IS THERE ANYTHING WE DON'T FORGIVE OUR ALLIES?

‘Breathtaking’ US sweetener on deal (K.P. NAYAR, 10/31/07, Telegraph)

President George W. Bush’s pointman for nuclear negotiations with Delhi has added a sweetener to the deal that the BJP may find difficult to turn down.

In a breathtaking departure, Nicholas Burns, the US under-secretary of state for political affairs, has held out the possibility that America may not end civilian nuclear cooperation with India even if Delhi tests another atomic bomb in the future.

“It would be up to the American President at that time,” Burns told National Public Radio (NPR) in an interview about the fate of the nuclear deal.

THE WoT'S ALMOST OVER, THE ANGLOSPHERE JUST HITTING ITS STRIDE:

'In long term, India matters more to US than Pakistan' (Rediff, October 31, 2007)

The United States has said that broad-based partnerships between America and India are critical and more important as compared to Pakistan, as New Delhi is growing as a potential power with global influence.

The US-India strategic potential is very, very profound," deputy assistant secretary of Defence for South and South East Asia James Clad told online journalists and bloggers during a conference call from the Pentagon.

While Pakistan continues to search for Osama bin Laden and help wage the global war on terrorism, Clad explained, the US-Indian relationship is more important in the long run.

"India simply must, as a long-term consideration, matter more for us than Pakistan," Clad has been quoted as saying in the American Forces Press Services.

THE DISHONOR OF THE ANTI-ANTI-COMMUNISTS:

Alexander Feklisov, Who Ran Red Atom Spies, Is Dead at 93 (RON RADOSH, October 31, 2007, NY Sun)

Alexander Feklisov, who died Friday at 93, was the spymaster who oversaw Julius Rosenberg and Klaus Fuchs as they stole secrets that helped the Soviet Union develop nuclear weapons during the Cold War. [...]

Decades later, in 1997, he went public with the full story. The reason, he made clear, was that he wanted Julius Rosenberg to be regarded as a hero for his valiant effort on behalf of the Soviet Union's great anti-fascist cause. Rosenberg, he wrote, was an "unreconstructed idealist," a "partisan" who "did not want to betray his Russian comrades."

In working for the Soviets, Feklisov wrote, Rosenberg "helped the USSR fight the Nazis" so he could "build a peaceful future for his children." He did not explain how Rosenberg, who enlisted as an agent during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was doing his service because of his opposition to fascism. He was a hero because Rosenberg "brought our common victory closer to becoming reality."

Feklisov's account provided missing links about the extent of the damage done by the Rosenberg spy network. He testified about the major successes. The most important piece of information that the Rosenberg gave the Soviets was an actual proximity fuse detonator. The fuse allows a shell to explode at a short distance from an airborne target, guaranteeing a direct hit. It also corrects the path of an explosive charge toward a plane, a precursor of missile homing devices. The Soviets used one to shoot down Major Francis Gary Powers's U–2 plane in 1960, thereby derailing the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit.

Other members of the ring, Joel Barr, Al Sarant and William Perl, provided equally important data such as the SCR584, a device that determines the speed and trajectory of V–2 rockets, that was part of some 600 pages of texts and drawing photographed by the ring members in one evening. Perl, a scientist working for NACA, the predecessor of NASA, gave Feklisov advanced aeronautical data about high-performance military jet aircraft. Through this material, the Soviets build the MIG fighter jets used against the Americans in the Korean War.

Feklisov also provided more information about Ethel Rosenberg's brother, David Greenglass, who had given Julius Rosenberg a sketch of the A-bomb that he had obtained working at Los Alamos during the war. He also provided evidence that co-defendant Morton Sobell was another spy who gave Feklisov major military data. Mr. Sobell has continued to deny that he spied.

IT'S NOT SCIENCE, IT'S MARKETING:

Medical Trials Ignore this Placebo Effect (Ben Harder, October 30, 2007, US News)

[I]f people who are taking the placebo know they are taking the placebo, then there may not be a placebo effect. And if people who are taking the real drug know they're not taking the placebo, they may get an extra psychosomatic boost—a sort of super-placebo effect—from the knowledge that doctors are expecting them to do better than the poor chumps getting the fake medicine. Either way, comparing the two groups at the end of the study could lead researchers to make over-optimistic conclusions about how well a drug works against an underlying physiological condition.

This might happen more often than medical investigators would like to think.

And because they rarely account for the possibility when they design studies, investigators would have no way of knowing which of their conclusions are fatally flawed.

Here's the paragraph (from page 12 of the Oct. 16 issue of Neurology Today, a publication mailed to members of the American Academy of Neurology) that prodded me to think harder about the subject:

"At six months, there was significant improvement in fatigue for the patients treated with antibiotics compared to the placebo. The study authors noted that enough patients receiving antibiotic treatment correctly guessed they were in that group to conclude that this finding might be due to 'unblinding' and a placebo effect."

Hmm. In other words, antibiotics may have produced no true, biological benefit in this trial (which was treating people who had a chronic condition known as post-Lyme syndrome) and only appeared to improve symptoms because patients figured out that they were getting real medicine and unknowingly fooled themselves into thinking they felt better. Sure enough, the medicated patients did no better than placebo-treated patients on two other study measures, including one that measured immunit-related molecules in cerebrospinal fluid.

What's interesting to me is that very few medical investigators do what the authors of this study did: ask their patients whether they think they're getting the real drug or the placebo. And even fewer do any sort of rigorous statistical analysis to rule out the possibility that patients who've figured out which group they're in either improve or don't, according to whether they "should" be improving. At the same time, I'm told, "blinded" investigators (those who during a trial aren't privy to which patients are getting placebo) often discuss their guesses with each other about which patients are getting placebo.

OF COURSE HE HASN'T QUIT...:

Giuliani Still Working at Firm He Promised to Leave (John Solomon, 10/30/07, Washington Post)

Ten months into his presidential bid, Rudolph W. Giuliani continues to work part time at the security consulting firm he promised to leave this past spring to focus on his pursuit of the Republican nomination.

Giuliani's continuing involvement with a firm catering to corporate clients makes him unique among Republican contenders. It also complicates the task of separating his firm's assets from his campaign spending.

RWR MAY BE GONE, BUT HIS GOOD WORKS REMAIN:

The Long Boom: An Amazing Economic Expansion Turns 25 (James Pethokoukis, October 31, 2007, US News)

If the toxic cocktail of a mortgage meltdown, a credit crunch, and surging oil prices should sicken the American economy enough to cause a recession—an actual shrinkage of our gross domestic product—it would be a pretty uncommon experience for many Americans. Over the past 25 years, the United States has enjoyed a marvelous stretch of almost uninterrupted economic growth.

In fact, November marks a wonderful double anniversary. The current six-year economic expansion dates from November of 2001, while the long economic boom dates from November 1982. (Both dates come from the National Bureau of Economic Research, which defines a recession as a "significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.")

Consider this: Since 1982, according to the NBER, the economy has suffered two recessions—in 1990-91 and in 2001—for a total of 16 months. By contrast, in the previous 25 years, the economy suffered six economic downturns for a painful total of 67 months. Even worse, the 1973-75 and 1981-82 recessions were two of the nastiest of the 20th century. Is it any wonder that the stock market basically went nowhere from 1966 to 1982, with such big hurdles to overcome? The Dow Jones industrial average hovered right around 1000 for more than a decade and a half. But since August 1982, when it bottomed at 776, the Dow has risen almost 1,700 percent. That ascent reflects an economy that has nearly tripled from $5.2 trillion in 1982, adjusted for inflation, to $13.9 trillion today.

THE FEAR YOU MIGHT ACTUALLY HAVE TO GOVERN THE PLACE DOES FUNNY THINGS:

Howard opponent in green disarray (BBC, 10/31/07)

Kevin Rudd says he will not ratify an agreement that does not include China and India, apparently contradicting his party's environment spokesman. [...]

Mr Rudd has promised to sign Kyoto if he wins November's election.

The government's refusal to do so has been deeply unpopular and a damaging issue for Mr Howard in the election campaign.

SPENCERIANS, NOT DARWNISTS:

The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008 (World Economic Forum)

The United States tops the overall ranking in The Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008. Switzerland is in second position followed by Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Singapore, respectively.

The rankings are calculated from both publicly available data and the Executive Opinion Survey, a comprehensive annual survey conducted by the World Economic Forum together with its network of Partner Institutes (leading research institutes and business organizations) in the countries covered by the Report. This year, over 11,000 business leaders were polled in a record 131 countries.

Rudy of the Good Book?: Neocon war problem. (David Klinghoffer, 10/31/07, National Review)

Who’s right? The Jewish “neoconservatives,” who make up more than half of Giuliani’s foreign-policy advisory team (Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and David Frum)? Or Christians, like Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who would not rule out supporting a third party candidate if Giuliani gets the nomination?

To adjudicate the dispute, I propose an appeal to the part of the Bible on whose authority Jews (like myself) and Christians agree: namely, the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew prophets have a political vision and it is not neoconservative. No one should know this better than the venerable neoconservative elder statesman, Norman Podhoretz.

Some neoconservatives who support Giuliani do so in spite of their clearly pro-life views on abortion. But they must feel that his position on “Islamofascism” (as Podhoretz in his current book calls the threat of Islamic radicalism) outweighs any opposition over classic culture war questions. The neocons, in other words, emphasize foreign over domestic policy.

Not so for a substantial portion of the Christian conservatives who gathered at the Family Research Council’s Values Voter Summit, in Washington, D.C. this month. They emphasize the suite of pre-9/11 culture war issues, abortion above all. Whatever else there may be to say in favor of Giuliani’s willingness to take the anti-terror offensive to Iran’s doorstep, these Christian conservatives would emphasize the domestic over the foreign.

To judge from his excellent 2002 book The Prophets, Podhoretz takes the Bible deeply to heart. A radio host who’s also Jewish told me that after a warm and stimulating broadcast interview with Podhoretz, the older man spontaneously blessed him with the ancient Hebrew priestly blessing, given by Jewish parents to their children on the Sabbath eve (Numbers 6:23-27). When I heard that story, I got choked up.

It’s relevant to ask, then, if Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel would shelve moral questions like abortion, in order to pursue an aggressive defense against Islamic enemies.

WITHOUT THAT MORTGAGE PAYMENT THEY JUST HAVE MORE CASH IN POCKET:

U.S. Economy Grows at Faster Than Expected Rate (Howard Schneider, October 31, 2007, Washington Post)

U.S. economic growth accelerated between July and September as increases in exports and consumer spending overcame the continuing downturn in real estate and turmoil in the mortgage industry.

The economy grew at a 3.9 percent annual rate during those three months, the fastest pace since early 2006 and a surprise to analysts who had predicted that a sluggish housing market would take a larger toll on growth.

BECAUSE WHO EVER TIRES OF REFIGHTING WWII?:

REVIEW: of The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality (2000) by Richard J. Overy (BrothersJudd.com, 7/17/04)

The myth of the Battle of Britain goes something like this: in the Summer of 1940, Hitler having rolled over the rest of Western Europe, the British though undermanned and outgunned unified in unprecedented fashion and overcame staggering odds to fend off a German air campaign which had it been successful would surely have been followed by an unstoppable invasion. In this very short but sufficiently thorough book, Richard Overy pretty much demolishes each facet of this myth, but notes that the reality that remains was still important, maybe even decisive to the outcome of the war.

It may be easiest to see the shortcomings of the mythic version by going backwards. To begin with, Hitler seems to have been quite cautious, even reticent, about the prospect of actually invading Britain. His various services--Navy, Army, etc.--were dubious about the chances of succeeding and no one appears to have thought it even worth considering the attempt unless the airwar rendered the British air force completely ineffective. The collective reluctance makes good sense considering that even if the air campaign had succeeded the Brits still had a superior navy and would have been defending their home soil with a not inconsiderable army. Think of it this way: folks continually portray D-Day as a moment of high drama, which could have gone either way. But by then it was the combined forces of Britain and America, attacking occupied territory with a potentially co-operative populace, defended by a Germany that was taking a beating in the USSR, and so on and so forth. The odds against a German version of D-Day would have had to have been astronomically higher, if not prohibitive.

Meanwhile, it's all a moot point because there was never much likelihood of the Nazis winning the air war. Britain was more than a match in both men and material. It had innovative technology like radar. The Germans had to fly to Britain just to begin the fight, while the Brits were right there waiting for them. Everything favored the British.

Lastly though, the nation wasn't particularly unified, with many folks more than willing to consider a negotiated peace. To some considerable extent this was a function of the very mythmaking involved in the Battle. Had people understood how slim Germany's chances were of ever invading and holding the British isles morale probably would have been better. But as Mr. Overy says, the Germans genuinely did underestimate British strength while the Brits truly did overestimate the Germans. In these circumstances people were understandably worried.

Ultimately, the myth mattered because American opinion shifted behind Britain as the tiny underdog courageously fought the mighty Nazi war machine. Bombing of civilians--though carried out by both sides and not, at that point in the war, designed to terrorize the citizenry--won Britain further sympathy, not least because American radio networks were there reporting on it. And, of course, even when you have the advantage in warfare it's still possible to botch it. The Brits didn't. The Battle of Britain should be a source of pride, even if it wasn't as perilous as the myth requires. Mr. Overy makes the case for all this in a straightforward, nonpolemical, and eminently readable fashion.

IN THE HOUSES WHERE YOU LIVE:

Democrats Must Turn Right to Win: Both John Edwards and Barack Obama want to move the Democrats to the left. But that's a sure way to lose the election. Many voters may live their lives on the left, but their hopes and dreams are well to the right. (Gabor Steingart, 10/31/07, Der Spiegel)

Voters happen to be harder to reach than most people think, and that's because they all live in two different places at the same time.

Their first place of residence is real life. There are no mysteries here: the unemployed person is unemployed, a student is a student, the blue-collar worker wears a blue collar, and the businessman is a businessman. This is the realm where the politician knows exactly how much his potential voters make and how much they spend. For the politician, the lives of voters in this first world are like an open book.

Behind the door of the second place of residence, on the other hand, is an inaccessible place built of hopes and dreams. This is where we enter the realm of the possible, and this is where everyone is what he wants to be. In this second world, people dream of a better education and of climbing the social ladder, of more money and greater happiness. It's a place where opportunities outnumber duties.

This second world is the perfect place for a politician to meet up with his voters. It's the only place where he can deliver his most important commodity -- the promise of a better life -- to the men and women of the electorate. It is here that people are actually waiting for someone to finally show up with a slice of a better future.

But, as it happens, we know a lot less about this second world where voters live. One thing, though, is clear: This second world may not be terribly far from the first but, in political terms, it can be found to the right of it. The unemployed person wants to be a worker again; the worker dreams of being promoted to foreman; the foreman wants a better-paying office job; and the white-collar workers wonders whether he wouldn't be happier as an executive.

This is why voters aren't just interested in their own tax bracket but also in the tax brackets of those richer than them. This is why higher estate taxes are so unpopular not because they actually affect the voter, but because they could affect the voter. The voter doesn't want to see the person he aspires to be punished or treated poorly. What it comes down to is that most voters live their lives on the left side of the political spectrum, while their dreams lie to the right of their reality.

In short, elections are not won at the center, as is so often claimed, but slightly to the right of center. In Germany, the conservatives have won 10 of the 16 parliamentary elections in the country's postwar history. In the United States, the Republicans have won seven of the last 10 presidential elections. In the US, the Republicans are simply better at promising a brighter future, as former President Ronald Reagan showed with his simplest of pledges: "It's morning in America."

What the Democrats and their presidential candidates are saying about their country these days has little to do with optimism and visions of the future. Some of their favorite words are: poverty, inequality, health insurance and tax increases. The old battle within the left is back, and it's being fought on three issues: Who does more for the military? John Edwards says: Edwards. Who has the better concept for expanding social welfare? Barack Obama says: Obama. Who has the guts to more heavily tax the rich and the super-rich? Both of them say: I do.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN:

Pumpkin gingerbread (Lisa Yockelson, October 31, 2007, Boston Globe)

CAKE

Butter (for the pan)
Flour (for the pan)
3 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt, preferably fine sea salt
1 tablespoon ground ginger
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 1/4 cups coarsely chopped pecans, lightly toasted and cooled
3/4 cup chopped crystallized ginger
1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups granulated sugar
3/4 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
4 eggs
2 tablespoons unsulphured molasses
1 1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 can (15 ounces) plain, solid-pack 100 percent pumpkin

1. Set the oven at 350 degrees. Have on hand a 10-inch tube pan. Brush it with butter. Line the bottom with a circle of waxed paper cut to fit it and butter the paper. Dust the pan with flour, tapping out the excess. Set aside.

2. In a bowl, sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice.

3. In a small bowl, toss the pecans and ginger with 1 tablespoon of the flour mixture.

4. In an electric mixer, cream the unsalted butter on medium-high speed for 3 minutes. Reduce the speed to medium and beat in the granulated sugar in 2 additions, beating for 1 minute after each addition. Add the light brown sugar and beat for 1 minute more. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Blend in the molasses and vanilla.

5. With the mixer set on low speed, blend in the pumpkin until combined. The mixture will look slightly curdled at this point. That's OK.

6. On low speed, add the flour mixture in 3 additions. Scrape down the bowl often with a rubber spatula. Remove the bowl from the mixer stand. With a large spoon, stir in the pecan mixture. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan. Smooth the top with a rubber spatula.

7. Bake the cake for 1 hour, or until set and a toothpick inserted into the center is clean or has a few moist crumbs attached when withdrawn. The cake will pull away slightly from the sides of the pan.

8. Set the cake on a rack to cool for 15 minutes. Place a cooling rack on top, carefully invert the cake, lift away the pan, discard the waxed paper, then invert the cake to sit right side up on the rack. Leave to cool completely. The cake may be made a day in advance up to this point. Store in an airtight keeper.

TOPPING

1/2 cup confectioners' sugar
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger

1. In a small bowl, whisk the confectioners' sugar and ginger.

2. Sift the sugar mixture through a small strainer onto the cake. Use a serrated knife to cut the cake into slices.

IS TOO MANY JEWISH ISRAELIS REALLY THE PROBLEM?:

Israel mulls citizenship changes (BBC, 10/31/07)

Israel's interior minister has called for reforming the law that grants Jews around the world Israeli citizenship.

Meir Sheetrit said citizenship should be earned by a strong commitment to Israel and not granted automatically.

He was addressing the governors of the Jewish Agency, which is responsible for promoting Jewish immigration to Israel.

He said funds should go towards helping deprived immigrant communities already in Israel rather absorbing more "lost tribes" living in Africa and Asia.

FREE TASTES GOOD:

Ellsbury scores with fans at 'Steal a Taco' promotion (Diedtra Henderson, October 31, 2007, Boston Globe)

Forget those pitchers who came at Red Sox fielder Jacoby Ellsbury with inside heat.

Yesterday, fervent fans came at him with even more: hats, T-shirts, posters, and even taco-stained wrappers and disposable cups. [...]

Inside the restaurant on the campus of Boston University, Ellsbury gave high fives on his way to the counter to order a free taco that he slathered with "fire" sauce. The fast-food crew of eight workers, who had dispensed 500 free tacos in the first hour of the three-hour promotion, paused to snag autographs and photos with Ellsbury.

As he munched on his taco, women crowded inside the restaurant swooned.

AND PEOPLE THINK YOU NEED A NAVY TO FIGHT THESE CLOWNS?:

North Korean Crew Overpowers Hijackers Off Somali Coast (Nick Wadhams, 30 October 2007, VOA News)

Gunmen who seized a North Korean ship late Monday off the coast of Somalia were overpowered by the crew hours later. As Nick Wadhams reports from Nairobi, the hijacking was the latest incident in what has become an increasingly lucrative business for pirates prowling the waters of the lawless country.

The East African Seafarers' Assistance Program says the hijackers seized the vessel late Monday with two dozen sailors aboard. It said the crew managed to overpower its attackers Tuesday.

Comments

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OFFEND THIS:

Senior US Democratic lawmaker offends Dutch counterparts with historical remarks (The Associated Press, October 27, 2007)

Dutch lawmakers who visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison this week said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat.

The lawmakers said that Tom Lantos, chairman of the House of Representatives' Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that "Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay."

IF DEMOCRAT HOPES THAT THIS IS ANOTHER VIETNAM ARE TO BE REALIZED...:

U.S. troop losses plunge in Iraq: Combat fatalities could be as low as 23 for October, a level not seen since 2006. Iraqi losses also fall. (Gordon Lubold, October 31, 2007, The Christian Science Monitor)

US troop losses in Iraq have plummeted in the past few months to levels not seen since early 2006 – an encouraging sign, say analysts and defense officials, that the US strategy is working, at least for now.

American defense officials cite recent weapons finds, disruption of bombmaking cells, and the 2007 "surge" of US forces as contributing to a dramatic improvement in security in many parts of Iraq, cutting casualties among both Iraqi civilians and US troops.

MR. RUDD, MEET YOUTUBE:

John Howard back in Australian election fight (Nick Squires, 31/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

John Howard, the Australian prime minister, is in his best position to win next month's general election since his younger opponent, Kevin Rudd, was elected leader of the Labour Party last December, a poll showed yesterday. [...]

The opposition Labour Party's 16-point lead over the coalition government was down to eight points after its support fell four to 54 per cent. The government is up four to 46 per cent, according to the Newspoll survey.

CROAK, CROAK:

Half full? Half empty? French see nothing in the glass at all (Adam Sage, 10/31/07, Times Online)

The French – descendants of the Gauls, who thought the sky would fall on their heads – are among the most gloomy, distrustful and pessimistic people in Europe, according to an official study.

They may live in le beau pays, home to stunning scenery, historic architecture and some of the finest gastronomy invented by mankind but they foresee catastrophe at every turn.

The study of national moods across Europe, commissioned by François Fillon, the French Prime Minister, illustrates the dark – and largely irrational – side of the Gallic soul. [...]

The gulf between the hard facts and the subjective vision of the French was highlighted by the United Nations Development Index, which rates countries on the basis of literacy, life expectancy, education and standard of living. This placed France above the EU average and fractionally ahead of Britain.

But when asked in a second survey to evaluate their standard of living, only 16 per cent of the French said that they were very satisfied – the lowest of any Western European country. The figure in Britain was 40 per cent. [...]

“The French are most fearful and complain the most although the country is not doing too badly,” said Julien Damon, head of the department of social affairs at the Centre for Strategic Analysis. [...]

Mr Damon said that this was compounded by the disappearance of the old French social model “founded in 1945 on the basis of full employment and a family cell where monsieur works and madame stays at home to look after the children”.

Worse, the high taxes and generous benefits that accompanied this model had proved to be a disadvantage in today’s economy, he added.

On the positive side, it is fun watching the political debate over this question match the French themselves against Paul Krugman and the folks who brought you glowing articles about the 1930s Soviet Union.

CONSUMING THE SUPERIOR CULTURE:

Illegal Alien Foe Tancredo Says 'Pass The Tacos' (Christie Findlay, Oct 30, 2007, Campaigns and Elections)

Illegal immigrants may be the reason Rep. Tom Tancredo is running for president, but there’s one place he always runs during campaign breaks: Mexican restaurants. [...]

Tancredo, who just announced he won’t seek a sixth term in Congress, is known for a finely-honed sense of irony about his one-issue candidacy.

When his Iowa chairman, full-time farmer Bill Salier, recently mentioned he needed help with the harvest, Tancredo quickly offered a suggestion.

“He told me, ‘You should go to Des Moines and get some illegals,’” Salier said, laughing. “He knew how funny that was.”

WE'RE LOVING THE LITTLE STEINBRENNERS:

M. Cabrera to Yankees? It's possible (CLARK SPENCER, 10/30/07, MiamiHerald.com)

The vacancy at third base for the New York Yankees could pave the path for trade discussions with the Marlins involving third baseman Miguel Cabrera, who is gradually pricing himself out of Florida's moderate budget. [...]

