the shot heard 'round the world." What is certain is that it touched off a storm of fire from the British lines. And when the shooting stopped, eight minutemen lay dead on the blood-spattered green.

The British rolled on for Concord, six miles away, stopping to fire their traditional victory volley. Their only casualties had been a wounded man and Pitcairn's bloodied horse.

On the return march from Concord to Boston, the British marched for eight hours through a gauntlet of armed and angry minutemen. Nearly 4,000 men fired at them during the march; the muskets of that time were wildly inaccurate, so the farmers and merchants of Massachusetts just kept firing and firing 1-ounce balls of lead. They shot about 80,000 rounds in all, an average of 3 blasts every second.

The British troops that made it as far as Concord had to march 16 miles back in wet boots, carrying 60 pounds of gear, with no sleep, while the trees, walls and houses around them exploded.

"We were fired at from all quarters, but particularly from the houses on the roadside, and the Adjacent Stone walls," wrote British Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. "Several of the Troops were killed and wounded in this way, and the Soldiers were so enraged at suffering from an unseen Enemey, that they forced open many of the houses from which the fire proceeded, and put to death all those found in them. . . .

"Our men had very few opportunities of getting good shots at the Rebels, as they hardly ever fired but under cover of a Stone wall, from behind a tree, or out of a house; and the moment they had fired they lay down out of sight until they had loaded again, or the Column had passed. In the road indeed in our rear, they were most numerous, and came on pretty close, frequently calling out, "King Hancock forever."

By day's end, Mackenzie tallied 168 British soldiers wounded, and 68 dead.

STOP ME BEFORE I PROVIDE GOVERNMENTAL SERVICES AGAIN

City To Immigrants: Hospitals Won't Ask Status (CBS/AP, 5/301/06)

The city is distributing a letter meant to reassure immigrants that no one will question their legal status when they seek care at the city's public hospitals, health officials said.

The letter, in 11 languages, promises that public hospital employees will "keep confidential all information regarding your immigration status." If workers reveal the information, they could lose their jobs, Health and Hospitals Corporation president Alan Aviles writes in the note.

The letter's release follows reports from advocates that many undocumented immigrants are afraid of going to hospitals.

TEMPORARY HAWKS?:

An Apocalyptic Religious Zealot Takes on the World: Iran's mullah-run theocracy is on a seemingly unstoppable course to becoming a nuclear power. The country's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a pious zealot with a penchant for visions, is doing his best to provoke the West. Faced with a choice between acceptance and intervention, America and Europe have opted for diplomacy -- for now, that is. (DIETER BEDNARZ, RALF BESTE, GEORG MASCOLO, STEFAN SIMONS, GERHARD SPÖRL, BERNHARD ZAND, 5/30/06, Der Spiegel)

Conditions in Iran are already nightmarish, a blend of the sermons of hate and efforts to develop the Bomb, a weapon this state, all denials to the contrary, clearly seeks to possess. Iran poses a far greater threat than nuclear powers Pakistan or India because the mullah-dominated state brings together a far-reaching Islamist ideology and an image of the enemy -- that of the Great Satan, the United States, and a smaller Satan, Israel -- all the while promoting a calculated anti-Semitism aimed at building Islamic solidarity in the Arab world.

Iran is also far more dangerous than Iraq or North Korea. The theocracy stands a good chance of successfully building weapons of mass destruction. The kind of weapons that, in a figment of Western imagination, Saddam Hussein had supposedly come close to obtaining.

THE REFORMATION HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN:

The Ireland of the East: Slovakia is an investor's paradise and a model of economic growth promoted by neoliberal measures. But dissatisfaction is growing among the population and the next elections promise historic changes. (Der Spiegel, 5/31/06)

Only ten years ago, the capital city was as gray as socialism itself. Now boutiques, pizzerias, sushi parlors and cocktail bars crowd the renovated city center. There is full employment here. The country may have come to capitalism late, but it has become a model country in record time -- an Ireland of the East.

Experts are predicting six percent economic growth for this year; unemployment has fallen from 18 to 11 percent during the past three years. Foreign corporations, especially those in the automobile industry, are waiting in line to invest. Kia, Volkswagen and Peugeot Citroen are all profiting from low wages and taxes and rejoicing over investment assistance. People are already talking of a "Detroit of Europe."

MORE:
The blessed calling of business: The greatest threat to privatization, tax cutting, deregulation and other unfinished economic reforms is no longer from the left, but from the right. (Stefan A. Bielski , 5/29/06, Warsaw Business Journal)

"The free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs."

"Overseeing and directing the exercise of human rights in the economic sector ... belongs not to the state but to individuals and to the various groups ... which make up society."

Are these the words of a classical economist or an editorial in The Economist? Or perhaps a chamber of commerce or free-market politico?

Though written by a Pole and a good Catholic, they seem to be ideas alien to Poland's current government, which is conservative, Catholic and distrustful of the market. In today's world, this puts Poland in quite a rare spot: The greatest threat to privatization, tax cutting, deregulation and other unfinished economic reforms is no longer from the left, but from the right.

"The state could not directly ensure the right to work for all its citizens unless it controlled every aspect of economic life and restricted the free initiative of individuals."

In 2006, this criticism could be directed at the two populist parties, one far-left and one far-right, that have joined the government. However, like all quotations in this essay, it was written 15 years ago this month in the aftermath of Communism's fall by Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical Centesimus Annus. [...]

Alas, in Poland, history is heavy, and her burliest neighbors throwing their weight around has made the deepest impression. But Poland's past domination - or betrayal - by foreign powers need not lead to a fear of foreign ideas and capital. Centuries of freedom-friendly traditions, such as limited government and cosmopolitanism, cultivated Poland's Golden Age. Even in an era when across Europe both Church and state were more autocratic, Poland limited their respective powers by never having a divine-right monarch and instituting extreme checks on state power such as the Liberum veto and Nihil novi. Toleration of other nationalities and creeds brought not only their accompanying goods and ideas, but helped develop an entrepreneurial, high-trust culture.

These will serve Poland well in its return to Europe. Unfortunately, some wrongly believe this entails forsaking spiritual wealth for material riches. We can help change this debate, in part, by showing religious leaders and their flocks that free-market economics is not only compatible with, but complements their moral principles. Moreover, it's an essential tool in their social goals, such as eliminating poverty, as the "free exercise of economic activity ... will lead to abundant opportunities for employment and sources of wealth."

OFF ON A TANGENT:

What You Don't Know About the Immigration Bill (Robert J. Samuelson, May 31, 2006, Washington Post)

The Senate passed legislation last week that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) hailed as "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history." You might think that the first question anyone would ask is how much it would actually increase or decrease legal immigration. But no. After the Senate approved the bill by 62 to 36, you could not find the answer in the news columns of The Post, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Yet the estimates do exist and are fairly startling. By rough projections, the Senate bill would double the legal immigration that would occur during the next two decades from about 20 million (under present law) to about 40 million.

One job of journalism is to inform the public about what our political leaders are doing. In this case, we failed.

MORE:
Rousing the Zealots: Neo-Nazis, white supremacists and militiamen are revivified by the furor over illegal immigration (JEFFREY RESSNER, 5/29/06, TIME)

Pugnacious anthems and racist diatribes have never been in short supply at Nordic Fest, an annual white-power Woodstock held over the Memorial Day break near the former mining town of Dawson Springs, Ky. And this past weekend was no exception. On the agenda were a Triumph of the Will--themed running event and a cross "lighting" sponsored by the Imperial Klans of America. But something new did arise at Nordic Fest this year: bellicose talk and plans of action against illegal immigrants. Among the scheduled guest speakers was Hal Turner, a New Jersey Internet radio talk-show host who recently instructed his audience to "clean your guns, have plenty of ammunition ... and then do what has to be done" to undocumented workers.

With immigration perhaps America's most volatile issue, a troubling backlash has erupted among its most fervent foes. There are, of course, the Minutemen, the self-appointed border vigilantes who operate in several states. And now groups of militiamen, white supremacists and neo-Nazis are using resentment over the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. as a potent rallying cry. "The immigration furor has been critical to the growth we've seen" in hate groups, says Mark Potok, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center counts some 800 racist groups operating in the U.S. today, a 5% spurt in the past year and a 33% jump from 2000. "They think they've found an issue with racial overtones and a real resonance with the American public," says Potok, "and they are exploiting it as effectively as they can."

WE MIGHT NEVER HAVE ANOTHER DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT (via Ed Driscoll):

Calif. bill would change electoral college (Ben Lando, May 31, 2006, UPI)

The California Assembly has passed a bill giving all its Electoral College votes to the presidential candidate who wins the most votes nationwide.

The bill is intended to give California more clout in the presidential race, The Los Angeles Times reports. [...]

The California Senate still needs to approve the measure and then the governor needs to sign it for it to take effect.

IT'S THE [BUSH] ECONOMY, STUPID:

A Wall Street rock star is Bush's pick for Treasury job: President Bush nominated 60-year-old Goldman Sachs Chairman Henry 'Hank' Paulson for Treasury secretary, traditionally one of the most powerful jobs in government. (RON HUTCHESON AND KEVIN G. HALL, 5/31/06, Knight Ridder News Service)

Paulson, who goes by ''Hank,'' is arguably the most influential executive on Wall Street, the market's equivalent of a rock star. Associates said he initially rebuffed Bush's overtures, but changed his mind after winning assurances that he'd have an influential role in shaping economic policy. [...]

Although Paulson is expected to win Senate approval with little difficulty, Democrats signaled that they'd use his confirmation to highlight troubling aspects of the nation's outwardly strong economy.

GAPING (via Tom Morin):

Up With Grups* (Adam Sternbergh, 4/03/06, New York)

* Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

This is an obituary for the generation gap.

DARLIN', YOU SEND ME:

Croquet's dark side (BBC Magazine, 5/30/06)

The angry press coverage of John Prescott's game of croquet puts the spotlight on a game struggling with its identity.

Some of the coverage of the deputy prime minister's distinctive choice in recreation has centred on its reputation as a sport for toffs, juxtaposing this with the working class origins of the former ship steward and MP for Hull East.

But as much as the world of croquet is fighting hard to shed its image as a sport of the posh, there is a darker side to the stereotyping of the hoops-and-mallets game, a belief that it is a uniquely "vicious" pastime.

One correspondent to the Daily Telegraph describes it as "one of the most self-serving, unsporting games ever played, requiring ruthless meanness and ungenerosity of spirit towards one's opponents".

Another correspondent, in the Times, recalls an episode where the Archdeacon of Oakham was quite insistent that it was "a vicious game".

For the uninitiated observer there is no escaping the observation that a major part of the game seems to involve bashing other people's balls off the pitch.

OUTLASTING ANOTHER ONE:

A lasting 'Net legacy - Korean anti-Americanism (Jeffrey Robertson, 6/01/06, Asia Times)

As the administration of South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun winds down and assumes its "lame duck" status, the question of its historical legacy is coming to the fore. Of all the issues that Roh has faced as president, two themes have dominated from the very beginning - the Internet and anti-Americanism.

Blogs and Internet chat rooms were the genesis of Roh's campaign. They brought a virtually unknown candidate to the presidency. With little background in national politics, without an prestigious education and from a less than privileged background, Roh could not have been elected without an overwhelming youth vote and its Internet coordination.

Today, Roh-Sa-Mo (the Korean-language abbreviation for the Roh Lover's Society) has become an Internet legend. On polling day, bulletin boards, chat rooms and cell-phone text messages urged eligible voters to vote for Roh, boosting the usually complacent youth vote. Perhaps for the first time in the Internet age, a dedicated band of "netizens" had influenced an election result. But four years on, with the US-South Korea relations under constant pressure, blogs and Internet chat rooms may leave Korea's first "Internet president" with a less favorable legacy.

Parallel to Roh's Internet-based victory was the growth of a more sinister form of Internet-based political consciousness - anti-Americanism.

South Korea's ruling Uri Party is expected to suffer another humiliating loss during Wednesday's local elections, accelerating the decline in President Roh Moo-hyun's political influence and making a party split more likely by year's end.

Party chairman Chung Dong-yong will be held responsible for the loss, weakening his candidacy for the December 2007 presidential election. Chung could even be forced to resign, as his predecessor Moon Hee-sang did after poor Uri Party results in the 2005 by-elections.

The main opposition Grand National Party (GNP) should sweep the majority of the electoral contests, improving the presidential candidacy hopes of both the party chairwoman, Park Geun-hye, and her party rival, Seoul Mayor Lee Myung-bak.

South Korea's main opposition Grand National Party won a crushing victory over the ruling Uri Party in Wednesday's nationwide local elections, widely seen as a weathervane for next year's presidential election, according to exit poll results released by local TV networks.

The state-run Korean Broadcasting System said its exit poll results showed the GNP won 11 out of 16 contests for either mayor or governors, with the Uri Party winning just one and the others going to minor opposition parties. [...]

The elections were held amid deepening public disappointment about President Roh Moo Hyun's handling of state affairs.

511 (via Brad S.):

Baseball's top 10 'records' ... without the home runs (Jayson Stark, 5/30/06, ESPN.com)

When Barry Bonds and his cohorts in the Asterisk Generation can perform radical surgery to remove all the romance from one of the most romantic numbers in any sport -- 714 -- it's time to reevaluate.

It's time to reevaluate the home run and what it means in our culture. And it's time, especially, to reevaluate what we've always looked on as our favorite records in the record book.

If numbers like 714 are going to cease to mean anything, then what do any home run records mean? And if the home run records are no longer the coolest, most celebrated records in baseball, what replaces them?

We've asked this question recently to a bunch of baseball people -- players, ex-players, executives, historians, writers and great statistical minds:

"If we take all home run records out of the argument, what are the 10 best records in baseball?" That's the question.

WHERE THE MINUTEMEN OUGHT TO BE PATROLLING:

Hurdle for U.S. in Getting Data on Passengers (NICOLA CLARK and MATTHEW L. WALD, 5/31/06, NY Times)

The ruling gave both sides four months to approve a new agreement, and American officials expressed optimism that one could be reached. But without an agreement, the United States could take punitive action, in theory even denying landing rights to airlines that withhold the information.

That could cause major disruptions in trans-Atlantic air travel, which accounts for nearly half of all foreign air travel to the United States.

PONY HUNT:

German figures suggest recovery (BBC, 5/31/06)

[S]ales were 1% lower in real terms on a year-by-year basis, in contrast to analysts' expected 0.6% rise. [...]

Unemployment was down to 11% in May, compared to 11.3% in April, according to seasonally-adjusted figures from the Federal Labour Agency.

One of the factors prompting greater job opportunities is the World Cup, both for employment in services and construction, the agency said.

However, while Germany's economy seems set for a recovery, data for France was not as positive.

Consumer confidence for May declined to a net -30, according to INSEE, France's National Statistics Office.

"We have extremely weak confidence and the only thing that could be a catalyst to help this would be a change in government," said Emmanuel Ferry, economist with Exane BNP Paribas.

SHOULDN'T HAVE STRAYED SO FAR FROM THE LAP:

President Bush should heed Tony Blair's advice (EJ Dionne, 5/31/06, Seattle Times)

Imagine where British Prime Minister Tony Blair would be if he hadn't joined with President Bush in prosecuting the Iraq war. [...]

You wish, at least, that the prime minister could have edited Bush's rhetoric. More important, you wish Blair would have pushed Bush much harder to approach the rest of the world in a way that would have left us with a few more friends and allies.

A MAJORITY COMPOSED OF RENEGADES

Gore: Bush is 'renegade rightwing extremist' (Oliver Burkeman and Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, May 31st, 2006)

Al Gore has made his sharpest attack yet on the George Bush presidency, describing the current US administration as "a renegade band of rightwing extremists".

In an interview with the Guardian today, the former vice-president calls himself a "recovering politician", but launches into the political fray more explicitly than he has previously done during his high-profile campaigning on the threat of global warming.

Denying that his politics have shifted to the left since he lost the court battle for the 2000 election, Mr Gore says: "If you have a renegade band of rightwing extremists who get hold of power, the whole thing goes to the right."

Actually, that sums it up rather nicely.

JUST SO

Top scientist gives up on creationists (James Randerson, The Guardian, May 30th, 2006)

A leading British scientist said yesterday that he had given up trying to persuade creationists that Darwin's theory is correct after repeatedly being misrepresented and, he said, branded a liar.

Speaking at the Guardian Hay festival at Hay-on-Wye, the evolutionary biologist Steve Jones spoke of his frustrations when trying to debate with religious opponents.

"I don't engage with creationists directly," he said, saying that, when he had, they had frequently quoted him out of context or accused him of lying. "If somebody has decided to believe something - whatever the evidence - then there is nothing you can do about it."

We know the feeling.

I HATE, THEREFORE I AM

Unmarried couples to get new rights(Clare Dyer, The Guardian, May 30th, 2006)

Unmarried couples will have the right to make the same financial claims after a break-up as those who have gone through a marriage or civil partnership ceremony, under proposals to be unveiled today.

These could include rights to claim maintenance, lump sums, and a share of property and pensions. Gay couples who have not gone through a civil partnership ceremony would enjoy the same rights as unmarried heterosexual couples.

The recommendations from the government's law reform body, the Law Commission, are at the consultation stage, but have been drawn up at the request of the government, which has been promised a draft bill by summer 2007. They are likely to be criticised for undermining the unique status of marriage, and encouraging more couples to opt out.

The nihilist, anti-family foundation of these ideas is demonstrated by the fact that none of their proponents can answer why the state should have any interest in these relationships at all.

FORCING THE CONTRADICTIONS:

From Israeli jails, Hamas activists press middle way (Joshua Mitnick, 5/31/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

A two-month-old survey taken by Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki on the eve of the inauguration of the Hamas government found that two-thirds of Palestinians support mutual recognition with Israel and a two-state solution. Some 75 percent wanted Hamas to negotiate with Israel.

"This is their Achilles' heel," says Shmuel Bar, a Middle East export at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center. "Hamas realizes that they weren't elected for their ideology, and most likely such a referendum would pass."

WHO KNEW SHE WAS EVEN JEWISH?:

Jolie, Pitt child named with Hebrew word for 'Messiah' (Associated Press, May. 30, 2006)

Nothing was normal about the birth of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's child, so naturally, neither was their baby's name.

The child - whose pending arrival created a frenzy of hyperbole making it for some the most awaited baby since Jesus - was named Shiloh, which fittingly means "Messiah" or "Peaceful One."

SPLANGE WORTHY:

New pitch is born out of compromise (MARC TOPKIN, May 30, 2006, St. Petersburg Times)

When Doug Waechter was warming up to pitch in Boston on Thursday, he didn't have a good feel for the split-finger fastball he had debuted in his previous start.

He fidgeted with his grip until it felt comfortable and ended up somewhere between how he holds the ball for a splitter and how he holds it for a changeup, with his index finger on the side of the ball and his middle finger on a seam.

From that, the "splange" was born.

GETTING THE HANG OF THAT ANGLOSPHERE DEAL:

Breaking faith with the cult of Kyoto: Environmentalists embraced Kyoto with religious fevour. Now it's time to start looking for a real solution (STEVE MAICH, Maclean's)

[W]hen Conservative Environment Minister Rona Ambrose walked into UN climate change meetings a couple of weeks ago and admitted Canada has no hope in Hades of meeting its Kyoto commitments, most Canadians were aghast. A Macleans.ca poll found more than 60 per cent of respondents considered the minister's position "a cop-out."

The reaction of activists and pundits was far more severe. "Our international credibility is skydiving," said Greenpeace's Steven Guilbeault. Liberal Leader Bill Graham suggested the Conservatives set out to "destroy the system from within." A parade of op-ed writers begged the Tories to reconsider. And the Toronto Star's Richard Gwyn perfectly channelled the smug self-regard of Canada's chattering classes, concluding that Ambrose had embarrassed herself and the country.

Pretty harsh, but whenever a question of public policy is elevated to the level of religious belief, passions are bound to run high. Over the past few years, the protocol's defenders have insisted that it represents the only viable plan to stop the scourge of global warming. And once you accept the notion that the survival of the planet hinges on the success of this initiative, no counter-argument -- economic, political or otherwise -- can hold any sway. Just as archaeological evidence wields no power over the faith of creationists, the holes in Kyoto's framework do nothing to loosen its emotional hold over its believers. To them, the lines are clear: you are either with Kyoto or against the planet.

But when Rona Ambrose came clean to the UN, all she really did was shine a cold hard light on all the happy myths that have kept the pact alive for almost a decade, despite showing virtually no progress toward its goal. [...]

Facing the facts, Ambrose has joined world leaders including Australia's John Howard, and yes, George W. Bush, calling for a third path. One promising option is the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development, which essentially replaces Kyoto's mandatory cuts and unenforceable penalties with a framework based on incentives, shared technology and co-operation.

THE GENIUS OF JOHN ROBERTS:

Justices Set Limits on Public Employees' Speech Rights (DAVID STOUT, 5/30/06, NY Times)

The Supreme Court declared today, in a ruling affecting millions of government employees, that the Constitution does not always protect their free-speech rights for what they say on the job. [...]

"We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.

The court's newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., was in the majority as were Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. [...]

In writing the decision that reversed the Ninth Circuit today, Justice Kennedy noted that the Supreme Court has made it clear in previous rulings "that public employees do not surrender all their First Amendment rights by reason of their employment." On the other hand, he wrote, "When a citizen enters government service, the citizen by necessity must accept certain limitations on his or her freedom."

The controlling factor in this case, Justice Kennedy wrote, was that Mr. Ceballos was acting purely in an official capacity when he complained internally about the search warrant. [....]

Dissenting in three separate opinions were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

SOMETIMES TOO AMAZIN':

The Boys of Spring: They started fast, but are playing dangerous baseball. Can an un-Mets-like optimism and an unusual leader keep them amazin’ through the fall? (Chris Smith, New York)

Hang on tight. The Mets are turning yet another game into a blindfolded ride on the Cyclone. And it’s only the first inning.

In some ways, this is a relief. The Mets have won three of the past four games in ludicrously dramatic style. Friday night, they fell behind the Yankees and Randy Johnson 4-0 in the top of the first, rallied to tie the game in the third inning and then again in the fifth, and finally won it in the bottom of the ninth. Saturday afternoon brought a shocking, vomit-bag loss, with prized $43 million closer Billy Wagner coughing up a 4-0 advantage in the ninth. Sunday night, another early lead for the Yankees, another comeback Mets win on back-to-back homers. Monday was for sleep—luckily, because Tuesday night, the Mets spotted Philadelphia a four-run lead, tied the game on a two-run Jose Reyes homer in the eighth, and then, after nearly five and a half hours, won the marathon in the bottom of the sixteenth on a blast by Carlos Beltran.

Today, all that’s on the line is the lifelong dream of a Cuban émigré and the future of the Mets’ starting rotation. Alay Soler escaped Castro on a harrowing boat ride, then spent nearly two years trapped in bureaucratic visa hell. In the past six weeks, Soler has been on a vertigo-inducing rise from the minors to Shea Stadium. He’s today’s starting pitcher against the Phillies because the Mets, despite being in first place in the National League East, are desperate for someone competent to follow the geniuses Pedro Martinez and Tom Glavine and give the brilliant-but-overworked bullpen a rest. The team’s success is as fragile as the chronically sore sesamoid bones in Martinez’s right big toe. And now the 26-year-old Soler appears to be on the verge of a heart attack. He’s walked the first three batters he’s faced in the big leagues.

Twenty years ago, Mets pitcher Jesse Orosco was seriously rattled. It was the sixteenth inning of an epic, playoff-series-turning battle with Houston. The Astros were teeing off on Orosco’s fastball and had the winning run on base when the emotional leader of the 1986 Mets, first-baseman Keith Hernandez, went to the mound. “Throw another fastball and I’m knocking you on your ass,” Hernandez said. Orosco threw six straight sliders to strike out Kevin Bass. Soon the Mets were spraying World Series champagne.

Today, Mets first-baseman Carlos Delgado goes to the mound. The Mets traded three prospects to the Florida Marlins for Delgado, eager to install the two-time All-Star power hitter in the middle of their batting order. And Delgado has delivered huge hits. But of equal value has been his leadership.

Now Delgado stands talking with Soler. The stakes aren’t nearly as high as they were in October 1986. But it is small moments like this, scattered throughout a long season, that build the camaraderie that is both overly mythologized and utterly necessary.

AYATOLLOGY:

Khamenei in control and ready to 'haggle' (Gareth Porter, 5/31/06, Asia Times)

Despite Ahmadinejad's clever exploitation of the nuclear issue to strengthen his domestic political position, he is playing second fiddle on this issue.

Ahmadinejad "doesn't have much to do with the nuclear issue", David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, the most experienced US non-governmental expert on Iran's nuclear program, told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty immediately after the Iranian president's election. Albright observed that the policy on Iran's nuclear program is run by the Supreme National Security Council "directly under the Supreme Leader" (Khamenei).

At a briefing in Washington last week, Hadi Semati, a professor at Tehran University who is now a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, said Ahmadinejad "is third in command" after Khamenei and the Supreme National Security Council. Khamenei and the council, he said, "are not going to let the president decide anything on the nuclear issue".

The Supreme National Security Council includes representatives appointed by the Supreme Leader as well as top officials from the military, foreign affairs, intelligence and other national-security-related agencies, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It determines national-defense and security policies on the basis of general guidelines laid down by the Supreme Leader.

Khamenei has not hesitated to set the record straight when Ahmadinejad has strayed from the foreign-policy line he and the Supreme National Security Council have set.

LONG MARCH...SHORT ATTENTION SPAN:

Al-Qaeda's long march to war (Michael Scheuer, 5/31/06, Asia Times)

Al-Qaeda believes that it and its allies can only defeat the United States in a "long war", one that allows the Islamists to capitalize on their extraordinary patience, as well as on their enemies' lack thereof. Before his death in a firefight with Saudi security forces, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Abu Hajar Abd al-Aziz al-Muqrin, wrote extensively about how al-Qaeda believed the military fight against the US and its allies would unfold. He envisioned a point at which the mujahideen would have to develop semi-conventional forces. He identified this period as the "Decisive Stage".

Muqrin told his insurgent readers that the power of the US precluded any expectation of a quick victory. He wrote that the war would progress slowly through such phases as initial manpower mobilization, political work among the populace to establish trust and support, the accumulation of weaponry and other supplies, the establishment of bases around the country and especially in the mountains, the initiation of attacks on individuals and then a gradual intensification of the latter until a countrywide insurgency was under way.

Each of these steps was essential and none could be skipped, Muqrin maintained; the steps would prolong the war, thereby allowing the mujahideen to grow in numbers, experience and combat power. "We should warn against rushing from one stage to the next," he wrote.

THE MUSLIMS CAN'T TAKE OVER FAST ENOUGH:

Pedophiles to launch political party (Reuters, 5/30/06)

Dutch pedophiles are launching a political party to push for a cut in the legal age for sexual relations to 12 from 16 and the legalization of child pornography and sex with animals, sparking widespread outrage.

The Charity, Freedom and Diversity (NVD) party said on its Web site it would be officially registered Wednesday, proclaiming: "We are going to shake The Hague awake!"