If the Marlins trade Cabrera, the asking price will be steep. They would almost certainly demand top, young prospects in return for an All-Star hitter on a Hall of Fame career trajectory. One possible trade piece could be Melky Cabrera, the Yankees 23-year-old center fielder.

But the Marlins would likely want pitching help thrown into any trade involving Miguel Cabrera, who has averaged 31 home runs, 116 RBI and a .327 batting average over the past three seasons.

IT'S NOT EXACTLY A NEWSFLASH THAT NEWSFLASHES CAN'T BE TRUSTED:

Until proven innocent (Thomas Sowell, 10/11/07, Creators Syndicate)

Some of the most depressing e-mails received over the past year and a half have been those that asked why I was worrying myself about three rich white guys at Duke University.

Neither those three students accused of rape nor the District Attorney who accused them are the ultimate issue.

Such levels of corruption in the law itself would make the American standard of living impossible. A steady diet of the racial polarization that Nifong promoted would make it only a matter of time before we would see in America the kind of violence seen between Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad. [...]

"Until Proven Innocent" is the title of a devastating new book by Stuart Taylor and K.C. Johnson about the rape charges against the Duke lacrosse players -- and about so many in the media and academia who treated them as guilty until they were proven innocent.

Even those of us who followed the case from the beginning will learn a lot more about what went on, both on the surface and behind the scenes, from this outstanding book.

More important, we will learn some chilling facts about how deep the moral dry rot goes in some of the fundamental institutions of this nation that we depend on, including its leading universities and its leading media.

I recently read the book and it is terrific. It is not only a genuine pageturner but also a probing dissection of the rush-to-judgment mentality from the early days of the case, and it asks questions that challenge conventional thinking of both left and right alike. Also, if you know someone who enjoys watching the press and academia get righteously roasted for their misdeeds, this book would make an awesome Christmas present.

EXCITED, OR DRUNK?:

Owner true blue for purple (Jim Armstrong, 10/29/07, The Denver Post)

No one was more excited about the Rockies' magical run than their owner, Charlie Monfort. In fact, maybe he got a little too excited.

Monfort insisted after Game 4 of the World Series that the Rockies are a better team than the Boston Red Sox, a team that outscored them 29-10 in a four-game Series sweep.

"These guys did amazing things," Monfort said. "I think this team is a better team than Boston. It would have been nice to have another two, three, four days. We'll wake up tomorrow and go, 'There's no baseball game to go to,' but what a deal they did. It's an amazing thing they accomplished just to get here."

They were amazing, all right. But better than the Red Sox?

"I think so," said Monfort. "How did we win 21 out of 22? We got the breaks. And I think they got the breaks. Are they a better team? I don't think so. You give us 10 games against them, we'll beat them six."

COMPARATIVELY, PAT SCHROEDER WAS IN THE LAND OF THE GIANTS:

Obama Hangs Hat On Social Security (John P. Gregg, 10/30/07, Valley News)

As part of his ramped-up effort to highlight his differences with Hillary Clinton, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama yesterday faulted the Democratic front-runner for dodging specifics about how she would address the long-term solvency of the Social Security system.

“It's important that we have a serious conversation and people put their ideas on the table so that voters know how we're going to move forward,” Obama said in a phone interview with the Valley News. “In the last debate, she specifically avoided providing any suggestions in terms of how she would approach the problem. I think that is what we have seen out of Washington for a lot of years now, a refusal to have a serious conversation about what is needed.

“We're not going to solve the big problems that we face in this country, whether it's Social Security or global warming or how we're approaching energy policy, unless we have a frank conversation with the American people,” he added.

At a Dartmouth College debate last month, several Democrats, including Obama, voiced support for raising the cap on income subject to Social Security taxes beyond the current $97,500 to bring more revenue into the Social Security trust fund. [...]

Obama yesterday expanded on his answer at Dartmouth, saying he might exempt some income over $97,500 from the Social Security payroll tax so as not to harm middle-class households, a plan similar to one voiced by Democratic rival John Edwards.

Asked by how much he would raise the cap, Obama said, “I think a lot of that depends on what the actuaries for the Social Security Trust Fund indicate is necessary. One of the things I think is worth exploring is having a gap in the cap, so that it may be you don't raise the cap for those dollars immediately after $97,500, but you start applying the payroll tax after, say, $250,000.”

While Obama was pressing Clinton to be more specific, he also sidestepped one key issue -- whether he believes upper-income workers who might see more of their income subject to Social Security taxes should, in turn, get that money back in increased benefits once they retire.

DIDN'T REQUIRE SKILL, JUST THE CHANNEL:

Our Battle of Britain heroes couldn't shoot straight, claims historian (MATTHEW HICKLEY, 30th October 2007, Daily Mail)

Their skill and bravery in winning the Battle of Britain is legendary.

But many of the RAF's Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were actually so short on training they were unable to shoot straight, a historian has claimed.

Dr Anthony Cumming, writing in the latest edition of BBC History Magazine, says the pilots' role in the nation's "finest hour" was a myth deliberately built up by the Air Ministry to help its own battle for more resources.

SO DEMOCRATS HAVE DECIDED TO DEFEND IRANIAN NUKES FROM THE AMERICAN PEOPLE?:

Zogby: Majority Favor Strikes on Iran (Newsmax, October 29, 2007)

A majority of likely voters - 52 percent - would support a U.S. military strike to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, and 53 percent believe it is likely that the U.S. will be involved in a military strike against Iran before the next presidential election, a new Zogby America telephone poll shows.

ANOTHER GREAT BATCH:

Harper Lee honoured by George W Bush (Iain Gray, 30/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

George W Bush has announced that Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, is to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour that can be bestowed upon a civilian.

The medal, established in 1963, is awarded for an "especially meritorious contribution" to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, or for their accomplishments in the areas of culture or "other significant public or private endeavours." [...]

Other recipients of this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom are:

Oscar Elias Biscet: Cuban anti-abortion and pro-democracy activist

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf: President of Liberia

Gary Becker: Nobel Prize-winning economist

Francis Collins: Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute

Benjamin Hooks: Civil rights leader

Henry Hyde: former House Foreign Affairs committee chairman

Brian Lamb: Visionary television executive

EXCEPT THE CONSTITUTION FORBIDS CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT:

‘Monster’ Spending Bills (Susan Davis, 10/30/07, Wall Street Journal: Washington Wire)

There is an advocacy group for pretty much everything in Washington, and Readthebill.org is no exception. The group’s singular mission is to advocate that members of Congress read the annual spending bills before they pass them into law. In particular, Readthebill.org is targeting the now common practice of rolling the bills into massive “omnibus” spending measures, in a 50-page report being released this morning entitled “Monsters in Congress: How Republicans and Democrats allowed 13 inherently unreadable omnibus appropriations bills to devour deliberative democracy.”

The group states that they aren’t advocating on the substance of the spending bills, but that those 13 bills were so massive, and brought to the floor for passage with so little time for consideration, that they make for bad process.

WHAT MAKES THE REVELATION FASCINATING IS HER HOMOPHOBIA:

Is Dumbledore Gay? Depends on Definitions of ‘Is’ and ‘Gay’ (EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, October 29, 2007, NY Times)

[I]t is possible that Ms. Rowling may be mistaken about her own character. She may have invented Hogwarts and all the wizards within it, she may have created the most influential fantasy books since J. R. R. Tolkien, and she may have woven her spell over thousands of pages and seven novels, but there seems to be no compelling reason within the books for her after-the-fact assertion. Of course it would not be inconsistent for Dumbledore to be gay, but the books’ accounts certainly don’t make it necessary. The question is distracting, which is why it never really emerges in the books themselves. Ms. Rowling may think of Dumbledore as gay, but there is no reason why anyone else should.

Yes, of course, Dumbledore acknowledges that at the bleakest moment of his life, when he was still a teenager and feeling “trapped and wasted,” the appearance of a charismatic friend “inflamed me” and lured him into fantastical dreams of power and influence. “Two clever, arrogant boys with a shared obsession,” he recalls, resulted in “two months of insanity.” But his regrets lasted a lifetime.

What was that insanity? If it was primarily a matter of sexual attraction or sexual identity, it makes Dumbledore’s reaction less plausible. He felt there were profound betrayals latent in his behavior and his ideas during that period: He resented his troubled siblings; he took on an inflated idea of his own importance; he thought wizards superior to Muggles. These attitudes had tragic consequences that ultimately transformed his views of virtue and power and altered his ambitions. Gayness is irrelevant.

As for his later celibacy, it has the echo of a larger renunciation and a greater devotion. That is, after all, what the fantasy genre is all about. The master wizard is not a sexual being; he has shelved personal cares and embraced a higher mission. And if he indulges in sex, it marks his downfall, as it did, so legend tells us, with Merlin, the tradition’s first wizard, who is seduced by one of the Lady of the Lake’s minions.

As for authors not understanding or controlling their own characters, in what was basically the first novel, Don Quixote, the first novelist, Cervantes, had to watch as the reading public turned the Don into someone quite different than he intended even as he was writing, so that the conclusion ofd the story undercuts the entire satirical intent:

Ah, sir, may God forgive you for the damage you've done to the whole rest of the world, in trying to cure the wittiest lunatic ever seen! Don't you see, my dear sir, that whatever utility there might be in curing him, it could never match the pleasure he gives with his madness? But I suspect that, despite all your cleverness, sir, you cannot possibly cure a man so far gone in madness, and, if charity did not restrain me, I would say that Don Quijote ought never to be rendered sane, because if he were he would lose, not only his witticisms, but those of Sancho Panza, his squire, any one of which has the power to turn melancholy into happiness.

WHAT DID DEREK JETER EVER DO FOR YOU?:

Taco Bell gives away free tacos on Tuesday (Seattle PI, 10/30/07)

In case you're on the prowl for some free food today, Taco Bell is the place. Thanks to Jacoby Ellsbury's stolen base during the World Series last week, Taco Bell's "Steal a Base, Steal a Taco" promotion takes place Tuesday between 2 and 5 p.m. at participating restaurants.

All you have to do is show up at a Taco Bell and ask for your free Crunchy Seasoned Beef Taco.

PUTTING THE CART BEFORE THE HORSE:

Tories open 8-point lead after election blunder (Andrew Grice, 30 October 2007, Independent)

The Conservatives have opened an eight-point lead over Labour following Gordon Brown's decision to call off a general election, according to the latest monthly poll for The Independent.

The ComRes survey shows a remarkable turnaround since last month, when Labour enjoyed a three-point lead on the eve of the party conference season. Now the Tories are on 41 per cent (up seven percentage points since last month), Labour on 33 per cent (down four points), the Liberal Democrats on 16 per cent (up one point) and others on 10 per cent (down four points).

If repeated at a general election, the figures would give David Cameron an overall majority of two seats.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the paper they acknowledge what's actually causing the fall, EU treaty is a constitution, says Giscard d'Estaing (Ben Russell, 30 October 2007, Independent)

Gordon Brown faces a renewed row over Europe after a declaration by the former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing that key parts of the European constitution remain "practically unchanged" in the new EU Reform Treaty.

Conservatives repeated their call for a referendum on the treaty after M. Giscard d'Estaing, one of the architects of the EU constitution that floundered after referendums in France and the Netherlands, said that the central proposals of the rejected document had been retained in the new treaty, agreed earlier this month by European leaders meeting in Lisbon. Writing in The Independent, M. Giscard D'Estaing said: "The proposed institutional reforms, the only ones which mattered to the drafting convention, are all to be found in the Treaty of Lisbon. They have merely been ordered differently and split up between previous treaties."

MORE:
The national indifference: England and Scotland are becoming foreign lands - thanks chiefly to ignorance on the south (Julian Glover, October 30, 2007, The Guardian)

Let me take you on a journey to a foreign land, though it shares a Queen and a prime minister. It is not far from home, if you come from England, and offers none of the immediate telltales of international travel, no ostentatious signs of difference. This land has red Royal Mail vans and Ordnance Survey maps. BBC Radio 2 brings Terry Wogan. Cars measure their speed in miles per hour and beer comes in pints.

But this land - which is Scotland - is becoming foreign to England. The three centuries-old union still stands strong in its institutions, but the joint cultural understanding that made the UK something more than a political arrangement is falling away. Two nations now talk of different things, discuss different people, and fear different threats.

Some of this pulling apart is political, and has to do with devolution. To talk politics in Scotland is for the ignorant English visitor to enter a conversation as remote as the Australian election - half-familiar, but distant. The common points of reference - people, parties, characters - that fuel English understanding of Westminster are absent.

AND THE BITTEREST IRONY IS...:

Palestinian census carries sobering subtext for Israelis: An expected spike in population could loom large in future negotiations with Israel. (Joshua Mitnick, 10/30/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

In the decade since the inaugural Palestinian census of West Bank and Gaza residents, the politics of numbers has inspired support among Israelis to withdraw from most of the Palestinian territories. But since that last census, the trepidation among Israeli Jews to return the country to its narrow borders prior to the 1967 Six Day War has been trumped by fears of a "demographic problem": Israelis may one day wake up to find themselves a minority in control of a Palestinian Arab majority. [...]

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) counted 2.6 million West Bankers and Gazans in 1997. Mr. Della Pergola expects the number to have grown to about 3.4 million. And even though Israel's population is 7.1 million, approximately one-fifth are Arab citizens and residents who identify as Palestinians. With a fertility rate that outstrips Jewish Israelis, Palestinians are expected to draw even in the not so distant future.

WELCOME TO SURGESTAN:

Key tribal leader on verge of deserting Taliban (Tom Coghlan, 29/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

An Afghan tribal leader is in talks to defect from the Taliban and take thousands of armed tribesmen with him to fight alongside British forces in southern Afghanistan.

The Daily Telegraph has learned that the Afghan government hopes to seal the deal this week with Mullah Abdul Salaam and his Alizai tribe, which has been fighting alongside the Taliban in Helmand province.

Diplomats confirmed yesterday that Mullah Salaam was expected to change sides within days. He is a former Taliban corps commander and governor of Herat province under the government that fell in 2001.

Military sources said British forces in the province are "observing with interest" the potential deal in north Helmand, which echoes the efforts of US commanders in Iraq's western province to split Sunni tribal leaders from their al-Qa'eda allies.

THE INTERESTING THING ISN'T THAT THE SMALL ONES ARE MOST FREE OF PATHOLOGIES...:

The Globalization Index 2007: The world may not be flat for everyone, everywhere, but there's no turning back the clock on globalization. For the seventh year, FOREIGN POLICY partners with A.T. Kearney to measure countries on their economic, personal, technological, and political integration. Find out who's climbing the ranks, and who's sliding down. (AT Kearney, November/December 2007, Foreign Policy)

For the fourth time in seven years, Singapore tops the list as the most globalized country in the world. But there was plenty of movement in the rest of the top 20. Many of the countries that previously ranked high fell off because of stiff competition from newcomers to the index. The top new addition was Hong Kong, which debuted in second place and distinguished itself with the highest scores in both the economic and the personal contact dimensions. The Netherlands made its way back into the top three for the first time since 2001, mostly due to the merger of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company and Britain’s Shell Transport and Trading Company. Worth about $100 billion, the deal helped to increase foreign direct investment outflows for the Netherlands by more than 590 percent over the previous year. Meanwhile, the United States slipped four places in the overall rankings to end up at seventh. Although U.S. trade grew by 12 percent, foreign investment shrank by more than 60 percent, mostly due to the effects of the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act, which granted tax incentives for hiring domestically. Clearly, the forces of globalization can turn on a dime.

If there is one big factor that many of the most globalized countries have in common, it's their size: They're tiny. Eight of the index's top 10 countries have land areas smaller than the U.S. state of Indiana; and seven have fewer than 8 million citizens. Canada and the United States are the only large countries that consistently rank in the top 10.

So, why do small countries rank so high? Because, when you're a flyweight, globalizing is a matter of necessity. Countries such as Singapore and the Netherlands lack natural resources. Countries like Denmark and Ireland can't rely on their limited domestic markets the way the United States can. To be globally competitive, these countries have no choice but to open up and attract trade and foreign investment--even if they're famously aloof Switzerland.

Indeed, economic integration is where these top-performing, tiny countries flex their muscle. All eight rank in the top 11 on the economic dimension of globalization, which incorporates trade and foreign direct investment. Hong Kong and Singapore, the top two performers in this category, leave other economies in the dust. Additionally, the World Bank placed all the high-ranking, small countries except Jordan in the top 25 out of 175 economies in ease of doing business. Jordan, though, ranks first on the index's measure of political engagement, due to its participation in treaties and U.N. peacekeeping missions.

And if you're living in a small country, reaching out beyond your country's borders may be the only way to find new opportunities. Not surprisingly, six of this year's tiny globalizers also ranked in the top 10 on the personal dimension of globalization, which measures international phone calls, travel, and remittances. People in small countries boosted their countries' rankings by chatting it up on the phone, or in the case of Jordan, by sending large sums of money home. It all goes to show that mini can be mighty.

IF YOU PACIFY WAZIRISTAN... (via Luciferous):

Pakistan plans all-out war on militants (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 10/19/07, Asia Times)

An all-out battle for control of Pakistan's restive North and South Waziristan is about to commence between the Pakistani military and the Taliban and al-Qaeda adherents who have made these tribal areas their own.

According to a top Pakistani security official who spoke to Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, the goal this time is to pacify the Waziristans once and for all. All previous military operations - usually spurred by intelligence provided by the Western coalition - have had limited objectives, aimed at specific bases or sanctuaries or blocking the cross-border movement of guerrillas. Now the military is going for broke to break the back of the Taliban and a-Qaeda in Pakistan and reclaim the entire area.

DESERVING OF A GENIUS GRANT:

sublime

THE WAGES OF FEMINISM:

Gendercide at Apocalyptic Levels - Experts (Zofeen Ebrahim, 10/29/07, IPS)

Experts at the 4th Asia Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights are painting an apocalyptical vision of the Asian region where 163 million women are ‘missing’ and the sex ratio continues to decline as a result of easy access to modern gender selection techniques.

China tops the list of countries with a skewed sex ratio at birth (SRB) with just 100 females for every 120 males. India follows going by the country’s 2001 census, which revealed that the SRB had fallen to 108 males per 100 females.

Experts worry that unless action is taken, Nepal and Vietnam may soon have skewed SRBs. Countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh are already beginning to follow Asia’s largest countries with people resorting to medical technology to do away with the girl child at the foetal stage.

AND YOU THOUGHT FOLKS OWED JACOBY ELLSBURY?:

Promotional rebate has Sox fans sitting pretty (The Associated Press, October 29, 2007)

When Marty Rodweller uses a $2,000 windfall to either remodel her bathroom or take a trip to Ireland next spring, she'll be thanking the Boston Red Sox.

The 53-year-old academic counselor from Danvers, Mass., is among several thousand Red Sox fans who are cashing in on a promotion run by a furniture store that offered full rebates if Boston won the World Series. [...]

The four-store Jordan's Furniture chain promised free sofas, chairs, dining tables and beds to customers who bought between March 7 and April 16 if the Red Sox won the championship. About 30,000 orders were taken during the promotion.

CEO Eliot Tatelman hasn't disclosed how much the rebates would total, but he won't have to pay it all. He bought an insurance policy to cover the losses.

SERVE ON SUNDAY AT 4PM:

Layered Tortilla Casserole with Guacamole (Dallas Morning News, October 29, 2007)

1 (4-ounce) jar tomato salsa (divided use)

8 flour tortillas (divided use)

2 (16-ounce) cans refried beans

1 cup shredded soy Monterey Jack cheese (divided use)

1 ripe avocado (see note)

1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lime juice

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preheat oven to 350 F. Spread a thin layer of salsa in a lightly oiled shallow baking dish. Arrange 4 of the tortillas on top, overlapping as needed.

In a bowl, combine refried beans with 1 cup salsa, stirring to blend well.

Spread bean and salsa mixture over tortillas and top with 1/2 cup shredded cheese. Arrange remaining 4 tortillas over cheese and top with layer of salsa. Sprinkle remaining 1/2 cup cheese on top. Cover and bake until hot, about 30 minutes.

To make the guacamole, halve and pit the avocado, and spoon the flesh into a bowl. Mash the avocado with the lime juice and salt and pepper to taste.

SO HE CAN DO TO PHIL HUGHES AND JOBA CHAMBERLAIN...:

Source: Girardi expected to accept Yankees' offer (ESPN.com news services, October 29, 2007)

Yankees general manager Brian Cashman told Don Mattingly and Tony Pena that they will not be getting the job. [...]

Mattingly will not accept a position on the Yankees coaching staff, Marchand and ESPN The Magazine's Buster Olney are reporting.

"Don was extremely disappointed that he wasn't the organization's choice to fill the manager's vacancy," Mattingly's agent, Ray Schulte, said in a statement.

STANDING UP:

Iraqi troops free eight kidnapped tribal chiefs (AFP, 10/29/07)

Iraqi troops on Monday rescued eight of 11 kidnapped tribal leaders after a gunbattle with their captors, defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari told AFP.

"We have rescued eight of the hostages and are working to free the others. We killed four of the kidnappers," Askari said.

The 11 tribal leaders from the restive province of Diyala were kidnapped on Sunday from northern Baghdad's Al-Shaab neighbourhood after a meeting with a top official from Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's office.

WOW!:

Braves trade Renteria to Detroit (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 10/30/07)

The Braves have traded shortstop Edgar Renteria to the Detroit Tigers for two prospects, centerfielder Gorkys Hernandez and right-handed pitcher Jair Jurrjens.

THE MAGIC OF THE MARKET:

The Science Education Myth: Forget the conventional wisdom. U.S. schools are turning out more capable science and engineering grads than the job market can support (Vivek Wadhwa, 10/26/07, Business Week)

Political leaders, tech executives, and academics often claim that the U.S. is falling behind in math and science education. They cite poor test results, declining international rankings, and decreasing enrollment in the hard sciences. They urge us to improve our education system and to graduate more engineers and scientists to keep pace with countries such as India and China.

Yet a new report by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, tells a different story. The report disproves many confident pronouncements about the alleged weaknesses and failures of the U.S. education system. This data will certainly be examined by both sides in the debate over highly skilled workers and immigration. The argument by Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Intel (INTC), and others is that there are not enough tech workers in the U.S.

The authors of the report, the Urban Institute's Hal Salzman and Georgetown University professor Lindsay Lowell, show that math, science, and reading test scores at the primary and secondary level have increased over the past two decades, and U.S. students are now close to the top of international rankings. Perhaps just as surprising, the report finds that our education system actually produces more science and engineering graduates than the market demands.

YOU'VE COME TO THE WRONG SHIP FOR rEALISM, BROTHER:

Putting British interests first sounds so radical (Iain Martin, 10/29/07, Daily Telegraph)

[F]or surprisingly long stretches of our post-war history there was broad consensus about how we should deal with the single largest menace of the age, the Soviet Union. Labour Right-wingers shared the Atlanticist outlook of mainstream Conservatives until that unofficial pact was shattered by the lunacy of the Left in the 1980s.

Since the West's victory in 1990, the British have lacked a shared world view or sense of what the limits of our capabilities are. It helps explain why many of us were attracted to the simplicity of the Blair doctrine after September 11. [...]

If [David] Cameron, who voted for the war despite some doubts, talks of replacing Blair's "liberal interventionism" with liberal conservatism. Western values and interests need to be defended but we should be much less starry-eyed and evangelical than Blair. A national interest test should be applied before we act abroad, he said — and if this sounds anything like a departure, it only shows how we lost sight of that basic truth under Blair.

The complexities of human nature make Cameron sceptical of "grand utopian schemes" to remake the world. His is a call for a new realism.

THE WORLD THAT VOLCKER AND REAGAN MADE:

The Even-Keel Economy: Today sharp shocks in one sector, like housing, don't necessarily lead to broader downturns

It's the economic heavyweight fight to watch. In one corner: the slumping but still powerful housing market, where new starts have dropped by almost 50% with no bottom in sight.

Its opponent: the global phenomenon known to economists as the Great Moderation. In the U.S., and across much of the world, the ups and downs of output, inflation, and employment have become far less pronounced since the mid-1980s. Recessions have been fewer and milder.

For now, the Great Moderation is winning, since the housing contraction has not turned into a full-blown downturn. This good news, if sustained, implies that different sectors have become less tightly linked. Moreover, it implies that the traditional way of thinking about recessions may be outmoded. Rather than broad-based declines in economic activity, these days we are more likely to get "micro-recessions"--sharp downturns concentrated in one or two economic sectors.

The term "Great Moderation" is relatively new, dating to a 2002 paper by economists James H. Stock of Harvard and Mark W. Watson of Princeton. Since then, researchers have come up with plenty of potential explanations for the decline in economic fluctuations, including better monetary policy, improved inventory controls, the rise of globalization, and more flexible financial markets. It's still not clear which factor is the most important, though more economists are placing greater weight on improvements in the finance sector, which enable consumers and businesses to keep borrowing and spending even in tough times.

But no matter what the cause, the effect is that bad economic news now comes like a tornado rather than a hurricane. There's still devastation, but it's in a much narrower band. "We've had a lot of big shocks, and they seem to be having less of an effect," says Stock.

ON THE ROAD TO HIS HORIZON:

Porter Wagoner, country music star, dies at 80 (The Associated Press, October 28, 2007)

Porter Wagoner, the rhinestone-clad Grand Ole Opry star who helped launch the career of Dolly Parton by hiring her as his duet partner, has died. He was 80.

Wagoner, who had survived an abdominal aneurysm in 2006, was hospitalized again this month 2007 and his publicist disclosed he had lung cancer. He died Sunday at 8:25 p.m. CDT (0125 GMT Monday) in a Nashville hospice, a spokeswoman for the Grand Ole Opry said.

Country singer and Opry member Dierks Bentley visited Wagoner in the hospice over the weekend and said Wagoner led them in prayer, thanking God for his friends, his family and the Grand Ole Opry.

"The loss of Porter is a great loss for the Grand Ole Opry and for country music, and personally it is a great loss of a friend I was really just getting to know," Bentley said. "I feel blessed for the time I had with him."

MORE:
Forgotten Music Star Makes Comeback (JOHN GEROME, 8/09/07, Associated Press)

Porter Wagoner looks right at home in the marble lobby of Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel. He wears a dark Western suit and tie and holds a shiny black cane. The glare from the crystal chandelier reflects off his eyeglasses as he tilts his head back, trying to remember the last time he played Madison Square Garden.

Sometime in the '70s ... one of those package tours ... Little Jimmie Dickens and Faron Young were there ... some others he can't recall ...

Back then, "The Thin Man from West Plains" was still the grand showman of country music with his rhinestone suits and pompadour hair. He had a TV show and dozens of hits on his own and with a pretty young blonde named Dolly Parton.

All that faded with time, and so did Wagoner. He checked into a psychiatric hospital for exhaustion, his show went off the air, he was dropped from his record label and dismissed as a relic. Last summer he nearly died.

Except for his standing gig on the Grand Ole Opry, he was mostly forgotten.

Until.

"I was thinking while on stage last night, 'This is the biggest, most well-known arena in the country, and here I am performing at it,'" he says the morning after a show with the White Stripes.

When the stage lights fix on Porter Wagoner , you almost have to look away. There's just too much sparkle, from the country patriarch's diamond-encrusted belt and boots to the hot-pink dress shirt tucked underneath the Nudie suit bejeweled with glimmering wagon wheels. His famous golden pompadour is now stark silver.

But at 79, Wagoner is still the resplendent rhinestone cowboy everyone expects him to be, the godfather of country bling who probably doesn't know what that means.

With the subway rattling the floor beneath him, Wagoner looks a little out of place at Joe's Pub. It's late March, a few months before the release of his new album, "Wagonmaster," which comes out Tuesday. Wagoner, a fixture at the Grand Ole Opry, has sold out the cozy venue for his first New York City performance in at least two decades.

After yet another round of applause and cheers, Wagoner surveys the mixed crowd and seems disbelieving but also relieved.

"I'm so glad my granddaughter is here in the audience tonight," he finally says. "I've been telling her for years that I'm popular as hell."

Afterward, Wagoner is backstage holding a meet-and-greet, and the first person eager to shake his hand is Laura Cantrell , a neo-country singer who was born in Nashville but lives in New York. She looks awestruck, all wide eyes, and perhaps unintentionally greeting him in slow motion: "Hello . . . Porter . . . Wagoner."

The next morning in his hotel room, Wagoner still can't get over that night.

"Man, I couldn't believe the crowd was so quiet and knew the songs," he says. "I've never played for a better audience in my life. And here we are in New York City."

Porter Wagoner has been like this for most of his 60-year career: exceedingly humble and nearly oblivious to just how influential and helpful he has been to generations of country and rock musicians.

PORTER WAGONER strides calmly to the microphone set center stage on the wood plank floor of the Grand Ole Opry here, pretty much the same way he has most every week since he was invited into country music's royal chamber 50 years ago.

As usual, he's dressed to thrill on this recent Friday night, in a royal-blue western suit embroidered with wagon wheels and rose blooms, all sparkling with sequins. The tips of the collar on his pale lavender shirt look to have been dipped in gleaming gold, and a dazzling sapphire-colored, triangular cut-glass neckpiece hides the top button. At his waist, a gold and silver National Wild Turkey Federation belt buckle big enough to catch radio waves from Jupiter.

Best of all, his boots. If, as they say in Texas, God is a cowboy, surely Wagoner this night has his boots, a dazzling gold pair with turquoise-colored cactus figures carved in, the toes and bootheels caked in jewels as if he'd stomped through a stable full of rhinestone horses.

At 79, Wagoner is the star most closely identified with the Opry -- the living and, thanks to a little emergency surgery last summer, still breathing personification of Nashville country tradition.

"This is my second weekend back," Wagoner says in his no-hurry-folks Missouri drawl backstage a few minutes before going on. He's referring to his seven-month layoff from the Opry after suffering a near-fatal aortic aneurysm last July. "It's so wonderful just to get out of the house. I didn't realize what being cooped up does.... I was so ready to come back to work."

Despite the old-time numbers he and mountain music patriarch Ralph Stanley sing for the Opry audience -- they form a duo that's collectively older than the Civil War -- Wagoner's sights these days are set resolutely forward. He's got a new album coming in June, "Wagonmaster," his first secular studio album in seven years, produced by longtime fan and fellow musician Marty Stuart. It's reductive country and honky-tonk that's likely to give Wagoner some late-in-the-game career-appreciation props the way Rick Rubin's albums with Johnny Cash (Stuart's onetime boss) did.

Wagoner's album isn't as consistently stark, it just shares the vision of classic country music sung the old-school way: staring straight into the heart of human darkness. [...]

His always-ready-to-work ethic has helped keep him as long and lean at 79 as when he was 29. The big difference, besides a fuller face and the usual wrinkles and creases of age, is the hair. The flattop he wore into the '50s, and which morphed in the '60s into his signature blond pompadour, has given way to a meticulously groomed silver cotton candy-like 'do.

Despite his astonishing tenure at the Opry, which will celebrate his half-century there with a May 19 all-star show, Wagoner never made it into country's top echelon of artists with the likes of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Merle Haggard, George Jones or Dolly Parton.

Parton, in fact, launched her career after Wagoner hired her in 1967 and featured her every week on "The Porter Wagoner Show," the first nationally syndicated country music TV series, one that ran for two decades and is reruns today on the RFD cable channel.

The team of Wagoner and Parton is second in the annals of country duet partners only to George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Their relationship rose to similar musical heights and sank to personal lows after her career skyrocketed in the '70s, taking her right past him and into the top rank of country stardom, at the same time his was falling back to Earth.

It was the stuff of a great country song, especially when the mentor sued his former prot-g- in 1979, feeling slighted and underappreciated once she got a taste of fame and fortune. Parton, meanwhile, felt stifled and exploited by the man who also served as her manager and shared in royalties of the songs she wrote, including "Coat of Many Colors" and "I Will Always Love You," a send-off that some have suggested was written with Wagoner in mind.

They settled the suit -- he got to record with her again at the peak of her pop-crossover success in the early-'80s; she regained ownership of her song catalog, one of the strongest in country music. And despite a period of bitterness, they returned to cordial relations as the years rolled by.

In recent years, Wagoner, who always held the respect of mainstream fans, has won over a lot of today's country cognoscenti for the plain-spoken credibility he typically brought to tightly crafted narratives full of melodramatic, hyper-emotional plot twists.

He's also won points for his maverick sensibility, no more evident than when he funked up the Opry in 1979 after persuading James Brown to play there.

Like the films of Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch, his songs explore the extremes to which characters are often pushed, challenging those who take them in to ponder how far from reality they really are. Yet there's no question how many light years separate Wagoner's brand of country from today's soccer-mom music by the likes of Rascal Flatts.

In "The Cold Hard Facts of Life," a Bill Anderson song that Wagoner took to No. 2 in 1967, a hapless fellow returns a day early from a business trip to find his wife with another man. After confronting the two with a knife -- the tragic denouement is assumed rather than detailed -- he dispassionately sings, "I guess I'll go to hell or I'll rot here in this cell/But who taught who the cold hard facts of life?"

In 1971 he sang of life in "The Rubber Room," a song he wrote about losing one's grasp on sanity, a theme that also crops up on the new album with "Committed to Parkview," a sobering look at life in a mental institution that Johnny Cash wrote in the '70s, at least in part with Wagoner in mind because both singers had spent time in the Nashville hospital by that name. Wagoner was admitted in 1965 for exhaustion because of his extensive touring schedule.

MORE:
'60s country star Porter Wagoner is a Renaissance man: : He always has been a flashy entertainer, though his music has had its macabre moments. (Brian Mansfield, 3/24/07 USA TODAY)

TRANSNATIONALISM YOU CAN USE:

LOST at Sea: The Law of the Sea Treaty threatens American sovereignty (John Fonte, 10/29/07, National Review)

The Bush administration and the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee are pushing ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS or LOST). The U.N. convention established a transnational institution, the International Seabed Authority, to regulate maritime activities for over 70 percent of the earth’s surface. [...]

Let us examine the details. Under UNCLOS, disputes between the United States and other parties are settled by “mandatory” (i.e., forced) arbitration. The final decisions are made either by a permanent International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg or by an ad-hoc court. The Hamburg tribunal consists of 21 judges chosen by member nations, many of them unfriendly to the United States. An ad-hoc court would consist of five judges, two chosen by the U.S., two chosen by the other party. The crucial fifth judge is chosen either by the secretary general of the United Nations or the Hamburg tribunal. The decisions are “final” and “binding” with no appeal.

International-law professor Jeremy Rabkin points out that when the Cambodian communists seized the USS Mayaguez in Cambodian waters in 1975, President Ford responded with military force to rescue American sailors and free the ship. He notes this type of action would be problematic under UNCLOS. For example, if a treaty signatory (e.g., China, Burma) seized a U.S. ship in its home waters, under the terms of Law of the Sea Treaty, the U.S. could not free her sailors by force, but would have to submit to mandatory arbitration by the Hamburg tribunal or an ad-hoc court, where the U.S. could very likely lose the case. In any event, vital decisions over American security and American lives would not be made by Americans, but by foreign judges, many of them unsympathetic to American interests (coming as they often do from third-world regimes or EU legal elites).

Supporters argue that member states can claim an exemption from binding arbitration for “military activities.” In addition, they point out that the U.S. will attach a special “understandings” to the treaty stating that any interpretation of what constitutes “military activities” will be “defined by the United States.”

WHY DOES THE HEADLINE ASSUME IT A BAD THING?:

Row Over Nuclear Negotiator's Firing Worsens (Kimia Sanati, Oct 29, 2007, IPS)

Criticism has been steadily building up against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s apparent move to harden Iran’s position on its nuclear standoff with the West by removing moderate chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, and replacing him with his handpicked loyalist Saeed Jalili.

On Sunday, in a move considered bold in Iranian politics, a group of 23 members of parliament said, in a letter addressed to Ahmadinejad, that ‘’in the circumstances when the nation is facing most sensitive times, a change of the top nuclear negotiator is not in line with the national interests and the good of the system.’’

"It was necessary for the President to act with more tolerance and thought," said the statement as quoted by the Fars news agency. According to Fars, 22 of the signatories were reformists and were joined by one conservative. [...]

Criticism had also surfaced in the media and among officials about the timing of the change. And foreign policy advisor to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, Ali Akbar Velayati, went on record to say that Larijani should not have quit.

"It was definitely better if this had not happened in the important and sensitive situation when the nuclear issue is on the table," Velayati, was quoted as saying by the semi-official news agency ISNA.

BEST NEVER TO UNDERESTIMATE HOW MUCH FOLKS DISLIKE IRAN:

Democrats want Iran stance on record (Anne Flaherty, 10/29/07, Associated Press)

Still reeling from the fallout of authorizing the Iraq war five years ago, congressional Democrats are determined to put themselves early on record as opposing military action in Iran.

In recent days, many Democrats have gone to great lengths to denounce President Bush's strategy on Iran, including his decision to label Tehran's Quds military force as a terrorist group and his statement that a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to "World War III."

Democrats also are jumping on Bush's latest war spending request as proof that the White House is considering air strikes on Iran's underground uranium enrichment facilities.

THE MONSTER HUNGERS:

This time, Red Sox bulldozed their way to title (Jayson Stark, October 28, 2007, ESPN.com)

It's never an easy thing to comprehend when the universe changes before your eyes.

You're never sure why. You're never sure how. And normally, you're never sure when.

But if anyone asks, you can tell them you saw it all unfold on the last Sunday night in October, in a scenic Colorado ballpark nestled between the mountain peaks.

You didn't just see the Boston Red Sox win the World Series. You didn't just see the Red Sox sweep the World Series. You saw something bigger, something deeper, something historic.

This wasn't 2004. That's ancient history now. This wasn't 86 years of torment and misery, curses and ghosts, being washed away by events taking place on a baseball field. This was different. Very different. Couldn't have been more different.

This is a franchise that has turned life as we used to know it upside down. This is no longer a team defined by all the years it didn't win. This is a team carving a whole new niche in the sporting universe.

Make no mistake. The Red Sox now are one of baseball's powerhouse franchises. And what they just did -- in this World Series, in this October and especially in the past week and a half -- made that 100 percent official.

The combination of pitching talent in place, a front office with a coherent and effective operating plan, and a fan base that's bought into not just the current players but the entire system makes for an archetypal winning franchise.

MORE:
Red Sox are masters of baseball's universe (Gene Wojciechowski, 10/29/07, ESPN.com

"The Red Sox can have their Nation. The Yankees have the universe."
-- Hank Steinbrenner, New York Yankees senior vice president

Not anymore, they don't.

For the second time in four years, the Boston Red Sox are World Series champions and the indisputable rulers of the baseball universe as we know it. They are the Roman Empire of the postseason, having won eight World Series games in a row. Hail, Tito.

That the Yankees' Steinbrenner says otherwise is one-third arrogance, one-third ignorance and one-third stupidity. Then again, that sort of self-infatuation helps explain why the Yankees haven't played in a World Series since 2003 and haven't hoisted the sterling silver Commissioner's Trophy above their heads since 2000.

Didn't anybody from the House of Steinbrenner (George and sons Hank and executive vice president Hal) see what the Red Sox just did to the Colorado Rockies? Four games, four wins. They could have played a best-of-17 series, and the Red Sox still would have swept.

This was the Europeans vs. USA in the Ryder Cup, New England Patriots vs. anybody, chocolate eclairs vs. Britney. Less than two weeks ago, the Red Sox were a loss away from playoff elimination. Now, they reek of champagne again.

SHOULD HAVE BEEN A THANKSGIVING GAME:

New England beats Washington 52-7 to stay unbeaten (Howard Ulman, October 28, 2007, AP)

Tom Brady and the peerless Patriots keep getting better.

Really.

The quarterback was merely magnificent Sunday, throwing for three touchdowns and running for two more as New England crushed the Washington Redskins 52-7 in an easy tuneup for its battle of unbeatens at Indianapolis.

Linebacker Mike Vrabel was a force on both sides of the ball in the biggest rout in a season filled with them. He caught a touchdown pass and forced three fumbles by quarterback Jason Campbell that led to 17 points.

The first half of the season is over. Bring on the Super Bowl champs.

BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS TO PLAY THE GROWN-UP:

Thompson alone tackles entitlements: Former senator is the only Republican who gets heated about entitlement spending (Linda Feldmann, 10/29/07, The Christian Science Monitor)

Already, those three programs make up 40 percent of the federal budget. If reforms are not enacted, Social Security will eventually go bust; in 40 years, on the current path, the two medical programs alone could equal the size of today's entire federal budget according to the US Government Accountability Office.

Experts tend to agree on the projections, but is it a crisis? In the hyperpartisan atmosphere of the 2008 presidential campaign, the topic of entitlement programs is also a matter of dispute between parties. Former Sen. Fred Thompson (R) of Tennessee, the most impassioned candidate on entitlement spending, suggests that it's the nation's most important domestic problem – and, alone among the top-tier Republican candidates, is willing to take the risky step of discussing cuts in benefits. Most Republicans stick with the safer position of saying what they won't do – raise taxes – or proposing a new commission to study the problem. The Democratic candidates call entitlement spending a long-term challenge, and assert that there's plenty of time to work out a solution. They tend not to bring up the subject on the stump, but when asked, they repeat their opposition to the "privatization of Social Security," a refrain from the days of President Bush's ill-fated effort to make private accounts a part of the program.

BUT HE'LL HAVE TO WIN SC TO GET TO GA:

Poll: Thompson, Clinton widen their leads in Georgia (Larry Peterson, October 25, 2007, Savannah Now)

Presidential hopeful Fred Thompson has soared to a nearly 2-to-1 lead over his closest Republican rival in the latest statewide poll.

In survey results announced Wednesday by Strategic Vision, the former U.S. senator from Tennessee led Rudy Giuliani, 39 percent to 20 percent.

WHEN THE CHURCH IS THE ONE STRIPPING THE ALTARS:

In Arabia, a glimmer of hope (Michael Goodwin, October 28th 2007, NY Daily News)

As role models go, a female African peace activist is hardly standard fare in the Persian Gulf. But a revolution in this oil-rich Arab nation has begun, one waged with the help of imported soft power from around the globe. If the rest of the Arab world follows, and if America takes yes for an answer, peace might have a chance.

This tiny country of 4 million, 75% of whom are foreign workers, has long been friendly with America. We have air bases here, and Emirates' troops took part in the 1991 war to oust Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

But something new and dramatic is happening - a movement to embrace Western educational ideals. Scientific standards, liberal arts and even critical thinking are now openly praised. American-style philanthropy is taking hold. First Lady Laura Bush got a red-carpet welcome on her trip to promote breast cancer awareness. The Louvre and Guggenheim are building museums. New York University is building a campus, and the New York Academy of Sciences signed cooperation deals with the government.

That such striking initiatives are coming from a Sunni Muslim theocracy, even a moderate one, is something I didn't believe until I got here. [...]

Sheik Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan, head of the fledgling college system and the force behind the conference, concedes that the Emirates must learn from the West. Upgrading educational standards and opportunities, especially for women, tops his goals.

So his invitation list included many Jewish Americans and professional women. The sheik, dressed in flowing robes and headdress, posed for photographs for the local media standing with Western women, including my wife, Jennifer Raab, the president of Hunter College. In this authoritarian system, symbols are values, and he was signaling that his country should adopt some of the West's. For his efforts, the sheikh has been called a "mosque burner" by Islamist critics.

NO ONE CHOOSES ALQAEDISM:

INSIDE THE SURGE: HOW ORDINARY IRAQIS ARE TURNING THE TIDE OF WAR (MICHAEL YON, October 28, 2007, NY Post)

Statistics in reports about faraway places can blunt the reality of what those numbers mean. But when it is a bomb in a road you are about to drive on, it takes on a whole new cast, as I found yet again when I spent most of May in Anbar Province.

I visited a former labor camp nicknamed “Coolie Village," or what remained of it, after a truck bomb locals attributed to al Qaeda had flattened it. Not surprisingly, the anger and frustration in response to this mass murder helped the villagers overcome their fear of the thugs who had taken hold of their community.

In mid-May, 2007, the Iraqi Army and Police had conducted a “Combined Medical Exercise" in the village of Falahat, and Iraqi doctors saw about 200 villagers. Two days later, the Iraqi Police opened an outpost at the old Falahat train station. That was just about the same time I was driving out to stay with a small team of Marines who were assigned as “MiTT 8" (Military Training Team 8.)

The men of MiTT 8 were living with their Iraqi protégées in filthy shipping containers on a highway. Several months ago they were attacked by a car bomb. But at about 9 a.m., while I was traveling to their location with Marines in a Humvee, some Falahat villagers went to the new police station to report the presence of a culprit they knew was placing bombs on the road.

It happened that quickly.

Within mere days of opening the station, people spoke up. The Iraqi Police (some of whom freely admitted to having been recent insurgents) called the tip into the Iraqi Army living with the Marines of MiTT 8. Our Humvee pulled up to the small MiTT 8 compound, where we met Staff Sergeant Rakene Lee, who was dressed for combat, and who was to take the Humvees and lead the mission to the suspected bomb site. The Iraqi Army was already blocking the road.

The patrol I was with had nearly run into an IED, except for a tip from Iraqis in another village, making what could have been my last dispatch.

WHILE HE FINDS THIS IRONIC...:

Bush's dangerous liaisons (Francois Furstenberg, October 28, 2007, IHT)

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term "terrorist" has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hated freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to "Islamofascism."

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

GEORGE LIVES:

The Wedding Present (JONATHAN TREW, 10/28/07, Scotland on Sunday)

THE Wedding Present were not the first indie band but they may be the definitive one. Led by the usually morose-looking David Gedge, they were heroes on the student union circuit from the mid-Eighties to the early Nineties. Pairing rapid-fire guitar riffs with Gedge's mournful lyrics about love affairs gone wrong, the Wedding Present's tinny tracks sparked many a moshpit in their day and were responsible for vast quantities of snakebite being spilled in discos up and down the land.

They are back on tour to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of their first album, George Best. By promising to play the entire album from beginning to finish at each gig, they have managed to tempt a significant proportion of their original fanbase off their suburban sofas and back into gigland. It's terrifying proof of the havoc that the passage of time can wreak.

HOW DO THE FRENCH SAY IT?--HISTOIRE ES KAPUT:

The Special Relationship Tries to Swim the Channel (DAN BILEFSKY, 10/28/07, NY Times)

In recent weeks, in fact, it has seemed as if a mirror has inverted the two sides of the English Channel: France has cast itself as America’s new best friend while Britain, America’s special buddy, behaves like an embarrassed relation.

Many in Europe have watched with bemusement as Mr. Sarkozy’s Socialist foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has entertained the possibility of war against Iran and Mr. Sarkozy talks of France rejoining NATO’s military command structure after an absence of 40 years. Meanwhile, his tax-cutting finance minister, Christine Lagarde, quotes Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” and admonishes the French to “stop thinking so much,” work harder, earn more and get rich.

And things could get chummier next month, when Mr. Sarkozy is to go with President Bush to George Washington’s mansion, Mount Vernon — a reminder that France helped Americans break their original bonds with England.

STICK TO THE POLITICALLY CORRECT QUACKERY, HUH?:

Bright Scientists, Dim Notions (GEORGE JOHNSON, 10/28/07, NY Times)

Iconoclasts at heart, the best scientists are faced with an occupational hazard: having left their mark on one small patch of ground, they are tempted to stir up trouble elsewhere.

“With my own advancing years, I’m mindful of the three different ways scientists can grow old,” Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom and president of the Royal Society, wrote in an e-mail message. The first two choices are either to become an administrator or to content yourself with doing science that will probably be mediocre. (“In contrast to composers,” Dr. Rees observed, “there are few scientists whose last works are their greatest.”) The third choice is to strike off half-cocked into unfamiliar territory — and quickly get in over your head. “All too many examples of this!” he lamented.