HUGO ALONE:

Chavez Calls for Cut In Oil Production (Natalie Obiko Pearson, 5/30/06, Associated Press)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is pushing for an cut in oil production as he hosts an OPEC meeting this week, but he appears to be a lone voice as other members of the cartel will probably want to keep output unchanged to temper soaring prices.

RUBINESQUE:

Bush taps Paulson for Treasury Secretary (TERENCE HUNT, 5/30/06, AP)

Treasury Secretary John Snow resigned Tuesday and President Bush nominated Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Henry M. Paulson Jr. as his replacement — another chapter in the shake-up to revive Bush's troubled presidency. [...]

Robert Rubin, one of Paulson's predecessors, served as Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and Jon Corzine, another Goldman Sachs chairman, served as a U.S. senator from New Jersey and is now governor of that state.

The Senate Finance Committee is expected to act swiftly on the nomination. A spokeswoman for the panel said it was possible a hearing could be conducted within the next few weeks, depending on how quickly the necessary paperwork for the nomination is supplied to the panel.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., a member of the Senate Finance Committee, gave Paulson his backing after talking to him Tuesday.

"His experience, intelligence and deep understanding of national and global economic issues make him the best pick America could have hoped for," Schumer said.

AFTER THE FOX (via Tom Morin):

Is the tide finally turning in Mexico? (GEORGIE ANNE GEYER, May 30, 2006, San Diego Union-Tribune)

[M]exico is so corrupt, so oligopolistic, so rotting inside with the privilege of the rich that it has to send its poor and its potential political activists to another country. And on top of that, it tries to blame the United States for its own failures.

When I was in Mexico last fall, after dozens of visits over the years, people on every political and social level confirmed these accusations, complaining to me of Fox's failures. Forty families still own 60 percent of Mexico. There are no voluntary organizations, no civic involvement, no family foundations – and thus, no accountability, allowing corruption to flourish. Mexico gains $28 billion from oil revenue and $20 billion from immigrant remittances. There is virtually no industrialization, no small business, no real chance at individual entrepreneurship. Under Fox, it has created only one-tenth of the 1 million jobs needed.

Ah, but there are new voices of change, of reason, of self-awareness in Mexico, in place of the hoary anti-gringo rants: the beginnings of a transformation of the debate.

The same week of the Fox visit, for instance, The New York Times ran a stunning article headlined “Some in Mexico See Border Wall as Opportunity.” It quotes men such as Jorge Santibanez, president of the College of the Northern Border, saying: “For too long, Mexico has boasted about immigrants leaving, calling them national heroes, instead of describing them as actors in a national tragedy; and it has boasted about the growth in remittances as an indicator of success, when it is really an indicator of failure.”

Other prominent Mexicans were quoted as saying, for instance, the formerly unthinkable: that a wall would be the “best thing that could happen for Mexico”; the “porous border” allowed “elected officials to avoid creating jobs.” And former Foreign Minister Jorge G. Castañeda, who always took a tough line toward the United States, writes in the Mexican newspaper Reforma that Mexico needed “a series of incentives” to keep Mexicans from migrating, including welfare benefits to mothers whose husbands remained in Mexico, scholarships, and the loss of land rights for people who were absent too long from their property.

This is European social democracy, this is American New Deal, this is real development talk, in place of the tiresome historical Mexican attitude that everything is the gringos' fault and they should pay for it. This is a real revolution of the mind! It also may indicate that, while President Fox failed in carrying through such basic modern reforms, he did lay the basis for them.

Two important points here. The fact that the free enterprise candidate for July's presidential election, Felipe Calderon of the National Action Party (PAN), is suddenly and unexpectedly surging ahead on his slogan of “My job will be to make sure you have a job” may show that the Mexican people are fed up. In addition, the fact that only 50,000 of the 400,000 Mexicans in the United States who were available to vote in the July Mexican elections have bothered to register can only indicate a generalized disgust with Mexican corruption and hopelessness, and perhaps even a turn toward American ways.

ONLY PIECEMEAL:

The Pope at Auschwitz: “They wanted to kill God” (Sandro Magister, 5/30/06, Chiesa)

By annihilating that people – Benedict XVI asserted – the architects of the slaughter “wanted to kill God.” The God of Abraham, and of Jesus Christ. The God of the Jews and of the Christians, but also of all humanity, for whose sake “on Sinai he laid down principles to serve as a guide, principles that are eternally valid.” By destroying Israel, the authors of this extermination “ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.”

This is the key passage of the address given by Benedict XVI on Sunday, May 28, at Auschwitz and Birkenau.

To speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible - and it is particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a Pope from Germany. In a place like this, words fail; in the end, there can only be a dread silence - a silence which is itself a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this? In silence, then, we bow our heads before the endless line of those who suffered and were put to death here; yet our silence becomes in turn a plea for forgiveness and reconciliation, a plea to the living God never to let this happen again.

Twenty-seven years ago, on 7 June 1979, Pope John Paul II stood in this place. He said: “I come here today as a pilgrim. As you know, I have been here many times. So many times! And many times I have gone down to Maximilian Kolbe’s death cell, paused before the execution wall, and walked amid the ruins of the Birkenau ovens. It was impossible for me not to come here as Pope.” Pope John Paul came here as a son of that people which, along with the Jewish people, suffered most in this place and, in general, throughout the war. “Six million Poles lost their lives during the Second World War: a fifth of the nation”, he reminded us. Here too he solemnly called for respect for human rights and the rights of nations, as his predecessors John XXIII and Paul VI had done before him, and added: “The one who speaks these words is ... the son of a nation which in its history has suffered greatly from others. He says this, not to accuse, but to remember. He speaks in the name of all those nations whose rights are being violated and disregarded ...”.

Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here. I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people - a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation’s honour, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power. Yes, I could not fail to come here. On 7 June 1979 I came as the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, along with many other Bishops who accompanied the Pope, listened to his words and joined in his prayer. In 1980 I came back to this dreadful place with a delegation of German Bishops, appalled by its evil, yet grateful for the fact that above its dark clouds the star of reconciliation had emerged. This is the same reason why I have come here today: to implore the grace of reconciliation - first of all from God, who alone can open and purify our hearts, from the men and women who suffered here, and finally the grace of reconciliation for all those who, at this hour of our history, are suffering in new ways from the power of hatred and the violence which hatred spawns.

How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes: “You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness ... because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!” (Ps 44:19, 22-26). This cry of anguish, which Israel raised to God in its suffering, at moments of deep distress, is also the cry for help raised by all those who in every age - yesterday, today and tomorrow - suffer for the love of God, for the love of truth and goodness. How many they are, even in our own day!

We cannot peer into God’s mysterious plan - we see only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. Then we would not be defending man, but only contributing to his downfall. No - when all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature! And our cry to God must also be a cry that pierces our very heart, a cry that awakens within us God’s hidden presence - so that his power, the power he has planted in our hearts, will not be buried or choked within us by the mire of selfishness, pusillanimity, indifference or opportunism. Let us cry out to God, with all our hearts, at the present hour, when new misfortunes befall us, when all the forces of darkness seem to issue anew from human hearts: whether it is the abuse of God’s name as a means of justifying senseless violence against innocent persons, or the cynicism which refuses to acknowledge God and ridicules faith in him. Let us cry out to God, that he may draw men and women to conversion and help them to see that violence does not bring peace, but only generates more violence - a morass of devastation in which everyone is ultimately the loser. The God in whom we believe is a God of reason - a reason, to be sure, which is not a kind of cold mathematics of the universe, but is one with love and with goodness. We make our prayer to God and we appeal to humanity, that this reason, the logic of love and the recognition of the power of reconciliation and peace, may prevail over the threats arising from irrationalism or from a spurious and godless reason.

The place where we are standing is a place of memory, it is the place of the Shoah. The past is never simply the past. It always has something to say to us; it tells us the paths to take and the paths not to take. Like John Paul II, I have walked alongside the inscriptions in various languages erected in memory of those who died here: inscriptions in Belarusian, Czech, German, French, Greek, Hebrew, Croatian, Italian, Yiddish, Hungarian, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Romani, Romanian, Slovak, Serbian, Ukrainian, Judaeo-Spanish and English. All these inscriptions speak of human grief, they give us a glimpse of the cynicism of that regime which treated men and women as material objects, and failed to see them as persons embodying the image of God. Some inscriptions are pointed reminders. There is one in Hebrew. The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm: “We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter” were fulfilled in a terrifying way. Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone - to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, by the Shoah, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful.

Then there is the inscription in Polish. First and foremost they wanted to eliminate the cultural elite, thus erasing the Polish people as an autonomous historical subject and reducing it, to the extent that it continued to exist, to slavery. Another inscription offering a pointed reminder is the one written in the language of the Sinti and Roma people. Here too, the plan was to wipe out a whole people which lives by migrating among other peoples. They were seen as part of the refuse of world history, in an ideology which valued only the empirically useful; everything else, according to this view, was to be written off as lebensunwertes Leben - life unworthy of being lived. There is also the inscription in Russian, which commemorates the tremendous loss of life endured by the Russian soldiers who combated the Nazi reign of terror; but this inscription also reminds us that their mission had a tragic twofold effect: they set the peoples free from one dictatorship, but the same peoples were thereby subjected to a new one, that of Stalin and the Communist system.

The other inscriptions, written in Europe’s many languages, also speak to us of the sufferings of men and women from the whole continent. They would stir our hearts profoundly if we remembered the victims not merely in general, but rather saw the faces of the individual persons who ended up here in this abyss of terror. I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before the inscription in German. It evokes the face of Edith Stein, Theresia Benedicta a Cruce: a woman, Jewish and German, who disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them. The Germans who had been brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau and met their death here were considered as Abschaum der Nation - the refuse of the nation. Today we gratefully hail them as witnesses to the truth and goodness which even among our people were not eclipsed. We are grateful to them, because they did not submit to the power of evil, and now they stand before us like lights shining in a dark night. With profound respect and gratitude, then, let us bow our heads before all those who, like the three young men in Babylon facing death in the fiery furnace, could respond: “Only our God can deliver us. But even if he does not, be it known to you, O King, that we will not serve your gods and we will not worship the golden statue that you have set up” (cf. Dan 3:17ff.).

Yes, behind these inscriptions is hidden the fate of countless human beings. They jar our memory, they touch our hearts. They have no desire to instil hatred in us: instead, they show us the terrifying effect of hatred. Their desire is to help our reason to see evil as evil and to reject it; their desire is to enkindle in us the courage to do good and to resist evil. They want to make us feel the sentiments expressed in the words that Sophocles placed on the lips of Antigone, as she contemplated the horror all around her: my nature is not to join in hate but to join in love.

By God’s grace, together with the purification of memory demanded by this place of horror, a number of initiatives have sprung up with the aim of imposing a limit upon evil and confirming goodness. Just now I was able to bless the Centre for Dialogue and Prayer. In the immediate neighbourhood the Carmelite nuns carry on their life of hiddenness, knowing that they are united in a special way to the mystery of Christ’s Cross and reminding us of the faith of Christians, which declares that God himself descended into the hell of suffering and suffers with us. In Oświęcim is the Centre of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, and the International Centre for Education about Auschwitz and the Holocaust. There is also the International House for Meetings of Young people. Near one of the old Prayer Houses is the Jewish Centre. Finally the Academy for Human Rights is presently being established. So there is hope that this place of horror will gradually become a place for constructive thinking, and that remembrance will foster resistance to evil and the triumph of love.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau humanity walked through a “valley of darkness”. And so, here in this place, I would like to end with a prayer of trust - with one of the Psalms of Israel which is also a prayer of Christians: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff - they comfort me ... I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long” (Ps 23:1-4, 6).

LIKE SAFIRE ON CLINTON:

Poise and style, wisdom and wit - yes, Cameron has left me starstruck: The Conservative leader has achieved things I once thought impossible, and sooner or later he will surely be prime minister (Max Hastings, May 30, 2006, The Guardian)

The highlights of Brown's early premiership will be supervision of a more or less ignominious retreat from Iraq, further increases in taxation, pressures on public spending and - if Brown is foolish - a lurch back to "old Labour values". Leave morality out of this. As Blair always understood and the left never does, there are not enough poor people in Britain to elect a government. The majority of "haves" will always care more about what happens to them than about compassion for the less fortunate.

Yet even if circumstances are shining wondrously upon Cameron, that does not diminish the scale of his achievement in the past six months. He has done more than many of us thought possible to make a Conservative government again plausible. He is, of course, playing Blair's 1990s game, by distancing himself from his unpopular old guard. Every time a neanderthal columnist attacks the Tory leader in a rightwing newspaper, I find myself wondering how much the Cameron camp paid for the privilege. "Norman Tebbit compares me to Pol Pot," says Cameron, gleefully, "and that's when things are going well!"

The struggle to force through his priority list of candidates, which includes a phalanx of women and gay people, has dismayed many local Conservative associations. Yet Cameron tells them the unpalatable truth: "If we want to govern this country, we have to reflect its make-up and its concerns. If we go on with the old system we might have, say, 10 more women MPs after the next election - and that's not good enough."

He refuses to commit a Tory government to abolishing inheritance tax, or to cutting taxes at all. He declares that the Tories were wrong to oppose university top-up fees. He acknowledges that devolution is "here to stay", though he wants "English votes to decide English law". When criticised for not attacking the government sufficiently vigorously, he says: "I don't wake up in the morning asking myself: 'What can I do to destroy the Labour party?' They're doing that themselves. I ask myself: 'What can I do to show people what a Conservative government will be like?'"

He refuses to get rough with Blair about Iraq or Afghanistan, saying that the public is thoroughly aware that the Tories supported the government in initiating both. "We are partly responsible for what has happened. I don't think people will respect us if we quibble endlessly." He says without apology that he sees no reason to commit his party to explicit policies until he must, and would not carry conviction with voters if he did.

Beyond thus gaining points for honesty, Cameron is in the happy position of not needing to say or do anything about Iraq and Afghanistan. The executive decisions, the further grief that lies ahead, are the exclusive responsibility of this government. He can leave the electorate to draw its own conclusions. Such an attitude represents wisdom, not wetness.

If I sound somewhat starstruck, so I am.

THE JOB OUGHT TO HAVE SOME PERKS:

Reid Accepted Free Boxing Tickets While a Related Bill Was Pending (John Solomon, May 30, 2006, Associated Press)

Senate Democratic Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) accepted free ringside tickets from the Nevada Athletic Commission to three professional boxing matches while that state agency was trying to influence him on federal regulation of boxing.

Reid took the free seats for Las Vegas fights between 2003 and 2005 as he was pressing legislation to increase government oversight of the sport, including the creation of a federal boxing commission that Nevada's agency feared might usurp its authority.

He defended the gifts, saying that they would never influence his position on the bill...

THE NEW DEAL COULDN'T LAST FOREVER:

Tyranny of the Christian Right (Michelle Goldberg, 5/30/06, AlterNet)

Whenever I talk about the growing power of the evangelical right with friends, they always ask the same question: What can we do? Usually I reply with a joke: Keep a bag packed and your passport current.

I don't really mean it, but my anxiety is genuine. It's one thing to have a government that shows contempt for civil liberties; America has survived such men before. It's quite another to have a mass movement -- the largest and most powerful mass movement in the nation -- rise up in opposition to the rights of its fellow citizens. The Constitution protects minorities, but that protection is not absolute; with a sufficiently sympathetic or apathetic majority, a tightly organized faction can get around it.

The mass movement I've described aims to supplant Enlightenment rationalism with what it calls the "Christian worldview." The phrase is based on the conviction that true Christianity must govern every aspect of public and private life, and that all -- government, science, history and culture -- must be understood according to the dictates of scripture. There are biblically correct positions on every issue, from gay marriage to income tax rates, and only those with the right worldview can discern them. This is Christianity as a total ideology -- I call it Christian nationalism. It's an ideology adhered to by millions of Americans, some of whom are very powerful. It's what drives a great many of the fights over religion, science, sex and pluralism now dividing communities all over the country. [...]

In the coming years, we will probably see the curtailment of the civil rights that gay people, women and religious minorities have won in the last few decades. With two Bush appointees on the Supreme Court, abortion rights will be narrowed; if the president gets a third, it could mean the end of Roe v. Wade. Expect increasing drives to ban gay people from being adoptive or foster parents, as well as attempts to fire gay schoolteachers. Evangelical leaders are encouraging their flocks to be alert to signs of homosexuality in their kids, which will lead to a growing number of gay teenagers forced into "reparative therapy" designed to turn them straight. (Focus on the Family urges parents to consider seeking help for boys as young as five if they show a "tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.")

Christian nationalist symbolism and ideology will increasingly pervade public life. In addition to the war on evolution, there will be campaigns to teach Christian nationalist history in public schools. An elective course developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, a right-wing evangelical group, is already being offered by more than 300 school districts in 36 states. The influence of Christian nationalism in public schools, colleges, courts, social services and doctors' offices will deform American life, rendering it ever more pinched, mean, and divided.

There's still a long way, though, between this damaged version of democracy and real theocracy.

LOUD, BUT MARGINAL:

Nation splits 4 ways on illegals (Susan Page, 5/29/06, USA TODAY)

Americans hold strong and conflicting views about immigration that underscore the difficulties Congress will face in reaching a final legislative deal on the issue, an analysis of USA TODAY polling data shows.

The public splits into separate camps over whether illegal immigrants should be able to work toward citizenship, whether they help or hurt the economy — even whether immigration is an urgent problem that must be addressed.

Those disagreements are reflected in the Senate immigration bill that passed Thursday and the House bill, passed in December, which takes a tougher approach. A conference committee will try to resolve conflicts between the two measures on the issue, President Bush's top domestic priority before Congress.

A USA TODAY breakdown of public opinion, based on Gallup polls taken in April and May, finds Americans falling into four clusters that are roughly equal in size but vary dramatically in point of view. The groups can be characterized as "hard-liners," "unconcerned," "ambivalent" and "welcoming."

25% of Americans, 60% male, 11% from immigrant families, 41% Bush approval rating.

27% of American, 59% female, 21% from immigrant families, 28% Bush approval rating. [...]

54% are Democrats. More than three of four are conservatives or moderates.

23% of Americans, 50% male, 13% from immigrant families, 20% Bush approval rating.

Their outlook:

Not at all concerned about the issue. Generally sympathetic to illegal immigrants. Think their removal would hurt the economy.

27% of Americans, 58% female, 15% from immigrant families, 33% Bush approval rating.

MORE:
New immigration laws won't change laws of nature (Ruben Navarrette Jr., 5/30/06, Seattle Times)

I've been wondering how the father of the legislation felt about all this. So I dialed the sage of Cody, Wyo., former Sen. Alan Simpson.

Simpson isn't just the chief sponsor of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, which morphed into IRCA. He is also a friend and was one of my graduate-school professors.

He's also delightfully quotable, like when he said that this debate is all about "emotion, fear, guilt and racism." Or when he said that a lot of the public concern over immigration starts when you "see people in the backyard who are roasting a pig and making a lot of noise and [you] don't understand what language they're talking." Or when he said to be wary of guest workers because "there's never been a temporary person in the United States, they all want to stay and they do." Or on his opposition to sending the National Guard to the border because "you're going to have a redneck in there every once in a while who is going to cause real pain." [...]

[O]n the big question — whether it was a mistake to grant amnesty to all those people — Simpson offers no apologies.

"I don't have any qualms about 3 million people from 93 countries coming forward," he said. "I like that. And I still see those people out in the street and it pleases me greatly."

So what do we do about the 11 million to 12 million here currently?

"You have to do something to give them a legal status," he said.

"They might have to put up five grand or two grand or 150 bucks but they've got to do something to come into one of the best countries on Earth."

100 MILLION MORE IMMIGRANTS GOTTA LIVE SOMEWHERE... :

Apartment rents expected to rise 5% (Noelle Knox, 5/29/06, USA TODAY)

Apartment rents are expected to increase 5.3% this year — about double last year's increase — the National Association of Realtors says. [...]

There are four driving forces:

•Job growth. U.S. businesses have generated 4 million new jobs in the past two years. New hires typically look for rental property.

•Rising home prices. From 1980 to 2000, the median price of a home was 12 times higher than the annual average rent. By this spring, it was 21 times higher, Nadji said. The median-priced home now costs $223,000, making the American dream a fantasy for more renters, whose competition for apartments then drives up rents. There's little relief in sight in such areas as Phoenix and South Florida, where home prices soared more than 30% in the first quarter of this year over the same quarter last year.

• Condo conversions. When the housing market was at its blazing peak, many investors who owned apartment buildings kicked out tenants and sold the units as condos. One out of three apartment buildings sold last year were converted into condos for sale. That took 191,400 apartments off the market, according to the NAR. In addition, the number of new apartment buildings under construction is down this year.

• Hurricane Katrina. About half the 100,000 displaced families in the New Orleans area haven't returned. Most of them were renters, says Lawrence Yun, an NAR economist, and "that's putting additional pressure on rental units throughout the country."

HAD ENOUGH?:

Harper wins opening round: Here's a list of 10 things he did brilliantly -- or at least correctly (Ted Byfield, 05/28/06)

We may not yet know (as this is written) who won the semifinal round for the Stanley Cup, but we do know who has won the opening round at Ottawa in the contest to govern Canada.

An Ipsos Reid poll confirmed what was becoming evident to anybody who watches politics.

Though they lack a majority, Steve Harper's Tories are running the country.

The poll put them at 43%, highest level of Tory support since the Mulroney ascendancy, and enough to win a majority if the election were held now.

Even in Quebec, the Conservatives are gaining on the Bloc, and the Liberals are far below their traditional standing.

All of which raises the question: How has Harper done it?

Here's one man's assessment (one man's plus one wife's) on 10 things he's done right, several of them brilliant: ....

IT'S A SCOOTER, FELLAS:

Segway Sets Course For Stock Market
Scooter's Catch On With Cops, But Not Consumers (AP, 5/28/06)

Although the electric, self-balancing Segway scooter never quite caught on with commuters the way its backers had predicted five years ago, the gizmo has found a growing market among law-enforcement agencies, with more than 100 departments around the world now signed on as customers and many others testing the device.

The niche market, coupled with a burst of interest from Europeans struggling with gas prices much higher than in the U.S., have breathed new life into the Segway.

And Segway Inc. President and Chief Executive James Norrod, hoping to parlay the growth into a payday for the original investors in the scooter, has made grooming the company for an initial public offering in the next few years a top priority. [...]

[T]he device is still expensive even five years later, retailing for between about $4,000 and $5,700, depending on the model and accessories package.

WHAT'S ON YOUR iPOD?:

Rapper faces jail for song dissing France (Angelique Chrisafis, May 29, 2006, Guardian)

One of France's most popular rappers will appear in court today charged with offending public decency with a song in which he referred to France as a "slut" and vowed to "piss" on Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle. Monsieur R, whose real name is Richard Makela, could face three years in prison or a €75,000 (£51,000) fine after an MP from the ruling UMP party launched legal action against him over his album Politikment Incorrekt.

MORE:
-France: Soundtrack to a Riot: A rap of protest from the ghetto (Marco Werman, March 28, 2006, The World)
-David Brooks, Playa Hater: The New York Times columnist grapples with "gangsta rap." (Jody Rosen, Nov. 10, 2005, Slate)
-France's Homegrown Gangstas (Olivier Guitta, September 28, 2005, Weekly Standard)

VP FIRST:

A Few Years, and Then Another Bush? (ELISABETH BUMILLER, 5/29/06, NY Times)

"I'm not running for president. I'm not running for United States Senate. I'm not going to run." For good measure he added, "Why doesn't everyone believe me on this?"

One reason is that Jeb, who was always considered the political comer compared with his brother the black sheep, was the original family favorite to run for president. But in a turn of events that has become a political parable, George surprised even his mother by upsetting Gov. Ann Richards of Texas in 1994, the same year that Jeb lost by two percentage points to Gov. Lawton Chiles in Florida. Although Jeb came back to beat Buddy McKay easily in 1998, by then his brother was in line for the White House.

People close to the Bushes say there are two major factors, political and personal, driving the governor's thinking.

First, Republicans say that running on the heels of what has shaped up to be a dismal second term for his brother would be difficult, if not impossible. Even if President Bush's approval ratings were better, Republicans say that Jeb Bush, for all his political popularity in Florida, would still have to define himself in the shadow of his brother's White House. [...]

Second, friends of the Bushes say that Jeb does not want the intense focus of a presidential campaign on his wife and daughter, and that his mother, for one, is opposed to a 2008 race. "It's very clear that he knows what he has to do for himself and his family in the immediate future," said Ron Kaufman, a political adviser to the first President Bush.

AT LEAST DURANTY BELIEVED IN WHAT HE WAS DOING:

Castro's American friend: a review of The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times By Anthony DePalma (KEN FRANKEL, 5/27/06, Globe and Mail)

Anthony DePalma's important and well-written book, The Man Who Invented Fidel, recounts the sad tale of the steady rise and meteoric fall of a shy New York City boy who had ambitions of being a scholar of Romance languages, but became a widely recognized New York Times foreign correspondent. Matthews reported from the front lines on many of the major events of the first half of the 20th century. His last assignment was covering the Cuban revolution. [...]

Because he was charismatic, well-spoken and dedicated to deposing a voraciously corrupt and ruthless dictator, Castro was the ideal subject for Matthews's emotional brand of reporting.

The articles caused a splash. Castro and Matthews each got what he wanted. As DePalma notes, Fidel benefited from an instant international image makeover from "a hot headed loser to a noble rogue with broad democratic ideals." Matthews reinforced this image in subsequent editorials and occasional news articles.

WHAT? THEY HAVEN'T HAD ENOUGH?:

Colombia's Uribe wins second term (BBC, 5/29/06)

Correspondents say his tough policies against drugs and militants paid off.

There was no major violence on election day, after huge numbers of security forces were deployed, and Farc rebels pledged not to interfere.

With nearly all ballots counted, Mr Uribe had 62% of the vote - well over the 50% needed to win in the first round.

He pledged to carry on his tough conservative policies.

SOCIALISTS ACTING LIKE STALINISTS? WHO'D'VE DREAMT:

Socialist Party at war as Sheridan says: I'm no drug dealer (HAMISH MACDONELL, 5/29/06, The Scotsman)

THE Scottish Socialist Party descended into open warfare last night when Tommy Sheridan, the former leader, accused a "cabal" of spreading lies to discredit him.
Advert for scotsman.com Rosslyn video podcast

Mr Sheridan sent an open letter to all SSP members claiming that senior figures in the party, including MSPs, had spread malicious rumours about him, including allegations that he was a drug dealer, that he trafficked women from eastern Europe and that he used prostitutes.

The Glasgow MSP warned that the SSP was in danger of becoming a "gender-obsessed discussion group" rather than a "class-based socialist party".

He said the tactics used against him were nothing more than "a political witch-hunt" redolent of the "dark days of Stalinism".

A SMALL village in France has been split by the will left by its late butcher, who bequeathed his house and land to the local council on condition that they were used to help to plan the communist revolution.

Albert Le Roy, a hardline Marxist who died two months ago at the age of 80, amazed his native Goudelin, in Brittany, with a handwritten will discovered in a drawer at his home that said he was leaving his property, valued at €140,000 (£96,000), to the village council “to prepare for communism”.