Creationists still gleefully pounce on a quote from the Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, who late in his career compared the likelihood of a living cell arising through evolution to “a tornado sweeping through a junkyard” and assembling a Boeing 747. This caricature of the evolutionary process led to the coinage of the term Hoyle’s Fallacy. Dr. Hoyle also promoted the notion that epidemics are caused by viruses hitchhiking on the tails of comets.

Sometimes the wandering from one’s home turf extends all the way to the paranormal. In 2001, when officials of the Royal Mail, the British postal service, issued a package of stamps commemorating the centenary of the Nobel Prize, they sought the counsel of Brian Josephson, who shared the prize for physics in 1973 for his superconductivity research. Physicists across Britain recoiled when an official pamphlet accompanying the stamps predicted that quantum mechanics might lead to an understanding of mental telepathy.

“Perhaps we should have checked that,” a spokeswoman for the Royal Mail told Nature at the time. “But if he has won a Nobel Prize for his work, that should give him some credibility.”

With science treading right to the bleeding edge of the knowable, maybe the Royal Mail can be forgiven for mistaking pseudoscience for the real thing. In an article in The Observer of London, David Deutsch, a quantum theorist at Oxford University, dismissed Dr. Josephson’s speculations as “utter rubbish.” Dr. Deutsch is known for proposing the existence of a multiplicity of parallel universes.

THERE IS NO GREAT BRITAIN:

Tories call for Scottish MPs to lose right to vote on English matters (Daily Mail, 28th October 2007)

David Cameron is being urged to back a radical plan to strip Scottish MPs of the right to vote on English matters at Westminster, it was disclosed today.

According to a report in The Observer, the scheme is designed to address the perceived growing constitutional imbalance which has grown up since devolution to Scotland and Wales.

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR BOXSCORE:

Good Or Bad, An Amazing Ride For Lugo (Martin Fennelly, October 28, 2007, The Tampa Tribune)

Julio Lugo delivered, on the field and in the clubhouse, until the Rays decided they couldn't pay him what he wanted in the market.

It wasn't the wrong call.

But it worked out pretty well for Lugo, too.

''I'll tell you why,'' Lugo's friend and Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz said. ''It's because he's strong.''

Last season, when the Rays traded him, Lugo went to Los Angeles, where he never fit in, and then to Boston as a free agent, for four years at $36 million. A lot more went with it. There was the spotlight.

And when you're hitting .197 on July 12, the spotlight can be brutal.

''The boos,'' Lugo said. ''That was the low point.''

He added, ''It's different here. Everybody knows what you do every day. You go 0-for-4 or make an error, it follows you into the next day. You get a boo in the stands, you get a boo in the paper the next day.

''But that's what you want, you want to be on the stage. In Tampa, I could go 0-for-4 and go home and nobody seemed to remember. Here in Boston they remember. That can be bad, but when it's good, it's very good.''

He hit .197 in the 80 games before the All-Star break. But he hit .280 after the break and his defense picked up. Aside from that dropped pop in the ALCS with Cleveland, he has been mostly on in the postseason.

It's October, a land far away from all the boos. Julio Lugo is hitting .400 through three games of the World Series, with four hits and three walks.

THE TITO FACTOR:

Youkilis a professional sitter, too (Jackie MacMullan, October 28, 2007, Boston Globe)

He has been asked to put his bat, his glove, and his ego on the shelf.

Kevin Youkilis was the designated sitter last night for Game 3 of the World Series, and it was the most difficult role he has assumed in his 3 1/2 seasons with the Red Sox.

Imagine completing an entire major league season without committing an error. Then, imagine hitting .500 in the American League Championship Series against Cleveland, including delivering multiple clutch hits.

Consider the fact you are batting .396 in the postseason, and have done absolutely everything your manager and teammates could possibly ask of you - including controlling your sometimes mercurial temper.

So you are two games away from celebrating your second World Series championship in four years, except you were not a pivotal part of 2004, because you were just a kid along for the ride, soaking up the moment so that when your time came, you'd be ready.

Your time has come. You are ready.

But you have to take a seat.

We've reached an odd point in sports where the competing demands placed on managers/coaches--game management, talent evaluation, handling a team of multimillionaire stars, and dealing with saturation media--are such different skills that there is almost no one who does all of them well. As it happens, because of the daily nature of baseball and the fact that you may end up playing 180 games, you can get away with being weak at the first skill as long as you're strong in the others. Whereas, in football, you can get away with being bad at the last, so long as you excel at the others (a point, it just so happens, that the Patriots coach illustrates).

ALMOST HALFWAY HOME:

U.S. forces to turn over security in Karbala (The Associated Press, October 28, 2007)

U.S. forces will turn over security to Iraqi authorities in the southern Shiite province of Karbala on Monday, the American commander for the area said, despite fighting between rival militia factions that has killed dozens.

Karbala will become the eighth of Iraq's 18 provinces to revert to Iraqi control...

GET THE PARTY STARTED:

Boston has built for now and the future (Ken Rosenthal, 10/28/07, FOXSports.com)

The Red Sox, on the verge of winning their second World Series title in four years, might be just getting started.

Consider which players were the biggest contributors Saturday night in the Sox's 10-5 victory over the Rockies in Game 3: Jacoby Ellsbury, rookie. Dustin Pedroia, rookie. Daisuke Matsuzaka, rookie. Hideki Okajima, rookie.

Yes, Matsuzaka and Okajima are experienced pitchers from Japan, but the Sox will control each for the next five seasons.

During that time, the team easily could win another World Series. Or more.

Do Sox fans still miss Pedro Martinez, Johnny Damon and Derek Lowe? Most of the team's core veterans are signed long-term. And the farm system is spitting out stars.

MORE:
We won't know what we've got 'til BoSox title is long gone (Gregg Doyel, Oct. 28, 2007, CBSSports.com)

For example, center fielder Jacoby Ellsbury looks like a future star. Hell, he looks like a present star. He hit .353 this season, was 9-for-9 on steals and played perfectly in the field, but he did all of that in just 116 at-bats. That's a small sample size. Then again, as the sample size grows, so does his production. He had four hits Saturday and keyed Boston's six-run third inning by becoming the second player in World Series history with two doubles in the same frame.

If Ellsbury becomes a perennial All-Star -- and that's a realistic projection -- we're going to look back and marvel at that 2007 Boston team that had David Ortiz and Manny Ramirez and Mike Lowell and Kevin Youkilis and Jason Varitek and Jacoby Ellsbury.

And don't forget Dustin Pedroia. He hit .317 this season, scored 86 runs, was an above-average fielder and still got overlooked nationally. He's been seen as a complementary piece, but what if he's more than that? Second basemen who hit well over .300 and are super in the field aren't pieces. They're All-Stars. This kid just turned 24. So did Ellsbury. On Saturday they became the first rookies in World Series history to hit 1-2 in the order, and they were so intimidated that they combined for seven hits, four RBI and three runs. If both turn out to be great players, how will history remember this 2007 Boston team?

We already know how good the established players are. Ramirez is a future Hall of Famer. Ortiz could join him in Cooperstown. Varitek and Lowell aren't in that caliber, but both have won a Gold Glove for defense and a Silver Slugger for offense. Youkilis is spackle on offense, spectacular on defense and special in the clubhouse.

Ace pitcher Josh Beckett won 20 games this season and has added four more wins in the postseason to enhance his reputation as his generation's Jack Morris or even Bob Gibson. Curt Schilling isn't what he was in his prime, but he's still a big-time money pitcher. Jonathan Papelbon is the best closer in baseball, and he's only 26.

But what of Jon Lester? He'll start Game 4 on Sunday after beating lymphoma and posting an 11-2 career record in two shortened regular seasons. He was once regarded so highly that Boston's development people couldn't decide who was better, Lester or Papelbon -- and that, Francona says, "is a pretty awesome comparison. ... You're looking at a young, sturdy left-hander with a real clean delivery that we think can be a good starter for a long time."

GIVE THEM TEN SECONDS AND THEY'LL TAKE YOU FOR A WHIRL:

Our friends Kevin Whited & Alex Whitlock have a new blog, Ten Second News, the premise of which we're very much in agreement with. They'll gather and post stories that they think you might find interesting and offer comments sufficient to say why that's so, instead of assuming that you'll find their every stray thought or incident from their personal lives fascinating. This model--as a kind of intelligent news aggregator--has always struck us as the proper role for all but a very few bloggers.

MAYBE THEY THINK WE'LL RUN OUT OF MUNITIONS?:

US says 80 Taliban killed in battle (JASON STRAZIUSO, 10/28/07, Associated Press)

U.S.-led coalition forces killed about 80 Taliban fighters during a six-hour battle outside a Taliban-controlled town in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, the latest in a series of increasingly bloody engagements in the region, officials said.

SUCK IT UP:

Bullying is exaggerated, says childhood expert (Anushka Asthana, October 28, 2007, The Observer)

The level of playground bullying is being exaggerated and children must learn to cope with name-calling and teasing to help them develop resilience, a childhood expert says.

In a book to be published tomorrow, Tim Gill, a former government adviser who led a major review into children's play, argues that mollycoddling children by labelling 'unpleasant behaviour' as bullying is stopping them from building the skills they need to protect themselves. 'I have spoken to teachers and educational psychologists who say that parents and children are labelling as bullying what are actually minor fallings-out,' said Gill, the former director of the then Children's Play Council, who is currently advising the Conservative Party's childhood review.

'Children are not always nice to each other, but people are not always nice to each other. The world is not like that. One of the things in danger of being lost is children spending time with other children out of sight of adults; growing a sense of consequence for their actions without someone leaping in,' he told The Observer

ACTUALLY, HE WAS THE SECOND:

Arthur Kornberg, 89; Nobel laureate was the first to synthesize DNA (Daily Telegraph, October 28, 2007)

LET'S SEE HOW FAST FOLKS REBUILD...:

Living here makes no sense… but that's LA (Rob Long, 28/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

The key, of course, is to rebuild. It makes no rational sense to live in a place so dangerously unstable, just as it makes no rational sense to work in a business where fortunes are made and lost at the whim of a focus group. But for those of us who work here you adjust to each disaster. When the canyons burn, you spend a few nights at Shutters, head back home, and start again. When ABC passes, you call up CBS.

GIVE HIM $40 MILLION PER, BUT FOR JUST FOUR YEARS TOTAL:

Sources: Yankees expected to make record-setting offer to A-Rod (Buster Olney, 10/27/07, ESPN The Magazine)

The New York Yankees have asked to meet with third baseman Alex Rodriguez, and if and when they get that meeting, league sources indicate the team is prepared to make him an offer that will exceed, in average salary, the $27 million per year that he is scheduled to make over the next three seasons -- and A-Rod would be in line to set yet another salary benchmark.

The offer could be for something in the range of five years -- beyond the three years Rodriguez is already under contract for, from 2008-10 -- and perhaps $30 million a year. The highest per-workday salary earned to date is the $28 million Roger Clemens received, in prorated salary, for a little less than four months of work this season.

WHAT THE HECK IS BENECOL?:

You say potato... (CLAIRE MACDONALD, 10/27/07, The Scotsman)

BAKED POTATO CAKE

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 onions, skinned and very thinly sliced
3oz butter
2 fat cloves of garlic, skinned and crushed, using the flat blade of a large knife
1/2 teaspoon salt
about 15 grinds of the peppermill
a grating of nutmeg
3lb [...] potatoes, peeled and very thinly sliced - this is best done on a mandolin
3oz [...] finely grated Parmesan - leave this out if you are following a low-fat diet

Thoroughly brush out with melted butter [...] an 8in [...] springform cake tin. Line the base with a disc of baking parchment. Heat the olive oil and fry the thinly sliced onions over moderate heat until they are completely soft, about five minutes. Take the pan off the heat and cool. You can do this in advance by several hours if it is more convenient.

Put the butter into a small saucepan with the crushed garlic, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Over moderate heat, melt the butter. Put a layer of the thinly sliced potatoes over the base of the cake tin. Brush with the seasoned, melted butter and add another layer. From time to time as you build up the stack, add a layer of fried onions, and the grated Parmesan if you are including it. End with a layer of potatoes, brush with the remaining butter, cover with a disc of baking parchment and bake in a hot oven, 200C/400F/Gas Mark 6, for one hour. After this time, stick a knife right down to the base to be sure the potato cake is cooked - it should feel soft. Then take the disc of baking parchment off the potato cake and return it to the oven for 10 minutes to brown the surface.

When cooked, leave the potato cake in its tin until you are ready to serve. Then unclip the springform tin and slip the cake onto a serving plate. If possible, pull out the lining disc of baking parchment as you do this, but if that proves difficult, remove the paper beneath each slice as you cut the cake into wedges to serve.

BOOST IT TO $2K AND ADD A MEANS TEST AT CASH-IN AND PASS IT THIS CONGRESS:

Edwards Offers Savings Plan (CHRISTINE HAUSER, 10/27/07, NY Times)

Former Senator John Edwards proposed yesterday that rules governing retirement savings be revised by creating new 401(k)-type accounts that employees could carry from job to job, and that the government match workers’ contributions to the accounts, dollar for dollar, up to $500 a year.

Under his plan, workers would also have the option upon retirement to convert their savings to annuities that are sponsored by the government and administered at low fee.

Mr. Edwards has outlined some of these provisions before, including his proposal for the $500 government match, through tax credits, to what he calls Get Ahead Accounts. The match would be intended to benefit middle-class employees, though the Edwards campaign has not specified an income cap.

WHAT'S LESS PRACTICAL THAN SUICIDE?:

Is the EU Really a Free Market?: Dismantling government protectionism may not be practical. Germany's VW law is one example, but Europe also has to think about even greater dangers from outside (Detlef Drewes and Michael Kroger, 10/26/07, Business Week)

Ten years ago, the European Commission ordered its member states to dismantle their government interests in private corporations -- like VW -- and report back to Brussels. The idea has always been to create a free-trade zone within the Union; but the largest members of the European Union haven't exactly complied.

Tuesday's ruling by the European Court of Justice to end Germany's VW law will help the Commission tilt at windmills like "golden shares" or "multiple voting rights" and other newish tricks that help governments protect privatized national enterprises from foreign takeover.

But regulators in Brussels, by the end of 2005, still had an internal list of 141 firms that were protected by European governments through special rights. In fact Charlie McCreevy, the Irishman responsible for enforcing European market laws at the EU Commission, has noticed a steadily decreasing tendency among member states to root out protectionism.

THERE'S A BEAR IN THE FENS:

Clutch on the field, beloved off it, either way, Ortiz shines: Teammates like marveling at mix of talent, affability (Joe Mahoney, 10/27/07, Rocky Mountain News)

It took a matter of days for Mike Lowell to realize the magnitude of David Ortiz in Boston, the utter adoration Red Sox fans have for the player they have come to revere as "Big Papi."

"The first week I was with the Red Sox, we went to a Celtics game," said Lowell, who was acquired Nov. 24, 2005, in a trade with Florida, "and it was the world coming to an end when they saw David Ortiz. The parking lot guy. The restaurant guy. The attendant that let us in. And he's nice and cordial and that's what people love about him." [...]

Knuckleballer Tim Wakefield has been there the entire time. He saw Ortiz arrive in 2003 as a free agent after not being tendered a contract by the Minnesota Twins when he became eligible for arbitration. At the time, Ortiz was trying to find his footing in the majors.

"When we first got him from Minnesota, he wasn't 'Big Papi,' " Wakefield said.

"I've seen him evolve into this iconic, lovable teddy bear because of his personality. Not only has he delivered on the field, he's one of the best teammates I've ever met.

"I've played with superstars that they're on their own. He treats himself the way the 25th man on the roster would be - not any better than anybody else." [...]

ESPN analyst Peter Gammons, a native of the Boston area and former longtime Red Sox beat writer for The Boston Globe, said he worked out last winter at the same gym as Ortiz across the street from Fenway Park.

Gammons said he saw a woman approach Ortiz one day with a booklet filled with designs for a clothing line she ran, her hope being Ortiz might invest in her venture.

Most players would automatically refuse to let a conversation like this get started or quickly say it would be something for their agent to evaluate.

Gammons said Ortiz did the latter but not before spending 10 minutes with the woman, looking at all her drawings and telling her how good they are.

When that story was related to Ortiz on Friday in the Red Sox clubhouse, he smiled and said, "That's how it is. You got to keep it that way."

Ortiz and his wife, Tiffany, a teacher from Appleton, Wis., whom he met while playing with the low Single-A Midwest League team there in 1996, and their three children split the offseason between the Dominican Republic, where Ortiz was born, and the Boston area, where he has become very involved in charitable and community causes.

Hence, it's not like Ortiz finishes the season, then leaves Boston and shows up with the Red Sox the next February in Fort Myers, Fla., for spring training.

"He's kind of a larger-than-life guy," Lowell said. "He's 6-4. He's black. He's 240 (pounds). And that's not a knock, but he's a very noticeable guy," Lowell said.

"In Boston all the time, I get, 'Man, you look exactly like the third baseman for the Red Sox.' I say, 'Thank you very much. I take that as a compliment.' David don't ever get, 'You look exactly like David Ortiz.' You see David, you know it's him. There's no mistaking."

THE NUMBERS ALWAYS WIN OUT IN THE END (EXCEPT WHEN THEY DON'T):

Drew has gone from fans' target to a hit (Amalie Benjamin, October 27, 2007, Boston Globe)

"I know the way people see J.D., where he's very stoic and passionless, he doesn't really show a lot of emotion," said Red Sox hitting coach Dave Magadan. "J.D.'s got a lot of emotion. He's got a lot of passion. He doesn't wear it on his sleeve like a lot of guys, but he cares about what he's doing out there. He doesn't let too many people see the emotion.

"I saw the look on his face when he went down into the tunnel after he hit that grand slam; he was shaking. He was so excited. It was like a piano was off his back. It made the whole season worthwhile for me, just seeing that."

A season like the one Drew has had in his first year in Boston would not be easy for anyone to endure. He might hide it, but arriving in a new city and hitting .270 with 11 home runs (boosted, actually, by a late-season surge) is bound to engender some hard feelings from the fans. [...]

Yet of late, things have turned for Drew. Because of something he noticed about his stance about six weeks ago, Drew turned in a much more Drew-like September. Over the final three weeks of the regular season, he hit .393 with a .500 on-base percentage and a 1.221 OPS (on-base plus slugging).

And that was only a prelude to his October.

A BITTER FEUD AT THE MARGINS:

A Dearth of Taxes? (John Tamny, 10/26/07, Real Clear Politics)

In truth, tax collections in the U.S. tend to follow our nation's GDP pretty closely irrespective of the tax rate. As Discovery Institute senior fellow Bret Swanson recently wrote, there is a "remarkable tendency for Federal revenues to hover around 18% of GDP (and for personal income tax revenue to gather between 7.5 and 9% of GDP), no matter if tax rates are high or low."

What this means is that if we grow the overall economic pie, we expand the taxable base. Sure enough, the reductions in top marginal rates that began in 1981 helped U.S. GDP to grow sixfold over the last twenty-five years and as a result, federal revenues have hit record levels nearly every year since.

THE DISTAFF W:

What Became of the Realist?: A close observer traces the rise and fall of Condi Rice's star: THE CONFIDANTE: Condoleezza Rice and the Creation of The Bush Legacy By Glenn Kessler (Rich Lowry, October 28, 2007, Washington Post)

Long a foreign policy "realist," Rice wrote an article for Foreign Affairs in 2000 calling for clear-eyed pursuit of the national interest. "To be sure, there is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity," she wrote, "but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect."

After Sept. 11, 2001, however, Rice bought fully into Bush's freedom agenda. Kessler engages in some unconvincing psychologizing to explain her transformation, suggesting she had reached into her deep, Calvinist faith in a moment of crisis. But the terror attack alone seems sufficient cause to explain her change. It convinced her, as she likes to say, that the United States had pursued stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy, and achieved neither.

FROM THE SWAMP TO THE MOUNTAIN TOP:

Traits of Fenway, Coors Factor In to Fall Classic (All Things Considered, October 26, 2007)

During this World Series, baseball games are being played in two very different stadiums. Fenway Park in Boston is nearly a century old, while Coors Field in Denver opened in 1995.

Nate Silver, executive vice president of the Baseball Prospectus Web site, talks with Melissa Block about those differences and how they might affect the series.

THEY AREN'T TERRORISTS IF YOU SUPPORT THEM:

Neocons Embrace Islamic Terror Group (Danny Postel, October 27, 2007, Common Sense)

The U.S. State Department officially considers the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) a Foreign Terrorist Organization. While those honors date back to 1994, they've been renewed during the Bush years. Indeed in 2003 Foggy Bottom went further, including the National Council of Resistance of Iran -- an MEK alias -- under the terrorist designation. (The MEK is also known as the People's Mujahedeen.) [...]

Here you have virtually everything the Right claims to oppose all rolled into one: Islamism, Marxism, terrorism, and Saddam. Naturally, then, neoconservatives would utterly deplore the MEK and everything it stands for, right? The MEK would in fact make an ideal target for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week and Terrorism Awareness efforts, no?

Well, no. At least one of the carnival's acts, it turns out, is rather fond of the Islamo-Stalinist-terrorist cult group, and has repeatedly argued for the removal of the MEK from the State Department's list of terrorist groups and indeed urged the U.S. government to embrace it. Daniel Pipes, who will be speaking at Tufts on October 24th as part of the Horowitz high jinks, has made the MEK a recurring theme in his writings going back several years: here, here, and here.

Pipes has also gone to bat for the MEK right in the pages of Horowitz's house organ.

But Pipes is far from alone on the Right in championing the MEK. He co-authored the first piece linked to above with Patrick Clawson of the right-wing Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Right-wing commentator Max Boot has argued not merely for the removal of the MEK from the terrorist list but for funding and unleashing it to do battle with Iranian forces -- this while casually acknowledging that it is a "political cult."

IF DARWINISTS DESIGN IT THEN IT IS NATURE, EH?:

The amazing reunion of 'guinea-pig' twins split at birth 35 years ago (DUNCAN ROBERTSON, 27th October 2007, Daily Mail)

Identical twin sisters who were separated at birth have been reunited after 35 years.

But more incredibly, Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein were astonished to discover they had been part of a bizarre social experiment.

Researchers had kept them apart with different adoptive families to investigate theories over 'nature and nurture'. [...]

Paula said: 'They neglected to tell them [the adoptive parents] the key element of the study, which is that it was about child development among twins raised in different homes. Nature intended for us to be raised together, so I think it was a crime we were separated.'

GREENER MONSTER:

Red Sox Turn Green: Fenway may be the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball. But it's receiving a very modern makeover (Ted Smalley Bowen, 10/26/07, Business Week)

In architectural terms, the 2007 World Series pits the Red Sox’s venerable 1912 Fenway Park against the Colorado Rockies’ 1995-vintage Coors Field in Denver—old bricks v. new bricks. Fenway is the oldest ballpark in Major League Baseball, but it’s receiving a makeover informed by the latest thinking on sustainability.

The Red Sox are planning to add photovoltaic panels and make additional green improvements with advice from the Natural Resources Defense Council. Although there is not yet a standardized way of greening a stadium, the Sox join a host of other ball clubs pursuing LEED-inspired, or LEED-aspiring projects including the Washington Nationals, Minnesota Twins, New York Yankees, and New York Mets. The NRDC is consulting with many of these teams, as well as Major League officials and NBA and NHL franchises.

“It’s enlightened self-interest (for sports teams),” says Mark Rosentraub, a sports economist and dean of the Cleveland State University School of Urban Affairs. “It’s a prudent response to the high cost of energy and there’s PR value, since everything they do is much more visible.”

THE WISDOM OF WATSON:

Q & A: IQs rise, but are children really smarter?: An expert says scores are higher because more people view the world through scientific spectacles (Denise Gellene, October 27, 2007, Los Angeles Times)

James R. Flynn, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Otaga in New Zealand, discovered two decades ago that IQ test scores were steadily rising in the developed world despite failing schools and stagnant standardized test scores -- a phenomenon called the "Flynn effect." During a recent visit to UCLA, Flynn talked about the conundrum, which is the subject of his new book, "What Is Intelligence?"

So why are their IQs higher than those of their parents and grandparents?

The people who invented IQ tests saw the world through scientific spectacles. They were interested in logical reasoning. But generations ago people were very utilitarian. If you asked a person in 1900 what a dog and rabbit had in common, they would say you could use a dog to hunt rabbits. Today you would say they both are mammals. That is shorthand for a lot of insight. That may seem trivial, but classifying the world is prerequisite to understanding it scientifically.

You are referring to the portion of the IQ test that measures the ability to determine similarities?

Yes. And if you say "Mammals," you get two points, and if you say "Dogs hunt rabbits," you get none. The score on this portion of the test has gone up 24 points in America since 1947.

Do you think there is something wrong with the way IQ is assessed?

The people who designed the test thought they were measuring intelligence, but they were actually measuring a mix of intelligence and a way of looking at the world. They looked at the world through scientific spectacles, and it took a long time for the average person to slowly take on that perspective.

IT'S THE SIN OF OMMISSION THAT'LL KILL YA:

Big Papi at first, Youkilis to bench as Red Sox deal with NL rules (AP, 10/26/07)

David Ortiz will play first base for Boston when the World Series resumes Saturday night, and Kevin Youkilis will be benched as the Red Sox adjust to life without a designated hitter.

Mike Lowell will remain at third for the Red Sox, who have a 2-0 Series lead against the Colorado Rockies.

AND THE ONLY NEGATIVE IMPACT IS ON LAW BREAKERS:

Cameras cut deaths on danger road by half (MATT DICKINSON, 10/27/07, The Scotsman)

Deaths and serious injuries on the A77 in Ayrshire have fallen by half since the devices were introduced.

The camera system was installed along the largely coastal road, between Ayr and Girvan, in August 2005.

ED'S DEAD:

'Ain't no stopping us now,' SNP leader taunts Brown (HAMISH MACDONELL, 10/27/07, scotsman.com)

ALEX Salmond taunted Gordon Brown yesterday, telling the Prime Minister he was powerless to stop the Scottish Government driving towards independence.

The First Minister hit out at what he claimed was obstructionism and a clear financial squeeze being imposed by the UK government on Scotland.

And, to loud applause at the SNP conference in Aviemore, he declared: "They are not going to stop us, Scotland is moving forward."

BUP BUP BUP BUP BUP BA, BUP BUP BUP BUP BU, BUP BUP BUP BUP BUP BU, BUP BUP BUP BUP BA....:

Student beats 'Chariots of Fire' record (Sophie Borland, 27/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

To succeed, competitors must run 367 metres (423 yards) round Trinity College's Great Court in the 43.6 seconds it takes for the college's clock to strike 12.

Until now this had only been achieved by two people, both Olympic gold medallists — Lord Burghley in 1927 and Sebastian Coe, whose 1988 attempt has since been discounted.

Last Saturday, Sam Dobin, 19, from Herne Island, Kent, who is reading economics at Trinity, completed the course in 42.77 secs, 0.83 secs faster than Burghley.

DON'T TRY AND CONFUSE THE RIGHT WITH FACTS:

Bush The Big Spender? Check Again (Investor's Business Daily, October 25, 2007)

In the first six years of his term, including the Office of Management and Budget's most current estimate for 2007, Bush spent, on average, 20% of GDP.

Was that a lot? Not really. As the chart shows, it puts him in the middle of the presidential pack. Since Johnson took office in late 1963, spending as a share of GDP has averaged 20.4%. And, ironically, spending under LBJ was the lowest.

So rather than a "record" spender, as some claim, Bush is actually below average. Indeed, he's within statistical spitting distance of President Clinton, who on average spent 19.6% of GDP.

PRETTY REVEALING, THAT FIFTY YEARS LATER...:

Putin: US risking new Cuban missile crisis (Damien McElroy and Adrian Blomfield, 26/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

President Vladimir Putin has declared that American plans for a missile shield in Europe pose as grave a challenge to Moscow as the Cuban missile crisis did in the 1960s.

JUST LIKE THE FOUNDERS DREW IT UP:

Senate Battle Over FEC Nominee May Hamper Agency's Ability to Act (Matthew Mosk, 10/26/07, Washington Post)

With no resolution in sight to a partisan stalemate over one of President Bush's nominees to the Federal Election Commission, campaign finance experts said yesterday that there is a real prospect the commission could start the 2008 election year without enough members to take any official action.

MUCH TO BE HUMBLE ABOUT:

Al-Jazeera 'on crusaders' side' over bin Laden (David Blair, 26/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

Al-Jazeera, the controversial Arab satellite channel, has been denounced for siding with the "crusaders" after it broadcast a message from Osama bin Laden that made him appear unusually humble.

In his latest missive, bin Laden admitted that al-Qa'eda's organisation in Iraq had made mistakes and called for unity among Muslims.

"Some of you have been lax in one duty, which is to unite your ranks," said bin Laden, in a taped message.

"I advise myself, Muslims in general and brothers in al-Qa'eda everywhere to avoid extremism in men and groups."

BETTER HIDE THAT FROM THE TEN-YEAR OLD...:

Computer games are 'good' for kids say experts (Daily Mail, 26th October 2007)

Experts are now telling us computer games are good for kids.

A study has found children who play computer games before school achieve better grades than those who don't.

In a pilot scheme run by one school in Dundee, pupils showed "dramatic" improvements in the classroom after gaming for 20 minutes before lessons.

"OUR LINE OF ATTACK":

Marines declare war on garbage: With Ramadi now quiet, troops turn to waste collection as a way to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis. (Tina Susman, 10/26/07, Los Angeles Times)

Now, instead of worrying about roadside bombs, they worry about puddles.

"That's a new one!" Falk said as he walked down Ramadi's main drag. Water gurgled from beneath the sand. The tiny ripples were a sign of a leaking underground pipe, and Falk made a note to alert the city's sewage manager about it.

Maj. Rory Quinn, the unit's executive officer, said that every little improvement helped keep Ramadi free of bombings.

"I've got to fix sewers today to buy three more days without one. You're constantly buying yourself three or four days to prevent another Iraqi from wanting to go out and kill Americans."

It doesn't take long to see that the desire for clean streets and pleasant surroundings has overtaken security concerns in Ramadi, where the population has declined by 100,000 residents since the war began four years ago.

Much of the city remains blighted by crumbling buildings and bullet-scarred facades, but there are rebuilt schools, offices, and businesses painted in bright colors, such as raspberry and lime green. A pedestrian walkway erected over the city's main street is robin's-egg blue.

Early each morning, young men and boys in the main market are paid to sweep debris out of alleys lined with stalls selling a wide variety of goods.

Cleanup is a topic of conversation between U.S. troops and local leaders as they gather at sheiks' villas to chat over French cigarettes, Cuban cigars and hot tea. It is the focus of meetings convened at U.S. military posts. It is the first thing shopkeeper Ibrahim Jassim Ahmed mentions when asked whether he has any complaints.

"The biggest problem is that trash right there," he said, pointing at an empty lot about 25 feet from the door of his tiny food store, where waste was strewn like soiled confetti. "It should be taken away to another area."

Two large trash containers sat on the edge of the field. Both were empty, pointing up one of the battles facing the U.S. and Iraqi officials trying to beautify Ramadi: getting people to use garbage cans.

The issue was the source of lively debate that evening when some local leaders met with Marines in the Jamaya neighborhood.

"What can I do for you?" asked Lt. Jordan Reese, the unit's designated trash guru, as he leaned forward and looked into the creased face of Karim Arak, a Ramadi city councilman.

"I need Dumpsters," Arak replied.

"We just ordered 400," Reese said.

"It's not enough," Arak replied. He wanted at least 1,500.

Reese counseled patience. "Four hundred is just the first step. It's not going to happen overnight, but we're trying to get as many out there as possible," he said.

Conversation shifted to the logic of spending money on containers that people might not use.

Someone suggested making posters showing people putting trash into containers. Someone else recommended asking imams to broadcast "no littering" messages. The city's director general of trash, Akram Mirshed Mahane, joked that an Iraqi police officer should be posted next to each bin to shoot litterbugs.

The issue goes beyond litter, though. This city produces more than the garden variety of city waste. It is a combination of rubble from the war and of garbage that went uncollected for years. Some of it flew away on desert winds, but most of it ended up mixed with the region's silken sand and in canals.

The Marines are hoping that a landfill on the city's southeastern edge becomes an organized city dump. For now, it is a tangle of crushed car parts, plastic bottles, paper and tons of unrecognizable muck heaped in mounds.

"This is the fight -- sewage, water and trash," Lt. James Colvin said as he showed the landfill to a visitor. "I was a poor math major in college. I come here and they tell me: 'OK, fix the sewage system!' " said Colvin, remembering how shocked he was to return to Ramadi and find that he could walk down streets that he once dreaded crossing in an armored vehicle. "But there's no enemy to hunt down now, so this is our line of attack."

AT LEAST AGENT ORANGE REALLY DOES CAUSE ACNE:

Official cites drug misuse in death, not 9/11 toxins (Amy Westfeldt, 10/26/07, Associated Press)

The city's medical examiner concluded that the misuse of pills, not the dust of ground zero, caused the lung disease that killed a man who became an example of post-Sept. 11 illness, the examiner's spokeswoman confirmed yesterday.

Chief Medical Examiner Charles Hirsch concluded that James Zadroga, a retired police detective, got the lung disease that killed him by injecting ground-up pills into his bloodstream, leaving traces of the pills in lung tissue, spokeswoman Ellen Borakove said. [...]

A New Jersey medical examiner had ruled last year that Zadroga died from inhaling toxic ground zero dust, but the family asked Hirsch for a second opinion - and a ruling that would add Zadroga to the official Sept. 11 victims' list.

WHEREAS THEY HAVE TO BE LUCKY EVERY DAY...:

Colombia kills rebel commander accused of leading attacks on U.S.-owned oil pipeline (The Associated Press, October 25, 2007)

A senior rebel commander, accused of leading attacks on a U.S.-owned oil pipeline and terrorizing residents along Colombia's Caribbean coast, was killed in combat, the defense minister said Thursday.

Gustavo Rueda, head of the 37th Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, was killed Wednesday night in the isolated Montes de Maria mountain range, defense minister Juan Manuel Santos said.

At least 18 other guerrillas were killed and four more captured during the fighting, which capped more than six months of intelligence work, Santos said. There were no reports of military casualties.

WHAT'S STRONG ABOUT A HOLD WHERE YOU HAVE TO HIDE?:

Battle at Pakistan Cleric’s Stronghold (ISMAIL KHAN, 10/26/07, NY Times)

Pakistani security forces exchanged heavy gunfire with militants at the sprawling seminary of an increasingly powerful extremist cleric in the troubled North-West Frontier Province today, according to regional police officials.

The fighting was in the same region where a bomb attack on Thursday killed 17 members of a civil armed guard and 3 civilians.

The cleric, Maulana Fazlullah, is also known as Maulana Radio for his illegal radio broadcasts urging Taliban-style Islamic law. The provincial government deployed 2,500 troops to the area, known as Swat, two days ago, to join army forces trying to quell the rise of extremism the cleric has fostered. He is believed to have gone underground since the troops arrived.

THE REFLEXIVE QUOTA HIRE SAYS A LOT ABOUT HIM...

Obama Fails To Quell Row Over an Anti-Gay Singer (NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT, October 26, 2007, NY Sun)

A frantic effort by Senator Obama to defuse a row over the appearance of a homophobic gospel singer at a fund-raising concert appears only to have made matters worse.

Mr. Obama's presidential campaign hurriedly added to the concert program yesterday an openly gay white minister, the Reverend Andy Sidden, to counteract the bad publicity generated by its decision to invite the Reverend Donnie McClurkin, a gospel singer who has described homosexuality as a "curse," to headline a fund-raising event on Sunday in Columbia, S.C.

The incident reflects the need for Democratic candidates to juggle the often conflicting demands of their supporters.

NOT ENOUGH TO MAKE A CANDLE?:

Kevin Rudd's earwax snack hits YouTube (Graeme Baker, 26/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

The man tipped to be the next prime minister of Australia has been caught on camera eating his ear wax in parliament.

The footage has already been viewed by more than 200,000 people on the YouTube website, and some analysts claim that it could even damage Kevin Rudd's opinion poll lead ahead of next month's general election.

THE DESERVING:

Providence trails only Boston in TV ratings for Game One (KEVIN McNAMARA, 10/25/07, Providence Journal)

In Boston, the game drew a 50.4 rating and a 70 share, meaning 70 percent of all TV's on were tuned to the game.

Providence was the second-highest market with a 40.5 rating and 72 share. That was ahead of Denver (35.8/51).

MORE:
Fox’s Coverage Of World Series Has Taco Filling (RICHARD SANDOMIR, 10/25/07, NY Times)

Game 1 of the World Series was won by the Red Sox.

But it belonged to Taco Bell, which is not related to Cool Papa, Buddy or Gus. [...]

[A]mazingly, after Ortiz’s flyout, Fox cut to Coco Crisp and Royce Clayton (combined 2007 salary: $5.3 million) in the Red Sox’ dugout for 40 seconds of taped, unprompted(?), cheerful chit-chat about how to get those free tacos. “Shameless, but very funny,” McCarver said.

DIRTY DANCING:

Music plays part in Fenway's tradition (Alyson Footer, 10/25/07, MLB.com)

"Sweet Caroline" is far from the only musical tradition at Fenway Park. When the Red Sox win, Kaiser's crew plays three songs -- "Tessie" by the Dropkick Murphys, "Dirty Water" by The Standells and "Joy to the World" by Three Dog Night.

Why "Dirty Water"?

"It's all about the Charles River and Boston," Kaiser said. "'Love that dirty water, Boston, you're my home.'"

The club's attachment to "Tessie" is a bit more complicated. It's become arguably the most famous of all of the Red Sox's good luck charms, especially as the season progresses toward the playoffs.

First, a little background information. The broadway tune "Tessie" was originally used as a rally song during the 1903 World Series. Boston was losing that year to the Pirates in the best-of-nine series, 3-1, and a group of self-proclaimed baseball fanatics called the Royal Rooters attempted to rally their team with every song that came to mind.

Ultimately, "Tessie" proved to be the most irritating to the Pirates, and with that knowledge, the Rooters stuck exclusively with that one tune. Boston went on to win Games 5, 6, 7 and 8 to win the series.

The Royal Rooters stopped singing in 1918, the last time the Red Sox won a World Series for the next 86 years. Fast forward to 2004. "Tessie" made a musical reappearance, and perhaps not so coincidentally, the Red Sox also won the World Series.

This time, the local band Dropkick Murphys remade the song, with the help of Red Sox players Johnny Damon, Bronson Arroyo and Lenny DiNardo, and Red Sox vice president of public affairs Charles Steinberg. Boston Herald sportswriter Jeff Horrigan co-wrote the new lyrics with the Murphys.

During the '04 season, the Murphys were invited to sing "Tessie" live at Fenway Park. Incredibly, the Red Sox are 5-0 with four final at-bat wins when the band appears.

Don't think the Red Sox brass isn't aware of the Dropkick Murphys' magic. With the Red Sox seeking their second American League pennant in three years this season, they invited the band to perform their famous song prior to Game 7 of the AL Championship Series.

Once the Red Sox secured the win, chaos ensued. Closer Jonathan Papelbon broke out in an Irish dance and gathered members of the Murphys, who were already on the field. Papelbon was dancing to the band's song, "I'm Shipping Up To Boston," a frantic Irish punk tune.

THANKS FOR THE TACO, MR. ELLSBURY!:

Steal a base, steal a taco.

DID THE rEALISTS REALLY THINK...:

In Sanctioning Iran, U.S. Plays Its ‘Unilateralism’ Card (HELENE COOPER, 10/25/07, NY Times)(

[A]fter 18 months in which the administration has touted the virtues of collective action against Iran by the United States and its allies, the sanctions are a major turn toward unilateralism.

The shift represents a tacit acknowledgment that the diplomatic strategy pressed most vigorously by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been ineffective, and it prompted fresh criticism on Thursday from Russia: “Why make the situation worse, bring it to a dead end, threaten sanctions or even military action?” President Vladimir V. Putin asked, in a report by Agence France-Presse.

The administration clearly hopes to enlist allies around the world in its new, tougher stance — in part because the United States, having maintained its own stiff sanctions against Iran since the Islamic revolution in 1979, does not have much leverage left itself.

The administration hopes its influence can turn Iran into a political and economic pariah from which more foreign institutions will shy away.

The sanctions will “provide a powerful deterrent to every international bank and company that thinks of doing business with the Iranian government,” Ms. Rice said.

Yet officials acknowledged that past attempts to enlist allies in limiting their business ties to Iran have come up short.

A TAD LATE TO THE DANCE:

What Comes Next (Yuval Levin & Peter Wehner, October 17, 2007, New York Sun)

If 25 years ago you had asked an American conservative to name the preeminent domestic policy challenges of the day, you probably would have gotten back, along with a general worry about cultural decline, some combination of welfare, taxes, and crime.

Few conservatives today would name any of these three as the foremost problems, and even on the cultural front they could point to some advances. This is due, in large part, to a series of conservative successes that have transformed American politics and made conservative theories of economics, law enforcement, and welfare the accepted wisdom. Success has not been complete in any of these areas, of course, but the struggle over first principles, over which way to go in general, has been won.

Today the left -- which for decades fought vigorously on all three fronts -- offers scant opposition on any of them. No leading Democrats are arguing that we undo conservative achievements on welfare and crime. And even on taxes, which liberals want to increase, no Democrats are arguing that we return to the days when the top rate of taxation was 70%.

But what now? On what issues can conservative principles point to popular reforms today? The most prominent domestic policy concerns of the day would seem, at first glance, to favor the left. Health care, income inequality, and the environment, among other issues, have long been identified with American liberals, and conservatives have been uncomfortable taking them up.

But the notion that the left owns these issues is not a fact inherent in the problems themselves; rather, it is a failure of conservative imagination. In fact, it is precisely these kinds of issues that should now be front and center on the conservative agenda, not only because the public cares about them, but also because the left is far more vulnerable on them than it seems. Conservatives should fight precisely on what is perceived to be liberal turf, as they have done successfully before.

Welfare reform -- the most successful social policy innovation in generations -- offers a powerful model. For decades welfare was the quintessential liberal issue, and while conservatives offered serious reasons for concern and opposition, they did not offer enough in the way of concrete reforms.

But when conservatives finally turned their attention to reforming the welfare system -- applying basic conservative premises about the centrality of the family, the power of economic incentives, and the value of self reliance -- they took control of the issue and eventually enacted a sweeping and dramatically successful reform. Democrats had been right to focus on welfare, but their approach was disastrous. Republicans were wrong to ignore it, but once they took it on and offered an alternative, they won.

Something of a similar dynamic now presents itself on a range of other issues.

IF WE ACCEPT THE PREMISE OF THE STARSHIP TROOPER ARGUMENT...:

When Rudy goes waterboarding : The former mayor says "liberal newspapers" have exaggerated the technique's brutality. Perhaps he should try it himself. (Joe Conason, 10/25/07, Salon)

...do the "pro-choice" need to experience being aborted?

BEST WHEN THE POPE LEADS THE REFORMATION:

King Tries to Grow Modern Ideas in Desert, Free of Saudi Taboos (THANASSIS CAMBANIS, 10/25/07, NY Times)

On a marshy peninsula 50 miles from this Red Sea port, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is staking $12.5 billion on a gargantuan bid to catch up with the West in science and technology.

Between an oil refinery and the sea, the monarch is building from scratch a graduate research institution that will have one of the 10 largest endowments in the world, worth more than $10 billion.

Its planners say men and women will study side by side in an enclave walled off from the rest of Saudi society, the country’s notorious religious police will be barred and all religious and ethnic groups will be welcome in a push for academic freedom and international collaboration sure to test the kingdom’s cultural and religious limits.

This undertaking is directly at odds with the kingdom’s religious establishment, which severely limits women’s rights and rejects coeducation and robust liberal inquiry as unthinkable.

For the new institution, the king has cut his own education ministry out the loop, hiring the state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco to build the campus, create its curriculum and attract foreigners.

NO WONDER SHE WANTED HIM IN AFRICA INSTEAD OF AT HOME:

Former Spy's Memoir Contains a Paradox (NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT, October 25, 2007, NY Sun)

"The frequent fights, seething accusations, hurtful words, and entrenched bitterness pushed us both to the brink," Ms. Plame writes. And she is talking about her fights with her husband, not Karl Rove.

"Joe is a formidable opponent in any circumstance, and I felt I was always on the losing side, unable to make my case coherently because so much emotion was involved and so much at stake personally. When communication nearly halted entirely, it became obvious that our marriage was in deep trouble. We retreated further into our shells and each began to contemplate life without the other."

Ms. Plame found herself pinned in a shooting match between the White House and the CIA, led by the flawed George Tenet at the time, after her husband reported from Niger on whether Iraq had been trying to buy yellowcake.

Whether Ms. Plame, an agency expert on weapons of mass destruction, was responsible for his going to Niger is one of the key mysteries in the whole affair. So did she send him? It depends upon which page you read. Page 168: "I neither suggested Joe nor recommended him." Yet on page 109, "a mid-level reports officer" said to her, "What about talking to Joe about it? … The reports officer and I walked over to the office of the [redacted] Chief to discuss our available plans of action. Bob, our boss, listened carefully and then suggested we put together a meeting with Joe and the appropriate Agency and State officers."

And on page 186, Ms. Plame explains she wrote an e-mail that read: "My husband has good relations with both the [Niger] PM and the former Minister of Mines (not to mention lots of French contacts), both of whom could possibly shed light on this sort of activity."

When this e-mail came to light, in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, the high-strung Mr. Wilson once again launched into a temper tantrum. "Midway through the silent meal, Joe abruptly got up, dumped his unfinished plate in the sink, and left the room in a wordless rage. ... Despite my best efforts to explain the innocence of the e-mail, Joe was too upset to listen. He just glared at me."

PEOPLE WHO FEAR COMPETITION...:

School Reform That Can Work: Entrepreneurial ventures hold great promise for improving American education (Frederick M. Hess and Thomas Gift, October 25, 2007, The American)

Steve Pines of the Education Industry Association reports that over 26,000 educational ventures are up and running in the United States. Many operate in established niches such as tutoring or textbook sales; other now-familiar operations such as the Knowledge Is Power Program and Teach For America either run schools or recruit teachers; and many others are tackling issues of instructional literacy, professional development, and information technology. To get a better sense of what these ventures are accomplishing, it’s worth taking a brief look at three: Blackboard, SMARTHINKING, and New Leaders for New Schools. The point is not to hail these particular efforts but rather to illustrate what is possible when smart, creative thinkers are given space to experiment with new ideas.

Blackboard, a for-profit firm, was founded in 1997 by Michael Chasen and Matthew Pittinsky. It has become the world’s leading provider of educational software, applications, and services. Its signature technology, the Blackboard Learning System, is a computer-based learning program that provides virtual access to classroom activities such as homework assignments, labs, and tests. With the click of a mouse, students can obtain academic feedback, communicate with their teachers, and collaborate with peers.

Now used by over 12 million students in 46 states, Blackboard has been integrated into the curriculum by some of the nation’s most tech-savvy schools, including nine of the top ten high schools as ranked by Newsweek. The New York Times has referred to Blackboard as a “disruptive technology … with the power to change how established institutions operate.” The Washington Post has called it “a high-tech star … that is doing more to change the way teaching and learning is done in America than any policies of the federal government.”

"I SAID WHAT?":

’55 ‘Origin of Life’ Paper Is Retracted (CORNELIA DEAN, 10/25/07, NY Times)

In January 1955, Homer Jacobson, a chemistry professor at Brooklyn College, published a paper called “Information, Reproduction and the Origin of Life” in American Scientist, the journal of Sigma Xi, the scientific honor society.