JUST AN ORDINARY DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE LEMMINGS

Eye of the Storm: Religious fanatic at a Persian bazaar (Amir Taheri, Jerusalem Post, May 27th, 2006)

What could be the logic behind Ahmadinejad's "preemptive diplomacy"? One answer is that the Islamic leader may be inspired by practices in Persian bazaars that are based on the assumption that whatever offer is made in any bargain is suspect because it may be a trick to avoid an even better offer.

Reviewing the events of the past year or so Ahmadinejad cannot but observe that by sticking to his guns he has received better and better offers across the line. The Europeans are offering him what they were not even prepared to consider in negotiations with his predecessor president Muhammad Khatami. Hassan Ruhani, the mullah who handled the negotiations with the EU under Khatami, says that he would have been in seventh heaven had the Europeans offered him what they now offer Ahmadinejad.

As for "security guarantees," Ahmadinejad knows that successive US administrations refused to consider them as advance payment for normalization of relations with the Islamic Republic. Now that so many prominent American personalities are prepared to promote the idea, shouldn't Ahmadinejad wonder whether he could secure even more concessions?

Would he not be tempted to wait-out President George W. Bush in the hope that his successor would offer what Albright, Brzezinski and Lugar are advocating?

The real problem with the Islamic Republic now is that Ahmadinejad, unlike his predecessors, is convinced that, backed by the "Hidden Imam," he can win across the line without making any concessions. The chorus of appeasers in Europe and the US confirm him in his dangerous belief. The message that Ahmadinejad can get more and more by offering less and less has already crushed the realists in Teheran who know that his policy of persistent provocation could lead to war. The more one tries to appease Ahmadinejad the less he will be appeased.

Excuse the self-reference, but last week I asked a leftist journalist and a European diplomat what they thought we should do about Iran. The leftist took all of one sentence to blame the whole thing on Bush and Iraq and assured me Ahmadinejad would never have arisen but for that imperialist madness. The diplomat fixed impatient eyes on me and said: “I suppose you would be all in favour of just bombing!” Neither had a clue what to do and neither seemed the slightest bit troubled by that.

WE LOVE DEMOCRACY; IT’S VOTERS WE CAN’T STAND

Foreign ministers consider plan to salvage EU constitution (Mark John and David Brunnstrom, The Scotsman, May 29th, 2006)

European Union ministers have raised the possibility of changing the name of the bloc's stalled constitution as part of a plan to rescue key parts of the charter by 2009.

French and Dutch voters a year ago rejected the text, aimed at streamlining EU decision-making and giving the bloc its own president and foreign minister, all but killing off a project that needs the backing of all EU states to come into force.

EU foreign ministers meeting in Vienna yesterday acknowledged no move could be undertaken to save the charter before French and Dutch general elections in May 2007. However, there was guarded backing for a German proposal to start steps to salvage the core of the text, possibly under a new name, immediately afterwards.

"Everybody agrees it was a mistake to call it a constitution, so that would be a sensible change," the Finnish foreign minister, Erkki Tuomioja, said, insisting his country nonetheless planned to become the 16th state to ratify the existing text later this year. [...]

Germany, among countries that have already ratified the charter, takes over the EU presidency early next year and its foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, for the first time publicly mentioned the idea of a possible name change.

"We in Germany live with a 'Basic Law', which does not carry the title 'constitution' but has the same legal quality. It's a possible starting point," he told reporters.

Jose Manuel Barroso, the EU Commission president, said: "If someone finds a better name, great. But what is important is to recommit ourselves to this vision of Europe."

We suggest “The European Democratic Republic”.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: TO BE WORTHY OF FREE MEN:

In Defense of History (Donald Kagan, 2005 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities)

I am most grateful for this great honor. When I think of the list of my brilliant predecessors I feel as most Yale freshmen do soon after arriving on campus. They look about them at their remarkably talented fellow-classmen and nervously ask themselves, "did the admissions office admit me by mistake?" At any rate, I come as a defender of the faith, of the humanities as they were understood ever since the invention of the concept many centuries ago. Their goals were nicely stated by the Renaissance humanist Pietro Paolo Vergerio some six centuries ago as the purposes of a liberal education:

We call those studies liberal which are worthy of a free man, those studies by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom, that education which calls forth, trains and develops those highest gifts of body and mind which ennoble men and which are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue only, for to a vulgar temper, gain and pleasure are the one aim of existence, to a lofty nature, moral worth and fame.

The training of the intellect was meant to produce an intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction but it also had practical goals of importance to the individual and the entire community, to make the humanistically trained individual eloquent and wise, to know what is good and to practice virtue, both in private and public life.

Such was the understanding of the ancient Greeks and of the Renaissance humanists but not, I fear of many teachers of the humanities today, who deny the possibility of knowing anything with confidence, of the reality of such concepts as truth and virtue, who seek only gain and pleasure in the modern guise of political power and self-gratification as the ends of education.

Among them it is common to reject any notion of objectivity, of truths arrived at by evidence or reasoning external to whims or prejudices. One famous professor deplored such an idea as foundationalism, defined as, "any attempt to ground inquiry and communication in something more firm and stable than mere belief or unexamined practice." Such views are proposed by literary critics, but their significance is much broader than for the interpretation of literature; they assert that all studies are literature, all, therefore subject to the same indeterminacy as all language. Even death is merely "the displaced name for a linguistic predicament." It should not be surprising, then, to learn that "the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions." What we know of history, after all, we learn from written accounts whose rhetoric "allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding." Including, I presume, any reading or understanding of the quotation I just read.

Such ideas have made their way even into the study of the Classics, but I remain grateful that I have spent much of my life in the exploration of the ancient civilizations, especially that of the Greeks. Because they are at the root of modern civilization, so like us in many ways and so different in others, they offer a perspective removed from the prejudices of time and place that threaten to distort our understanding and yet continually relevant and illuminating to those who will examine them with a mind open to the possibility that useful wisdom can be found in their thought and experience.

Let me offer an example of how a study of the ancient world may help our understanding: the question of the role of the artist in his society. Ever since the beginning of the Romantic movement the dominant belief has been that a true poet or artist, whatever his genre, must be a rebel against the established order of society. Writers of the past who don't fit the model seem always to be merely the victims of their place in corrupt societies or stooges of those who rule them. The modern critic who discovers this is, of course, free from such influences. To me, and to the poor writers of the past, ignorant of their pitiful roles, art, and especially literature, has an autonomous place apart from politics and sociology, even from philosophy. Its power comes from its ability to choose its own subject, style and purpose. Literature that is shaped merely by its author's time and his place within his society, by his prejudices and purposes, is a poor and weak thing that deserve the social scientific analysis and pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo that pass for literary criticism in our day.

But true artists are not bound by such things. They see through and beyond the prejudices and passions of their own time and place and are bound only by the limits that bind all human beings at all times in all places: the reality of nature and of human nature. There is a natural world outside of human will and desire; man's genius can manipulate it to a considerable extent, and the results can be wonderful, but they are inevitably constrained by the enormous power and mystery of nature and by the limits imposed by man's own nature. For confirmation I turn to the tragic poet Sophocles and especially his drama Antigone. There his chorus describes the dilemma:

Wonders are many on earth, and the greatest of these
Is man, who rides the ocean and takes his
way
Through the deeps, through wind-swept valleys of perilous seas
That surge and sway.
He is master of ageless Earth, to his own
will bending
The immortal mother of gods by the sweat of his brow,
As year succeeds to year, with toil unending
Of mule and plough.

He is lord of all things living; birds of the
air,
Beasts of the field, all creatures on sea and land
He takes, cunning to capture and ensnare
With sleight of hand;
Hunting the savage beasts from the
upland rocks,
Teaching the mountain monarch in his lair,
Teaching the wild horse and the roaming ox
His yoke to bear.
The use of language, the wind-swift
motion of brain
He learnt; found out the law of living together
In cities, building him shelter against the rain
And wintry weather.
There is nothing beyond his power. His
subtlety
Meets all chance, all danger conquers.
For every ill has found its remedy,
Save only death.
O wondrous sublety of man, that draws
To good or evil ways! Great honour is given
And power to him who upholds his country's laws
And the justice of heaven.
But he that, too rashly daring, walks in sin
In solitary pride to his life's end,
At door of mine shall never enter in
To call me friend.

Man's ingenuity and power are great, but both his power and life are limited. Such is the basis for the Greeks' tragic view of life. There is no excuse for passivity, for human beings can help shape the environments that shape them and they have the opportunity and the power to defy their societies and their unjust laws, as Antigone does in defying Creon. He has overridden the unwritten divine law by forbidding the burial of her brother, killed in a rebellion against his state. She chooses to bury her brother and accept a horrible death as the penalty, and we marvel and admire her for it.

So far, it is possible to think of Sophocles as the kind of artist favored today--the champion of revolt against man's fate, so often in our time taken to be the revolt against his society and its ways. True artists, like Sophocles, however, are not propagandists but pursuers of deep, usually complicated, understandings of the human condition. Sophocles's play reveals such complexity. There is something to be said for Creon. His decree is meant to preserve the security of the state and society, the minimal requirement of civilization, the thin veneer that protects us from the plunge into barbarism and savagery. Modern artists tend to assume that the established order is always wrong. Ibsen's Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People made it clear that the rule applies even to democratic establishments with his passionate assertion that "the majority is always wrong." But the greatest artists are prepared to search for the truth of the human condition wherever the trail may lead. They do not prejudge the outcome. The establishment or the defiant rebel may be right or, as is typical of real tragedy, each may be right in his own way, even as the two rights clash disastrously. Sophocles's portrayal of the struggle is so even-handed that some ancient scholars thought that Creon's case is the stronger and that the play should be called Creon, not Antigone. That must be wrong, for Antigone alone displays the willful, defiant, single-minded, unrelenting, uncalculating determination to do what she must, regardless of consequences, that is characteristic of Sophoclean heroes. But the point is that Sophocles wrestles with the issues and depicts their champions with such honesty as to do justice to the depth, difficulty and universality of the subject and his characters.

Such an artist does not reflexively take the side of any rebel against the established order. It may be that the establishment is right. More likely, there is a degree of right on both sides, so that the difficult task for human beings is to gain a deeper understanding of what is at stake, both for individual and society, to understand that the needs of individual and society are both competitive and complementary and to contemplate the resulting dilemma with the seriousness and awe it deserves.

In Antigone, Sophocles is concerned, in the first place, with the temptation that power can place in the way of a political leader like Creon to do whatever is necessary, even to violate divine law, in the interest of the state. That would be a comfortable position for a writer in our times. But Sophocles understands the enormous cost when an individual tramples on human law, even in defense of the most fundamental human needs. The resulting clash leaves us neither with a burning determination to overthrow the regime nor to suppress all insurgency. It leaves us emotionally stimulated and then drained, and it leaves our minds alerted and sobered. We have become deeper individuals and wiser citizens.

André Malraux said that "All art is a revolt against man's fate." If he is right, Sophocles's plays, the other tragedies, and much of ancient Greek literature are not art. Malraux seems to me to reflect the Romantic view that is determined to see the artist as an individual apart from, superior to and in rebellion against the established order. Sophocles, like Aeschylus and Thucydides, was very much a part of his society. He fought its battles as a soldier, he understood and appreciated its necessity and excellences even as he probed its dilemmas and weaknesses. His plays, among other things, helped their audiences to understand and come to terms with man's fate. It is man's fate, part of the tragic human condition, to revolt and struggle against its negative elements. But human excellence, virtue, even survival depend on the establishment of a decent social order and its defense even against the most passionate and sincere rebels who would smash it in search of some imagined perfection beyond human grasp.

Because he was part of the society in which he lived and understood its needs and virtues he could compel his fellow citizens honestly to confront its conflicts and its deepest contradictions. They did not suppress, scorn, or, what is worse, ignore him. Instead, they honored him with prizes, election to the highest military and political office and with deep and abiding reverence. Would that all this were possible for modern artists and their audiences in the world today.

To understand this question, which involves both literature and philosophy, one must study history, my own special field of interest, the dearest to my heart. I want to make the case that history, defined not meanly in the current style as an infinitely malleable tool to be used to achieve current political ends, but as the Greek founders of the genre did, can be the most valuable approach to achieve the proper goals of the humanities.

The world we live in is a difficult place to try to make a case for the value of history. Through the centuries its claim has rested chiefly on its search for truths arrived at by painstaking research conducted with the greatest possible objectivity, explaining events by means of human reason. Its various goals, as the late Arnaldo Momigliano put it, were "to provide an example, constitute a warning, point to likely developments in human affairs." The ancient Greek historians, the earliest and still among the greatest, set the agenda, taking as their subjects large events affecting great numbers of people in dramatic and powerful ways.

Herodotus, the first true historian, wrote of the war in which a band of small Greek city-states defended their freedom against the assault of the vast and mighty Persian Empire. He wrote, he said, "so that time may not blot out from among men the memory of the past, and that the fame of the great and marvelous deeds done by Greeks and foreigners may not be lost, and especially the reason why they fought against each other." Here, from the very beginning of the genre, we can discern the special place occupied by history among humanistic studies. Like literature, specifically the epic poetry of Homer, it has the responsibility of preserving the great, important and instructive actions of human beings, individually and in the mass so that we may marvel at them and learn from them. It sets the historian the task, however, not merely of describing events in evocative language that will impress them on human hearts and arouse an emotional response but also, like philosophy, to explain their meaning by the use of reason.

Thucydides, a younger contemporary of Herodotus, took on the same assignments. He wanted to memorialize the great event of his day, the war between Sparta and Athens.

Thucydides tells us that he undertook his history:

in the belief that it would be great and noteworthy above all the wars that had gone before…. For this was the greatest upheaval that had ever shaken the Hellenes, extending also to some part of the barbarians, one might say even to a very large part of mankind.

No one who has read his dramatic accounts of the debates in the various assemblies, and especially his heart-rending account of the destruction of the Athenian forces that invaded Sicily will doubt his literary artistry in achieving that goal. But Herodotus' story had a happy ending, while Thucydides' tale was far grimmer. The account of the Persian War seems filled with sunshine; the report of the Peloponnesian War seems to have been written in twilight. Herodotus, like Homer, tells good stories for their own sake, whether he believes them or not. Most of his explanations of events credit human agents alone, but, again like Homer, he leaves plenty of room for the intervention of the gods. Thucydides ruthlessly excludes everything not clearly relevant to his task and employs cold reason alone in his explanations. Herodotus obtained the necessary information by asking people who seemed to know something he was interested in, sometimes reporting more than one account of things without choosing among them, sometimes making a choice based on the exercise of reason and what seemed likely. This was not good enough for Thucydides. "As to the facts of what happened," he said, "I did not learn them from any chance informant nor did I think it proper to write down what seemed probable to me but by investigating each of them with the greatest possible accuracy, both those events at which I was present myself and those I learned about from others. And the discovery of these facts was laborious, since eye-witnesses to the same events did not give the same reports of them, either because of partisanship or failure of memory."

Thucydides understood that his careful attention to factual accuracy came at a literary price. "Perhaps," he says, "the absence of the fabulous from my account will seem less pleasing to the ear." But he judges the sacrifice necessary to achieve a higher goal, a philosophic one with great practical application: "If those who wish to have a clear understanding both of the events of the past and of the ones that some day, as is the way in human things, will happen again in the future in the same or a similar way, will judge my work useful, that will be enough for me. It has been composed not as a prize-essay in a competition, to be heard for a moment, but as a possession forever."

These lines seem plainly to be a critique of Herodotus and then a bold claim to contribute to rational, philosophic understanding. Even beyond that, I believe, they lay claim to practical usefulness in dealing with real human problems in the real world. These are the missions for the historian: to examine important events of the past with painstaking care and the greatest possible objectivity, to seek a reasoned explanation for them based on the fullest and fairest possible examination of the evidence in order to preserve their memory and to use them to establish such uniformities as may exist in human events, and then to apply the resulting understanding to improve the judgment and wisdom of people who must deal with similar problems in the future. That is the legacy the Greek historians handed down to their successors which, when practiced well, makes Clio the Queen of the Humanities, standing between and slightly above her noble handmaidens, the muses of literature and philosophy.

So say I, but not everyone has agreed. Critics of history have been legion, running the gamut from the sophisticated, wickedly witty Voltaire, who asserted that: "History is a pack of tricks the living play upon the dead," to the simpler remark of Henry Ford that "History is bunk." A more serious critique, favoring literature, came soon after the invention of history from Aristotle's Poetics, which says:

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse. Indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history, whether written in meter or not. The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is somewhat more philosophical [philosophoteron] and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

By a general truth I mean the sort of thing that a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily. That is what poetry aims at. A particular fact is what Alcibiades did or what was done to him.

Aristotle, of course, would have claimed the same advantage for philosophy which must also be more philosophos than history. He had great learning and wisdom but, like Homer, even he occasionally nodded. The primary source for what Alcibiades did and suffered, in fact, is Thucydides, and it is hard to believe that Aristotle did not read his history. If he did, this assertion is truly astonishing for, as we have seen, Thucydides took the greatest pains to discover what particular people did precisely in order to establish general truths about human behavior. He stood at a position on the road from literature to philosophy. Like the poet he was free to select his topic, to define its boundaries, to treat some events and topics at greater length than others, to emphasize some things and touch lightly on others. Unlike the creative writer, however, the historian may not invent characters or events or chronology but must report with the greatest possible accuracy the doings of real people, keeping to the true order in which they happened. To the extent that he fails in those responsibilities he is not a bad historian but no historian at all.

Yet, if he follows the rules, carefully establishes the facts and reports them in their true chronological order and does no more, he is still not a historian but a chronicler. It is not enough to record a certain level of events each year, however accurately. The historian must select a topic of importance. Even a narrative history must organize and arrange events in such a way as to reveal their significance most effectively. He must try to explain why things happened as they did and what may be learned about human affairs and behavior in general from the events he has studied. In this respect his work must be philosophical.

But unlike philosophers and their post-enlightenment offspring, the social scientists, who usually prefer to explain a vast range of particular phenomena by the simplest possible generalization, historians must be prepared to explain the variety of behavior in various ways. The well-known lines of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus present the two fundamental choices: "The fox knows many tricks, the hedgehog only one:/ one big one." This may work in the animal kingdom, but in the world of human affairs, wildly complicated by the presence of individual wills and of different ideas of what produces or deprives people of happiness and honor, in what does interest consist and of what there is to fear, extremely general explanations are neither useful nor possible. Historians, in the first instance, need to be foxes, using as many tricks as they can to explain as many particular things as accurately and convincingly as they can. Then, they should try to find revealing examples from the wide variety of human experiences to support generalizations of varying breadth. They should not expect to find the one big trick that will explain everything, but the lesser generalizations that can be tested by other understandings of the evidence and by new human experiences as they arise, which can still be interesting and useful. It is this mixed path taken by the historian, chiefly of the fox but with a necessary element of the hedgehog that promises the best results.

The poet, inspired by a unique personal perception and understanding, may shed a more intense and powerful light on some human affairs than the most careful and serious historian. We may admire its brilliance and originality, but are his revelations right? When we think so, it is by intuition that we are convinced or by some feeling that the poet's perception accords with our own experience. But everyone has his own intuition and experience. The literary road to the understanding of human things calls for generalizing from a single perception. It can be galvanizing, inspiring, but not satisfying to the mind. The literary experience is primarily aesthetic and emotional, not intellectual or practical.

Philosophy is a word and concept harder to define but among the many definitions I find in my dictionary the following strikes me as most central: "inquiry into the nature of things based on logical reasoning rather than empirical methods." The pursuit of philosophy does not preclude the study of human experience to provide material for contemplation and analysis by ordered reason, but experience is clearly subordinate and ancillary. Even Aristotle, who for centuries was known as the philosopher and liked to begin his inquiries with reference to the experience and thought of real people, did not investigate these widely or deeply but just until they produced the inevitable intellectual difficulties, the aporiai, to which he then applied his great powers of logic and reason. There are great advantages for our understanding of the nature of things in it: pointing out sloppy thinking and helping to correct it; the ability to analyze things that appear unitary or to bring together others that seem hopelessly disparate; the search for simpler, more general principles than those available to the empirical students of human experience, among others. But philosophy inevitably leads to metaphysics, the investigation of first principles and the problem of ultimate reality, which over the millennia has led to massive disagreement, no progress, cynicism and rejection. Wags have described the pursuit of metaphysics as looking in a perfectly dark box for a black cat that doesn't exist. More seriously, the situation has driven professional students of philosophy to such despair as to reject entirely the most basic and compelling questions as impossible, in fact as non-existent, merely the result of bad thinking or improper grammar. In that spirit the Enyclopaedia Britannica defines philosophy narrowly as "the critical examination of the grounds for fundamental beliefs and an analysis of the basic concepts of such beliefs." Aristotle must have rolled over in his grave when he first learned of the thin gruel modern teachers have made of his rich philosophical porridge. Fortunately, a small band of scholars have not given up the search for wisdom that is true philosophy, but their tribe is small and their enemies legion. A field of study in such shape can not help us much in our efforts to comprehend the human condition.

None of this is to say that history is without its problems for our purpose. Although, in its moderate way, it has not suffered so badly as philosophy from the linguistic analysts or literature from the pseudo-philosophers, it has not escaped the assaults of post-modernism in its various forms. A major assault is in the area of subject matter and attitude. The traditional great events and subjects: high politics, constitutions, diplomacy, war, great books and ideas, are not to be considered, except to show why they must be excluded as the product of dead white males engaged in the permanent process of oppressing good ordinary people of one kind or another. The purpose of the enterprise is not to seek the truth with the greatest objectivity one can muster but to raise the consciousness of the oppressed, to bring them the self-esteem they will need to overthrow the current version of this ancient establishment.

Some historians may not be convinced by these beliefs, observing that post-modernists assert that there is no such thing as truth, only self-interest, prejudice and power, that there is no objectivity, that all statements of fact or value are relative and claims to the existence or search for objective truth are part of the racket by which the ruling groups try to retain power. Such doubters may point out that the opinions of those making these claims should be ignored since, by their own admission, their claims can not be objective or true but merely devices to gain power.

Although historians in universities have given far too much ground to such mindlessness promoted by contemporary political partisanship, as historians they are better situated than their colleagues in the other humanities to recover their senses. They know that the current fad of skepticism and relativism is as old as the Sophists of ancient Greece and had a great revival with the Pyrrhonism of the sixteenth century. On both occasions their paradoxical and self-contradictory glamour yielded in time to common sense and the massive evidence that some searches are more objective, some things truer than others, however elusive perfect objectivity and truth may be.

Historians have reason to know this and to resist the blatantly subjective and untruthful assault of the modern-day sophists, confident that if they hold, or return, to their traditional methods, which allow them to correct errors in our beliefs about the past, or, sometimes, to bring new evidence and perceptions, that may have the effect of refining or even confirming what has been believed. For history is a discipline in which the improvement of understanding is not impossible, random, nor merely cyclical, but cumulative.

Perhaps you will think that my own approach is not entirely objective, that it is shaped by what the French call a déformation professionelle, so let me say at once that it goes without saying that literature, philosophy and history have long been valuable roads to the understanding of the human condition, and all make important contributions, but I confess that as to their relative merits my mind is not completely open. Perhaps my view could be compared with that of the clergyman who listened to a heated debate among his fellow divines, each claiming the superiority of his sect. At last, he intervened with these words: "Friends, let us not quarrel among ourselves in this sectarian fashion. We all seek to work God's will, you in your several ways, I in His."

But I believe there is more to my claim than mere prejudice related to professional deformation. Two millennia ago the Roman historian Livy's introduction to his great narrative account of his nation's history included this observation:

What chiefly makes the study of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous monument; from these you may choose for yourself and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in the result. (1.10)

That is a view of the purpose of historical study that went out of favor with professionals in the nineteenth century and is not thought respectable in our time. As a result it has been increasingly harder to persuade people that they have anything to learn from history. At the same time, the retreat by professors of history from the tradition of writing narrative accounts that explain the past by telling a story has further repelled potential readers. This has not, however deterred millions of people hungry for historical writing from reading those historians who will interpret the past by narrating a story and are alert to the moral implications, personal and political, of the story they tell. And why should it be otherwise? The fact is that we all need to take our moral bearings all the time, as individuals and as citizens. Religion and the traditions based on it were once the chief sources for moral confidence and strength. Their influence has faded in the modern world, but the need for a sound base for moral judgments has not. If we can not look simply to moral guidance firmly founded on religious precepts it is natural and reasonable to turn to history, the record of human experience, as a necessary supplement if not a substitute. History, it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament. Is it too much to hope that one day we may see Clio ascend her throne again and resume her noble business at the same old stand?

[Originally posted: 5/19/05]

YOU CAN BE EVANGELICAL OR LEFTIST, NOT BOTH (via Tom Morin):

American theocracy: Is God ambidextrous? (Lexington, May 25th 2006, The Economist)

The religious left is more energised than it has been for years. The number of new-wave “values voters”—who loathe, rather than love, the values embraced by George Bush—is growing rapidly. They range from blacks and Latinos (who are among the most churchgoing people in the country) to left-wing evangelicals to a hotch-potch of Buddhists and gurus, and they are coming together to make their voices heard. The religious left has acquired spokesmen in the form of Jim Wallis, the author of “God's Politics”, and Michael Lerner, a rabbi and the organiser of last week's conference. Several topical themes are giving it momentum, from immigration reform, where the Catholic church has been particularly outspoken, to Iraq. [...]

The Democratic high command has at last worked out that it does not have much chance of thriving in one of the most religious countries in the world if it cannot close the “God-gap”. Yet, if anything, the God-gap is growing. In 2004 Mr Bush won 64% of the votes of people who go to church more than once a week and 58% of people who go once a week. The proportion of people who regard the Democratic Party as less “friendly” towards religion than the Republican increased from 12% in 2003 to 20% in 2005. Fully 67% of people think that liberals have gone too far in keeping religion out of schools. [...]

The religious left suffers from two long-term problems. The first is that it is building its house on sand. The groups that make up the heart of the religious left—mainline Protestants, liberal Catholics and reform Jews—are all experiencing long-term decline. Most of the growth in American religion is occurring among conservative churches. And the constituent parts of the religious left are also at odds over important issues. Middle-of-the-road Catholics are happy to march hand-in-hand with mainline Protestants over immigration and inequality. But they often disagree over abortion and gay rights.
The secular left usually wins

Serious doubts also persist about how much the Democratic Party is willing to change to embrace religion. Some influential Democrats want real change. Others think that all they need to do is drop a few platitudes to religious voters and the God-gap will disappear.

PIPE THE WASTE AWAY FROM LIVING AREAS, WASH YOUR HANDS, STOP SMOKING, AFFORD 2000 CALORIES A DAY-- THE REST IS DECORATIVE (via Tom Morin):

Forty years of miracle cures. Now it's homeopathy's turn (Ben Goldacre, May 27, 2006, The Guardian)

'I hope you get cancer and then look in the mirror." That is a pretty representative sample from the Bad Science mailbag last week, so I shan't be writing about mobile phone masts again until you all calm down. But it's in the backlash that you can find the truth. This week some fabulous elderly scientists came out loudly against homeopathy on the NHS.