In it, Dr. Jacobson speculated on the chemical qualities of earth in Hadean time, billions of years ago when the planet was beginning to cool down to the point where, as Dr. Jacobson put it, “one could imagine a few hardy compounds could survive.”

Nobody paid much attention to the paper at the time, he said in a telephone interview from his home in Tarrytown, N.Y. But today it is winning Dr. Jacobson acclaim that he does not want — from creationists who cite it as proof that life could not have emerged on earth without divine intervention.

So after 52 years, he has retracted it.

LET THE TANKREDISTS EAT IMPORTED CAKE:

Immigration Raids Hurt Farmers: Farmers say an immigration crackdown is causing workers to flee and crippling operations. Now they're urging reform (Moira Herbst, 10/25/07, Business Week)

Maureen Torrey, an 11th-generation farmer in the rural town of Elba, N.Y., has been losing sleep. Just as rows of cabbage and winter squash stand ready for harvest on her 11,000 acre farm, she can't find enough workers to bring in the crops. She needs about 350 workers and is 70 short of that number. "I wake up at 3:30 in the morning and my mind doesn't shut off," she says.

The problem, she says, is fear. Torrey Farms, a 14-crop vegetable farm located an hour east of Buffalo, has been raided twice since last October, when she says immigration officials kicked in the doors of workers' housing and apprehended 34. In August, officials arrested seven workers and 14 more fled the area. Amid continued talk of a federal crackdown on undocumented immigrants, she's afraid still more of her workforce will flee to less hostile terrain. With a population of about 9,000, the town of Elba, "Onion Capital of the World" to locals, may not have the manpower to replace them. [...]

[W]hile the new rule has yet to take effect, its impact is already being felt by farmers like Torrey. An estimated three-quarters of agricultural workers in the U.S. are undocumented, and growers are starting to feel the paralyzing effects of losing their workforce. They say that unless the government implements workable reforms, the future of the U.S. as a food-producing nation is in jeopardy.

THE NATURAL DEVOLUTION FROM COUNTRY TO NATIONS:

A country at war (Ziauddin Sardar, 25 October 2007, New Statesman)

Pakistan is about to descend even deeper into violence and chaos, as the front-line state in the war on terror prepares for an all-out offensive on the jihadi militants entrenched in Waziristan, the country's lawless northern province. In what amounts to total war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda, President Musharraf is planning to bring the whole region under military control. This is a high-risk strategy, as the consequences of failure could be devastating for Pakistan. They could even lead to the break-up of the country.

Behind the headlines, the state's contradictions and tensions are being tested to the limit.

THAT POODLE WON'T HUNT:

Edwards's Bid for Favor Of Hunters Draws Fire (JOSH GERSTEIN, October 25, 2007, NY Sun)

A new attempt by a Democratic presidential hopeful, John Edwards, to cozy up to hunters is coming under fire from the National Rifle Association and conservation groups.

Traveling in Iowa yesterday, Mr. Edwards unveiled a "Hunting and Fishing Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" that calls for giving hunters more access to federal lands, including, in some cases, national parks.

"This is part of who I am and part of what I will stand for as president," Mr. Edwards told voters in Glenwood, Iowa, according to the Associated Press. He said he hunted while growing up in rural North Carolina and still fishes occasionally.

THE SURPRISING WEAKNESS OF THE CAVE DWELLERS:

Al Qaeda reveals signs of weakness: The US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, said Thursday that Al Qaeda is 'simply gone' from some areas. (Dan Murphy, 10/26/07, The Christian Science Monitor

Across the Arab world, where Al Qaeda had sought to build influence and bases of operation on the back of widespread anger against the US over its war in Iraq and the broader war on terrorism, the movement is now showing signs that it is stalled, if not in retreat.

Experts say Al Qaeda's failures have largely come down to its brutal methods, which have turned off large numbers of Arabs. They say that Muslims from Iraq to Egypt may want their countries to adhere to strict Islamic law, but not at the price of suicide bombings.

MORE:
Osama bin Laden's growing anxiety: He's struggling to direct fewer and fewer followers. (Fawaz A. Gerges, 10/26/07, CS Monitor)

In yet another sign of trouble for Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden publicly conceded that his like-minded militants in Iraq "made mistakes." In an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera this week, he sounds deeply anxious about the survival of Al Qaeda in Iraq – a group that is largely independent of his own organization but adheres to a similar ideology. Al Qaeda's top leader appealed to Sunni Arab tribes and other armed Iraqi Sunni groups to stop fighting Al Qaeda members and unite against the real enemy – the US-led coalition.

Al Qaeda in Iraq faces growing indignation from fellow Sunni Iraqis fed up with its indiscriminate killing of civilians and its Taliban-like religious laws. In the past year, Sunni tribes and fighters have risen against Al Qaeda's branch in Iraq and, working jointly with US troops, killed and expelled scores of its militants from their neighborhoods, particularly from Anbar Province. Besieged both internally and externally, Al Qaeda in Iraq struggles to survive and absorb these catastrophic military setbacks.

BOY, THEY DON'T JUST WANT OUT OF THE COLD...:

Libya seals peace deal for Chad (BBC, 10/25/07)

Four Chadian rebel groups have sealed a peace agreement with the government, three weeks after negotiating the preliminary deal.

Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi hosted the talks alongside the presidents of Chad and Sudan.

RAISING TAXES AND CEDING SOVEREIGNTY IS THE SECOND WAY:

Tory bounce endures, shows Telegraph poll (Andrew Porter, 25/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

A dramatic turnaround in Conservative party fortunes is confirmed in an exclusive Daily Telegraph poll which shows their revival has been sustained.

David Cameron's personal poll ratings have also doubled in the past month, while Gordon Brown's have dived.

It is the first concrete sign that the Tory tax plans and Mr Brown's decision to call off the election has transformed the political landscape.

The Daily Telegraph YouGov survey shows the Tories on 41 per cent, a rise of nine from last month. Labour has dropped five points to 38.

There is also more gloom for the leaderless Liberal Democrats who have fallen from 15 per cent to just 11.

YOU MEAN HIS POLITICAL CAREER WASN'T JUST ONE DAY?:

National, State Polls Show Support for Pro-Abortion Rudy Giuliani Dropping (Steven Ertelt, October 25, 2007, LifeNews.com)

Rudy Giuliani continues to drop in national and state polls following a seminal survey issued just two weeks ago by the Des Moines Register. That poll was the first to show Giuliani's campaign hurting as more Republicans recognize his pro-abortion view and newer polls show his numbers continuing to drop.

A new Rasmussen Reports daily presidential tracking poll showed the lowest numbers for Giuliani of any recent surveys.

Giuliani is now supported by just 21% of likely GOP voters while Fred Thompson is the top choice for 19%. Another seventeen percent are undecided while John McCain has the backing of 14 percent and Mitt Romney enjoys the support of 12 percent.

SMART TARGETING:

Iranian regime reaching point of no return (Damien McElroy, 25/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

America has after all pinpointed the IRG, and specifically its Quds Force, as the main instrument of Iran's support for terrorists in Iraq and Lebanon.

In a broader sense, it adds to the pressure Washington has successfully placed on Iran as the country defies the world by pursuing atomic research that looks suspiciously like an attempt to develop a nuclear bomb.

By deploying a handful of aircraft carriers around the Islamic Republic, America has made plain its military resolve. By successfully holding an international coalition together at the United Nations, Ms Rice's diplomats have impelled the UN into censuring the regime.

THE VATICAN GETS ALL THE GOOD AMBASSADORS:

Mary Ann Glendon, New US Ambassador to the Holy See? (Catholic Online, 10/25/07)

It looks as though the well-known lawyer and pro-life feminist Mary Ann Glendon may become the newest U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

According to reports by ANSA in Italian, sources inside the Bush administration are saying that it is very likely that “President George W. Bush would appoint Mary Ann Glendon as the new US Ambassador to the Holy See."

DETENTE HAVING SAVED THE USSR, THEY TRIED TO SAVE THE DETENTIST:

Brezhnev tried to buoy Nixon during Watergate scandal, documents show (The Associated Press, October 25, 2007)

As the Watergate scandal enveloped President Richard Nixon, he was buoyed by a secret message of moral support from Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, according to newly released State Department documents.

Brezhnev told the U.S. president he knew he would not "crack under the pressure."

BUREAUCRACIES NEVER DIE:

New Maritime Strategy to Focus on 'Soft Power' (Ann Scott Tyson, 10/17/07, Washington Post)

The new approach marks a stark departure from the last U.S. maritime strategy, conceived by the Navy in the 1980s, which focused heavily on offensive operations against the Soviet Union. "This isn't just a strategy about putting ordnance on a target or sinking someone else's fleet," said a senior Navy official, who like some others spoke on condition of anonymity.

"Soft power, the humanitarian and economic efforts, have been elevated to the same level as high-end naval warfare," said another Navy official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity because the strategy had not been officially unveiled.

The 16-page document was developed over two years and outlines six imperatives. These include the traditional missions of concentrating major combat forces in the Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean and Western Pacific to deter or fight potential conflicts. Protecting vital sea lanes represents a growing priority, it said, as seaborne trade has more than quadrupled over the last four decades and now accounts for 90 percent of all international commerce and two-thirds of global petroleum trade.

In addition, the strategy calls for dispersing smaller maritime teams to carry out humanitarian missions as well as to counter terrorism, weapons proliferation, piracy and other illicit maritime activities -- partly to contain threats before they can reach the United States. These teams, which would integrate Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard forces, would deploy to areas such as Africa and the Western Hemisphere to promote closer cooperation with maritime forces in other nations.

"The global system and network and commerce could not function without the free flow on the world's oceans," Roughead said at the symposium. "But we all know . . . the disruptions that can occur, whether it's piracy, smuggling of people, of drugs, of weapons, terrorism -- all of that disrupts maritime security."

Roughead also spoke of "a movement toward . . . proactive humanitarian assistance in the deployment of our hospital ships to South America, Southeast Asia" and Africa.

To implement the strategy, sailors, Marines and Coast Guard personnel would be dispatched on a wide variety of ships as "force packages" able to conduct security missions, serve as mobile training teams or perform humanitarian, legal or reconstruction work.

THE VIEW FROM FRANKLIN'S WINDOW:

Baghdad Diarist Was On Guard When Questioned by Editors (Howard Kurtz, 10/25/07, Washington Post)

Beauchamp stood his ground even after Editor Franklin Foer told him "that if you're not able to talk about this and able to stand by your story, I'm not sure we'll be able to stand by it. . . . You wouldn't have much credibility left in the public eye. . . . You basically made a vow to us that what you were publishing was the truth." Foer added that Beauchamp's wife, Elspeth Reeve, then a New Republic reporter, had said "that it's the most important thing in the world for her that you say that you didn't recant."

Beauchamp replied that she was a journalist and he was a soldier.

Despite the contentious conversation, Foer continued to defend the article days later. He did so again yesterday, reiterating that other soldiers whom the magazine would not identify had confirmed the allegations.

THE NEW NEW SCIENCE IS THE OLD OLD CREATION::

All systems go: A powerful way of studying biology looks set for take-off (The Economist, 10/25/07)

[T]he beating heart was no simple video. It was, instead, the output of a stupendously complex computer model of a heart, developed over more than 40 years. This model is an example of “systems biology”, an approach that represents a significant shift both in the way biologists think about their field and in how they go about investigating it.

A central tenet of most scientific endeavour is the notion of reductionism—the idea that things can best be understood by reducing them to their smallest components. This turns out to be immensely useful in physics and chemistry, because the smallest components coming from a particle accelerator or a test tube behave individually in predictable ways.

In biology, though, the idea has its limits. The Human Genome Project, for example, was a triumph of reductionism. But merely listing genes does not explain how they collaborate to build and run an organism. Nor do isolated cells or biological molecules give full insight into the causes and development of diseases that ravage whole organs or organisms. A complete understanding of biological processes means putting the bits back together again—and that is what systems biologists are trying to do, by using the results of a zillion analytical experiments to build software models that behave like parts of living organisms.

IF HARRY REID HAD BEEN MAJORITY LEADER:

Southwick confirmed to 5th Circuit (S.A. Miller, October 25, 2007, Washington Times)

The Senate yesterday confirmed the long-stalled nomination of Leslie H. Southwick to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, overcoming Democratic criticism that the Mississippi judge's past rulings were potentially racist and homophobic.

In a rare gesture of bipartisanship for the chamber this session, 12 Democrats helped the nomination clear a procedural 60-vote hurdle to reach final consideration.

It won final passage by a vote of 59-38 with support from 49 Republicans, nine Democrats and one independent.

THE NATION WITHIN A COUNTRY:

Baseball whomps debate in TV ratings (Foon Rhee, 10/23/07, Boston Globe)

Fox News Channel reported this morning that the Republican debate Sunday night drew about 2.5 million viewers, including nearly 800,000 in the 25-54 age group.

But Game 7 of the American League championship series between the Red Sox and Cleveland Indians drew about 19 million viewers to Fox. The two events overlapped for about the first hour of the game, which was the highest-rated game since Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS between the Sox and Yankees.

It's a good bet that those numbers were even more skewed in Red Sox Nation, despite the presence of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney on the debate stage.

DON'T SWEAT IT, WOODY...:

Recovering From Injury, Returning to TV, Speaking for the Wounded (JACQUES STEINBERG, 10/25/07, NY Times)

In the summer of 2006, as Israeli and Hezbollah forces in Lebanon were clashing, Bob Woodruff desperately wished to fly there to report for ABC News. Never mind that it had been less than six months since a roadside explosion in Iraq pocked his brain with shrapnel and other debris, almost killing him.

“I couldn’t even remember the word ‘Lebanon,’” Mr. Woodruff, 46, said in an interview this week in his office at ABC News, reflecting on the months after he emerged from a 36-day, medically induced coma. “I couldn’t remember the names ‘Israel’ and ‘Hezbollah.’”

Now, though, Mr. Woodruff has recovered to the point that he has returned to work full time as a correspondent for ABC News on its various programs, including “World News” and “Nightline.” In recent weeks viewers have seen him reporting from Syria (on his search for the interpreter who helped save his life in Iraq), as well as from Sioux Falls, S.D. (on the rehabilitation of Senator Tim Johnson, himself recovering from a brain hemorrhage), and Bethesda, Md. (on troops who suffered brain and other injuries as traumatic as his own). In the spring he was in Cuba; two weeks ago he was in Angola for an ABC documentary about Chinese influence around the world that will be broadcast next year.

While he is not yet comfortable reporting live — he still struggles to find the right word at times, or he substitutes one (like syllable) when he means another (synonym) — he has traveled an unimaginable distance from those dark, early days last year, when he would look at a picture of scissors and be unable to say what it was. He is also playing pickup soccer again on weekends, much to his wife’s regret.

“You can see why I think every day, now, is a free day,” he said, his voice soft but firm.

CHOKE OR SMOKE:

Beckett is the new Schilling (Sam Donnellon, 10/25/07, Philly.com)

"We've got the best pitcher on the planet going for us tonight," Curt Schilling said before last night's Game 1 of the World Series.

At another time, in this and other places, that would have read as a boast. Once, and not that long ago, Curt Schilling was the guy Josh Beckett was last night, an entry in the win column of the postseason ledger before a pitch was thrown. But the guy who takes the mound tonight does so in a cloud of doubt and uncertainty, his diminished fastball forcing him to tap heavily into the knowledge and guile accrued during his 20 seasons.

"His preparation has always been off the charts," Red Sox manager Terry Francona said before last night's 13-1 laugher, and there seemed a twinge of hope in his voice. "That has never changed or wavered. If anything it's probably gotten better."

AMERICAN BEFORE THEY GET HERE:

Between Here and There: How Attached Are Latino Immigrants to Their Native Country? (Roger Waldinger, University of California, Los Angeles, 10/25/07, Pew Hispanic Center)

Most Latino immigrants maintain some kind of connection to their native country by sending remittances, traveling back or telephoning relatives, but the extent of their attachment varies considerably. Only one-in-ten (9%) do all three of these so-called transnational activities; these immigrants can be considered highly attached to their home country. A much larger minority (28%) of foreign-born Latinos is involved in none of these activities and can be considered to have a low level of engagement with the country of origin. Most Latino immigrants (63%) show moderate attachment to their home country; they engage in one or two of these activities.

Latino immigrants who have been in the U.S. for decades and those who arrived as children are less connected than those who arrived more recently or migrated as adults. There are also significant differences by country of origin, with Colombians and Dominicans maintaining more active connections than Mexicans, and with Cubans having the least contact.

Whether Latino immigrants maintain active, moderate or limited connections is an important marker of their attitudes toward the U.S., their native country and their own lives as migrants. Those with the highest levels of engagement have deeper attachments to their country of origin than immigrants whose connections are less robust. They also have more favorable views of their native country in comparisons with the U.S. Nonetheless, a clear majority of even these immigrants see their future in the U.S. rather than in the countries from which they come.

TALK ABOUT GILDING THE LILLY:

Pump up your pecan pie (LAURA H. EHRET, 10/24/07, The Dallas Morning News)

COCONUT PECAN PIE

2/3 cup sugar

1/3 cup butter, soft

1 cup dark corn syrup

1/2 teaspoon salt

3 large eggs

1/2 cup toasted coconut

1 1/2 cups toasted chopped pecans

1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell

Preheat oven to 375 F. In a medium bowl beat sugar, butter, corn syrup, salt and eggs with a wire whip until well blended. Stir in coconut and pecans. Pour mixture into prepared pie shell and bake for 40 to 50 minutes. Center will be soft set. Makes 8 servings.

START RUNNING:

Sharp decline in U.S. troop deaths in Iraq: Officials cite U.S. ‘surge,’ civilian assistance as reasons for decrease (AP, 10/23/07)

The commander of the battle zone — Lt. Col. Val Keaveny, 3rd Battalion, 509th Infantry (Airborne) — said his unit has lost only one soldier in the past four months despite intensified operations against both Shiite and Sunni extremists, including powerful al-Qaida in Iraq cells.

Keaveny attributes the startling decline to a decrease in attacks by militants who are being rounded up in big numbers on information provided by the citizen force — which has literally doubled the number of eyes and ears available to the military.

The efforts to recruit local partners began taking shape earlier this year in the western province of Anbar, which had become the virtual heartland for Sunni insurgents and al-Qaida bands. The early successes in Anbar — coming alongside a boost of 30,000 U.S. forces into the Baghdad area — led to similar alliances in other parts of Iraq.

“People are fed up with fear, intimidation and being brutalized. Once they hit that tipping point, they’re fed up, they come to realized we truly do provide them better hope for the future. What we’re seeing now is the beginning of a snowball,” said Keaveny, whose forces operate out of Forward Operating Base Kalsu, about 35 miles south of Baghdad. [...]

Sunni Sheik Emad Ghurtani is among those helping.

“Honestly, I’m not going to hide this from you,” Ghurtani told Lynch as the two stood talking at a newly established tribal check point near Haswa, a village just north of the Kalsu base.

“There is some al-Qaida here in this area. But, God willing, we will get rid of them. ... The citizens are coming out. They’re not afraid any more,” the tall and handsome tribal leader said. Three scruffy young men watched, AK-47s slung over their shoulders, in the sandbag bunker at the check point.

Lynch, hatless on the balmy autumn day, answered in staccato sentences.

“What we really need is information. You know where al-Qaida is. You know who they are. You have to tell us. We can use all our capabilities to take out the enemy. But you have to tell us where they are, because you know. You’ve got our total support.”

The sheik, who made Lynch promise to return for lunch one day, responded with striking eloquence.

“Because of what the American forces have accomplished, instead of us moving step by step we’re going to start running toward the enemy ... Instead of walking, we’re going to start running now. We just need the weapons and ammunition,” Ghurtani said.

MORE:
The Greatest Story Never Told: Military progress in Iraq goes unnoticed by the press. (Dean Barnett, 10/23/2007, Weekly Standard)

THE SECRET TO MAKING CHOICE WORK...:

Score 1 for the Investor Class (James Pethokoukis, 10/23/07, US News)

My guy Dan Clifton over at Strategas Research tells me that new pension regulations issued yesterday by the Department of Labor will significantly alter the way Americans save for retirement by providing new incentives for workers to participate in a 401(k). The regulations will also increase the amount of equity and bond exposure and gradually reduce the use of traditional defined benefit plans.

rEALISM TRUMPS REALITY:

Israeli seeks Hamas participation (BBC, 10/24/07)

An Israeli minister has called on his government to suspend a boycott of Hamas and invite the group to an upcoming Middle East conference.

Minister without portfolio Ami Ayalon said any invitation would be conditional on Hamas pledging to accept agreements reached at the summit. [...]

"Such a call by Israel would cause Hamas to crumble because of the internal struggles taking place within the group," Mr Ayalon told Israeli army radio.

NIXON'S DEAD:

Actually, Iran is not so tough (Martin van Creveld, October 24, 2007, International Herald Tribune)

Judging by its behavior, Iran's leadership is in a panic. It has good reason to be. Over a month has passed since Israel successfully attacked an alleged Syrian nuclear installation, proving that the Russian built anti-aircraft defenses, which Iran too has bought, are vulnerable.

Behind Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert stands George W. Bush. Four years ago, Bush took on Iran's neighbor to the west and demolished it to the point where it may never rise again. Both men have repeatedly signaled their determination to prevent Iran from going nuclear, using force if necessary. They may very well carry out their threats.

Should they do so, Iran will have little to put in their way. Though rich in oil, Iran is a third-world country with a population of 70 million and a per capita income of $2,440.

President Nixon and Henry Kissinger liked to use madness as a method. In 1969, Nixon told Kissinger to caution the Soviet ambassador that Nixon was "out of control" on Indochina, and could do something drastic.

Three months earlier, as Anthony Summers wrote in "The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon," "Kissinger had sent that very same message by proxy when he instructed Len Garment, about to leave on a trip to Moscow, to give the Soviets 'the impression that Nixon is somewhat "crazy" - immensely intelligent, well organized and experienced to be sure, but at moments of stress or personal challenge unpredictable and capable of the bloodiest brutality.' Garment carried out the mission, telling a senior Brezhnev adviser that Nixon was 'a dramatically disjointed personality more than a little paranoid when necessary, a cold-hearted butcher.' " All of which, his aides later reflected, was kind of true.

Cheney seems to enjoy giving the impression that he is loony enough to pull off an attack on Iran before leaving office - even if he has to do it alone, like Slim Pickens riding the bomb down in "Dr. Strangelove" to the sentimental tune of "We'll Meet Again."

FUNNY WHAT THREE DECADES OF THATCHERISM HAS DONE FOR THE PLACE:

Tumultuous Britain: For more than a century, Americans have seen Britain as tired and broken. But some of them now think that the old dynamism and iconoclasm has returned. If Britain really is back, it will be another test for the special relationship (Walter Russell Mead, November 2007, Prospect)

The special relationship is based largely on the family firm, and as it happens the family business is spectacularly successful. For roughly three centuries now, the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organising, managing, expanding and defending a global system of power, finance, culture and trade. Up until the second world war, the British branch of the family held the majority of shares and furnished the firm's leadership; since then, the American branch has taken the lead, but the firm, though periodically updating and revising its methods and objectives, still bears the imprint of the British founders. For better or worse, the family business is the dominant force in international life today, and is set to remain the foundation of world order for some time to come.

So it is not so much a matter of Britain having a special relationship with the US; rather, it has a special relationship with the international capitalist order. And the world system today preserves most of the features of the British system that existed before the second world war: a liberal, maritime international order that promotes the free flow of capital and goods and the development of liberal economic and political institutions and values. However much the British may object to particular US policies and priorities, the overall direction in which America seeks to lead the world is the direction in which most Britons more or less hope it will go. Both British and American leaders can and do make mistakes about how best to develop and defend this world system, but the health of that system has been the chief concern of British foreign policy since the 18th century.

The close similarity between the British and American world orders does not just influence the two countries towards international policies that are usually broadly compatible; it also gives Britain a unique role in the world order. This is most clearly seen in the close relations between London and New York, the twin financial centres of the world. The financial genius of Britain has been one of the driving forces that created the world we live in; Americans share that genius and, like the British, seek to make the world a safer and more profitable place in which increasingly sophisticated financial markets can operate on a progressively more global scale.