A maelstrom ensued, and critics focused mainly on the failures of modern medicine: the side effects, and the failures, as if these problems could somehow be subtracted from medicine and given to alternative therapies as a benefit. In that backlash, you can see a whole century of medical history.

Before 1935 we were basically useless. Then suddenly, between about 1935 and 1975, science poured out a constant stream of miracle cures. Everything we associate with modern medicine happened: antibiotics which could save you at 21 and let you die at 70; dialysis; transplants; intensive care units; CT scanners; heart surgery; almost every drug you've ever heard of, and more.

As well as the miracle cures, we were finding those hidden killers that the media still desperately pine for in their headlines. Smoking, in the 1950s, to everybody's genuine surprise, turned out to cause 97% of lung cancers.

Then, rather suddenly, for the most part the breakthroughs stopped, and the subtle refinements began.

MERCURY FALLING:

Good news you didn't read on mercury fillings (Ben Goldacre, May 6, 2006, The Guardian)

And now here's the news they didn't tell you. You might remember the scare stories about mercury fillings from the past two decades: they come around every few years, usually accompanied by a personal anecdote, where fatigue, dizziness and headaches are all vanquished with the removal of the fillings by one visionary dentist. Traditionally these stories conclude with a suggestion that the dental establishment may well be covering up the truth about mercury, and a demand for more research into its safety.

Well, the first large scale randomised control trials on the safety of mercury fillings were published just two weeks ago, and I've been waiting to see these hotly awaited results pop up in the newspapers, but nothing doing so far. They studied more than 1,000 children, some were given mercury fillings and some mercury-free fillings. Then they measured kidney function and various neurodevelopmental outcomes such as memory, coordination, nerve conduction, IQ, and so on, over several years. There were no significant differences between the two groups.

EVEN GOD CAN'T HIT A ONE IRON:

Why you should have a phone mast as close to your house as possible (Ben Goldacre, May 20, 2006, The Guardian)

The one thing that people who worry about the health risks of mobile phone masts tend to forget is the inverse square law: the power of the signal falls away extremely rapidly as you move away from the mast, much faster than you'd think, exponentially in fact, because the energy is dissipated and spread out in three dimensions like a big, ever-growing sphere.

A bit like the way the skin of a balloon gets thinner, the more you inflate it.

Meanwhile, you are holding a dirty great big transmitter right up next to your brain in the form of your mobile phone.

In fact, because of the inverse square law, the phone gives you a far higher dose of evil rays than the mast.

Go on, press it harder - I can't quite hear you. But mobile phones, very cleverly, preserve their battery life by transmitting a much weaker signal into the air (and therefore also your head) when they detect that a mast is very close by.

If you have a phone, it's in your interests to have it transmit at the lowest power it can manage, which means a strong signal from the mast, which means the mast should be on your street.

I don't expect you all to start campaigning at once.

DISTRUST AND PULVERIZE (via Tom Morin):

The Secrets of the Bomb: a review of Spying on the Bomb: American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea
by Jeffrey T. Richelson (Jeremy Bernstein, May 25, 2006, NY Review of Books)

About the Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, and Iraqi programs, Richelson points out that what they all have in common is that foreign intelligence failed badly to detect them, a failure caused in part by the successful deception practiced by these countries. In the Iraqi case, American and other intelligence services failed twice to find out about its nuclear progress. After the Israeli air raid that destroyed Iraq's so-called Tammuz 1 reactor in June of 1981, foreign intelligence agencies assumed that the Iraqi program had been successfully stopped. As far as the manufacture of plutonium was concerned this was largely true. But the Iraqis had a very sizable program to separate uranium isotopes that had not been affected by the raid. They also had a group of bomb designers equally unaffected. Neither of these had been detected by American intelligence. Only after the first Gulf War, and after a good deal of resistance by the Iraqis, were international inspectors finally able to pin down the extent of the program. They concluded that if it had not been interrupted it might have produced a bomb within a year or so. In short, Saddam Hussein's abortive invasion of Kuwait had an unintended consequence of depriving him of a nuclear weapon.

The misreading of the intelligence before the latest Iraq war has been much discussed, but a reader who wants a compact summary will find it in Richelson's book. What the reader will not find is an explanation of why Saddam Hussein gave up the program in the early 1990s yet did not fully cooperate with the inspectors who would have verified that he had done so. If he had supplied adequate information at first, the war might well have been avoided; he might have reconstituted the program, although I have seen no hard evidence that he planned to do so. If inspections had been allowed to continue under Mohamed ElBaradei and Hans Blix in 2003, as many nations preferred, the absence of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction would have been increasingly clear, and in Blix's view war would probably have been avoided. What has been hardly mentioned in the controversy over whether Saddam Hussein might have revived a nuclear program is Blix's statement in his book Disarming Iraq that while he informed the Security Council that "neither governments nor inspectors would want disarmament inspection to go on forever," he

reminded that Council that, after verified disarmament, a sustained inspection and monitoring system was to remain in place to strike an alarm if there was any sign of revival of forbidden weapons programs.

In his failure to make full disclosure, Saddam Hussein's worst enemy was Saddam Hussein. He may, Blix and others have speculated, have been reluctant to admit that he didn't have the weapons with which to intimidate Iran and others in the region.

As for the Indians and Pakistanis, they simply lied about their intentions. The US had no informants on the ground, so when they tested their first nuclear weapons Americans were taken by surprise. Until 1959 the Russians and the Chinese collaborated on nuclear development, and Chinese scientists were sent to the Soviet Union to learn about nuclear technology. The Russians had agreed to supply the Chinese with fissionable material and, more remarkably, with a sample bomb and the plans that went with it. But then the two countries had a falling out and the cooperative program was stopped before any samples arrived. The Chinese were on their own. US intelligence services made a very substantial effort to follow developments, but they assumed incorrectly that, like the other countries, the Chinese were going to make a plutonium bomb, so they made an unsuccessful search, mainly from the air, for nuclear reactors that would produce plutonium. Not finding any, they came to the conclusion that no Chinese bomb was imminent.

The Chinese, however, had decided to make a uranium bomb but one with a novel design. In a bomb the fissionable material passes through three stages; subcritical, critical, and super-critical. In the subcritical stage fissions do take place but they do not produce a self-sustaining chain reaction. When the material becomes critical the chain reactions become self-sustaining and when it goes super-critical the material becomes explosive. In the Hiroshima bomb what happened was that a subcritical mass was fired into another mass, producing first a critical and then a super-critical mass. This device was not tested before it was used at Hiroshima.

When the plutonium bomb was first considered, scientists proposed to use the same design. But when the first plutonium was delivered to Los Alamos from the reactors in Hanford, Washington, it was found to contain an unwanted isotope of plutonium that spontaneously fissioned. This could set off the fission reaction in the bomb before enough material was assembled, thus producing a "fizzle." Thus a different method was needed. This consisted of imploding a sphere of plutonium by wrapping shaped high explosives around it. This worked much faster and solved the isotope problem. What the Chinese did was to use implosion for their uranium bomb, which they exploded on October 16, 1964. This design was much more efficient than the one the US used at Hiroshima, so it used less fissionable material. The test again caught our intelligence services totally by surprise.

The last part of Richelson's book deals with Iran and North Korea. Here events, especially in Iran, are moving so quickly that Richelson's account has to be supplemented by information released by the International Atomic Energy Agency and reported by the press. Of the two countries, in my view, the prospects of an Iranian bomb are the more serious. The North Koreans probably have a small, untested nuclear arsenal. My guess is that sooner or later, under Chinese and other international pressure, Kim Jong-il may accept an offer of economic and other rewards in return for giving up his nuclear program. Meanwhile, the principal concern about the North Koreans is that they do not try to sell their technology to terrorists. They may have little else to sell.

What makes the Iranian situation so difficult is that they have oil to sell, which makes them less vulnerable to economic sanctions. Indeed, when they are threatened the price of oil tends to go up, making the Iranians richer. The Chinese at the moment get about 14 percent of their oil from Iran, which is why they are so unwilling to apply pressure. To add to the difficulties, the Iranian president often speaks of eliminating Israel, although it is a question whether he has the authority to try to do so. In any case, if the Iranians eventually make one or more bombs, the logic of mutual deterrence would apply: use of the bomb against Israel would very likely result in a disaster for Iran. Meanwhile, the Israelis seem to mean it when they say they would not allow the Iranians to have nuclear weapons; the Iranians, one can surmise, are as aware of this as anyone else, just as they must be aware of the alleged American contingency plans for an attack on Iran recently reported by Seymour Hersh.

The themes of this review have been twofold. In order to have really reliable intelligence about the atomic program of a foreign country a necessary, but not sufficient, condition is to have agents on the ground. In the examples I have given the necessity is clear. Countries can hide their nuclear programs even from satellites and other sophisticated detection instruments. The Chinese hid their program because the satellites were looking for the wrong signals. Until Vanunu, an agent on the ground, unmasked the Israeli program the Israelis hid it by deception. But even with an agent on the ground mistakes can be made. Samuel Goudsmit was selected as the scientific leader of the Alsos mission in part because he did not know anything about ours. He often said that if he had been captured by the Germans he could not have told them anything. Since he did not know about our plutonium program, he did not look for the German program and made the erroneous assertion that there was none.

The second theme is that in almost all cases the predictions have erred on the side of conservatism.

WHAT OUR DEPENDENCE ON GAS PURCHASES:

A 'Bolivarian' backlash (Kelly Hearn, 5/28/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Ideological allies of Mr. Chavez's who had been expected to win the presidencies in Mexico and Peru have plummeted in polls, as voters take offense at the Venezuelan leader's public campaigning as an insult to their respective nations' independence and sovereignty.

Moreover, the backlash is threatening to spread to other nations, including Venezuela, and Mr. Chavez's checkbook diplomacy is adding to suspicions of a man who fashions himself as a 21st-century version of South America's liberator, Simon Bolivar.

"The real size of the Venezuelan government is three feet high -- the size of a barrel of oil," said Diego E. Arria, former Venezuelan ambassador to the United Nations.

Mr. Chavez has spent between $18 billion and $25 billion on foreign projects since taking power in 1999 -- on everything from paying off Argentina's debt to the International Monetary Fund to underwriting a popular samba festival in Brazil.

In recent weeks, Mr. Chavez's spending and his use of the bully pulpit to back leftist political candidates in other Latin American nations has caused diplomatic spats with Nicaragua, Peru and Mexico, all of whom accuse the Venezuelan of meddling in their affairs.

NOT JOE BAPTIST:

Fan creates card set to honor Jewish players (Joe Capozzi, May 28, 2006, Palm Beach Post)

The Marlins thought they were honoring their Jewish first baseman when they decided to give away Mike Jacobs T-shirts as part of Jewish Heritage Day at Dolphin Stadium this afternoon.

One small problem — Jacobs isn't Jewish, a fact the Marlins would have learned if they'd asked Jacobs himself.

Better yet, they could have contacted Martin Abramowitz.

As records custodian for the non-profit Jewish Major Leaguers Inc., Abramowitz is on a mission to catalogue every Jewish player who ever played in the majors — from Lipman Pike of the 1871 Troy Haymakers to Kevin Youkilis of the 2006 Boston Red Sox.

He's at 154 now, and his mission also includes distinguishing the likes of Shawn Green and Brad Ausmus from imposters like Mike Jacobs and Walt Weiss, players with common Jewish names who are not.

MORE:
Jews on First (Dann Halem, April 13, 2001, Slate)

MEDITATIONS:

Battered Up!: He's Been Hit by Pitches 277 Times, but Houston Astro Craig Biggio Is Having a Ball (Peter Carlson, 5/24/06, Washington Post)

Craig Biggio is the king of pain. He has been beaned, plunked, dinged, smashed, whacked, zapped and clobbered, but he doesn't let it bother him. Last year, Biggio, who works as a second baseman for the Houston Astros, set the modern (post-1900) record for getting hit by the most pitches in a career: 268. This year, his total is up to 277 plunkings, which means he's zeroing in on Hughie "Ee-Yah" Jennings's all-time record, which is 287.

Sitting in the visitors' locker room at RFK Stadium on Monday, waiting to play the first of four games with the Washington Nationals, Biggio shrugged off these records with the calm of a Zen master.

"If it's meant to be, it's meant to be," he said. "And if it's not, it's not."

Biggio is a Stoic philosopher in a baseball cap. He knows life hurts, but he chooses to ignore that.

"It swells up and you move on," he says. "You give it enough time and it goes away."

Biggio lives by a code that seems old-fashioned in this Era of Shared Feelings: When some huge, hulking brute hits him with a hardball thrown at 95 mph, he just heads down to first base. He does not whimper, he does not curse, he does not yell or charge the mound with homicide blazing in his eyes. And he never, ever rubs the sore spot.

"Oh, no, I won't touch it," he says. "The pitcher knows he hit you and you know he hit you, and rubbing ain't gonna make it any better."

YOUNG MEN AND FIRE:

With Illegal Immigrants Fighting Wildfires, West Faces a Dilemma (KIRK JOHNSON, 5/28/06, NY Times)

As many as half of the roughly 5,000 private firefighters based in the Pacific Northwest and contracted by state and federal governments to fight forest fires are immigrants, mostly from Mexico. And an untold number of them are working here illegally. [...]

Some Hispanic contractors say the state and federal changes could cause many immigrants, even those here legally, to stay away from the jobs. Other forestry workers say firefighting jobs may simply be too important — and too hard to fill — to allow for a crackdown on illegal workers.

"I don't think it's in anybody's interest, including the Forest Service, to enforce immigration — they're benefiting from it," said Blanca Escobeda, owner of 3B's Forestry in Medford, Ore., which fields two 20-person fire crews. Ms. Escobeda said all of her workers were legal.

Some fire company owners estimate that 10 percent of the firefighting crews are illegal immigrants; government officials will not even hazard a guess.

The private contract crews can be dispatched anywhere in the country through the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho — and in recent years have fought fires from Montana to Utah and Colorado, as well as Washington and Oregon — anywhere that fires get too big or too numerous for local entities to handle.

The work, which pays $10 to $15 an hour, is among the most demanding and dangerous in the West. A workweek fighting a big fire can go 100 hours.

"You've got to be physically able and mentally able," said Javier Orozco, 21, who has fought fires in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, California and Montana since 2002.

KHOMEINISM TEETERS:

Iran Chief Eclipses Power of Clerics (MICHAEL SLACKMAN, 5/28/06, NY Times)

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pressing far beyond the boundaries set by other presidents. For the first time since the revolution, a president has overshadowed the nation's chief cleric, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on both domestic and international affairs.

He has evicted the former president, Mohammad Khatami, from his offices, taken control of a crucial research organization away from another former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, challenged high-ranking clerics on the treatment of women and forced prominent academics out of the university system.

"Parliament and government should fight against wealthy officials," Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a speech before Parliament on Saturday that again appeared aimed at upending pillars of the status quo. "Wealthy people should not have influence over senior officials because of their wealth. They should not impose their demands on the needs of the poor people."

In this theocratic system, where appointed religious leaders hold ultimate power, the presidency is a relatively weak position. In the multiple layers of power that obscure the governance of Iran, no one knows for certain where the ultimate decisions are being made. But many of those watching in near disbelief at the speed and aggression with which the president is seeking to accumulate power assume that he is operating with the full support of Ayatollah Khamenei.

"Usually the supreme leader would be the front-runner in all internal and external issues," said Hamidreza Taraghi, the political director of the strongly conservative Islamic Coalition Party. "Here we have the president out front on all these issues, and the supreme leader is supporting him."

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pursuing a risky strategy that could offer him a shot at long-term influence over the direction of the country — or ruin. He appears motivated at least in part by a recognition that relying on clerics to serve as the public face of the government has undermined the credibility of both, analysts here said.

The changing nature of Iran's domestic political landscape has potentially far-reaching implications for the United States. While Iran has adopted a confrontational approach toward the West, it has also signaled — however clumsily — a desire to mend relations. Though the content of Mr. Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush was widely mocked here and in Washington for its religious focus and preachy tone, it played well to Iran's most conservative religious leaders. Analysts here said it represented both Mr. Ahmadinejad's independence and his position as a messenger for the system, and that the very act of reaching out was significant.

"If the U.S. had relations with Iran under the reform government, it would not have been a complete relationship," said Alireza Akhari, a retired general with the Revolutionary Guard and former deputy defense minister, referring to Mr. Khatami's administration. "But if there can be a détente now, that means the whole country is behind relations with the West."

Mr. Ahmadinejad is trying to outpace the challenges buffeting Iran, ones that could undermine his presidency and conservative control. The economy is in shambles, unemployment is soaring, and the new president has failed to deliver on his promise of economic relief for the poor. Ethnic tensions are rising around the country, with protests and terrorist strikes in the north and the south, and students have been staging protests at universities around the country.

Mr. Ahmadinejad's critics — and there are many — say that the public will turn on him if he does not improve their lives, and soon. It may ultimately prove impossible to surmount these problems while building a new political elite, many people here said.

ACHIEVE THE SAME END BY DIFFERENT MEANS:

2 Industry Leaders Bet on Coal but Split on Cleaner Approach (SIMON ROMERO, 5/28/06, NY Times)

The future for American energy users is playing out in coal-rich areas like northeastern Wyoming, where dump trucks and bulldozers swarm around 80-foot-thick seams at a Peabody Energy strip mine here, one of the largest in the world.

Coal, the nation's favorite fuel in much of the 19th century and early 20th century, could become so again in the 21st. The United States has enough to last at least two centuries at current use rates — reserves far greater than those of oil or natural gas. And for all the public interest in alternatives like wind and solar power, or ethanol from the heartland, coal will play a far bigger role.

But the conventional process for burning coal in power plants has one huge drawback: it is one of the largest manmade sources of the gases responsible for global warming.

Many scientists say that sharply reducing emissions of these gases could make more difference in slowing climate change than any other move worldwide. And they point out that American companies are best positioned to set an example for other nations in adopting a new technique that could limit the environmental impact of the more than 1,000 coal-fired power projects on drawing boards around the world.

HIGHWAYS CREATED DRIVERS, NOT VICE VERSA (via Tom Morin)

THE SLOW LANE: Can anyone solve the problem of traffic? (JOHN SEABROOK, 2002-09-02, The New Yorker)

Since September 11th, as anyone who drives in New York knows, traffic patterns have changed. Congestion cleared up when Mayor Giuliani used his special emergency powers to restrict bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan below Sixtieth Street. Not since the Second World War had traffic in the city flowed as freely. In April, restrictions were lifted on some crossings, but morning-rush-hour restrictions on lone drivers entering Manhattan remained in effect below Fourteenth Street. Although the cleanup operation at Ground Zero has now ended, Mayor Bloomberg—who, during his campaign, promised to improve the quality of life in New York by making the city less auto-reliant—says that he will keep the restrictions in place while the reconstruction of lower Manhattan continues. Traffic has been getting steadily worse since April, but it's still less crowded in the city now than it was a year ago. [...]

Since 1970, the population of the United States has grown by forty per cent, while the number of registered vehicles has increased by nearly a hundred per cent—in other words, cars have proliferated more than twice as fast as people have. During this same period, road capacity increased by six per cent. If these trends continue through 2020, every day will resemble a getaway day, with its mixture of commuters, truckers, and recreational drivers, who take to the road without regard for traditional peak travel times, producing congestion all day long: trucks that can't make deliveries on time, people who can't get to or from work, air quality that continues to deteriorate as commerce suffers and our over-all geopolitical position weakens because we are forced to become ever more dependent on foreign oil. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a traffic jam. [...]

No major new highways have been built around New York since the nineteen-seventies, partly because there's no room left, and partly because many people believe that building highways makes congestion worse, because drivers who had previously used mass transit to avoid the traffic begin using the new roads. Even if no new drivers take to the new roads, scientists have shown that increased road capacity alone can increase congestion, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "Braess's paradox," after a German mathematician named Dietrich Braess. In the twenty-three American cities that added the most new roads per person during the nineteen-nineties, traffic congestion rose by more than seventy per cent.

MORE:
The sum of all things in road levy (Seattle Times, 5/28/06)

Mayor Greg Nickels' proposed levy for Seattle roads, bridges and other items is too big and lasts too long. But the central idea is all right. A smaller, shorter levy focused on roads and bridges alone makes sense.

WHERE THE 70'S NEVER ENDED:

Revealed: grim truth of Scots unemployment (EDDIE BARNES, 5/28/06, The Scotsman)

THE true figure for unemployment in Scotland is 250,000 - almost three times the official number - according to a groundbreaking report.

Research conducted by one of Britain's leading authorities on the welfare state claims there are 160,000 "hidden unemployed" in Scotland, many of them forced on to sickness benefits through lack of work.

They outnumber by almost two to one the official unemployment claimant count of 88,000. The 160,000 make up around half of the total number of Scots presently on incapacity benefit, the £78 a week payment given to those who are deemed too ill or disabled to be required to look for work.

However, the report says this group, largely made up of less skilled workers, women and older workers, should be counted as among the unemployed, arguing that they are capable of working and, in a more vigorous economy, would have nothing to stop them finding a job.

MORE (via Tom Morin):
Capital send-off for Royal Scots (BBC, 5/26/06)

Well-wishers turned out to cheer the Royal Scots during their parade
Hundreds of well-wishers have turned out for the Royal Scots on their last parade in Edinburgh.

Friday's event, which marked the end of the Edinburgh regiment's 373-year history, included more than 500 serving soldiers and veterans. [...]

The Royal Scots, formed in 1633, is the oldest infantry regiment in the British Army and won its first battle honour in Tangiers in 1680.

The regiment's first Victoria Cross was won during the Siege of Sevastopol, while in the First World War the number of battalions increased to 35, of which 15 served as active front line units.

WHAT FLEXIBILITY BUYS YOU:

West Virginia and Kentucky Alter Medicaid (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, 5/24/06)

West Virginia families served by Medicaid could face a reduction in benefits if they refuse to sign contracts promising to show up for doctors' appointments and to use the emergency room only for emergencies. Kentucky, meanwhile, is putting new limits on prescriptions and visits to therapists.

They are the first two states to take advantage of a new law that makes it easier to mix and match which residents get which benefits under Medicaid, the state-federal program that provides health insurance coverage to about 55 million low-income people.

In years past, when states provided a health benefit for Medicaid beneficiaries, they had to do so for all participants in their state. The concept, called comparability, guaranteed comprehensive health insurance coverage for the poorest of the poor.

Now, comparability is out. Flexibility is in.

Governors had seen the comparability requirement as a straitjacket, forcing them to drop people off the Medicaid rolls when trying to reduce the program's explosive costs. The governors view the changes approved by Congress as a way to scale back coverage for some rather than drop people into the ranks of the uninsured.

HOW'S IT GOIN' GOLIATH? (via Tom Morin):

Armed groups shun electronic media to counter U.S. high-tech surveillance (Azzaman, May 24, 2006)

No mobile phones, no landlines, no Internet – that is the message anti-U.S. rebels have recently received from their commanders.

The message is believed to have even spread in neighboring states as part of the package of instructions foreign fighters receive before heading to Iraq.

“You are not to use electronic communication or even land lines when communicating,” said a leaflet which the groups distributed recently.

The instructions are apparently a response to what are described as ‘moderate successes’ U.S. troops have achieved in the past few weeks in their fight to flush out rebel cells.

P.M. IN WAITING:

Things are looking up but can Dave really deliver? (Melissa Kite and Patrick Hennessy, 28/05/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

[H]ow well is he really doing? Polls suggest that Labour is now in serious trouble and that Mr Cameron is succeeding in the first challenge he set himself when he became leader, late last year: to begin rescuing the damaged Tory brand.

He has started to persuade voters that his party is changing, but not enough of them, yet, to send him to Number 10. To borrow the Blairite phrase: "A lot done, but a lot left to do."

His staff realise this, and it explains the frenetic pace the Tory leader is setting. After "Beckingham Palace" last Sunday, Mr Cameron delivered a speech to the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference, in Hertfordshire on Monday, in which he launched a discussion of the "happiness" agenda and said that there was more to life than money.

It could have backfired, with some critics immediately mocking the assertion. However, he held firm and insisted that politicians had a right to explore such esoteric issues.

He followed it with a polished performance at Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday.

Not for the first time, commentators concluded that he had got the better of the Prime Minister, with a forceful line of attack - on immigration - and a nicely timed joke accusing Mr Blair of bogusly blaming past Tory leaders for his own mistakes - "He'll be blaming Robert Peel next."

Leaks from the recording of his Desert Island Discs prompted more admiring headlines after it emerged that he chose Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West, by Benny Hill as one of his favourite records, by way of homage to his first childhood memories.

His other choices included Bob Dylan, The Killers and Mendelssohn. A case of Scotch whisky and a cookbook were perhaps less inspiring and may have owed much to a Blair-style attempt to be all things to all voters.

However, evidence was about to come that his efforts to "rebrand" the party, which some denounce as superficial, have had an impact, even if only a limited one.

A SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP EVEN BY SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP STANDARDS:

Blair beefed up his Iran speech to please Bush (Toby Harnden in Washington and Patrick Hennessy, 28/05/2006, Sunday Telegraph)

Tony Blair made significant changes to one of his most important foreign policy speeches after bowing to American objections, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The Prime Minister changed key passages on possible action against Iran, climate change, and a proposed shake-up of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Objections by President George W Bush's inner circle played a key role in the alterations, which were made just before Mr Blair delivered his landmark address at Georgetown University in Washington, on Friday, British sources have revealed.

Gordon Brown must surely have had what senior ministers call "one of his little moments" last Thursday when George W Bush was asked about Tony Blair's departure date. "My attitude is," Mr Bush said, gazing fondly at the Prime Minister, "I want him to be here so long as I'm the President."

That would give Mr Blair till noon on January 20, 2009 (teatime in Downing Street, allowing for the time difference). "Well, what more can I say?" said the Prime Minister, with one of his 1,000-watt grins. To which the Chancellor doubtless growled inwardly: "Say you're going tomorrow, you idiot!"

The President, meanwhile, could only beam satisfaction. It is just possible that he is the one true Blairite left, the last politician who will say publicly that he, for one, wishes the Prime Minister could go on, and on, and on. Who is this Scotch guy, anyway, and what's with all these girly-man "deals"? Where Mr Bush comes from, Granita is the name of the Mexican housekeeper.

It is hard to exaggerate the affinity that has arisen between the President and Prime Minister.

NOTHING COSTS MORE THAN IT USED TO (via Pepys):

The $10,000 Light Bulb …: Or, why it's so hard to measure inflation (Tim Harford, May 27, 2006, Slate)

Flipping through the Montgomery Ward mail-order catalog, which began publication in 1893, economic historian J. Bradford DeLong calculates that a simple bicycle cost 260 hours' wages for the typical worker in 1895 and just 7.2 hours' wages in 2000. But silver spoons actually cost more hours of labor today than in 1895. Your personal inflation rate depends on whether you are spending your money on bicycles or spoons. [...]

In recent years, received wisdom among economists has been that the inflation rate has been overstated because of unmeasured improvements in quality. Home computers have not only become cheaper but dramatically better, and failure to fully adjust for the quality improvements would overestimate the inflation rate and underestimate how much better off we are compared with previous generations.

A highly influential paper by Yale economist William Nordhaus made the point forcefully. He studied not commodities like bicycles or spoons but a service: light. By tracking lighting technology from campfires to oil lamps to today's energy-saving light bulbs, he estimated that the real price of light had fallen 10,000-fold in 100 years. Partly because of Nordhaus' work, many economists believe that the official statistics on wages underestimate how much richer we have become.

THEIR DARK MATERIALS (via Pepys):

Children for Sale: Would $36,000 convince you to have another kid? (Daniel Gross, May 24, 2006, Slate)

Communism is officially dead in the Soviet Union, but the Marxist belief that men and women are essentially economic creatures is alive and well at the Kremlin. Earlier this month, Vladimir Putin, alarmed at Russia's declining population, which is falling thanks to short life expectancy and a plummeting birthrate (1.17 children per woman, down from about 2 in 1990), offered a bonus of 250,000 rubles (about $9,200) to women who would have a second child.

Meanwhile, at the other end of Europe, Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates is using the stick instead of the carrot to make babies. As part of a slate of reforms intended to simultaneously reform pension funding and reverse Portugal's declining birth rate (about 1.5 children per woman compared with 2.6 in the 1970s), Sócrates proposed tying tax rates for pensions to the number of children a worker has. Rates for those with two kids would remain constant, would fall for those with more than two, and would rise for those with fewer than two.

MORE:
Child benefits may get boost to push births (Japan Times, 5/28/06)

The government is considering increasing the amount of benefits to households with infants as part of its efforts to stem the declining birthrate, officials said Saturday.

The measure, already proposed by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, is intended to financially help households with small children as income levels of such households are relatively low, the officials said.

Economically, the Russian Far East is becoming separated from European Russia.

Before the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, the Far East supplied European Russia and the other western republics with fish and crabs from the Sea of Okhotsk. The area's heavy industry produced steel, aircraft and even ships, and few foreign consumer goods were for sale.

Today, Chinese consumer goods - which are cheaper and better than those produced far away in European Russia - and even food are flooding the markets, while timber and raw materials are going south. Entire factories are being dismantled and sold as scrap metal to China. And the seafood is almost exclusively sold to South Korea and Japan.

In the long run this could also lead to demographic changes. There is a floating population of tens of thousands Chinese traders and seasonal workers who move back and forth across the border, and one day they may want to stay.

Russia's Far Eastern Federal District - a huge area covering 6,215,900 square kilometers - has only 7 million inhabitants, and that is down from 9 million in 1991. The population is declining rapidly as factories are closing down and military installations have been withdrawn.

Across the border, China's three northeastern provinces - Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning - are home to 100 million people, and the area has even by Chinese standards an unusually high unemployment rate. Or, as one Western analyst put it: "If the Russians continue to move out, the Chinese are ready to fill the resultant population vacuum in the area." And that could lead to more than just a change of the demographic balance in what still is the Russian Far East.

IT'S NOT A THRUWAY, IT'S A THIRDWAY (via Pepys):

For Whom the Road Tolls (MITCH DANIELS, 5/27/06, NY Times)

AS Americans hit the roads this Memorial Day weekend, debate is building about how to pay for the first-class transportation network that everyone agrees the United States requires. The money from gasoline taxes no longer comes close to meeting needs. Nationally, the gap between road-building needs and projected tax revenue is estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and growing. Almost every governor I talk to faces a seemingly intractable shortfall.

When I became governor last year, my administration inherited a gap of at least $3 billion, equal then to 10 years of new road construction. Long-sought, long-delayed projects languished on the drawing board. For Indiana, a centrally located state that calls itself "the crossroads of America" and has great promise as a logistics and distribution capital, the opportunity cost of inaction was enormous.

A case can be made for higher gas taxes, but no economically rational or politically imaginable increase could close a gap this huge, even if leveraged through reckless borrowing. The only alternative to throwing in the towel was to bring to bear that handiest of revenue sources, Other People's Money.

LET US NUKE THEM FOR YOU (via Tom Morin):

India shelves ambitious nuclear missile program (Siddharth Srivastava, 5/26/06, Asia Times)

Has the Agni III, India's most ambitious nuclear-capable ballistic-missile program, been aborted or merely put in cold storage? Keen to impress the world community of its peaceful intentions in its quest to obtain nuclear fuel and technology from the United States, France, Canada and Australia, it seems that New Delhi has made up its mind to shelve plans for big military-power credentials for now.

The government has decided to cancel the first test-firing of an Indian inter-continental ballistic missile (ICBM), one with a range of 4,000 kilometers (some say up to 6,000km), which is sufficient to reach China and capable of delivering a nuclear payload.

Pressure from the US and others cannot be discounted. The United States has always been very suspicious about India's Agni program, and in 1994 persuaded it to suspend testing of the missile after three test flights.

THE BASIS FOR THE BUSH/KHAMENEI SUMMIT (via Tom Morin):

Iran offered 'to make peace with Israel' (Gareth Porter , 3/26/06, Asia Times)

Iran offered in 2003 to accept peace with Israel and cut off material assistance to Palestinian armed groups and to pressure them to halt terrorist attacks within Israel's 1967 borders, according to a secret Iranian proposal to the United States.

The two-page proposal for a broad Iran-US agreement covering all the issues separating the two countries, a copy of which was obtained by Inter Press Service (IPS), was conveyed to the US in late April or early May 2003. [...]

The negotiating proposal indicated clearly that Iran was prepared to give up its role as a supporter of armed groups in the region in return for a larger bargain with the United States. What the Iranians wanted in return, as suggested by the document itself as well as expert observers of Iranian policy, was an end to US hostility and recognition of Iran as a legitimate power in the region.

Before the 2003 proposal, Iran had criticized Arab governments that had supported the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The negotiating document, however, offered "acceptance of the Arab League Beirut Declaration", which it also referred to as the "Saudi initiative, two-states approach".

A NATION OF DAVIDS (via Tom Morin):

Missile defense system makes history: A Pearl Harbor ship intercepts a test missile at the end of the target's flight, a first (Gregg K. Kakesako, 5/25/06, starbulletin.com)

The Pearl Harbor-based Aegis cruiser USS Lake Erie successfully intercepted a target test missile in the last few seconds of its flight for the first time yesterday.

In previous tests the Lake Erie successfully intercepted target missiles as soon as they were launched from the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands on Kauai or in the middle of their flights, the Navy said.

Target missiles had been intercepted in their final stage only by ground-based interceptors before yesterday.

The interceptor is part of the Missile Defense Agency's multibillion-dollar program to protect the United States and its allies from an enemy missile attack.

AN ALTERNATIVE ALTERNATE:

'Bad Twin,' a Novel Inspired by 'Lost,' Makes the Best-Seller Lists (FELICIA R. LEE, 5/27/06, NY Times)

Whether "Bad Twin" is good fiction, good marketing for "Lost" or both is a judgment call.

The novel follows the private detective Paul Artisan, who is helping the scion of a wealthy family find his twin brother. Entertainment Weekly called the book "a chewy snack for Lost-philes, though its mythological value is T.B.D."

Margaret Maupin, a buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, said "Bad Twin" sold out quickly there. "I'm not sure that the people who are buying this are your general book buyers, but they love the TV show," she said. [...]

On Web sites devoted to "Lost," fans have been debating the meaning of the book and how it figures in the Chinese-box puzzle that is the "Lost" plot. On ABC's site devoted to the show, one post declared that the book was an "alternate reality" experience relayed to Troup. ("That's the only thing that makes sense.") Meanwhile, on the site The Lost Experience are lists of possible clues: the names of the characters, various literary references (including "The Great Gatsby," "Beowulf" and "King Lear") and even references to the color green.

To add to the layers of marketing and mystery, the book has been denounced by the Hanso Foundation of Copenhagen, which is also part of the "Lost" puzzle. The island where the "Lost" characters are stranded has bomb-shelter-type hatches, where they find videotapes made by Hanso that suggest the island was used for experiments or for scientific research. On its Web site, the fictional Hanso tells visitors not to read Troup's book. Hyperion, in return, has taken out real advertisements in real newspapers defending the book.

"It's about perpetuating the mystery and what's going on," Mr. Benson said. "Everyone knows Harry Potter doesn't exist, but it sure makes it more fun to believe that Harry Potter is somewhere out there, in a magical place."

THERE HE GOES, PADDING HIS PERSONAL STATS....:

Royals foil joy of Jeter's 2,000th hit (BRIDGET WENTWORTH, 5/27/06, Newark Star-Ledger)

Derek Jeter collected the 2,000th hit of his career last night at Yankee Stadium.

But the Yankees' captain was in no mood to celebrate it, because it did not help his team beat the lowly Kansas City Royals, who won for the first time in the Bronx since August 2002 and snapped a 13-game losing streak in sending the Yankees to a 7-6 loss.

TREATING CRIMINALS LIKE CRIMINALS:

Tough Justice for Executives in Enron Era (KURT EICHENWALD and ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO, 5/27/06, NY Times)

The tactics and strategies used in the successful prosecution of the former Enron chief executives, Jeffrey K. Skilling and Kenneth L. Lay, highlight the transformation that has occurred in recent years in the investigation and prosecution of white-collar crime, a change that has brought many of the techniques applied to drug cases and mob prosecutions into the once-genteel legal world of corporate wrongdoers.

No longer are defendants allowed to surrender themselves quietly, outside the view of the press. Now, as Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay learned firsthand, there are "perp walks" where the handcuffed defendant is brought in by law enforcement for booking. Cases are not resolved with a fine or a short stay in a "country club" prison; now defendants face decades of real jail time, sentences that can preclude them from being considered for minimum-security prisons.

Witnesses are squeezed, with threats against family members and stints in solitary confinement. Those who fail to cooperate are indicted, or deemed unindicted co-conspirators, a designation that places potential witnesses in a state of indefinite legal limbo. And companies that want to settle a criminal case can often do so only by taking the once unusual step of waiving their right to protect the confidentiality of their communications with their lawyers. [...]

Legal experts yesterday heralded such aggressive approaches as crucial to the government's securing convictions of Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling. "Prosecutors in white-collar cases are looking at the range of legal tactics that are available to them that they have used for years in other kinds of cases, and they are not just ruling out those tactics because it is a white-collar case," said Christopher Wray, the former head of the Justice Department's criminal division and now head of the government investigations practice at the law firm of King & Spalding.

SORRY, AL QAEDA DOESN'T WANT US MAKING FRIENDS WITH HERETICS:

U.S. Is Debating Talks With Iran on Nuclear Issue (STEVEN R. WEISMAN, 5/27/06, NY Times)

The Bush administration is beginning to debate whether to set aside a longstanding policy taboo and open direct talks with Iran, to help avert a crisis over Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons program, European officials and Americans close to the administration said Friday. [...]

One reason senior administration officials do not like the idea of talking with Iran, many of them say, is that they are not certain Iranian leaders would respond positively. A rebuff from Iran, even to a back-channel query, is to be avoided at all costs, various officials agree.

The administration, for example, has been embarrassed by the on-again, off-again possibility of talks with Iran on Iraq, which were authorized by Ms. Rice late last year.

The concern, some say, is that talking to Iran only about Iraq will anger Sunni dissidents in Iraq, reinforcing the Sunni-led insurgency while enhancing the status of Iraqi Shiites, whose strong ties to Iran make Washington uneasy.

On the other hand, the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, was said to be eager to enlist Iran in helping to deal with Iranian-backed Shiite militias, which are accused of carrying out killings and kidnappings of Sunnis in Iraq.

Meanwhile, if the President gave a speech in which he offered to fly to Teheran for a meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei it would be a diplomatic coup whether they accepted or not and would deepen the rifts in their regime regardless.

WORKED FOR STROM THURMOND & ROBERT BYRD:

House Republican Pessimistic on Immigration Deal (RACHEL L. SWARNS, May 26, 2006, NY Times)

If the Senate bill's provisions were to make it into law, they would be the most substantial overhaul of immigration law in two decades. The key architects of the bill, Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, hailed the bipartisan coalition for withstanding a large number of amendments intended to sink the legislation.

The bill was also praised by some immigrant advocacy groups, the Roman Catholic Church and business leaders, who worked to ensure its passage. And Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the majority leader, described the vote as "a success for the American people" as well as for the immigrants "who hope to participate someday in that American dream."

Mr. Bush issued a statement praising the Senate for its vote and the House for passing an earlier immigration bill that he said "began a national dialogue." He urged both chambers to work together to pass a bill that he could sign into law.

But with Republicans deeply divided over immigration, the bill's future remains in doubt, reflecting the fluid politics of the issue in a Congressional election year. House conservatives, who passed a border security bill in December, vowed to thwart any deal that includes a central provision of the Senate bill: its call to give most illegal immigrants a chance to become citizens if they meet certain conditions.

LAW AND ORDER ALBERTO:

Gonzales Said He Would Quit in Raid Dispute (DAVID JOHNSTON and CARL HULSE, 5/27/06, NY Times)

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, and senior officials and career prosecutors at the Justice Department told associates this week that they were prepared to quit if the White House directed them to relinquish evidence seized in a bitterly disputed search of a House member's office, government officials said Friday.

Mr. Gonzales was joined in raising the possibility of resignation by the deputy attorney general, Paul J. McNulty, the officials said. Mr. Gonzales and Mr. McNulty told associates that they had an obligation to protect evidence in a criminal case and would be unwilling to carry out any White House order to return the material to Congress.

The potential showdown was averted Thursday when President Bush ordered the evidence to be sealed for 45 days to give Congress and the Justice Department a chance to work out a deal.

OTHER THAN THAT HOW'D YOUR HAIRCUT GO, MS NOONAN?:

Claws, tongues sharp in beauty salon brawl (Michele McPhee, May 27, 2006, Boston Herald)

Fake nails and women’s shoes were flying as a bloody claw fight erupted at a Dorchester salon after one primping patron allegedly screamed at a woman bantering in Spanish, “Speak English! This is America!”

Just minutes after the melee broke out at Kathy’s Nail Design at 261 Bowdoin St., it escalated to the point of a 911 call.

A cop who arrived to break the fracas up got angry red scratches on his neck and arm for his trouble. They were left by a woman who’d just spent $40 for French manicure nail tips, said the shop’s owner, David Win.

POSTMODERN BLASPHEMY

What on Earth is going on? (Joseph Brean, National Post, May 27th, 2006)

Among users of Internet chat rooms, Godwin's Law states that as any discussion grows longer, the probability of someone making a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis approaches 100%.

Meteorologists seem to have a similar law: that in discussions about mankind's effect on the weather, it is only a matter of time before someone makes a crack about believing the Earth is flat.

Ptolemy's Law, as a scientist might call it, was at work on the grounds of the London Zoo recently, where some of the world's most eminent climate experts gathered for lectures of the Royal Meteorological Society.

The victim of the inevitable quip, a television weatherman, had said that public debate on the Kyoto accord is polarized between alarmism and industry-funded skepticism, neither of which satisfy him as a professional communicator. He asked whether there might be a "middle way."

Everyone turned to get a look at this heretic. They knew what was coming.

"Sorry to be provocative," Henry Derwent, Britain's climate-change representative to the G8, replied to the weatherman. "But round Earth, flat Earth. Where's the middle way in that?"

The room came alive with chortles of agreement.

Mr. Derwent -- a politician and former investment banker, not a scientist -- meant that there is no middle way, that the "anthropogenic" or man-made nature of climate change is now established beyond all but the most frivolous skepticism, wilful blindness or complete ignorance. "The last few years have seen the elimination of hiding spaces for skeptics," he said later in an interview.

Few of the experts in his audience would have contradicted him. To them, doubting whether humans are responsible for the warming air and rising oceans, or whether we can now do anything to reverse these trends, or whether we should, or even whether Kyoto is the best of various possible approaches, is as stupid as worrying about falling off the edge of the Earth. The situation is much the same in Canada. On climate change, skepticism has become Nazism.

Anyone who thinks his belief in global warming is based upon rational science should ask himself why he becomes so enraged when skeptical scientists deliver encouraging news.

IF ONLY ORWELL COULD SEE THIS

Back to basics as maths problems multiply (Liz Lightfoot, The Telegraph, May 27th, 2006)

Modern methods of teaching maths which have mystified parents and confused many pupils are to be abandoned six years after the Government forced them on primary schools.

The same unit at the Department for Education which devised the strategy now wants teachers to go back to the "standard written method" it abolished.

The decision has prompted a backlash from some primary teachers and maths advisers who say children are better able to understand the concept of arithmetic when they break sums down into a series of units.

They say the "back to basics" approach heralds a return to the "dark ages" of adding up, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in vertical rows without understanding what they are doing.

But evidence has shown that many pupils are arriving at secondary school unable to do long division and multiplication and reliant on columns of workings out which take longer and are more prone to errors along the way.[...]

The decision to return to the old methods will come as a relief to many parents.

Christine Turno says she dreads the twice-weekly homework with her nine-year-old daughter.

"She goes ballistic," she said. "We have massive rows because she says I'm doing it wrong and she has to do it the way the school says. But she can't understand what they want and it's a complete mystery to me."

A 20-minute homework session turns into an hour.

Mrs Turno, of west London, said: "The teachers say it is the new way and if the answer is wrong it doesn't matter as long as she is using the right method. It's quite bizarre."

It must take years of postgraduate studies in education before one sees that wrong answers in math are preferable to right ones provided the students “understand what they are doing.” More.

HE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT McCAIN'S SECRETARY OF STATE SO BAD HE CAN TASTE IT:

As Bush admits making mistakes over Iraq, Blair offers a new world vision (Alec Russell, 27/05/2006, Daily Telegraph)

Tony Blair last night challenged the world to unite around a policy of "progressive pre-emption" as he sought to shore up his legacy by linking the invasion of Iraq to a range of problems, from global warming and poverty to immigration.

In a speech in Washington just hours after he and President George W Bush made strikingly frank admissions of mistakes in their handling of Iraq, the Prime Minister called for the world to help the new government in Baghdad. On his visit to Iraq on Monday he had seen a "child of democracy struggling to be born".

He also called for radical reform of the United Nations and its sister bodies, the IMF and the World Bank, arguing they were out-of-date and incapable of confronting the financial and security threats facing the world.

This is the third of my speeches on the challenges facing the international community. In the first, I argued that the global terrorism that menaces us, can only be defeated through pulling it up by its roots. We have to attack not just its methods but its ideas, its presumed and false sense of grievance against the West, its attempt to persuade us that it is we and not they who are responsible for its violence. In doing so, we should stand up for our own values, asserting that they are not Western but global values, whose spread is the surest guarantee of our future security. In the second speech, I argued that such values would only succeed, however, if they were seen to be fairly and even-handedly implemented; that this required a unifying agenda for global action, which was about more than the immediate security threat but was also about justice and opportunity for all.

In this speech, I contend that now is the moment for reconciliation in the international community around such an agenda and I outline some of the key policy priorities and reforms of the global institutions to make such an agenda happen.

Underlying all these arguments, is a world view. We all agree that the characteristic of the modern world is interdependence. We haven't yet thought through its consequences.

In Government, I realised this first at the time of the Asian financial crisis shortly after taking office. Within weeks, all of us who had been initially holding back, waiting for the market to correct itself, wondering how a market meltdown in Thailand could possibly destabilise our own economies, were coming together, agreeing packages to prevent contagion, supporting Brazil and others who looked like they might be the next to go. In the process every conventional doctrine about markets was amended to prevent catastrophe.

A year later, Kosovo happened and the spectre of ethnic cleansing returned to Europe. We put pressure on Milosevic. We threatened diplomatic action. We eventually took military action by air strikes. But it was only when, with considerable courage President Clinton indicated - and it was only an indication - he might be prepared to use ground force, that suddenly Milosevic collapsed and the crisis was resolved.

What these two events taught me was that the rule book of international politics has been torn up. Interdependence - the fact of a crisis somewhere becoming a crisis everywhere - makes a mockery of traditional views of national interest. You can't have a coherent view of national interest today without a coherent view of the international community. Nations, even ones as large and powerful as the USA, are affected profoundly by world events; and not affected, in time or at the margins but at breakneck speed and fundamentally. Why is immigration the No.1 domestic policy issue in much of Europe and in the US today? What are the solutions? The answer is that globalisation is making mass migration a reality; and only global development will make it a manageable reality.

Which is the issue that has rocketed up the agenda of most political leaders in a way barely foreseen even 3 years back? Energy policy. China and India need energy to grow. The damage to the environment of carbon emissions is now accepted. It doesn't much matter whether the issue is approached through energy security or climate change, the fact is we need a framework, internationally agreed, through which the developing nations can grow, the wealthy countries maintain their standard of living and the environment be protected from disaster. And this is not a long-term issue - though its consequences are long-term. It is here and now.

The point is that in respect of any of these challenges, certain things stand out. They affect us all. They can only be effectively tackled together. And they require a pre-emptive and not simply reactive response.

Here is where it becomes very difficult. In the old days - I mean a few decades back - countries could wait, assess over time, even opt out - at least until everything was clear. We could act when we knew. Now we have to act on the basis of precaution.

What is more such action will often require intervention, far beyond our own boundaries. The terrorism we are fighting in Britain, wasn't born in Britain, though on 7th July last year it was British born terrorists that committed murder. The roots are in schools and training camps and indoctrination thousands of miles away, as well as in the towns and cities of modern Britain. The migration we experience is from Eastern Europe, and the poverty-stricken states of Africa and the solution to it lies there at its source not in the nation feeling its consequence.

What this means is that we have to act, not react; we have to do so on the basis of prediction not certainty; and such action will often, usually indeed, be outside of our own territory. And what all that means is: that this can't be done easily unless it is done on an agreed basis of principle, of values that are shared and fair. Common action only works when founded on common values.

Therefore, to meet effectively the challenge that faces us, we must fashion an international community that both embodies, and acts in pursuit of global values: liberty, democracy, tolerance, justice. These are the values we believe in. These are the values universally accepted across all nations, faiths and races, though not by all elements within them. These are values that can inspire and unify. So, how, at this moment in time, in an international community that has been riven, do we achieve such unity around such values?

Let us go back to the immediate issue: Iraq. We can argue forever about the merits of removing Saddam. Our opponents will say: you made terrorism worse and point to what is happening there. I believe differently. I believe this global terrorism will exploit any situation to further its cause. But I don't believe that its cause is truly to be found in any decision we have taken. I believe it's cause is an ideology, a world-view, derived from religious fanaticism and that had we taken no decisions at all to enrage it, would still have found provocation in our very existence. They disagree with our way of life, our values and in particular in our tolerance. They hate us but probably they hate those Muslims who believe in tolerance, even more, as apostates betraying the true faith.

They have come to Iraq because they see it as the battleground. The battle they are fighting is nothing to do with the liberation of Iraq, but its subjugation to their extremism.

I don't want to reopen past arguments. I want to advocate a new concord to displace the old contention.

It is three years since Saddam fell. It has been three years of strife and bloodshed. But it has also seen something remarkable. Despite it all, despite terror, sectarian violence, kidnapping and the exhibition of every ugly aspect of human nature, a democratic political process has grown. Last week, a new Government was formed. This Monday I visited it in Baghdad, I sat and talked with the leaders, chosen by the people, Sunni, Shia, Kurds, non-aligned, and heard from them not the jarring messages of warring factions but one simple, clear and united discourse. They want Iraq to be democratic. They want its people to be free. They want to tolerate difference and celebrate diversity. They want the rule of law not violence to determine their fate.

They were quite different from the Interim Government of 2004 or the Iraqi Transitional Government after the elections of January 2005.

This is a child of democracy struggling to be born. They and we, the international community, are the midwives.

You may not agree with original decision.

You may believe mistakes have been made.

You may even think how can it be worth the sacrifice.

But surely we must all accept this is a genuine attempt to run the race of liberty.

These are not stooges. Or placemen.

They believe in their country.

They believe in its capacity to be democratic.

They are fighting a struggle against the odds but they are fighting it.

And in their struggle is a symbol of a wider struggle.

Listen to what the new Prime Minister says and the new Government's programme.

Tell me where their vision differs from ours except that ours is based in experience and theirs in hope.

I came back from Iraq not less daunted by the responsibility on our shoulders to help them succeed. But I did come back inspired by their determination that they do indeed succeed.

This should be a moment of reconciliation not only in Iraq but in the international community. The war split the world. The struggle of Iraqis for democracy should unite it.

There was a moving moment when I was talking to the new Prime Minister in his office in Baghdad that he told me, with a smile, used to be the dining room of one of Saddam's sons. We were on our own with the interpreter. He leant across to me and said: "if we can change Iraq we can change this region and the world".

The terrorism that afflicts them is the same that afflicts us. Its roots are out there in the Middle East, in the brutal combination of secular dictatorship and religious extremism. Yet in every country of the region there are people, probably the majority, who are desperate for change. In Kuwait, as I boarded the plane for Iraq, they told me how they were planning elections for the first time with women voting. Across the Gulf states, in the Lebanon, in the steps, however difficult, Egypt is taking, in signs of change in nations as different as Jordan or Algeria, there are possibilities for progress.

These are the true voices of Muslim and Arab people, or more true than the voices of hate, with their poisonous propaganda that seeks to divide.

They need our support. In Iraq, of course, people want to gain full control of their own destiny. The MNF should leave as soon as the Government wishes us. As the Prime Minister said we need an objective timetable. By that he means one that is conditions-based ie as Iraqi capability is built up. But don't be in any doubt. No-one, but no-one I spoke to, from whatever quarter, wanted us to leave precipitately. An arbitrary timetable ie without conditions being right, would be seen for what it would be: weakness.

Here is where we have to change radically our mindset. At present, when we are shown pictures of carnage in Iraq, much of our own opinion sees that as a failure, as a reason for leaving. Surely it is a reason for persevering and succeeding. What is the purpose of the terrorism in Iraq? It is to destroy the prospect of democratic progress. In doing so, they hope to deal us a mortal blow. They know victory for them in Iraq is defeat not just for Iraqi democracy but for democratic values everywhere.

So they kill our soldiers even though our forces - with incredible heroism and dedication - are and have been in Iraq for three years with full United Nations support and are there now with the free consent of Iraq's first ever fully democratic Government. They kill ordinary Iraqis for wanting to join the police or build the country or just for being of one religious persuasion not another. Theirs is a strategy drenched in the blood of the innocent.

Should their determination to do evil eclipse our desire to do good? By all means debate the tactics and strategy of how we succeed. But I ask: how can we possibly, in the face of such a struggle, so critical to our own values, not see it through and do so with renewed vigour and confidence? If Iraqis can show their faith in democracy by voting for it, shouldn't we show ours by supporting them in it?

By "we" I don't mean the countries of the MNF, I mean the entire international community.

Doing so would signal a dramatic step of reconciliation.

There are two "ifs".

"If" the international community could see the struggle for security in Iraq as part of the wider global struggle against terrorism. And "if", we would commit the same energy, engagement and raw political emotion to the rest of the agenda which preoccupies the world at large.