Acheson's crack about Britain's fallen empire and missing role was made at a time when Britain had, temporarily, lost sight of the sources of its own prosperity and power. The crash of the international system during the great depression and the second world war, combined with the forced liquidation of Britain's overseas investments during and after the war, left the world less hospitable to British enterprise. Combined with the unhappy results of Britain's flirtation with socialism and the profound disorientation which many Britons felt as the empire melted away, Britain seemed doomed to decline.

Today, led by a revived financial and service economy that is both connected to and dependent on the integrated global economy, Britain is back. Twenty-five years ago, smug French and German voices read Britain stern lectures; today they seek to match its success. Britain's voice counts for more today in Europe than at any time in the last half century; across Africa and the middle east, Britain, for better or worse, is seen once again as a significant and rising power.

MORE:
Higher fertility, immigration and longer lives fuelling Britain's population rise (John Carvel, October 24, 2007, Guardian)

Britain's population is set to increase by more than 10 million over the next quarter century - about 4 million more than the previous official estimate published only two years ago, government statisticians said yesterday.

The Office for National Statistics advised politicians and civil servants to prepare for the fastest population growth since the postwar baby boom in the 1950s. They said an unprecedented combination of high fertility, rising life expectancy and increasing immigration would swell the population from 60 million this year to 65 million by 2016 and 71 million by 2031.

Guy Goodwin, the office's head of demography, said the impact on England would be equivalent to adding the entire population of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to the English total. It would require a massive reappraisal of long-term plans for housebuilding, transport, education and the health service.

SORRY, STEVE:

Big Papi mojo: The 2004 ALCS, Game 5, bottom of the 14th (An excerpt from Feeding the Monster by Seth Mnookin)

In the bottom of the 14th, Yankees pitcher Esteban Loaiza came out for his fourth inning of work. A bust during the regular season, Loaiza had been unhittable in this game, with a devastating sinker falling off one side of the plate and a wicked cut fastball collapsing on the other. His last three innings of work may have been the best pitched innings of the series thus far. Since entering the game in the 11th with runners on first and second and one out, he’d allowed just one walk. Now, Loaiza struck out Mark Bellhorn to begin the inning, and a pair of walks sandwiched around another strikeout put Johnny Damon on second base and Manny Ramirez on first with two outs. David Ortiz was due up at the plate. A base hit would likely win the game.

As Ortiz walked to the plate, he spit into his batting gloves and then smashed his hands together. As he dug into the batter’s box, he tried to drown out the serenading cries of “PAPI, PAPI,” to ignore the adulatory signs that freckled the Fenway stands. “You want to shut everything down,” he later told Globe’s Chris Snow. “After you shut down all the noise and everything around you, that’s when your concentration comes. That’s when you focus on what you want to do.”

Ortiz is often described as a hitting genius, as if his talent is purely God given. He’s more comfortable than many Latin players talking with and teasing reporters, but English is not his first language, and he often plays the part of the friendly jokester. But Ortiz works on his hitting as much as anyone in baseball. While his teammates are in the field, Ortiz often retreats to the Red Sox’s clubhouse to study his previous at-bats against that night’s pitcher. Ortiz had been preparing for Loaiza ever since he’d taken the mound. “I wasn’t trying to go too crazy with him,” Ortiz said later. Because of Loaiza’s pitches’ late movement, Ortiz said, he “just wanted to stay on the ball longer.”

Loaiza’s first pitch looked hittable, and Ortiz took a monstrous cut, but at the last moment the ball dove down and away, and Ortiz missed. Strike one. A ball and a foul made it 1-2. The Yankees were one strike away from sending the game, which had already taken longer than any postseason game in baseball history, into the 15th inning. The fourth pitch was outside but not by enough for Ortiz to take, and he punched it foul. He hit the next pitch deep enough to be a home run, but it hooked foul into the right field stands. Loaiza followed with another ball, bringing the count even, to 2-2. Ortiz stepped out of the batter’s box.

As Ortiz and Loaiza battled, Fenway was in a complete frenzy. A group of young men just behind home plate had been pounding on the dividing wall that separated the field from the stands since the eighth inning. Down the third base line, ESPN’s Peter Gammons stood, poised by the entrance to the field, as he waited for the game to end so he could run out and collect a few quick on-camera quotes. He’d been standing there for a couple of hours already, ever since the bottom of the eighth, when the Yankees looked as if they were about to put away the game, and the series. Gammons, who’d seen the Red Sox beat the Cincinnati Reds in extra innings in the Sixth Game of the 1975 World Series, couldn’t seem to erase the grin from his face. “Unbelievable,” he occasionally murmured, shaking his head.

Ortiz knew a walk would load the bases, and with Doug Mientkiewicz on deck, he also knew the Yankees would much prefer to pitch to the light-hitting defensive specialist than to the man whose postseason highlight reel seemed to grow with each passing day. At this point, the difference between men on first and second and men on every base was negligible: with two outs, the lead runner would be off on contact in either case, and a base hit would likely win the game regardless of whether Damon was on second or third. Even with two strikes, Ortiz knew Loaiza wasn’t going to give him anything on the fat part of the plate, and the way Loaiza was pitching, he could keep on painting the corners forever. Ortiz dug in, determined to foul off as many pitches as it took until there was one he could handle.

And so Ortiz fouled off the seventh pitch of the at bat, and then the eighth and the ninth. As he stepped out of the batter’s box again, he examined his bat before seizing it by the barrel and smacking it, handle first, into the ground to make sure one of Loaiza’s cutters hadn’t splintered it. Satisfied, he tucked it under his arm, spat into his gloves once more, smacked his hands together again, and settled back in to hit. And on the tenth pitch of David Ortiz’s seventh plate appearance of the night, Loaiza threw a cut fastball in on his hands. Ortiz, no longer swinging for the fences, fisted the ball over Derek Jeter’s head, where it fell in front of center fielder Bernie Williams. On national television, commentator Joe Buck exclaimed, “Damon coming to the plate, he can keep on running to New York. Game 6, tomorrow night!” As Loaiza walked dejectedly off the mound he spit out his gum and took a swat at it with his glove. This had been the best he’d pitched all year, and still Ortiz had beaten him.

It was Ortiz’s second walk-off hit of the series and his third of the postseason; no other player in history had hit more than two in his entire career. Afterwards, Theo Epstein said, “It might be the greatest game ever played. I’d like to hear other nominations…. That might have been one of the greatest at-bats to end the greatest game ever played.” Pedro Martinez, who’d made headlines in September after referring to the Yankees as “my daddy” after a tough loss to New York, said simply, “The Yankees need to think about who’s their Big Papi.”

CONSUME MASS QUANTITIES:

Apple Pecan Scones (Contra Costa Times, 10/24/2007)

4 cups all-purpose flour

2/3 cup granulated sugar

1 tablespoon baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

1/2 cup cold, unsalted butter, cut into chunks

2 eggs, beaten, divided use

11/2 cups whipping cream

1 tablespoon vanilla extract

1 baking apple, finely chopped

1/4 cup chopped pecans

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper or a Silpat.

2. In a mixer bowl fitted with paddle attachment, beat flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg on low speed until blended, for 2 minutes. With mixer running, gradually drop in bits of butter, mixing until it resembles coarse crumbs.

3. Set 1 tablespoon of the beaten egg aside. Whisk together remaining egg, cream and vanilla. Pour over dry ingredients and using a fork, stir until dough starts to bind together.

4. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and knead in apple pieces and pecans. Continue to knead dough until it holds together, about 6 times. Shape into a ball and pat into a 10-inch circle. Place on prepared baking sheet.

5. Using pizza cutter or sharp knife, cut into 18 wedges. Do not separate wedges. Brush top with reserved egg. Bake in preheated oven until light brown, 18 to 22 minutes. Serve warm.

ROX OF AGES (via The Mother Judd):

Rockies Place Their Faith in God, and One Another (BEN SHPIGEL, 10/23/07, NY Times)

The role of religion within the Rockies’ organization first entered the public sphere in May 2006, when an article published in USA Today described the organization as adhering to a “Christian-based code of conduct” and the clubhouse as a place where Bibles were read and men’s magazines, like Maxim or Playboy, were banned.

The article included interviews with several players and front office members, but team players and officials interviewed this week said it unfairly implied that the Rockies were intent on constructing a roster consisting in large part of players with a strong Christian faith. Asked how his own Christian faith affected his decision-making, General Manager Dan O’Dowd acknowledged it came into play, but not in a religious way. He said it guided him to find players with integrity and strong moral values, regardless of their religious preference.

“Do we like players with character? There is absolutely no doubt about that,” O’Dowd said during a recent interview in his Coors Field office. “If people want to interpret character as a religious-based issue because it appears many times in the Bible, that’s their decision. I believe that character is an innate part of developing an organization, and to me, it is nothing more than doing the right thing at the right time when nobody’s looking. Nothing more complicated than that.

“You don’t have to be a Christian to make that decision.”

Even if the Rockies are not consciously doing it, reliever Matt Herges, playing for his seventh organization, said the team had the highest concentration of devout Christians he had seen during his nine major league seasons.

Every Sunday, about 10 people gather for chapel, according to reliever Jeremy Affeldt, and Tuesday afternoon Bible study sessions usually attract seven or eight players. Affeldt said players discussed life and their families as well as scripture.

“Certain guys attend chapel, certain guys don’t,” outfielder Cory Sullivan said. “I don’t think that’s any different from how it is in any other major league clubhouse. Nothing’s shoved down your throats.”

On the whole, players were relaxed in speaking about their religious convictions but said that faith was not a requirement for peer approval. The Rockies, who will face the Red Sox in the World Series beginning Wednesday, care more about whether a teammate plays hard, is unselfish and treats everyone with respect.

MORE:
The Rockies' Starting 8.5 (Mark Allen Haverty, 10/24/07, Sports Grumblings)

The rotations for both teams have been set, with the Rockies going with Jeff Francis for Game One, as we said Monday, followed by Ubaldo Jimenez in Game Two, Josh Fogg in Game Three, and the returning Aaron Cook in Game Four. We had discussed that possibility previously, as Cook had been declared done for the season only when the Rockies thought the season would end when September did. Cook was the only starting pitcher for the Rockies to pick up a loss in the three game series with the Red Sox back in June, but he had pitched brilliantly, holding the Red Sox to two runs in 7 2/3 innings. Cook replaces Franklin Morales, who failed to pitch more than four innings in either of his two postseason starts and who has only eight regular season major league starts under his belt. Morales will move to the bullpen for the World Series.

Baseball is usually seen as a clash between pitchers and hitters—a test of wills between the guy on the mound and the slugger at the plate. The defense, on the other hand, is praised and scorned in extreme circumstances, glimpsed only in the final few moments on Baseball Tonight, and all but ignored when sportswriters call upon team management to find nirvana by signing Johan Santana or Alex Rodriguez. But if there's ever a time to focus on the guys with gloves, it's the 2007 World Series. This year's Colorado Rockies are perhaps the greatest defensive team in baseball history. It's even possible that their defensive prowess will change the way the game is played and the way teams are constructed.

In 2003, Michael Lewis' Moneyball showed how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used statistics to find undervalued players. Back then, these were typically guys like Scott Hatteberg who drew walks to keep innings going. By the time Lewis published the book, the secret was out and the art of plate discipline was no longer undervalued. Beane and other smart GMs around baseball had already moved on to the next great statistical frontier: defense.

DOUBLE STANDARD:

Specialists identify Israeli target as possible nuclear site: Syrian structure called similar to N. Korea reactor (Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, October 24, 2007, Washington Post)

Independent specialists have pinpointed what they believe to be the Euphrates River site in Syria that was bombed by Israel last month, and satellite imagery of the area shows buildings under construction roughly similar in design to a North Korean reactor capable of producing nuclear material for one bomb a year, the specialists say.

Photographs of the site taken before the secret Sept. 6 airstrike depict an isolated compound that includes a tall, boxy structure similar to the type of building used to house a gas-graphite reactor. They also show what could have been a pumping station used to supply cooling water for a reactor, say specialists David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS.

US and international experts and officials familiar with the site, who were shown the photographs yesterday, said there was a strong and credible possibility that they depict the remote compound that was attacked. Israeli officials and the White House declined to comment.

DOESN'T HE KNOW THE BRIGHTS HAVE GIVEN UP ON LIBERALIZATION?:

Bush to call for support to aid Cuba after Castro (Ben Feller, October 24, 2007, Associated Press)

President Bush, seizing on Fidel Castro's fading health as a chance for rare change, will ask other nations today to help Cuba become a free society one day by committing money and political capital to the cause. [...]

Bush will propose at least three initiatives: the creation of an international "freedom fund" to help Cuba's potential rebuilding of its country one day; a US licensing of private groups to provide Internet access to Cuban students; and an invitation to Cuban youth to join a scholarship program.

The latter two offerings help the Bush administration underscore the kind of real-life limitations that Cubans now face - from blocked Internet access to restricted information about their leaders to denial of legal protections. The international fund is to speed up societal transformation.

SEEING WITH AMERICAN EYES:

Do Stronger Japan-India Ties Herald an Asian Alliance of Democracies? (Jason Miks, 23 Oct 2007, World Politics Review)

Hiroshi Hirabayashi, president of the Japan-India Association and Japan's ambassador to India between 1998 and 2002, says relations between the two nations have been steadily improving since then-Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori became the first Japanese prime minister in 10 years to visit India when he did so in August 2000. "Japan's relations really started to warm up with the visit of Mr. Mori. Along with the visit of Mr Clinton [also in 2000], we saw a change of mood after the sanctions imposed after India's nuclear test [in 1998]."

Hirose agrees the thaw in U.S.-India relations influenced Japan's own relationship with India. "The U.S.-India relationship has improved, and this made Japan realize how important India was," she says. "It was through American eyes that things got better."

The relationship continued to prosper under former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, including with the announcement of the "Eight-fold Initiative for Strengthening the Japan-India Global Partnership," and flourished under his successor, Shinzo Abe, with Singh and Abe announcing their desire for a "strategic and global partnership" during the former's visit to Tokyo in December last year. Abe followed this up with a visit to Delhi in August, calling for the two nations to become "perfect partners."

Much of the attention during the Abe-Singh meetings inevitably focused on the two countries' growing economic ties, and the two leaders issued a joint communique following their August meeting in which they pledged by 2010 to triple bilateral trade. Indeed Abe was accompanied on his visit by almost 200 business leaders, including Japan Business Federation Chairman Fujio Mitarai.

Bilateral trade between Japan and India hit $8.6 billion in 2006, jumping from $4 billion in 2002, while Japan's net flow of foreign direct investment to India rose from $125 million in 2003 to $515 million in 2006.

However, these numbers still lag those of India's other big trading partners, with bilateral trade between India and the United States, for example, hitting $32 billion in 2006.

(WAX ON):

Kids are up for watching Sox (Stan Grossfeld, October 24, 2007, Boston Globe)

Sleep researcher Amy Wolfson, an associate professor of psychology at Holy Cross, said sleep deprivation isn't good at any age. But it is an especially tough call for parents to decide whether to let their kids stay up for the World Series.

"It puts parents in a difficult situation because the kids have all the goodies, the T-shirts, and the hats, and they've been following the Red Sox since April and this is all incredibly exciting," she said. "When there is a special event, to let a kid stay up is such a difficult question. Are they being a bad parent? No, but be aware of the consequences. It's just going to be awful the next day. I worry what teachers are going to accomplish the next day in school. Probably nothing."

Wolfson said kids between the ages of 10 and 17 are recommended to get 9.2 hours of sleep per night.

"The reality is that a younger child in elementary school is going to have trouble staying up," she said.

Wolfson urges parents to "catch the moment" when a child looks tired and find clever ways to get them into bed. "Like tape the game and let them watch it later."

THEIR STRUGGLE:

The Eugenics Temptation (Michael Gerson, October 24, 2007, Washington Post)

James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who helped discover the structure of DNA in 1953, recently pronounced the entire population of Africa genetically inferior when it comes to intelligence. And while he hopes that everyone is equal, "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true."

Watson's colleagues at the Federation of American Scientists found his comments "racist, vicious and unsupported by science" -- all true. But they could not have found those views surprising. In 2003, Watson spoke in favor of genetic selection to eliminate ugly women: "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." In 2000, he suggested that people with darker skin have stronger libidos. In 1997, Watson contended that parents should be allowed to abort fetuses they found to be gay: "If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her." In the same interview, he said, "We already accept that most couples don't want a Down child. You would have to be crazy to say you wanted one, because that child has no future."

When it comes to the parents of disabled children, Watson has somehow confused "loving" and "courageous" with "crazy" -- the sign of a heart clearly inferior to the gentle hearts of children with Down syndrome. And most of us have met women who don't look like models and gay people who prefer being alive to the preferences of their parents.

"If you really are stupid," Watson once contended, "I would call that a disease." What is the name for the disease of a missing conscience?

If life is just a struggle amongst species and the biological imperative makes you favor the success of your own in that struggle then to be a Darwinist is to be a eugenicist.

GOOD PRIMARY POLITICS, BAD POLICY:

Thompson stirs rivals with immigration plan (Michael Levenson, October 24, 2007, Boston Globe)

Highlighting what he believes are key vulnerabilities for his main rivals, Thompson called for stripping federal funds from cities and states that do not report illegal immigrants and criticized Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney for allowing so-called sanctuary cities in New York and Massachusetts.

The first principle of Thompson's plan is "No Amnesty," a clear shot at another rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, who joined President Bush in trying unsuccessfully to push through a sweeping immigration overhaul bill that would have created a guest worker program and provided a path to possible citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country. [...]

Party officials in key primary states said yesterday that the candidate who can win voters' trust on immigration could make significant gains. Polls indicate that Republicans care more than Democrats about the issue and support a harder line against illegal immigrants. [...]

The former Tennessee senator's plan also calls for stronger laws forcing employers to verify that workers are not illegal immigrants, for a more rigorous system to track who is coming in and out of the country, and for increased prosecution of smugglers who bring illegal immigrants across the Mexican border. [...]

McCain and Giuliani criticized Thompson, saying he did not show leadership on illegal immigration during the eight years he was in the US Senate, ending in 2003.

"Where was Fred Thompson when he had the chance to tackle illegal immigration and fix a broken system?" asked Katie Levinson, a Giuliani spokeswoman.

ADJUSTING TO OVERDOGDOM:

With the Red Sox victories comes a loss of angst (Brian McGrory, October 24, 2007, Boston Globe)

We're rolling sevens everywhere. The perennial bridesmaid is now the odds-on favorite - two-to-one against Colorado, according to the Vegas line. Phones are ringing. Far-flung friends and family members are calling - tell us what it's like, fill us in on the excitement, don't spare a single detail of the city's singular swagger.

So shouldn't it feel better than it does?

The first order of business is to admit it to ourselves: 2004 was more meaningful. Back then, and in the 86 years that preceded it, we knew who we were. We were hapless, though never hopeless. We were the ones that always had something to overcome - a curse, a seemingly in surmountable deficit, a little-brother syndrome.

In the end, until that fabled October, we usually lost, but that was OK. In defeat, we had identity. We got to be the luckless loser. A team, its city, and indeed, an entire national following, thrived on it.

Tom Menino was sitting in his City Hall office yesterday saying what needed to be said. "This is different. In 2004, we never had a taste." He paused, then added, "When you think about Boston, 1 in 3 Bostonians is 20 to 34 years old. You and I know what it's like to lose. They don't."

Which means they don't know about our angst. It was our blanket, our source of comfort, our common bond. If angst were a natural resource, we could have had factories packaging it up 24 hours a day and shipping it to every part of the world.

As it was, we claimed all the angst for ourselves, though the good people of Chicago seemed to have their own supply. Red Sox fans could always blame our misfortunes on New York's payroll, Boston's mismanagement, free agents' unwillingness to come here. It gave us our status as perennial underdogs, the lovable spectacle. We wore that suit, frayed as it sometimes seemed, very comfortably.

Without it, what have we become?

IF YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING GOOD TO SAY...:

Giuliani Is Asked His Conservative Views (AP, Oct. 23, 2007)

Republican Rudy Giuliani declined to tell a voter on Tuesday where he agrees and disagrees with conservative members of his party, saying it's about more than "just an ideology."

The former New York City mayor, who has made conservative Republicans nervous with some of his more liberal views — his support of abortion rights and gun control, for example — was asked pointedly at a town-hall-style meeting to outline where his views align with conservatives.

Giuliani chuckled, took a deep breath and then told the questioner it was up to him to figure that out.

AS EVEN AFRICA LEAVES THE MIDDLE EAST IN THE DUST:

Democracy in Sierra Leone: Still recovering from civil war, but looking forward. (Benjamin Alsdurf, September/October, Books & Culture)

These 2007 presidential and parliamentary elections were the first since U.N. peacekeepers left in 2002, following the country's 10-year civil war. The current president, Tejan Kabbah, won the last election with over 70 percent of the vote, having been widely credited for bringing the country to peace. Now five years later, Sierra Leone is in charge of its own election and the international community has been closely watching the outcome. With a population of five million, this country—roughly the size of South Carolina—is situated on Africa's west coast and boasts massive natural resources, including both large mineral deposits and fertile land. It also has the dubious distinction of ranking next to last in the UNDP's human development index.

Voters openly expressed their dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs. For some this meant that Solomon Berewa, "Solo B", the current ruling party's candidate, should be given a chance to finish the work that his Sierra Leonean Peoples Party (SLPP) started when peace was established in 2002. In one of the most interesting developments in the lead-up to the election, Charles Margai, frustrated at losing his bid to be the SLPP's presidential candidate, split off to form a third major party, The People's Movement for Democratic Change (PMDC). With that move, Margai upended what had been a historical rivalry between the SLPP and the All People's Congress (APC). The Mende-dominated SLPP has long controlled the southern and eastern parts of the country, whereas the Temne-dominated APC has fared better in the north and west. Margai's penchant for vitriolic speeches against the ruling SLPP made him the firebrand of the election and a clear favorite of younger SLPP supporters disenchanted with their party's performance.

The APC, which controlled the country for most of its first 30 years of independence, emerged as the front-runner in the first round of elections. Its candidate, Ernest Bai Koroma, once described to me as "a soft-spoken technocrat," succeeded in rallying enough of the APC faithful along with a percentage of disgruntled voters to come out ahead. Constitutionally, to win the first round of voting, a candidate must secure 55% of the vote, and Koroma's 44% was not enough to avoid a runoff election. [...]

In the end yet another twist seems to have determined the result of the election. In 477 polling stations, turnout exceeded the number of registered voters, and the NEC decided that all ballots cast at those stations should be thrown out. Ironically, these stations were in predominantly SLPP areas. Forces that may have been trying to help the SLPP ended up doing their party a great disservice. The outcome of what was predicted to be an extremely close race was 54% for Ernest Bai Koroma and 45% for Solomon Berewa. Many of the polling stations that would have given a majority of their votes to "Solo B" were among those disqualified.

This election was trying for Sierra Leone, with much commerce and many day-to-day activities suspended during the election period. After months of hearing from two candidates who did their best to polarize the electorate, the country now must focus on moving forward. After the election, representatives from both parties spoke with pride and hopefulness about their country. Despite a few hiccups along the way, it seems fitting to congratulate "Salone" on a job well done.

WORTH THE PESTS:

Five Easy Ways to Go Organic (Tara Parker-Pope, 10/23/07, NY Times: Well)

4. Ketchup: For some families, ketchup accounts for a large part of the household vegetable intake. About 75 percent of tomato consumption is in the form of processed tomatoes, including juice, tomato paste and ketchup. Notably, recent research has shown organic ketchup has about double the antioxidants of conventional ketchup.