Throughout the past years, ever since I saw 9/11 change the world, I have believed that the greatest danger is that global politics divides into "hard" and "soft". The "hard" get after the terrorists. The "soft" campaign against poverty. The divide is dangerous because interdependence makes all these issues just that: interdependent.

The answer to terrorism is the universal application of global values. The answer to poverty is the same. Without progress - in democracy and in prosperity - security is at risk. Without security, progress falters.

That is why the struggle for global values has to be applied not selectively, but to a global agenda.

The agenda is there. It is largely agreed. But it needs passion as well as policy.

We must act on global poverty, most of all in Africa. We have a plan that last year's G8 agreed. Each aspect is important: aid, cancelling debt, education, tackling disease, especially HIV/Aids, governance, conflict resolution.

We must act on climate change. The G8 +5 process, whose next meeting is in Mexico in October, offers a way forward, building on Kyoto, which can involve America, China and India.

We must deliver an ambitious world trade round, for the poorest nations but also for ourselves.

In each of these areas, there are powerful reflections of nation's interests but also vital tests of commitment to global values. If we believe in justice, how can we let 30,000 children a day die preventably? If we believe in our responsibility to the generations that come after us, how can we be, knowingly, indifferent to the degradation of the planet we live on?

How can we have a global trading system based on unfair trade?

Indeed, even in respect of that part of the agenda that naturally preoccupies my country and yours, there is a breadth we must address.

Earlier I described the fledgling movement toward democracy across the Middle East. As I said, I believe success in Iraq has an importance far beyond the borders of Iraq.

But I would put it higher than this. I now think that we need a far more concentrated and concerted strategy across the whole region. The United States rightly began this with its Broader Middle East Initiative. However, the more I examine this issue, the more convinced I am, that to protect our future, we need to help them to theirs. For example, I don't believe we will be secure unless Iran changes. I emphasise I am not saying, we should impose change. I am simply saying the greater freedom and democracy which, I have no doubt, most Iranians want, is something we need. There is a choice being played out in the region: to be partners with the wider world; or to be defined in opposition to it. If Iran leads the latter camp, the results will be felt by us all. The most effective way of avoiding that is to encourage and support all nations and people in the region who share our belief that freedom is the best route to peace and prosperity. This cannot and should not be the responsibility of the United States alone. The EU, in particular, needs to be fully engaged. But country by country, in every way we can, with every means we can properly deploy, the international community should be the champions of those who want change there. And wherever those who strive for that freedom are in danger, we should be at their side.

They would be hugely empowered and encouraged if we were able to offer hope on Israel and Palestine. At so many levels, this is critical: for ordinary Israelis and Palestinians, of course, who suffer the depredations of the conflict. But far wider than that, this is a dispute which casts a shadow over all attempts at reconciliation. Under its cover, global terrorism recruits. Because of its darkness, moderate Muslim opinion is put on the defensive. And shut out is any enlightened sensible view of what we in the West really stand for and believe in.

The frustrating thing is that whatever people say, everyone knows the following: the state of Israel is here to stay; the Palestinian people aren't going to disappear; and the only possible solution is two states, side by side. In fact, when President Bush became the first US President openly to articulate this, everyone more or less accepted it. The problem we have had in Northern Ireland is that there has never been agreement on the basic nature of the final outcome, one part wanting Union with the UK, the other with the Republic of Ireland. Nonetheless we have achieved extraordinary progress, by relentless working at it through every stop and start. In the case of Israel and Palestine, we do now have agreement as to the basic nature of the settlement: two states. Yes, there are innumerable difficult aspects, not least Jerusalem and of course a negotiation about territory; but the constitutional outcome is essentially agreed.

There is only one way through. Clear acceptance by Hamas that the two-state solution is the only one; a renunciation of all violence; and then a move back into the Road Map, with a speeded up pathway to final status negotiations. It will require heavy engagement by the US and the Quartet. But there is not a better time than now, to break out of what is otherwise a continuing descent into despair.

The scale of this agenda is enormous. It means that today's leaders of nations must analyse, cope with, deal with, a vast array of international problems as well as the myriad of challenges thrown up by each of our systems of healthcare, pensions, welfare, law and order. Except that, these problems are no longer simply international. They intrude into domestic politics. There is globalisation in politics, too.

All of the issues raised today, require immense focus, commitment and drive to get things done. Increasingly, there is a hopeless mismatch between the global challenges we face and the global institutions to confront them. After the Second World War, people realised that there needed to be a new international institutional architecture. In this new era, in the early 21st century, we need to renew it.

I want to make some tentative suggestions for change.

First, the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has done an extraordinary job in often near impossible circumstances. He has also proposed reforms of the UN that should certainly be done.

But a Security Council which has France as a permanent member but not Germany, Britain but not Japan, China but not India to say nothing of the absence of proper representation from Latin America or Africa, cannot be legitimate in the modern world. I used to think this problem was intractable. The competing interests are so strong. But I am now sure we need reform. If necessary let us agree some form of interim change that can be a bridge to a future settlement. But we need to get it done.

We should give the UNSG new powers: over the appointments in the Secretariat - it is absurd they have to be voted on, one by one, in the General Assembly; and over how the resources of the UN are spent. We should streamline radically the humanitarian and development operations so that the UN can act effectively as one agency in country: single UN offices, with one leader, one country plan and one budget. There is even a case for establishing one humanitarian agency that allows for better prediction of an impending crisis; for swifter action to remedy it; and sees the different aspects, from short-term relief to longer term development as linked not distinct.

We should also strengthen the UNSG's powers to propose action to the Security Council for the resolution of long-standing disputes; and encourage him in doing so.

Second, the World Bank and IMF. These institutions together play an important role in global stability and prosperity. There is a case, as has been argued before, for merger. But in any event, there is certainly a powerful case for reform.

The IMF, and the international monetary and financial committee chaired by Britain's Gordon Brown, is developing plans for change. To fulfil its role in ensuring the stability of the international monetary and financial system, the IMF must focus on surveillance, both of individual countries and the wider system, that is independent of political influence. It also must become more representative of emerging economic powers and give greater voice to developing countries. The World Bank must remain focussed on fighting world poverty.

Finally, reform, including to appointments and administration, is needed to make the Executive Board more effective.

Third, there is a strong argument for establishing a multilateral system for "safe enrichment" for nuclear energy.

The IAEA would oversee an international bank of uranium to ensure a reliable fuel supply for countries utilising nuclear power without the need for everyone to own their own fuel cycle.

Fourth, the G8 now regularly meets as the G8 +5. That should be the norm.

Finally, we need a UN Environment Organisation, commensurate with the importance the issue now has on the international agenda.

I do not, for a second, under-estimate the hazardous task of achieving these changes. But I am sure it is time to make them.

I want to take one example as a test case: Sudan. There are hundreds of thousands who have died. The dispute between different groups has every dimension of strife in it: ethnic, religious, territorial. If it gets even worse, the knock-on consequences will stretch across the middle belt of Africa and beyond. And we have watched it, with intermittent bursts of activity, for the past two years. The seeds of it were, of course, sown years before that.

This is not a condemnation of world leaders. On the contrary, most of us have devoted what time we can and are doing so now. But in reality, we can't do it all. What it needs is an empowered international actor; the capacity to intervene militarily; and a properly orchestrated humanitarian response. And we needed all of it, from the beginning.

Leaders should do more. But it's the system itself that is at fault, not because of indolence but because of time. Occasionally I look at our international institutions and think as I do about our welfare state: the structures of 1946 trying to meet the challenges of 2006.

What's the obstacle? It is that in creating more effective multilateral institutions, individual nations yield up some of their own independence. This is a hard thing to swallow. Let me be blunt. Powerful nations want more effective multilateral institutions - when they think those institutions will do their will. What they fear is effective multilateral institutions that do their own will.

But the danger of leaving things as they are, is ad hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy; or paralysis in the face of crisis.

No amount of institutional change will ever work unless the most powerful make it work. The EU doesn't move forward unless its leading countries agree. That is the reality of power; size; economic, military, political weight.

But if there is a common basis for working - agreed aims and purposes - then no matter how powerful, countries gain from being able to sub-contract problems that on their own they cannot solve. Their national self-interest becomes delivered through effective communal action.

Today, after all the turmoil and disagreement of the past few years, there is a real opportunity to bring us together. We all of us face the common security threat of global terrorism; we all of us depend on a healthy global financial system; all of us, at least in time, will feel the consequences of the poverty of millions living in a world of plenty; we all of us know that secure and clean energy is a common priority. All of us have an interest in stability and a fear of chaos. That's the impact of interdependence.

Above all, though in too many countries and in too many ways, global values are not followed, there is no dissent about their desirability. From the moment the Afgans came out and voted in their first ever election, the myth that democracy was a Western concept, was exploded. The Governments of the world do not all believe in freedom. But the people of the world do.

In my nine years as Prime Minister I have not become more cynical about idealism. I have simply become more persuaded that the distinction between a foreign policy driven by values and one driven by interests, is obviously wrong. Globalisation begets interdependence. Interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work. In other words, the idealism becomes the real politik. None of that will eliminate the setbacks, fallings short, inconsistencies and hypocrisies that come with practical decision-making in a harsh world. But it does mean that the best of the human spirit, that which, throughout the ages, has pushed the progress of humanity along, is also the best hope for the world's future. Our values are our guide.

To make it so, however, we have to be prepared to think sooner and act quicker in defence of those values - progressive pre-emption, if you will. There is an agenda for it, waiting to be gathered and capable of uniting a world once divided. There wouldn't be a better moment for it.

GONNA NEED CHRISTO TO BUILD THAT WALL:

Registered foreigners top 2 million (Japan Times, 5/27/06)

The number of registered foreign residents in Japan at the end of 2005 totaled roughly 2,011,500, surpassing the 2 million mark for the first time ever, the Justice Ministry announced Friday.

The figure was up 1.9 percent from a year ago and foreign nationals now account for 1.57 percent of the total population.

OUTLASTING ANOTHER ONE:

That Chávez Thing Is Over: If his foes triumph, he will be pushed to the fringe. The Chávez road will have led nowhere. (Ruchir Sharma, 5/29/06, Newsweek International)

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez is the new rock star of world politics. His impassioned rants against globalization, with animated poses to match, make front-page headlines almost daily. The commentariat—particularly in Europe—seems to buy Chávez's line that Latin Americans are so disenchanted by their short tryst with liberalism that they now prefer a strongman to spread the benefits of a commodity boom. The recent moves by a Chávez soulmate, Evo Morales, to renationalize the energy resources of Bolivia reinforce a growing perception that Latin America is lurching to the radical left.

But it's not. While Chávez does seem to rekindle a certain romantic Western nostalgia for Latin American guerrilla movements, the underlying trends point in the opposite direction. Voters in Latin America, far from crying out for a radically new economic model inspired by Caracas, are in fact rallying powerfully behind leaders and parties who promote more-orthodox economic policies. As candidates espousing Chávez-style populism have plummeted in the polls in Mexico and Peru, their camps have tried to distance themselves from the Venezuelan leader. Elsewhere, incumbent presidents like Alvaro Uribe in Colombia and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil have won plaudits as economic managers, and look likely to be reelected.

This is good news for Latin America. It shows that political societies have evolved to the point where most people realize that, in a globalized world, they have to stick to a reformist path.

SIPHONING:

Mastering art of the prolonged at-bat: Game's most patient, resilient steadily disrupt pitchers' plans (Tom Singer, 5/26/06, MLB.com)

You've doubtless seen at least one classic duel between irresistible pitches and immovable hitter. The count reaches two strikes, and the batter refuses to be counted out. He starts wasting strikes and can't stop ... and eventually the scoreboard begins tracking the pitches, with the entire house screaming the countup.

Usually, such standoffs become consequential, not just memorable. We saw it just last Saturday, in Shea Stadium, where Yankees rookie Melky Cabrera punked veteran Mets closer Billy Wagner.

Wagner is accustomed to blowing through ninth innings, closing out lights; only the night before, he had struck out the side on 12 pitches. This time, Cabrera stayed rooted in the batter's box, fouling off pitches until he'd worked an 11-pitch walk -- the centerpiece of a Wagner meltdown, as he went on to blow a four-run lead.

On such occasions, baseball is reprising its role as a metaphor for life.

Alex Cora served as such inspiration on May 12, 2004, when he fouled off 14 consecutive Matt Clement pitches before punctuating an 18-pitch at-bat with a two-run homer.

The next day, Cora appeared on NBC's network news, and Tom Brokaw described the incident to the nation as "a moment that transcended sports."

Cora's recollection of the battle captured the essence of all such standoffs: "It was tough; he was throwing good pitches. When they put it on the scoreboard, that put me under a little bit of pressure. I had to stand back and regroup."

At 18 pitches, Cora fouled his way into rare territory. While there is no gospel when it comes to this stat, according to various Internet sources Cora's at-bat was the third longest of the last quarter-century. Only longer: Ricky Gutierrez's (Astros) 20-pitch affair with Bartolo Colon (Indians) on June 26, 1998, and Kevin Bass' (Astros) 19-pitch epic with Steve Bedrosian (Phillies) on July 23, 1988.

But forget those oddities. Far more common, and as disruptive, are those 10-12 pitch at-bats that alter a game's course.

"Any hitter who works the count is a pain," says Bud Black, the respected Angels pitching coach following a career as a successful American League left-hander. "Being able to foul off pitches makes him even more of a pain.

"As a pitcher, you're trying everything ... in and out, up and down ... and he keeps fighting balls off. You feel as though you're making good pitches, and he keeps fighting them off. You start thinking, 'What do I have to do to get this guy out?'"

Black sighs. "It's not a good feeling."

Because even if the pitcher wins the battle, he is closer to losing the war. Or, at the very least, his place on the mound. Both Clement and Colon (Bedrosian was a reliever) were removed immediately following the aforementioned marathons.

Clement, who had thrown 86 pitches before Cora stepped in, was taken over that 100-pitch wall to 104, a spectacular example of emptying a guy's tank.

Among today's players, the consensus identifies the best at that as Texas' Michael Young, Oakland's Mark Kotsay, Bill Mueller of the Dodgers, Ichiro and, of course, Eckstein.

As far as the St. Louis dynamo is concerned, his at-bat doesn't even begin until he's got two strikes; that just gets his attention.

GOOD ENOUGH FOR THEE, NOT FOR ME:

Dying 'Dr. Death' Has Second Thoughts About Assisting Suicides (LARA SETRAKIAN and ABC News' Law & Justice Unit, May 26, 2006, ABC)

Today, on his 78th birthday, Jack Kevorkian, the man known as "Dr. Death," is slowly dying in prison.

And, according to his lawyer, Kevorkian seems to have second thoughts about helping people die. [...]

When asked to describe Kevorkian's physical and mental state, Morganroth said it was "not great. … He's quite ill."

"Certainly he does get depressed at times," he said.

LET ME EXTEND MY LUKEWARMEST APOLOGIES TO SENATOR McCAIN

Senate Confirms Kavanaugh to Appeals Court (Laurie Kellman, AP, 5/26/06)

White House aide Brett Kavanaugh won Senate confirmation as an appeals judge Friday after a wait of nearly three years, yet another victory in President Bush's drive to place a more conservative stamp on the nation's courts.

Kavanaugh was confirmed on a vote of 57-36, warmly praised by Republicans but widely opposed by Democrats who said he is ill-suited to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

So, I am not overly displeased to offer this self-criticism: I was wrong about the Gang of 14 deal and Senator McCain was right.

WAIT, YOU MEAN WE REALLY ARE JERKS?:

Defendants Sunk by Their Testimony (Carol Rust, 5/26/06, The Washington Post)

Jurors in the Enron trial made it clear that it would have been better for former executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling if they'd kept their mouths shut and stayed off the witness stand.

Speaking shortly after a federal judge read their verdict, jurors said Lay's indignant outbursts while testifying in his own behalf made him seem "that he very much wanted to be in control -- he commanded the courtroom," said Wendy Vaughan, a Houston business owner.

"He was very focused, but he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder that made me question his character," she said.

As for Skilling, who spent days explaining the tedious financial inner workings of the once high-flying energy company, the jurors couldn't understand how he could know so much about that and not be aware of illegal business maneuvering, whether or not he was responsible for it personally.

"Skilling was supposed to be a hands-on individual," said Freddy Delgado, an elementary school principal. "It's hard to believe a hands-on individual wouldn't know what was going on."

"When he got on the stand and knew what a [technically complicated] chart was and how it worked, we knew he was involved," Delgado said.

Elementary school teacher Kathy Harrison said she was glad Lay and Skilling took the stand during their trial. Had they not, "I would have always had questions," she said.

ANOTHER YEAR, ANOTHER TAX CUT:

Century-old phone tax for war is defeated (Bloomberg News, May 26, 2006)

More than a century after the Spanish-American War, phone companies have succeeded in getting rid of the tax created to pay for it.

Treasury Secretary John Snow announced Thursday that the government is "conceding the issue" over the 108-year-old U.S. excise tax on long-distance calls and will refund about $13 billion in taxes paid for the past three years.

In past years five appeals courts have said the tax is illegal, and Republican lawmakers in Congress sought to abolish it.

THE 15% PARTY:

Senate Confirms Hayden As CIA Director (KATHERINE SHRADER, May 26, 2006, The Associated Press)

Hayden, 61, would be the first active-duty or retired military officer to run the spy agency in 25 years. He was approved by a vote of 78-15. [...]

During Thursday night's debate, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said the warrentless wiretapping program raised "serious questions about whether the general is the right person to lead the CIA, serious questions about whether the general will continue to be an administration cheerleader, serious questions about his credibility."

FUNNY HOW THE REALISTS COULDN'T SEE THIS REALITY COMING:

Abbas Urges Hamas To Back 2-State Plan: Palestinian Leader Says He May Call Referendum (Scott Wilson, 5/25/06, Washington Post)

If Hamas does not change its position, Abbas said, he will measure public support for a two-state solution within 40 days through a popular referendum. Although it would not be binding, the result would help clarify for recalcitrant Hamas leaders, the Israeli government and the world what course Palestinians favor to resolve the conflict with Israel.

"We must stop with the slogans and start dealing with reality," said Abbas, Fatah's leader. "We must stop dreaming and accept what we can take now. Let us not speak of dreams. Let us take the Palestinian state on the '67 borders. There is a national consensus for this."

Abbas delivered his ultimatum during a meeting of Fatah and Hamas leaders in the West Bank city of Ramallah that was intended to reduce mounting tensions. His comments reflect frustration over Hamas's refusal to soften its views at a time of deepening economic hardship in the Palestinian territories and sporadic armed conflict between the two movements.

LET'S ROLL 'EM:

Senate OKs citizenship for illegal aliens (Charles Hurt, 5/26/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

The Senate yesterday easily approved an immigration bill that allows 10 million illegal aliens to become citizens, doubles the flow of legal immigration each year and will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $54 billion over the next 10 years.

The leaders of both parties hailed the 62-36 passage as a historic success. [...]

In the moments before the vote, Mr. Frist and about a dozen senators, from both parties, tearfully congratulated one another for all their hard work in producing the legislation. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat and the leading proponent of the bill, called it "the most far-reaching immigration reform in our history."

After the vote, more than a dozen giddy lawmakers from both sides of the aisle gathered before television cameras to again commend one another.

"I am so proud of the Senate," Minority Leader Harry Reid said as those around him smiled broadly. "This is the way we should legislate -- on a bipartisan basis."

As he spoke, a television screen behind him showed a live picture of the Senate floor, where fellow Democrats were at that moment trying to mount a filibuster against President Bush's latest judicial nominee.

In the end, Democrats failed and a final vote was set for today on the nomination of White House lawyer Brett M. Kavanaugh, named to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. After speaking to reporters, Mr. Reid returned to the Senate floor and cast his vote in favor of the filibuster.

The House is the only obstacle that stands between President Bush and a comprehensive immigration bill, and the White House yesterday predicted that the chamber's Republicans will give in.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said House Republicans will want to pass border security badly enough to back down from the fight against what many consider amnesty for illegal aliens, knowing there is a "heavier political price for failing to act, than for acting."

"If you are a Republican member of Congress and you're concerned about illegal immigration, do you really want to say to your constituents: You know, I'm going to wait a couple of years before I take up the issue of people knowingly hiring illegal aliens, I want to wait a couple of years before I go ahead and try to identify who the illegal aliens are, I want to wait a couple of years before I start grappling with what to do with these 11 or 12 million people who are here illegally," Mr. Snow said.

HAD EACH BEEN BORN IN THE OTHER'S COUNTRY THEY'D HAVE EACH OTHER'S JOBS:

-Blair and Bush Are Duo Even in Descent (Glenn Kessler, 5/26/06, Washington Post)

The two have always been a bit of an odd couple. Bush is a conservative Texan who speaks inelegant English, while Blair is an eloquent speaker who promoted the "third way" of politics with former president Bill Clinton, his transatlantic pal. After their first meeting, when Bush was asked what they had in common, he replied: "We both use Colgate toothpaste."

But Blair always has had a moralistic streak. Clinton, after all, had restrained the more enthusiastic prime minister when he wanted to send ground troops during the conflict over Kosovo. It turned out that Blair's worldview meshed perfectly with the neo-Wilsonian outlook that Bush adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Blair, convinced that it was essential for Britain to align its foreign policy closely with that of the United States, moved quickly to make sure he was in Bush's good graces. Though most European nations opposed Bush's plan for a missile defense system, Blair offered to support it as long as Bush agreed to negotiate a deal with Russia to end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- rather than end it unilaterally, as some administration officials preferred. Bush agreed to Blair's proposal.

The Third Way is no more than the idea that neither command-and-control nor laissez-faire provides the best way of running a society and iits economy. You need, this creed asserts unremarkably, a bit of both. Since the Tories have always known this, and important sectors of Labour have resisted it, the Third Way has more to each socialists than conservatives.

The reality is that Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush could hardly be more similar.

GIVE IT TO NEWT:

Treasury Secretary to Step Down (Peter Baker and Paul Blustein, 5/26/06, Washington Post)

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, who has presided during a period of strong economic growth but at times seemed out of sync with President Bush, has informed the White House that he will resign in the coming days after three years as the nation's chief economic officer, a source close to Snow said yesterday.

Snow asked the White House to announce his resignation in early June and said he plans to stay in the job no later than July 3 while a replacement is sought, the source said. The secretary's decision was intended to bring finality to a process that has played out awkwardly in public over months as Snow's job security has been a regular source of Washington speculation.

Republican insiders said possible candidates to succeed Snow include former commerce secretary Donald L. Evans, a longtime Bush friend; Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez, a former Kellogg Co. chief executive; Ambassador David C. Mulford, a former treasury undersecretary who represents the United States in India; and Stephen Friedman, the president's former chief economic adviser and a former Goldman Sachs chief executive. [...]

Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick, a former trade representative, had hoped to be named the next treasury secretary but does not appear likely to get the job, and has indicated to associates that he plans to resign soon to return to the private sector.

NO MORE SLAVIN' FOR BREAD:

Reggae legend Desmond Dekker dies (BBC, 5/26/06)

Reggae legend Desmond Dekker has died suddenly from a heart attack, his manager has announced.

The 64-year-old Jamaican, best known for his 1969 hit Israelites, collapsed at his Surrey home.

THEY'VE BEEN WATCHING TOO MUCH DR. PHIL:

Bush, Blair admit Iraq errors (The Associated Press, 5/26/06)

President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair acknowledged costly mistakes and difficult times in the Iraq war they launched together in 2003, but they insisted that enough progress has been made that other nations should support the new Iraqi government.

While Bush increasingly has begun to acknowledge missteps in handling the war, his comments at the joint news conference Thursday — together with Blair's — represent his most explicit acknowledgment that the administration underestimated the difficulty of the central project of his presidency.

Bush said he regrets his cowboy rhetoric after the Sept. 11 attacks, such as his "wanted dead or alive" description of Osama bin Laden and his taunting "bring 'em on" challenge to Iraqi insurgents.

"In certain parts of the world, it was misinterpreted."

He also cited the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. "We've been paying for that for a long time," Bush said.

But, he said, "Despite setbacks and missteps, I strongly believe we did and are doing the right thing."

Blair regretted the way in which Saddam Hussein's political allies were purged soon after the fall of Baghdad. Critics have said the sudden purge left a security vacuum in Iraq and encouraged former regime loyalists to take up arms against the newly installed government.

Blair also said allies seriously underestimated the insurgency.

"It should have been very obvious to us" from the beginning, Blair said.

He said he and Bush should have recognized that the fall of President Saddam Hussein would not "be the rise of a democratic Iraq, that it was going to be a more difficult process" because "you're talking about literally building the institutions of a state from scratch."

PHILISTINIANISM (via Tom Corcoran):

Dear Useful Idiot: On Cindy Sheehan’s Dear President Bush (Catherine Seipp, 5/25/06, National Review)

[T]he most idiotic statement in Sheehan’s new book, Dear President Bush, comes not from Sheehan herself but from Howard Zinn, who writes in the introduction: “A box-cutter can bring down a tower. A poem can build up a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution.”

A box-cutter can bring down a tower. By now, I suppose, we should be used to the hard Left’s extending underdog status to the worst of mass murderers; still, the sheer gall of beginning a series of David-and-Goliath metaphors with that one is breathtaking.

LUCKILY THE DEMOCRATS HAVEN'T LEARNED ANYTHING FROM BRITAIN:

Tories six points ahead as scandals rock Blair (George Jones, 26/05/2006, Daily Telegraph)

The Conservatives are experiencing their most sustained electoral recovery for more than 14 years as public confidence in the competence of Tony Blair's government plummets, according to a YouGov poll published in The Daily Telegraph today.

After a string of Government blunders and scandals culminating in near meltdown at the Home Office this week, the Tories have opened a six-point lead over Labour - their largest advantage since before John Major's win in the 1992 general election.

WHAT THE FROG IS HE TALKING ABOUT?:

The French malady: Philosopher Andre Glucksmann diagnoses the ailment that has been troubling the French Republic for decades. (Andre Glucksmann, Sign and Sight, 5/24/06)

Extravagant France! In just a year, four crises have confounded international opinion. A year ago, there was the Non to the European referendum, followed last autumn by the suburban riots, then in spring by the student revolt and now the Clearstream scandal (news story). Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, currently no. 1 in the government, is said to have put the secret service onto the activities of no. 2, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and cast suspicion onto no. 3, Defence Minister Michele Alliot Marie. [...]

If the French no longer believe in the sacrosanct left-right alternative, it's because they see that in several decades of cohabitation, alternation, mobilisation and counter-mobilisation, neither the left nor the right have done a thing to solve France's problem of problems: the unemployment rate. Here France is the long-standing Western European champion. As long as the country has 10 percent unemployment (over 20 percent among young people and almost 40 percent in disadvantaged neighbourhoods), the situation will not improve.

Did he really just say that the employment situation won't get any better until the unemployment rate drops?

TRY SHORTENING HER EMPLOYMENT:

Judge: Man Is Too Short for Prison (AP, 5/25/06)

Sidney, Neb. [...] A judge said a 5-foot-1 man convicted of sexually assaulting a child was too small to survive in prison, and gave him 10 years of probation instead.

His crimes deserved a long sentence, District Judge Kristine Cecava said, but she worried that Richard W. Thompson, 50, would be especially imperiled by prison dangers. [...]

"I want control of you until I know you have integrated change into your life," the judge told Thompson. "I truly hope that my bet on you being OK out in society is not misplaced."

Hasn't exactly been okay out in society so far, has he?

COMPETENCE WOULD BE REVOLUTIONARY:

Talking to Hamas: Hamas official Osama Hamdan explains how US pressure is making it hard to govern. But the organisation, if it can stay on track, is set to change the face of Islamism and then the middle east (Alastair Crooke, June 2006, Prospect)

It seems...that the new Israeli government will aim towards partial independent withdrawal from the West Bank, for the time being at least. And for this, Israel prefers Hamas to Fatah. To engage with President Abbas would undermine the claim that unilateralism is necessary “because there is no Palestinian partner.” Unlike Fatah, Hamas does not want to negotiate on a partial solution, and can be plausibly labelled “a non-partner.” As a result, some Israelis perceive Hamas as sharing a common interest in Israeli withdrawal that could lead to some “understandings.” And as Israel knows, Hamas counts all Israeli departures from Palestinian land as a victory, especially without a quid pro quo.

This prospect would leave Hamas to concentrate over the coming year or two on its core objective of providing competent governance to the Palestinians. Osama Hamdan underlined the importance of bringing law and order to the Palestinians and, specifically, of resolving clashes between Hamas and Fatah factions: “Ismail Haniya [the Palestinian prime minister] has begun working… there are good signs that he will succeed in securing the internal situation. Some of the other groups, such as the popular resistance committees, have begun working directly with the interior minister, and a new co-ordinator of security, who is very popular and commands wide support among all factions, has been appointed.”

According to Hamdan, Hamas’s other priorities are to reform the security services, to create effective judicial oversight over the security agencies and, above all, to make parliament accountable for and the instrument of control of all Palestinian institutions and ministries. Hamas has not perpetrated any direct attack in Israel since late 2003; its military wing has focused instead on targets within the occupied territories. For over a year, Hamas has observed a unilateral de-escalation, or tadiya. The suicide attack in Tel Aviv in April that led to the death of 11 Israelis was mounted by Islamic Jihad in response to an earlier killing of several of its leaders. In a response that was widely criticised, Hamas spokesmen refused to condemn Islamic Jihad, repelling any tentative European feelers towards engagement. But Hamas wanted to signal clearly that it would not be Israel’s policeman in the territories. It had learned from Fatah’s experience that to publicly condemn such attacks was to invite US and Israeli pressure to arrest members of Islamic Jihad, something it was not ready to do given the risk of being outflanked by more militant groups. Hamas also knows that if it begins to arrest Palestinians, Israel will send lists of further Palestinians to be arrested. These lists, which were sent to Arafat as soon as he took office in 1993, proved deeply corrosive to Fatah’s credibility and legitimacy. The language used by Hamas, however, was not well chosen. Israel may have understood the signal, but externally it was damaging.

Hamas and Fatah represent two very different traditions of Muslim thinking. Fatah has looked to the international community to help balance the asymmetrical relationship with Israel, whereas Hamas’s Islamist approach relies on the inner resources of its constituency for the fortitude to persevere. But contrary to the popular view, Hamas does not believe in imposing Sharia law on Palestinians, or anyone else. This has been said publicly. It does not seek a “top-down” Islamic state that imposes norms of Islamic behaviour but has no real Muslims living in it. It prefers the goal of a state peopled by believing Muslims whose freely chosen priorities colour society from below.

If Muslims judge Hamas to have been successful, this approach will change the face of Islamism. It will do more than any other initiative to swing the pendulum away from the revolutionary groups that aim to radicalise and to impose strict Islamic structures. And the commitment to reform will appeal to public opinion throughout the region. It is this that represents the revolutionary nature of the Hamas electoral victory and explains the antagonism of leaders like Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan, who can see the implications only too clearly.

MORE:
President's ultimatum to Hamas: recognise Israel or the people will decide (Stephen Farrell, 5/26/06, Times of London)

The move appeared to wrong-foot Hamas, whose refusal to recognise Israel and renounce violence has led to international isolation and the freezing of millions of dollars in international aid.

Waiting until the last minute of an otherwise turgid address to a “national dialogue” conference broadcast live on television, Mr Abbas, a Fatah leader, called on his Islamist rivals to accept a proposal drawn up by Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and other prisoners in Israeli jails — foremost among them the Fatah populist Marwan Barghouti.

Mr Abbas, trying to persuade Hamas to drop its traditional refusal to accept Israel's right to exist, seized on a seven-page document written inside an Israeli prison by Palestinian political prisoners.

The prisoners represent not just Hamas, but all major factions, including Mr Abbas's own Fatah movement and Islamic Jihad.

It was debated inside high-security cells and drawn up under the eyes of prison guards during exercise periods.

In parts verbose and repetitive, the document nevertheless implies an acceptance of the right of Israel by claiming a Palestinian homeland only on land occupied by Israel in 1967 - Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

If he could persuade the Hamas leadership to accept the 18-point prison accord it would mean the movement had dropped its original claim on all the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.

Mr Abbas gave the parties 10 days to accept the document as a common platform, and said he would call a referendum if they failed to do so.

He is understood to have won tacit agreement for the plan from the Hamas leadership before unveiling it during a Palestinian national unity summit held yesterday to try to halt the slide towards civil war.

FAREWELL, BIG O:

When we said goodbye to the USS Oriskany: A rusted ship moved men to tears. And that was before she slipped beneath the sea (Nicholas A. Basbanes, 5/26/06, CS Monitor)

A day before the USS Oriskany (CV-34) was scheduled to be sunk in the Gulf of Mexico last week, Denny Earl, a naval aviator attached to the venerable aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War with Attack Squadron 163, bade farewell to his old ship in a dazzlingly audacious way. [...]

People who have never served aboard a naval ship can be excused for wondering how it is that grown men could cry so freely and without embarrassment at the sight of an obsolete leviathan they once called home being sent to the bottom in what amounted to a sailor's burial at sea. "Ships have a way of imparting something of themselves to those who sail in them," is the way Captain Kenyon describes the dynamic that takes place between a vessel and her crew. He said that two years ago when news of the reefing was announced, and his words still resonate quite powerfully for me today.

ONE OF THE KEY FRONTS ON WHICH WE'RE WINNING THE WoT:

A Latin leader set to defy leftist trend: Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe looks likely to win reelection Sunday. (Danna Harman, 5/26/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

The slight, bespectacled yoga enthusiast with an amateur historian's interest in the US Civil War (he knows the Gettysburg Address by heart) is expected to be reelected here Sunday. Uribe has more than 57 percent support, enough to win elections in the first round, according to the Napoleón Franco Group, a polling firm here. [...]

"Uribe is a remarkable leader," says Michael Shifter, vice president of the InterAmerican Dialogue, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "He has an acute sense of what the people want, and despite continuing, serious problems, has made real progress on the security front."

YOU HAVE A RIGHT TO SPEAK, NOT TO BE HEARD (via Bryan Francoeur):

Congress passes funeral protest ban: Bill targets group that taunts mourners at military rites (AP, 5/25/06)

Demonstrators would be barred from disrupting military funerals at national cemeteries under legislation approved by Congress and sent to the White House.

The measure, passed by voice vote in the House Wednesday hours after the Senate passed an amended version, specifically targets a Kansas church group that has staged protests at military funerals around the country, claiming that the deaths were a sign of God's anger at U.S. tolerance of homosexuals.

The act "will protect the sanctity of all 122 of our national cemeteries as shrines to their gallant dead," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, said prior to the Senate vote.

"It's a sad but necessary measure to protect what should be recognized by all reasonable people as a solemn, private and deeply sacred occasion," he said.

DON'T YOU LOVE IT WHEN THE LEFT TALKS TOUGH:

Rise and Fall of the Enron Boys (William Greider, The Nation)

Normally, I am a "bleeding heart" when it comes to long prison terms, but an appropriate sentence for the Enron boys might be six trillion years.

I’M ONLY MY BROTHER’S KEEPER AT SEA LEVEL

Wrong to let climber die, says Sir Edmund (Tom McKinlay, New Zealand Herald, May 24th, 2006)

The first man to the summit of Mt Everest cannot understand how New Zealand climber Mark Inglis and others on the mountain left British mountaineer David Sharp to die.

"All I can say is that in our expedition there was never any likelihood whatsoever if one member of the party was incapacitated that we would just leave him to die," Sir Edmund Hillary said yesterday.

The renowned adventurer was reacting to the decision by double-amputee Inglis, who was one of many who passed the dying Briton near the summit without trying to rescue him.

Sharp died on the mountain.[...]

The difficulties posed by operating at high altitude were not an excuse.

"You can try, can't you? This is the whole thing," Sir Edmund said.

"You are in a dangerous situation, there's no question about that.

"But at least you can try to rescue the life of a man who is obviously in a distressful condition."

Sir Edmund has previously criticised the intensely commercial environment that has developed around the world's highest peak and called for a moratorium to give the mountain a break.

"I think the whole attitude towards climbing Mt Everest has become rather horrifying. The people just want to get to the top.

"They don't give a damn for anybody else who may be in distress and it doesn't impress me at all that they leave someone lying under a rock to die," Sir Edmund said.

Obviously uncomfortable supporters of Inglis have been responding to Hillary’s Old Testament-like thunder with the familiar argument that one’s intellectual and moral faculties are strained under these conditions and thus no one who hasn’t experienced them is in any position to condemn. This is true, of course, but the problem is that it is also true of anyone in a desert or jungle or just about anywhere else, and also of anyone who is hungry, thirsty, in pain, in mourning, drunk, broke, depressed, falling in love, falling out of love, getting married, getting divorced, sick, suddenly rich, pregnant, lonely, a new parent, under stress at work, injured, in a war, jilted, in jail, receiving the special attention of the IRS or endless other “special” conditions. Moral relativists like to imagine a mythical noble man assessing his moral choices independent of contingency, but as he doesn’t exist and never did, they end up standing for a regression to a pagan perception of morality in which we are just bounced around helplessly by chance and circumstance and are therefore never accountable.

MISSING THE ARSONIST FOR THE TREES

Hastert Lashes Out at Justice Dept (Laurie Kellman, AP, 5/25/06)

House Speaker Dennis Hastert accused the Justice Department Thursday of trying to intimidate him in retaliation for criticizing the FBI's weekend raid on a congressman's office, escalating a searing battle between the executive and legislative branches of government.

"This is one of the leaks that come out to try to, you know, intimidate people," Hastert said on WGN radio Thursday morning. "We're just not going to be intimidated on it."

The Illinois Republican, in his interview with the Chicago radio station, was responding to an ABC News report that quoted an unnamed law enforcement source as saying that he was "in the mix" of the Justice Department's investigation into influence peddling by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

"We are not going to dignify or speculate about the motives of anonymous sources providing inaccurate information," said Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse.

Within minutes of that report late Wednesday, the department issued the first of two denials that it was investigating Hastert. The speaker demanded a retraction from ABC News, which stood by its story. Hastert on Thursday threatened to sue the network and reporters and executives for libel and defamation.

CAN ONE FALL WITHOUT EVER RISING?:

Chirac's failing reign (International Herald Tribune, MAY 23, 2006)

One reason France's latest political scandal, the so- called Clearstream affair, is way down among the topics of café chit-chat is because it's so incomprehensible. What it boils down to is whether Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin tried to smear his arch-rival, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy. In the best tradition of French political affairs, there probably won't be an answer. But that doesn't really matter, because Clearstream already figures as another tedious chapter in the fast-failing Chirac presidency. As Ségolène Royal, the current Socialist favorite, put it in an interview, "It is the end of a reign without ethics, the explosion of a system that gives room to secret methods, to blows below the belt, to destabilizing moves."

HIGHER & FASTER:

Britain to boost retirement age to 68 (JANE WARDELL, 5/25/06, Associated Press and Canadian Press

The British government unveiled a major overhaul of the state pensions system Thursday, revealing that it will gradually raise the retirement age to 68 and link benefits to earnings to avert a looming funding crisis as people live longer and have fewer children.

The government said that, beginning in 2024, it will begin increasing the retirement age from the current 65 to 66 and later to 68. That will also help pay for the government's plan to restore the link between state pensions and earnings by 2012 if fiscal conditions allowed, it said.

The link to average pay was removed by former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1980 in one of the first acts of her government to tackle a system that was deemed too expensive. The link to prices since then has significantly reduced the value of post-work benefits.

EVER HAVE TROUBLE SHAKING THE FEELING....

Iran leader's love of soccer worries World Cup host: A visit by Ahmadinejad would trouble Germany (Colin Nickerson, May 23, 2006, Boston Globe)

German security forces are ready to deal with hooligans, right-wing protesters, and even suicide bombers.

But the possibility of Iran's president making a surprise appearance at next month's World Cup soccer championship is giving the country's leadership a collective case of angst.

The prospect of such a visit started to emerge last month after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- the world's best-known Holocaust-denier, despiser of Israel, and alleged wannabe wielder of nuclear arms -- expressed his passionate love for soccer. Iran's national team is one of 32 that have qualified for the championship, and it will play its first game at Nuremberg.

Suddenly, it seems possible that Ahmadinejad and his entourage might show up to cheer Iranian players in a city where Adolf Hitler set the stage for the Holocaust with massive Nazi rallies and passage of the Nuremberg laws, which stripped citizenship from German Jews.

COCAO PEBBLES, BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Study: Chocolate may boost brain power (Reuters, 5/25/06)

Chocolate lovers rejoice. A new study hints that eating milk chocolate may boost brain function.

"Chocolate contains many substances that act as stimulants, such as theobromine, phenethylamine, and caffeine," Dr. Bryan Raudenbush from Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia noted in comments to Reuters Health.

"These substances by themselves have previously been found to increase alertness and attention and what we have found is that by consuming chocolate you can get the stimulating effects, which then lead to increased mental performance."

HAD ENOUGH?:

Q1 GDP growth fastest in 2-1/2 years (Reuters, 5/25/06)

The U.S. economy shot forward at an upwardly revised 5.3 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the fastest growth in 2-1/2 years, as companies built up inventories and exports strengthened, a Commerce Department report on Thursday showed.

ON THE BRIGHTER SIDE...:

Deer Attack Three at Ill. University (JIM SUHR, 5/24/06, The Associated Press)

A year after the normally docile creatures attacked seven people on a university campus here, the deer have turned bullish again.

Three people were attacked by deer within minutes of each other Tuesday on a footpath at Southern Illinois University, police said Wednesday. One doe probably was responsible for all three attacks, said Todd Sigler, the school's public safety chief.

One worker needed stitches for a gash on his forehead, another suffered cuts, bruises and a sprained wrist, and a student was left with a scratched jaw. Two of the victims sought medical treatment.

PURITAN NATION FILES:

Bill to Ban Gambling Online Gets 4th Chance (Frank Ahrens, 5/25/06, Washington Post)

Online poker players will have to fold their hands if a Virginia congressman gets his way.

Today, the House Judiciary Committee will mark up a bill introduced by Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte (R) that would ban much online gambling, including bets on sporting events and games of chance -- namely poker, which has enjoyed a boom in recent years.

The legislation could get an unexpected boost from the Jack Abramoff scandal. The disgraced lobbyist was key to blocking one of Goodlatte's three previous attempts to ban Internet gambling, and backlash over corruption charges could help the current effort. [...]

"I am a big advocate of opening up the Internet to all kinds of legitimate uses," said Goodlatte, who is co-chairman of the Congressional Internet Caucus. "But we don't want the Internet to become the Wild West of the 21st century." Goodlatte said he opposes gambling because it leads to "a whole host of ills in society."

WHAT'S GOOD FOR MR. JEFFERSON:

Gonzales's Rationale on Phone Data Disputed (Walter Pincus, May 25, 2006, Washington Post)

Civil liberties lawyers yesterday questioned the legal basis that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used Tuesday to justify the constitutionality of collecting domestic telephone records as part of the Bush administration's anti-terrorism program.

While not confirming a USA Today report May 11 saying the National Security Agency has been collecting phone-call records of millions of Americans, Gonzales said such an activity would not require a court warrant under a 1979 Supreme Court ruling because it involved obtaining "business records." Under the 27-year-old court ruling in Smith v. Maryland , "those kinds of records do not enjoy Fourth Amendment protection," Gonzales said. "There is no reasonable expectation of privacy in those kinds of records," he added.

Noting that Congress in 1986 passed the Electronic Communications Privacy Act in reaction to the Smith v. Maryland ruling to require court orders before turning over call records to the government, G. Jack King Jr. of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers said Gonzales is correct in saying "the administration isn't violating the Fourth Amendment" but "he's failing to acknowledge that it is breaking" the 1986 law, which requires a court order "with a few very narrow exceptions."

OUR CHILDREN HAVE EXQUISITE TASTE . . .

Study: Parents Encourage Tots to Watch TV (Lauran Neergaard, AP, 5/24/06)

Even for the littlest tots, TV in the bedroom isn't rare: 19 percent of babies under 2 have one despite urging from the American Academy of Pediatrics that youngsters not watch any television at that age.

So concludes a new study that highlights the immense disconnect between what child-development specialists advise and what parents allow.

"My reasoning was that my little boy was extremely intelligent since birth. At 1 year old, he was putting his own DVDs in, skipping scenes," one mother of a preschooler told researchers with the Kaiser Family Foundation. "I thought it was a real good thing for him to have his own TV because TV helped him grow at a very young age."

SORRY, I'M ACTUALLY SERIOUS ABOUT THE PROBLEM:

PM takes aim at Charest over Kyoto (BILL CURRY and RHÉAL SÉGUIN AND GLORIA GALLOWAY, 5/25/06, Globe and Mail)

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is shooting back at his Kyoto critics, including Quebec Premier Jean Charest, saying actions are more important than words on reducing greenhouse gases.

"There's lot of people around the world who have bold and ambitious statements about limiting greenhouse gases, but I am more interested to see what actual effective actions are undertaken," Mr. Harper said.

WHAT DID ONE VIEWER SAY TO THE OTHER?:

Dickens, Challah and That Mysterious Island (KATE AURTHUR, 5/25/06, NY Times)

On last night's "Lost," which closed the island mystery's second season on ABC, a crucial plot development hinged on a copy of the Charles Dickens novel "Our Mutual Friend." (Readers who do not wish to know the particulars of the finale should stop here.)

In a flashback Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick), the character "Lost" viewers know as the man who lived down the hatch, tells a prison guard that he carries around "Our Mutual Friend" because he means for it to be the last book he reads before dying. Later, on the island, when Desmond thinks that death is near, he finds a letter inside the book from the love of his life, Penny. Her letter inspires him to go on an apparent suicide mission to save the island and, the episode implied, possibly the world.

During a visit to New York City last week, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, the executive producers who run "Lost," said they got the idea of the deathbed reading of "Our Mutual Friend" from an interview with the writer John Irving in which he said he was saving it for last. But besides paying tribute to Mr. Irving, they were eager to refer to Dickens for their own narrative purposes.

"He was writing chapter by chapter for newspapers," Mr. Cuse said. "We often think: 'How much did Dickens know when he was writing his stories? How much of it was planned out, and how much was flying by the seat of his pants because he had to get another chapter in?' " He paused, then said with a laugh, "We can respect what he went through."

THANKFULLY, SOME OF US ARE BLESSED WITH PARTNERS DETERMINED TO SAVE US

Men die young in pursuit of sex, researchers say (Amy Brown-Bowers, National Post, May 25th, 2006)

Women live longer than men in part because males incessantly pursue sex, a new study suggests.

A research paper recently published in the journal Human Nature says men die sooner than women because of patterns of procreation established hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Simply put, the traits that made men more likely to get a girl in the past -- being competitive, physically dominating and daring -- are also traits linked to shorter life spans.

So today's man is living with the effects of thousands of generations of men who have been naturally selected for their ability to successfully have sex at the cost of a long life.

So, let’s get this straight. The Freudian ideal of the man whose emotional make-up is most in tune with his long-evolved natural instincts is the lounge lizard?

IT TAKES A CONCERTED EFFORT TO MAKE A CULTURE ANTI-HUMAN:

Japan bans suburban sprawl as population slips (AFP, 5/24/06)

The Japanese parliament banned new large shopping malls in suburbs in a bid to prevent the hollowing out of urban centers as the population shrinks.

Despite opposition by the business community, the upper house of parliament unanimously backed the proposal amid worries that American-style sprawl would be unhealthy as Japanese have fewer children. [...]

Japan has seen a more than decade-old shift toward the suburbs by residents who buy cars to flee the famously high rents inside the densely populated cities.

But the Japanese population fell for the first time in peacetime last year and at current rates is expected to be cut to 60 million, or less than half the current total, by 2100. [...]

More Japanese young people are putting off starting families, finding them to be a burden to their careers, finances and lifestyles.

THE DISCIPLINE OF DEMOCRACY:

Abbas plans referendum if no deal reached with Hamas (MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH, 5/25/06, Associated Press)

In a dramatic announcement, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Thursday that he will call a national referendum on accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel if Hamas does not agree to the idea within 10 days.

The deadline to Hamas represented a political gamble that could either could either help resolve the Palestinians' internal deadlock or lead them into a deeper crisis.

Senior Hamas officials said they accepted the idea of a referendum.

RE-EXTENDING:

Families Add 3rd Generation to Households (MIREYA NAVARRO, 5/25/06, NY Times)

Tess Crescini keeps trying to limit her roommates to her fiancé and her dog, but so far she has failed miserably.

At the moment, Ms. Crescini, 51, and her fiancé are sharing her four-bedroom house in San Jose, Calif., with two of her three adult sons, a daughter-in-law, a 3-year-old granddaughter and a brother who comes and goes. Exorbitant housing costs, layoffs and children who yearn for family togetherness have coalesced to make her the head of a multigenerational household.

In a society where the most common type of household is led by those who live alone and where the scattered family is almost a cultural institution, many grandparents, adult children and grandchildren are gathering to live under the same roof.

The last census showed these "multigenerational households" — defined as those of three or more generations — growing faster than any other type of housing arrangement. [...]

Multigenerational living, especially those in which grandparents care for their grandchildren, have long been common in Asian and Hispanic countries, and the arrangement is popular among immigrants from those nations.

7 7/8THS-8, THANKS:

Just Manny being Manny:

2006 BOS 152 27 48 11 29 35 0 0.3158 0.4421 0.5789

GRANTING THEIR ASPIRATION, WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT:

Olmert Urges Palestinians To Qualify For Talks (William Branigin, 5/25/06, Washington Post)

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert yesterday urged the Palestinian Authority to meet his terms for peace talks or face a unilaterally imposed settlement in the West Bank, and he warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute "an intolerable threat" that he said "cannot be permitted to materialize."

In an address to a joint meeting of Congress a day after talks at the White House with President Bush, Olmert acknowledged Palestinians' "national aspirations" and asserted that Israel has no desire to rule or oppress them.

But he said Israel cannot wait indefinitely for the Palestinians to become acceptable negotiating partners, and he outlined a plan for unilateral "disengagement" from the West Bank that would involve redrawing Israel's final borders to include major West Bank settlements and a "united Jerusalem" as the capital.

THEO, NOT NEO:

Editor at Conservative Magazine To Be Top Policy Adviser to Bush (Michael A. Fletcher, May 25, 2006, Washington Post)

President Bush appointed a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to be his top domestic policy adviser, a post that has been vacant since February, when Claude A. Allen stepped down after being charged with stealing more than $5,000 in a phony refund scheme.

Karl Zinsmeister, who has worked the past 12 years as editor in chief of the American Enterprise magazine, is slated to assume his White House post June 12. At the institute, he focused on examining cultural issues, as well as social and economic trends. His columns for the magazine included pieces praising Wal-Mart's efficiency and extolling the role of religion in forming the glue that bonds communities.

Zinsmeister, 47, also has written three books defending the war in Iraq, a nation he has visited four times as an embedded journalist. His books focus on the everyday work of U.S. troops, whose progress in fulfilling a noble mission, he argues, is often overlooked by much of the media.

"What the establishment media covering Iraq have utterly failed to make clear today is this central reality: With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over," Zinsmeister wrote in his column last June. "Egregious acts of terror will continue -- in Iraq as in many other parts of the world. But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this critical guerrilla war."

Over the last generation, many historians, politicians, and journalists have labored to downplay the significance of religion in making American society what it is. That's not easily accomplished, though. There's just too much concrete evidence of the importance of our religious roots.

Nearly half the men who signed the Declaration of Independence had some seminary training, and John Adams’s description of the American Revolu­tion was that it “connected, in one indissoluble bond, the principles of civil govern­ment with the principles of Christianity.” In their marvelous story starting on page 20 (built on a year of research) Michael and Jana Novak debunk today’s conventional portrayal of George Washington as a man influenced mightily by Greek and Roman paganism but not much touched by Christian ideals. To the contrary, they report, Washington’s Christianity was critical to his fathering of our nation.

David Gelernter looks at different historical evidence and finds that America is deeply stamped with the Judeo-Christian ideas and practices first brought to this con­tinent by Puritan settlers. Stepping back even further in Western history, professor Rodney Stark concludes that Christian principles were decisive in allowing Europeans to vault out of the static misery that most humans had to cope with through the cen­turies. Not just compassion, moral equality, and democracy, but even seemingly secu­lar innovations like liberty, limited government, and science were products primarily of Christian insights. And these religious understandings made Western civilization more successful and more humane than other societies.

This issue of The American Enterprise doesn’t concern itself with all of the ways Judeo-Christianity has influenced us, but focuses specifically on how religion creates social bonds—how it knits people and communities together. The common view among liberal intellectuals today is that religion is something that divides peo­ple, a “wedge,” a force that corrodes unity. Everything from today’s “culture wars” to the recent marauding of disaffected Muslims through European cities is blamed vaguely on “too much religion.”

That is a crude reduction of the actual effects of religious belief on most people. It’s true that religion is a potent influence on all aspects of a civilization. “The beginning of culture is cult,” reminds Michael Novak. Often, religious views have soaked so deeply into the social fabric that most citizens are no longer even conscious of them, even as their culture continues to be shaped by echoes of faith.

In particular, it is the religious impulse that makes typical men and women capa­ble of concern for their fellows. The verdict of history, says Novak, is that “apart from the worship of God, human beings cannot transcend themselves in the large num­bers needed to sustain a civilization. Unless human beings have a vision of something beyond the bounds of their own natures, they cannot be pulled out of themselves.”

JUST THE FACTS:

Libby Told Grand Jury Cheney Spoke of Plame (R. Jeffrey Smith, May 25, 2006, Washington Post)

Vice President Cheney was personally angered by a former U.S. ambassador's newspaper column attacking a key rationale for the war in Iraq and repeatedly directed I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, then his chief of staff, to "get all the facts out" related to the critique, according to excerpts from Libby's 2004 grand jury testimony released late yesterday by Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Libby also told the grand jury that Cheney raised as an issue that the former ambassador's wife worked at the CIA and that she allegedly played a role in sending him to investigate the Iraqi government's interest in acquiring nuclear weapons materials. That issue formed the basis of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV's published critique.

A CORRUPTION INVESTIGATION IS HARDLY WORTH IT:

Breach Was More of the Spirit, Not the Letter, of the Constitution (Charles Lane, May 25, 2006, Washington Post)

The FBI raid on Rep. William Jefferson's congressional office was an aggressive tactic that broke a long-standing political custom. But while it might violate the spirit of the Constitution, it might not violate the letter of the document or subsequent rulings by the Supreme Court, legal analysts say.

The issue could turn on whether a court finds that the items seized from Jefferson's office were related to such protected legislative activities as writing, researching and voting on bills. Other things could be fair game for the prosecution, analysts said. [...]

Both the search warrant for Jefferson's office and the raid to execute it were unprecedented in the 219-year history of the Constitution. In that sense, they violated an interbranch understanding rooted in the separation of powers -- and, indeed, in the events of 1642, when King Charles I burst into Parliament and attempted to arrest five members of the House of Commons, triggering the English Civil War.

CHOOSING SECURITY OVER LIFE:

Like it or not, Europe is paying the transaction costs of diversity: Renaissance Europe's restless pluralism brought great creativity, but also bloodshed. Now we have peace without dynamism (Timothy Garton Ash, Thursday May 25, 2006, The Guardian )

Amid yawns of boredom from most of our citizens, Europe's political intellectuals agree that the EU needs a new narrative to inspire us. What should that be? Ah, say some, the narrative of diversity. On the face of it, this is an odd thing to say. This new political narrative must presumably address the question: "What do we all have in common?" "That we are all so different!" does not seem a sufficient answer. The more conventional European formula is "unity in diversity" - but where's the unity?

In the great age of Renaissance Florence, diversity was indeed the dynamo of Europe's extraordinary creativity. There's a marvellous book called The European Miracle, by the economic historian EL Jones, that explores why Europe rather than China - scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe in the 14th century - produced the scientific, agrarian and industrial revolutions that led the world into modernity. In brief, his answer is: Europe's diversity.

But this was the diversity of a restless, often violent competition between cities, regions, states and empires. Florence and Siena, England and France, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire - they did not resolve their differences by coalition agreements and endless negotiations in airless committee rooms on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels. To reverse Churchill's post-1945 adage: they made war-war not jaw-jaw.

Many readers will remember the speech that Orson Welles put into the mouth of the gangster Harry Lime, in the film of Graham Greene's The Third Man: "In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Has Europe today entered its age of the cuckoo clock?

Of course I'm not suggesting that what we in Europe need is another good dose of warfare, terror and bloodshed; but I am wondering aloud about the conditions in which diversity produces dynamism and creativity. The question for all Europeans today is whether the path we have chosen since the end of our last 30 years' war (from 1914 to 1945) - the path of permanent, institutionalised, peaceful conflict resolution, both domestically and internationally, inspired by the "spirit of solidarity and consensus" that the former European commission president Romano Prodi has promised to rebuild in his new Italian government - is capable of producing a dynamism to match that of the US, let alone of the rising powers of Asia. Yes, we have Airbus - which produces slightly better planes than Boeing - and a European GPS system called Galileo, which may eventually be slightly better than the American one; but aren't these the exceptions that prove the rule? They should not obscure the fact that the economies of China and India are currently growing at around 10%, ours at an average of around 2%. And that's at least partly because of the enormous transaction costs of what, to be more precise, we must describe as the peaceful management of diversity.

A probable future is that, having chosen this path of the peaceful, consensual management of diversity, Europe is set for a long period of relative economic decline. But relative decline need not be absolute decline. If we Europeans are conscious of the choice we are making; if we don't kid ourselves that we can have our cake and eat it, simultaneously enjoying the social solidarity and easier lifestyle of Europe and the economic dynamism of America and Asia; if we mobilise to make the maximum reforms that our political systems and societies permit; then we can still live quite well.

YEAH, BUT THEY DON'T DISRUPT CLASS ANYMORE:

ADHD drugs take toll on minors (Joyce Howard Price, 5/25/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Accidental overdoses and side effects from attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder drugs send about 3,100 Americans -- 80 percent of them children -- to hospital emergency rooms annually, a federal survey has found.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said 60 percent of the overdoses were accidental and were preventable if parents had kept the stimulant drugs locked in cabinets and in child-resistant containers.

VS. THE REDUCED CIRCUMSTANCES OF EUROPE (via Tom Morin):

Benedict Contra Nietzsche: A Reflection on Deus Caritas Est (Benjamin D. Wiker, May 2006, Crisis)

Deus Caritas Est is a declaration of war, and it is loaded with ammunition—much of it stealth in design, and of such power that the Church under Benedict XVI will certainly be the Church Militant. For while on the surface Benedict only seems to be offering a theological platitude, that “God is love,” hidden to the hasty eyes of the press, buried in the intricacies of his philosophical and theological analysis, obscured from all but those initiated into Benedict’s inner circle, he really is declaring that God is love. [...]

It was quite surprising to have Benedict open with philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s charge against Christianity. “Christianity gave Eros poison to drink,” Nietzsche quipped; “he did not die of it but degenerated—into vice.” [...]

Benedict’s counterattack is disarmingly simple and charmingly direct. It is not Christianity but modern culture that has poisoned eros by exalting personal, sensual pleasure. The unhappy result is that eros is “Deiectus merum ad ‘sexum.’”

The English translation of the encyclical renders Deiectus merum ad “sexum” as “reduced to pure ‘sex,’” a most unfortunate mistake, since in its current debased condition sex is anything but pure. Benedict is far more subtle and exact in the Church’s native tongue. The Latin adjective merus comes from the noun merum, wine that is unmixed with water, and hence (in antiquity) only drunk by the intemperate—drinking for the sake of drunkenness. Deiectus comes from the verb meaning “to hurl down,” “to throw down,” even “to kill.” Our contemporary focus on sexual pleasure as pleasure hurls eros down, nearly kills it, and makes us into sexual drunkards.

In regard to sexuality, we might say that our culture is merely erotic because it sees nothing more to eros than eros. Such a brutish flattening of sexuality brings not gain but a “slipping down and diminishing of human dignity.” In exalting eros it makes eros “ebrius et immoderatus,” “drunk and immoderate.”

If eros by itself is unmixed wine, Benedict reminds us that it is still wine, and wine is good. He therefore affirms eros in the strongest terms. Love between man and woman, “where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness,” presents “the very epitome of love,” such that “all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in comparison.”

Ahh, sighed the chorus, now the pope’s got it! And what could be more baneful than throwing water upon such unmixed erotic bliss?

The problem, the pope replies, is that “eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.” The entire argument of Deus Caritas Est is packed into this single reply.

Against the notion that eros unbound is eros free and natural, Benedict makes the countercharge that eros unbound binds us to self-destruction. Eros needs to be disciplined and purified because it represents only a half-truth.

The half-truth, embraced by our culture as the whole truth, is that we are bodily creatures. For a host of reasons (and it is not an angelic host), the West over the last 400 years has ever more passionately thrown itself into the arms of materialism, the belief that bodily reality is the only reality. Following upon the belief that there is nothing more to the human being than the body—that, indeed, “souls” are a fiction of unenlightened, unscientific primitives—comes the belief that there is nothing more to eros than the unmixed wine of bodily pleasure.

Contra Nietzsche, the West is dying in a drunken bacchanalia of this materialist reading of eros. It represents, for Benedict, a woeful loss of our true humanity precisely because it denies that we are bodily creatures with souls: Animals, yes, but animals made in the image of God.

And nothing could more aptly describe the West’s bleary, weary, and frantic divinization of sex than this: It is soulless. Empty-eyed, because the eyes are the windows of the soul; aimless, because it aims at everything, having nothing more to hit than bodily pleasure; lifeless and mechanical, because it denies that the soul gives life to the body, and hence to eros; all-consuming, because consuming is all it knows.

To cure this spiritless malaise, Benedict offers the truth: Bodily pleasure is an essential aspect of the body-soul union that truly and properly defines our sexuality and our entire being, but if it is made the essence of eros, it becomes the nemesis of eros. Eros, to be eros, must be ensouled, otherwise it contains only a half-truth that destroys even what truth it has. The whole truth is contained in the union of body and soul, and there is no escape from the whole truth by taking either half.

Should he [man] aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness.

The restoration of eros demands that we reject both the gnostic denial of the reality and goodness of the flesh and the materialist, Epicurean denial of the reality and goodness of the spirit. Each age, it seems, is marked by its own characteristic lapse into one extreme, one error or the other. We live in a hidebound age, an age bound to the pleasures of its hide, an age of Epicurean hedonism if ever there was one—and it is against the drag of this Charybdis that Benedict must steer the Church.

The point of steering away from hedonism isn’t to escape the body but to return to the truth that humanity is essentially defined by this strange union of animality and something like divinity.

It is neither the spirit alone nor the body alone that loves; it is man, the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only when both grow together [coalescent] does man become fully his own self. By this one way alone, love—eros—has the strength to grow to the maturity [maturescere] of its own true greatness.

But then the pope adds something very odd and very ancient: “Man truly becomes his own particular self when his body and soul are united most intimately.” Only this union can love. Yet this attempted union is not achieved without struggle. Eros is not docile, but ornery. The “dispute [concertatio] of eros” must be overcome, and eros is “truly conquered” only when “this union [of body and soul] is achieved.”

The dispute of eros? The English translation of concertatio as “challenge” no doubt confused more than it clarified, because it loses the aspect of antagonism within eros that Benedict assumes must be conquered. The verb concertare means to strive eagerly, often in verbal disputes; hence the noun concertatio means a contest in words, a wrangling, a dispute. It is as if the body is arguing against the soul, dividing each “self” into factions, eagerly striving to make the case to the self that the self is, after all, only a body, and that bodily pleasure is the highest satisfaction and perfection.

As wonderful, natural, and good as eros is, then, it contains a spirit of rebellion, an aftershock of original sin that brings eros to assert itself against the true, human union of body and soul. Nietzsche attempted to rarify this spirit of rebelliousness of the flesh into a spirit of rebellion itself—a Promethean “against-ness” set against the spirit. He therefore represents the greatest corruption of eros, a divinization of intoxification.

But for all that, Benedict makes clear that eros must not be denied. Eros needs discipline and purification, so that unmixed wine doesn’t lead us into the Bowery gutter of history along with other lost, decrepit, and enervated civilizations.

What, then, must be mixed with eros? In a word (a very strange word for most of us) eros needs agape. “Theos agape estin,” declares the Greek of 1 John 4:16—“God is love.” In Latin, “Deus caritas est,” the name of the encyclical. The first words of Benedict’s first encyclical quote the First Letter of John: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

God is love, agape. Not eros? Eros needs agape? Eros needs God? No wonder Nietzsche was gnashing his teeth at Christianity. It was Nietzsche who famously declared that God was dead. If St. John and Benedict are right, then it was Nietzsche’s atheism that poisoned eros, not Christianity, and this atheism was rooted in the modern West’s denial of any reality beyond brute matter. No amount of Dionysian celebration of eros by itself in a godless cosmos could save Nietzsche from lapsing into madness and spending the last decade of his life in an asylum.

100 MILLION MORE IMMIGRANTS GOTTA LIVE SOMEWHERE... (via Brad S):

Sales of New Homes Jump Unexpectedly (MARTIN CRUTSINGER, May 24, 2006, AP) --

Sales of new homes rose unexpectedly in April to the fastest pace this year as the housing sector showed resilience in the face of rising mortgage rates. But the price of homes sold last month fell and the level of unsold homes rose to a record high.

The Commerce Department reported that sales of new single-family homes increased by 4.9 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.198 million units, the highest rate since last December.

The pace of activity caught economists by surprise.< /blockquote>

Comments

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DARWINISTS VS. DARWINISM:

Montenegro's challenge to Europe (The Monitor's View, 5/25/06, CS Monitor)

The emergence of a new nation in old Europe is a bit like the sudden surfacing of a volcanic island. Life around it adjusts. A new ecology springs up. With the mountain realm of Montenegro voting for independence, Europe's evolution, too, must now shift.

Montenegro, tiny though it is with 612,000 people, and located in the continental backwater of the Balkans, declared separation from Serbia in a May 21 referendum. This has revealed an unresolved tension in Europe between toleration for the kind of old-style nationalism that sparked many wars and promotion of the half-century experiment to unify Europeans around the political and economic ideals of Western civilization.

THE WEDGE WILL SPLIT DEMOCRATS, NOT REPUBLICANS:

Rising black-Latino clash on jobs (Daniel B. Wood, 5/25/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

While Los Angeles is ground zero for black-Hispanic friction these days, echoes of Vaughn's words are rising throughout urban black America as Congress labors over immigration reform. In cities where almost half of the young black men are unemployed, a debate is raging over whether Latinos - undocumented and not - are elbowing aside blacks for jobs in stores, restaurants, hotels, manufacturing plants, and elsewhere. [...]

"In this era of mass immigration, no group has benefited less or been harmed more than the African-American population," says Vernon Briggs, a Cornell University professor who researches immigration policy and the American labor force.

THE IMMACULATE COMBUSTION:

Another fuel to power your car arrives in R.I. (DANIEL BARBARISI, 5/24/06, Providence Journal)

Environmentalists have long offered the benefits of compressed natural gas vehicles as a solution to all of these problems. The engines burn immaculately clean. [...]

Monday, the Rhode Island Airport Corporation opened the state's first public-use CNG station at T.F. Green Airport, finally giving eco-friendly drivers an option and opening Rhode Island to retail sales of CNG-powered cars.

Vehicles powered by CNG produce only 10 percent of the carbon monoxide and particle discharge of gasoline-powered engines, and half the nitrogen oxides. Carbon dioxide discharge is reduced by 30 to 40 percent.

The fuel, which is primarily methane, is cheaper than gasoline -- at T.F. Green, the natural gas will retail for $2.69 for the equivalent of one gallon -- and natural gas-powered cars get better mileage.

NOT NOT THE NEW YORK TIMES?:

A.C.L.U. May Block Criticism by Its Board (STEPHANIE STROM, 5/24/06, NY Times)

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization's policies and internal administration.

"Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement," the committee that compiled the standards wrote in its proposals.

"Directors should remember that there is always a material prospect that public airing of the disagreement will affect the A.C.L.U. adversely in terms of public support and fund-raising," the proposals state.

Given the organization's longtime commitment to defending free speech, some former board members were shocked by the proposals.

HOW'D THEY LEARN ALL THAT STUFF WHILE WAITING IN THE WELFARE LINE? (via Matthew Cohen):

Illinois 12-Year-Old Wins 2006 National Geography Bee (AP, May 24, 2006)

Could you locate the Cambrian Mountains on a map? Twelve-year-old Bonny Jain could and his knowledge made him the winner Wednesday of the 2006 National Geographic Bee.

The eighth-grader from Moline, Ill. won a $25,000 college scholarship by correctly naming the mountains that extend across much of Wales, from the Irish Sea to the Bristol Channel. [...]

Although Bonny plans to celebrate his victory by having "a huge party," he also needs to prepare for his third appearance in the national spelling bee, which starts May 31.

He was joined by his father, Rohit Jain, his mother, Beena Jain, and his 5-year-old sister, Riya Jain. His teacher Kelly Mulcahy also accompanied him.

Neeraj Sirdeshmukh, 14, from Nashua, N.H., came in second. He won a $15,000 college scholarship. Third-place contestant, Yeshwanth Kandimalla, 13, of Marietta, Ga., won a $10,000 college scholarship. The other seven finalists won $500 each.

THE NATIVES ARE THE PROBLEM:

When Germans join migrant field hands, the harvest suffers (Andreas Tzortzis, 5/24/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

In Germany, the spring asparagus is harvested by migrant farmworkers. But the labor ministry has a new rule that says 10 percent of seasonal farmworkers should be German.

With only 170 German field hands in the state of Brandenburg so far, the experiment is off to a rocky start. And German farmers are angry, saying native-born pickers are only half as efficient as the Poles.

Unemployed Germans lack both practice and motivation, farmers here say.

IS CONSISTENCY IRONIC?:

For Neocons, the Irony of Iraq (Harold Meyerson, May 24, 2006, Washington Post)

In the beginning, neoconservatism was a movement of onetime liberals enraged at the wave of violence and disorder that overtook the cities in the 1960s. Riots convulsed urban America in that stormy decade, crime rates soared, student radicals seized campuses. How could anyone see all this, the first generation of neocons inquired, and still remain a liberal?

For it was all the liberals' fault. Wafted along by their vaporous good intentions, indifferent to any unintended consequences those intentions might engender, wrapped up in their dizzy notions of the perfectibility of humankind, the liberals (at least, as the neos caricatured them) crafted criminal codes devoid of punishment, welfare programs requiring no work. In the world the liberals made, civic order took a back seat to individual rights, and as order vanished, the urban middle class vanished with it, abandoning once-vibrant neighborhoods for the safety of the suburbs. A neoconservative, the movement's founding father, Irving Kristol, famously observed, was a liberal who'd been mugged by reality. While liberals dithered, neoconservatives argued first and foremost for more cops.

Fast-forward four decades and we've come full circle. The neocons have refocused their attention on foreign policy and, in championing the Iraq war, have come to embody everything they once mocked and despised in '60s liberals.

Bolsheviks in the cause of their vaporous intentions, so bent on ignoring reality that they dismissed and suppressed all intelligence that prophesied the bloody complexities of the post-Hussein landscape, they conjured from nowhere and guaranteed the world an idealized postwar Iraq.

The sharpest irony was their stunning indifference to the need for civic order.

CONDI'S GONNA BE BITTER:

Gov. Bush considered for commish (AP, 5/24/06)

Florida Gov. Jeb Bush said he was privately approached about his interest in becoming the NFL's next commissioner.

Bush said Tuesday the issue was discussed at a recent meeting with Patrick Rooney Sr., according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

SEPARATION IS A THREE WAY STREET:

F.B.I. Raid Divides G.O.P. Lawmakers and White House (CARL HULSE, 5/24/06, NY Times)

After years of quietly acceding to the Bush administration's assertions of executive power, the Republican-led Congress hit a limit this weekend.

Resentment boiled among senior Republicans for a second day on Tuesday after a team of warrant-bearing agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned up at a closed House office building on Saturday evening, demanded entry to the office of a lawmaker and spent the night going through his files.

The episode prompted cries of constitutional foul from Republicans — even though the lawmaker in question, Representative William J. Jefferson of Louisiana, is a Democrat whose involvement in a bribery case has made him an obvious partisan political target.

Speaker J. Dennis Hastert raised the issue personally with President Bush on Tuesday. The Senate Rules Committee is examining the episode.

TOPPER RETURNS:

Senate Advances Sweeping Immigration Bill (RACHEL L. SWARNS and JOHN HOLUSHA, 5/24/06, NY Times)

Chances that the Senate will pass a bill overhauling the immigration system increased sharply today when senators voted 73 to 25 to limit debate on the immigration bill and the number of amendments that can be offered.

The cloture vote makes it likely that final action on the bill, which would provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have been in the country for over five years, will take place this week, possibly on Thursday.

KNEW HIM? HE'S STILL GOT REAGAN'S FOOTPRINTS ON HIS BUTT:

Just got a great, though repeatedly self-contradictory, e-mail:

Richard A. Viguerie FOR RELEASE May 22, 2006

ConservativeHQ.com Contact Nancy Bakersmith

9625 Surveyor Court, Suite 400 (703) 392-7676, ext. 1144

Manassas, Virginia 20110 After business hours (703) 209-6190

Richard Viguerie Criticizes President Bush’s Betrayal of Conservatives; White House Responds; Viguerie Replies to the White House

The May 21 Washington Post published an article by Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and the author of the forthcoming book, Conservatives Betrayed: How Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause, criticizing President George W. Bush’s betrayal of conservatism.

The Washington Post article is on-line at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/19/AR2006051901770.html

Viguerie also participated in a May 22 Washington Post on-line discussion of his article at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/05/19/DI2006051901212.html

Peter Wehner, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives, sent the following e-mail message to an unknown number of persons:

Original Message-----
From: Wehner, Peter H. [mailto:Peter_H._Wehner@who.eop.gov]
Sent: Monday, May 22, 2006 11:54 AM
Subject: Richard Viguerie: Now & Then

Now

“Sixty-five months into Bush's presidency, conservatives feel betrayed... The main cause of conservatives' anger with Bush is this: He talked like a conservative to win our votes but never governed like a conservative.” -- Richard Viguerie, “Bush's Base Betrayal,” The Washington Post, Sunday, May 21, 2006

Then

“[Richard Viguerie], who also is a leading fund-raiser for conservative candidates, indicated he would not support Reagan in 1984, adding: ‘I'm very disillusioned with a president that walks away from the Soviet Union.’” -- “Conservative Leader Blasts Reagan on Plane Reaction,” Associated Press, September 8, 1983

“‘Just like Jimmy Carter gave conservatives the back of the hand, we see the same thing happening in the Reagan administration,’” said Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail wizard who is the leading fund-raiser for conservative candidates and causes. ‘Almost every conservative I have talked to in the last two months has been disappointed in the initial appointments to the Reagan cabinet,’ Viguerie said.”-- “Conservatives Angry with Reagan,” Associated Press, January 27, 1981

“‘The White House slapped us in the face,’ says Richard A. Viguerie, the conservative direct-mail expert. ‘The White House is saying you don't have a constituency we're concerned about. We don't care about you.’” -- “For Reagan and the New Right, the Honeymoon Is Over,” Washington Post, July 21, 1981

“[M]any longtime conservative activists are not buying Reagan's rhetoric. ‘The emperor has no clothes on; just about every conservative I know is now acknowledging it,’ said Viguerie.” -- “Reagan Seeks to Calm His Right-Wing Critics” Los Angeles Times, September 6, 1987

“In other important matters he [Reagan] has changed sides and he is now allied with his former adversaries, the liberals, the Democrats and the Soviets," said Viguerie.” -- “Conservatives Hit Reagan on Treaty,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1987

“Eight years after Reagan's nomination for president, the conservative movement is directionless” -- Richard Viguerie, “What Reagan Revolution?” The Washington Post, August 21, 1988

Richard A. Viguerie Replies to White House:

Apparently the White House’s response to my article in the May 21 Washington Post is to send out an e-mail from Peter H. Wehner, Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, consisting of six quotes by me criticizing Ronald Reagan during his presidency.

That’s a lot easier than trying to respond to my arguments. That’s a lot easier than trying to explain away the many examples I give of how Bush has betrayed the conservative movement. And that is standard operating procedure for this White House: Put the spotlight on the president’s critic, rather than respond to the critic’s arguments.

Peter, I plead guilty to your implied criticism of me. I am, indeed, a consistent conservative. I put loyalty to conservative principles above loyalty to the Republican Party or a politician.

Yes, I followed that policy even during the Reagan presidency. President Reagan was a hero to me and most conservatives. I voted for him in 1980 and 1984, and the conservative organizations that used my direct mail services helped elect him to the White House. But he was not perfect by any means, and his administration disappointed conservatives on a number of issues. Reagan’s true friends were those who would tell him when he was not governing as a conservative, such as the appointments of Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy to the Supreme Court, the tax increases of 1982 and 1983, and signing into law the amnesty of illegal aliens in 1986.

As I explain in my forthcoming book, Conservatives Betrayed,

* This is why conservatives must maintain their independence. Our job as conservatives is not to be mouthpieces for any administration, but to give credit where credit is due, and to give criticism where criticism is due.

* This is why the proper role for the conservative movement is to act as a Third Force in American politics, rather than a third party. Our constant goal is to return the Republican Party to conservative principles and to move the Democratic Party to the right as well.

* In the 1960s we conservatives learned how to nominate a conservative (Barry Goldwater) for the presidency. During the 1970s and in 1980, we conservatives learned how to nominate and elect a conservative (Ronald Reagan) as president. The remaining task for conservatives is to nominate and elect a president who will govern as a conservative.

One final word, Peter. I knew Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush is no Ronald Reagan. Bush’s presidency follows in the tradition of Big Government Democrats and Republicans like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, and George H. W. Bush. That is not a conservative line-up!

NOT NOW, BUDDY, AMERICAN IDOL IS ON

The Cold Wars are coming (Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times, May 24th, 2006)

Why does it suddenly seem so hard to stop Iran from going nuclear? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is behaving with such recklessness that it ought to be easy. In October, he called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". It is, he told cheering Indonesian students last week, a "tyrannical regime that one day will be destroyed." Simultaneously, Ahmadinejad has trumpeted Iran's "right" to pursue its nuclear ambitions, barely disguising his country's intention to move from energy into weaponry.

Yet the West -- what's left of it --seems paralyzed, watching Ahmadinejad with the same appalled fascination that a large and docile cow might regard a rearing cobra.

It is, of course, always dangerous to draw analogies with the 1930s. Too many bad decisions have been made over the years on the basis of facile parallels -- between Hitler and Nasser, between Hitler and Saddam Hussein. Still, in one respect, Ahmadinejad really has taken a leaf out of the Füührer's book. He has discovered the counterintuitive truth that it works to talk aggressively before you have acquired weapons of mass destruction.

The key is that weak opponents are unnerved when they fear they are dealing with a madman. In this respect, the long and nutty letter sent by Ahmadinejad to President Bush last week was exemplary, with its repeated references to "the prophet ... Jesus Christ (PBUH)" (Peace Be Upon Him).

Four years ago, George W. Bush would have trash-canned such drivel with a snort of "WBUH" (War Be Upon Him). But those days are gone. Bush is now almost as unpopular as Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter at the nadirs of their political fortunes. Not only is domestic support lacking for any preemptive action against Tehran, international support is close to nonexistent.

In short, it seems highly probable that nothing will be done this year, next year or the year after to stop Iran's nuclear program. Sure, maybe a miracle will happen and the Iranian people will get rid of the madman and the mullahs. But I'm not holding my breath.

Perhaps we can have a contest here. Complete the following sentence: “The world is going to stand by and watch Iran acquire nuclear weapons because...”

GOD COMMANDED THE TIME-ZONE RULE FOR A REASON:

Whining, Bitching and Moaning (Joerg Colberg, 5/24/06, Der Spiegel)

I have been living in the US for about seven years now, and if there's one thing I dread when I go home to visit Germany, it's the complaining. I had never realized how much Germans love to complain until I moved away.

The complaints range from the small, which are occasionally understandable, to the large, which tend never to make any real sense at all. If you go to Germany you will definitely be subjected to hours and hours of complaints, especially if you dare to disagree.

N.I.M.B.Y.

Statue no one wants will be unveiled anyway (Brian Hutchinson, National Post, May 23rd, 2006)

Isaac Romano, U.S.-born child therapist, dreamer, promoter and irrepressible peace impresario, stood on the grass outside Vancouver City Hall yesterday. It began to rain.

To his right, on a table, stood a sculpture: Three figures in wax and clay. A man and woman, about to be embraced by another, taller man. The woman is looking over her shoulder, anxiously, toward the viewer.

After two years of delays, missteps and "misunderstandings," announced Mr. Romano, the draft dodger statue that no one wanted will finally become a reality.

Too rich to be excerpted, this article captures nicely the pathetic absurdity of a greying generation trying desperately to keep living the putative glories of their youth.