IS THERE ANY COACH IN THE NFL...:

Colts-Patriots tilt shaping as battle of Good vs. Evil (Gregg Easterbrook, October 23, 2007, ESPN)

Patriots at Colts on Nov. 4 is shaping up to be one of the most attractive and exciting NFL regular-season games ever staged. The pairing is fabulous; the teams are the league's best; and there is a chance both will take the field undefeated. Plus, Patriots at Colts has a powerful, compelling narrative. Namely -- Good vs. Evil.

The fact that I don't even need to tell you which team represents Good and which stands for Evil says a lot about how low New England has sunk. You knew instantly which was which, didn't you?

Argument for the Indianapolis Colts as paladins who carry the banner of that which is beneficent: Sportsmanship, honesty, modesty, devotion to community, embrace of traditional small-town life, belief in higher power, even love of laughter. The Colts are the defending champions, so they obviously play well on the field. Yet after winning the Super Bowl, they have remained humble and appealing. Through prior years of postseason frustration, they never complained or pointed the finger outside their team. Their players are active in community affairs and don't carp about being assigned to a nonglamorous Farm Belt city with an antiquated stadium. Their coach, Tony Dungy, smiles in public and answers honestly whatever he is asked: He never yells at players or grimaces at bad plays and, when defeated, doesn't act as though it's the end of the world. Although religious, Dungy said on the night he won the Super Bowl that God doesn't care about football games, which shows perspective. The team's star, Peyton Manning, stands for love of family, constantly appearing in public with his brothers, father and mother. Manning is happily married and a major donor to a children's hospital. Manning spends a lot of time at children's camps and events, and he constantly makes fun of himself. Ladies and gentlemen, representing Good, the Indianapolis Colts.

Argument for the New England Patriots as scoundrels in the service of that which is baleful: Dishonesty, cheating, arrogance, hubris, endless complaining even in success. The Patriots have three Super Bowl rings, but that jewelry is tarnished by their cheating scandal. They run up the score to humiliate opponents -- more on that below -- thus mocking sportsmanship. Their coach snaps and snarls in public, seeming to feel contempt for the American public that has brought him wealth and celebrity. Victory seems to give Bill Belichick no joy, and defeat throws him into fury. Belichick and the rest of the top of the Patriots' organization continue to refuse to answer questions about what was in the cheating tapes -- and generally, you refuse to answer questions if you have something to hide. The team has three Super Bowl triumphs, yet its players regularly whine about not being revered enough. The team's star, Tom Brady, is a smirking sybarite who dates actresses and supermodels but whose public charity appearances are infrequent. That constant smirk on Brady's face reminds one of Dick Cheney; people who smirk are fairly broadcasting the message, "I'm hiding something." The Patriots seem especially creepy at this point because we still don't know whether they have told the full truth about the cheating scandal -- or even whether they really have stopped cheating. They say they have, but their word is not exactly gold at this juncture. Ladies and gentlemen, representing Evil, the New England Patriots.

In the Good vs. Evil narrative of the Colts and Pats, running up the score is a telling factor: It reveals a team's sportsmanship or lack of same, and whether a team shows sportsmanship in public might offer insights into its character in private. New England is scoring so many points the Patriots offense looks like cherries and oranges spinning on a slot machine. The Flying Elvii stand plus-159 in net points, by far the best scoring margin in the NFL. This is supposed to be impressive. But I think it's creepy, and New England's creepy on-field behavior is only underscoring the seediness of the Beli-Cheat scandal.

LESS THAN 1% OF THE POPULATION, BUT 72% OF THE ON-LINE LOONS:

Redstate.com bans new Ron Paul supporters (Ryan Grim, Oct 23, 2007, Politico)

The ubiquitous and web-savvy supporters of Ron Paul now have one less forum in which to vent their rage.

The influential conservative blog Redstate.com placed a ban last night on all Paul commentary from readers who are recent arrivals to the blog.

Paul's followers are angry that the Libertarian congressman can’t seem to get traction in national polls as he bids for the Republican presidential nomination.

Paul — a representative from Texas who ran for president in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket — remains mired in the low single digits.

THANKS!:

Rockies add Cook to World Series roster, will start Game 4 (AP, 10/23/07)

Aaron Cook was added Tuesday to the Colorado Rockies' roster for the World Series, and he'll start Game 4 at home against Boston.

Cook, who was the Rockies' opening-day starter, hasn't pitched in a major league game since Aug. 10 because of a strained muscle in his side. [...]

With Cook, who was 8-7 with a 4.12 ERA, rookie Franklin Morales goes to the bullpen, giving manager Clint Hurdle a third left-handed reliever to go with Jeremy Affeldt and Brian Fuentes.

TWO BY LAND OF SEA:

Song of the Day: 'Take These Thoughts,' Drenched in Harmony (Stephen Thompson, October 23, 2007, NPR.org)

For all its lilting mandolin lines and rich vocal interplay (Chris and Thomas are nothing if not born to sing simultaneously), there's an unnerving underbelly to "Take These Thoughts," from the opening line ("And all I want is all that you possess") to the chilling last. The overall effect is as agreeably soothing as iced tea on a front porch in the summertime — with a slice of lemon to offset all that sweetness, of course.

MORE:
BAND SITE: ChrisandThomas.com
-INDIE911: Chris & Thomas
-Chris and Thomas: Drenched in Harmony (David Dye, August 6, 2007, World Café)
-Chris and Thomas (Morning Becomes Eclectic, JUN 22, 2007)

GREAT, THE KIDS WILL SPEND NEXT SUMMER...:

Broccoli may outperform sunblock (Rick Weiss, 10/23/07, The Washington Post)

George H.W. Bush: Call your dermatologist.

New research suggests broccoli, the vegetable that the former president famously demonized as inedible, can prevent the damage from ultraviolet light that often leads to skin cancer. And as Bush would surely appreciate, he would not even have to eat it.

In tests on people and hairless mice, a green smear of broccoli-sprout extract blocked the potentially cancer-causing damage usually inflicted by sunlight and showed potential advantages over sunscreens.

THE MOST REVEALING ASPECT OF THE EPISODE...:

Ahmadinejad deals with aftershocks of nuclear negotiator's dismissal (The Associated Press, October 23, 2007)

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad cut short a two-day visit to Armenia on Tuesday, officials there said, as he faced growing unhappiness back home over the resignation of Iran's top nuclear negotiator.

The sudden replacement of Ali Larijani fueled increasing complaints - even from conservatives who were once Ahmadinejad's supporters - that the president was mismanaging Iran's most vital issues, particularly its confrontation with the West over the nuclear program. [...]

In a sign the displeasure may reach high levels in Iran's clerical establishment, a foreign policy adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, complained about the change, which took place just ahead of a meeting Tuesday with the European Union.

"It was definitely better if this did not happen in the important and sensitive situation when the nuclear issue is on the table," the adviser, a former foreign minister, Ali Akbar Velayati, was quoted as saying by the semi-official news agency, ISNA.

Ali Larijani's resignation as Iran's nuclear negotiator on Saturday revealed a crucial political rift. Observers believe that at its heart is a power struggle between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The president is trying to wrest at least partial control of nuclear policy from Mr Khamenei. If Mr Ahmadinejad succeeds, this would probably dash any hope of compromise with the West.

Even if Mr Khamenei reasserts his control — a more likely outcome — the power struggle will gravely complicate Iran's foreign policy.

PROXIMITY IS NOT CAUSALITY:

NO 'NIGHTMARE': WHY 'SURGE' IS WORKING (PETE HEGSETH, October 23, 2007, NY Post)

The new counterinsurgency approach - namely, to take territory from al Qaeda, hold it, secure it and empower tribal sheiks to work together and rebuild their communities - finally provides an effective "counteroffensive" to the chief tactics of al Qaeda militants and Shiite death squads.

America's enemies in Iraq, radical insurgents living and fighting among the general public, understand that they can't continue their fight without capitulation from ordinary Iraqis. Finally, after almost four years, the U.S. military understands this as well.

Whereas we used to emphasize overwhelming firepower (even when I was there in 2006), we now emphasize firepower as a last resort. Whereas we used to rush to the scene after the violence occurs, we're now there to repel it or deter it altogether.

This commitment - up and down the chain of command - has made a major impact on the tit-for-tat death toll that was threatening to tear the country apart. Sectarian violence has been severely curtailed.

Since last December, sectarian deaths throughout Iraq have dropped over 50 percent; overall attacks against civilians are down 50 percent. In Baghdad - the focal point of Petraeus' strategy - sectarian deaths are down almost 80 percent in 10 months and large al Qaeda-style truck and suicide bombings have dropped over 50 percent.

Moreover, ordinary Iraqis are providing far more tips and other information. We now get some 23,000 tips a month, four to five times the level of a year before. This measure - which directly correlates to the trust and support of the population - is promising.

These are significant and consequential numbers and indicate real successes in stomping out the civil war. But it's not just numbers that make the case that the civil war is ending. Look, too, at what the new strategy lets commanders do in their now-daily discussions with ordinary Iraqis.

Petraeus reports that foreign (non-Iraqi) recruits conduct over 80 percent of al Qaeda's attacks; and therefore, by refocusing local tribal leaders on this fact, American commanders are making a convincing argument to the sheiks: Why launch an indiscriminate reprisal against another sect, ratcheting up the level of violence, when you can simply tell us and Iraqi security forces where the foreign insurgents are and we'll go get them? The numbers say that's exactly what's happening.

WHAT'S THE SPANISH FOR "WHAT STEEL TARIFFS?":

Bush trade agenda getting help from an unlikely ally: Hugo Chávez (Steven R. Weisman, October 23, 2007, NY Times)

The Bush administration has an unlikely new ally in its international trade agenda: Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan president, who a habit of denouncing U.S. influence in Latin America.

President George W. Bush - facing opposition to proposed trade accords with Peru, Panama and Colombia from labor unions, advocacy groups and most Democrats - has unleashed an intensive campaign to win approval for these deals, arguing that they would strengthen capitalism and democracy and weaken Chávez in a volatile region.

The campaign includes trips to Colombia with Democratic and Republican lawmakers by Commerce Secretary Carlos Guttierez and Susan Schwab, the administration's top trade envoy, and a separate push by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice emphasizing security interests in Latin America.

At least with some Democrats, a few of whom have traveled to Colombia with Bush officials, the arguments are persuasive.

JUST LIKE THEO DREW IT UP:

The Sox' Starting Nine (Mark Allen Haverty, October 23, 2007, Playoff Grumblings)

Manny Ramirez continued to pad his Hall of Fame résumé with his postseason performance this year. Like Ortiz, Ramirez was on base more in the ALDS than he was not, with a .615 OBP after going 3-for-8 with two home runs, four RBI, and five walks. In the ALCS, he was on base almost as often, with a .563 OBP, with nine hits, two homes, ten RBI, five runs, and nine walks in 22 at-bats. Ramirez put up almost identical numbers on the road and at home, with ten points more in batting average in Fenway and with the same number of home runs at home and on the road.

Fifth is Mike Lowell, who has only raised his free agent dollar value with his performance this postseason, hitting .333 in both the ALDS and ALCS, with a home run and 11 RBI in the ten games. Lowell has become an extreme Fenway hitter, with a batting average .100 points higher in the Fens, as he hit .373 with 14 home runs and 73 RBI in 77 home games; by comparison, Lowell hit just .273 with seven homers and 47 RBI in 76 road games, which is rather pedestrian really. Maybe he hurt his free agent value this year, rather than helped – any team seriously looking at his numbers will see how much Fenway helped.

Sixth is J.D. Drew, who already has the big money but is now trying to justify that he was worth it. Drew has been huge when needed most, hitting .342 with four RBI, 18 RBI, 17 runs scored, and two stolen bases in the month of September over 76 at-bats, making him a huge reason why the Sox held on to win the best record in the league. Add in that he walked more times than he struck out in September, giving him an OBP of .454, and you had him doing a darned good Manny impression. Drew did struggle in the ALDS, but he rebounded in the ALCS, with nine hits in 25 at-bats, including the grand slam that everyone is still talking about, and six total at-bats. There are still plenty of Drew haters in New England, but he is winning them over, one hit at a time.

FRIENDS OF BILL Z:

Shhh...My Child Is Sleeping (in My Bed, Um, With Me) (TARA PARKER-POPE, 10/23/07, NY Times)

In most of the world, sleeping next to your child is a necessity: families of limited means live in cramped quarters. But in the affluent West, the practice is widely frowned on, not just by grandparents and friends, but by the medical community at large.

Still, it is far more common than many people think. Nearly 13 percent of parents in the United States slept with their infants in 2000, up from 5.5 percent in 1993, according to a report last month in the journal Infant and Child Development. Countless children start the night in their own beds, only to wake up a few hours later and pad into their parents’ bedrooms, crawling into the bed or curling up nearby on the floor.

Ask parents if they sleep with their kids, and most will say no. But there is evidence that the prevalence of bed sharing is far greater than reported. Many parents are “closet co-sleepers,” fearful of disapproval if anyone finds out, notes James J. McKenna, professor of anthropology and director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame.

“They’re tired of being censured or criticized,” Dr. McKenna said. “It’s not just that their babies are being judged negatively for not being a good baby compared to the baby who sleeps by himself, but they’re being judged badly for having these babies and being needy.”

In fact, research shows that parents often talk about their children’s sleep habits in terms of where the child starts off the night or where the child is supposed to sleep — not necessarily where the child usually ends up sleeping.

In a series of studies in Britain, scientists interviewed parents about their children’s sleep habits, but also used infrared cameras to monitor the parents’ bedroom. The children often spent part of the night in the adults’ bed, but in about half those cases, the parents did not reveal that unless they were specifically asked. As a result, many experts say most of the data in the United States vastly understates how common the practice really is.

WITH SPHERICALITY COMES RESPONSIBILITY:

UN Envoy 'Encouraged' By Indian Stance on Burma: The U.N. special envoy to Burma says he will return to the military-run state earlier than planned. Ibrahim Gambari made the announcement after "encouraging" talks with Indian government leaders about the Burmese government's violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. (VOA's Steve Herman, 10/23/07)

Without providing details, Gambari said he considers this week's meetings with Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, a success.

"I am encouraged by the undertaking which they have given to do everything possible to support in concrete terms the good official role of the secretary-general and use their influence to encourage the authorities in Myanmar to continue their cooperation and to deliver tangible result," Gambari said.

Gambari says he will return to Burma early next month, sooner than had been expected.

LEAVE WELL ENOUGH ALONE:

Hybrid Music From a Hybrid Ensemble (NATE CHINEN, 10/23/07, NY Times)

"La Leyenda del Cañaveral," the long-form composition he unveiled on Wednesday night at Zankel Hall, concerns itself with the movement of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and the resulting hybrid culture; the title means "The Legend of the Cane Plantation." As performed by Mr. Sánchez with a sextet, it was potent and impressive, though perhaps not always in the ways intended.

The suitelike piece, which had its premiere in Mr. Sánchez's native Puerto Rico this spring, extends a theme he originally tapped for his album "Melaza," released on Columbia in 2000. What prompted him to pick it up again was a poem of the same name written by one of his sisters, Margarita Sánchez de León. "The cadence of the poem was really strong," he said from the stage, adding that he had used that cadence as a guide.

This sounded promising, but when the Puerto Rican rapper SieteNueve joined the ensemble to recite "Melaza," at the beginning and end of the suite, he came across as an interloper. The poem's text — a terse incantation, arresting and entirely unsubtle — served essentially the same purpose as the melodic head in a bebop tune.

Whatever shortcomings this indicated were redeemed by the music.

MORE:
Jazz is backbone of David Sánchez's African rhythm (Ed Morales, October 14, 2007, Newsday)

Ever since he was part of Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra, Puerto Rican saxophonist David Sánchez has dedicated much effort to tracing the influences of African music on jazz. In 2000, Sánchez released "Melaza (Molasses)," a meditation on the cultural legacy of African sugar-cane workers in Puerto Rico. His sister, Margarita Sánchez de León, subsequently wrote a poem of the same title, which in turn has inspired Sánchez's latest work, "La Leyenda del Cañaveral," premiering at Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall (212-247-7800) Wednesday.

Commissioned by Chamber Music America, "La Leyenda del Cañaveral" draws inspiration from Sánchez's recent investigations into the music of Tanzania as well as the Baca Forest people of Cameroon. "I thought since Margarita was inspired by 'Melaza,' what if I forget about that album and just follow the cadence of her poem to do something new," said Sánchez in a phone interview. "The piece is in three motifs, three sections. Originally it was supposed to be for two horns, but since I've been using guitar in my quartet, I replaced the second horn with a guitar."

Sánchez allows that the "backbone" of this new work is jazz, but what he does in the composition process is to reinterpret these African music forms through jazz conventions.

ALL ALONG THE AXIS:

Mongolia, US Sign Developmental Aid Agreement: Mongolia and the United States have signed an agreement providing Ulaanbaatar with $285 million worth of developmental aid. In an interview with Senior Correspondent André de Nesnera, Mongolian President Nambaryn Enkhbayar talks about the accord and his country's political and economic development. (VOA News, 10/23/07)

"We have a multi-party system and we have a parliament very actively working and the government very actively working," said President Enkhbayar. "NGOs [non-governmental organizations] and newspapers and television channels expressing their views on the work we are doing as elected representatives of the people. So there are strong democratic institutions." [...]

While his country is moving forward democratically, President Enkhbayar says it needs help in another area.

"In terms of economic achievements we still need better results - still unemployment and poverty is a main concern for the government of Mongolia, so we have to focus now more on economic development issues," said Nambaryn Enkhbayar.

THE SHORT PATH FROM HOPELESS TO HUB:

Rwanda aims to become Africa's high-tech hub: The African country aims to turn itself into the 'Singapore of Africa.' (Scott Baldauf, October 17, 2007, The Christian Science Monitor)

Sometime in the next two years, nearly every school in Rwanda – from distant mountain villages to swelling urban areas – will be hooked up to the Internet. And it won't be some crummy dial-up service. It will be high-speed broadband, carried by fiber-optic cables.

The fact that Rwanda is closing in on this goal without having the massive oil wealth of Angola or Sudan, the diamonds of Congo or South Africa, or even the copper of nearby Zambia is a testimony to the power of imagination. And Rwanda imagines that one day, it will be the information technology center of Africa.

IT MANY HAVE BEEN MORE ABOUT BOB JONES THAN JOHN McCAIN...:

Winning the Catholic Vote (SETH GITELL, October 23, 2007, NY Sun)

In an election where most of the attention has been on the Evangelical vote, the group that could help determine the result in the general contest is American Catholics.

Many American Catholics reside in the industrial heartland's swing states, such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. They could make the difference for November 2008. In 2000, Vice President Gore barely edged out President Bush for the backing of Catholic voters. In 2004, President Bush beat Senator Kerry for the Catholic vote by 52 to 47.

Usually the question of the Catholic vote comes into consideration in the spring, once the primary season is over. This year is different. A major issue among the Republican candidates is electability. The focus is on which candidate will be the most likely to defeat the Democratic nominee.

THE DRAGON IS DEAD:

Low inflation figures limit retirees, investors (Mike Causey, October 23, 2007, Washington Times)

The low inflation rate is having a major impact on both federal retirees and working feds who max out their 401(k) investments. [...]

• In January, federal and military retirees and people who receive Social Security benefits will get a 2.3 percent cost-of-living adjustment. That's the lowest COLA in years for the huge group of retirees whose benefits are linked to inflation.

ONLY THE SERIOUS SCHOLARS ARE DUBIOUS:

'There was no Armenian genocide': The Turkish Embassy's Orhan Tung responds to the Armenian ambassador on the question of the 1915 genocide (Orhan Tung, 23 October 2007, New Statesman)

There is a legitimate historical controversy concerning the interpretation of the events in question and most of the scholars who have propounded a contra genocide viewpoint are of the highest calibre and repute, including Bernard Lewis, Stanford Shaw, David Fromkin, Justin McCarthy, Guenther Lewy, Norman Stone, Kamuran Gürün, Michael Gunter, Gilles Veinstein, Andrew Mango, Roderic Davidson, J.C. Hurwitz, William Batkay, Edward J. Erickson and Steven Katz.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. A good number of well-respected scholars recognize the deportation decision in 1915, taken under World War I conditions, as a security measure to stop the Armenians from co-operating with the foreign forces invading Anatolia.

On the legal aspect, the elements of the genocide crime are strictly defined and codified by the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Genocide, adopted by the General Assembly on 9 December 1948. However, Armenians, claiming that "the evidence is so overwhelming", so far have failed to submit even one credible evidence of genocide.

OH, STRANGE NEW WORLD, WHERE THERE ARE JOBS EVEN RUSSIANS WON'T DO...:

A boom that depends on migrant workers (Celestine Bohlen, 10/23/07, Bloomberg News)

Slapping a coat of paint on the pedestal of a bust of Lenin in a provincial Russian town may not be much of a job, but Kuram, 49, says it beats making the equivalent of $16 a month back home in Uzbekistan.

"If things were better there, I wouldn't be here," said the tractor driver, at work in Khotkovo, 60 kilometers, or about 40 miles, northeast of Moscow. He declined to give his last name for fear of running afoul of the Russian immigration authorities.

Russia's booming economy is luring more and more people like Kuram, who are willing to take jobs its own citizens can't or won't do. The country's increasingly capitalistic society is creating greater wealth and aspirations, forcing Russia to confront a problem more familiar in the West: integrating foreign workers who often face discrimination and harassment.

IF YOU'RE NOT A STEINBRENNER, IT WAS A A FINE YEAR:

Why the Indians lost to the Red Sox (Ryan Richards, October 23, 2007, Hardball Times)

Although the Indians got unexpected help from some of their supporting cast, the poor performances from players expected to carry the team, especially Fausto Carmona, Travis Hafner, and Rafael Perez, allowed the Red Sox to first extend and finally win the ALCS. The 2007 campaign should be counted as a success especially given where the Indians were a year ago, but blowing a 3-1 series lead against any team, even one as good as the Red Sox, is a disappointing coda to an otherwise promising season.

(1) You noticed it most in the respective performances of Beckett and Carmona, but it was illustrated best in Game 7: in a "big game" you want to start a fastball pitcher, not a sinkerballer, because while the former's overthrowing just makes his heater more dominant and provides greater separation from his offspeed stuff, overthrowing the sinker flattens it out.

(2) While Grady Sizemore and Victor Martinez are premier hitters, no one else in the Indians' lineup is hard to handle.

(3) This may have been the first 7 game series in any sport where there was near universal recognition that the team that was up 3-1 had its back to the wall.

THE BUSIER THE PRESIDENT THE WORSE OFF THE COUNTRY:

Fred Thompson and the value of 'easy does it': Many politicians are workaholics. Smart leaders take time off to reflect (Ralph Keyes, October 23, 2007, CS Monitor)

Pundits and Democrats are making the same mistake with Fred Thompson that they did with Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower: underestimating him because he's not a workaholic. Mr. Reagan liked to joke that "They say hard work never killed anyone, but I figure, why take the chance?" Reagan also once observed of himself, "I've really been burning the midday oil." The same could be said of Mr. Thompson. To detractors, this is clear evidence of his limitations. It isn't.

Any wise manager knows that long hours are not synonymous with added productivity. It could be the other way around. Working too hard usually indicates that an executive is disorganized, can't manage time, and has problems delegating authority. That person stays up late and brings work home on weekends because he has to. But working overtime is hardly the same as working effectively. Typically, it's just the opposite.

TERROR IN THE HOLE:

Worried Bin Laden Urges Iraq Insurgents to 'Unite' (Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri, 10/22/07, ABC: The Blotter)

Showing apparent signs of concern over events in Iraq, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden urged insurgents to "unite your lines into one" in an audiotape played on al Jazeera Monday. [...]

Bin Laden's message comes at a time when U.S. strategy to split Iraqi insurgent groups from al Qaeda units appears to be working.

"It's always good news when they are divided," said Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, now an ABC News consultant. "It's reflective that U.S. tactics are having some success."

LONG LIVE THE KING:

Benny Carter Centennial: Jazz Master’s Signature, Written in Sax and Brass (BEN RATLIFF, 10/22/07, NY Times)

It was fitting then that no single musician ran away with Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Friday night concert at Rose Theater, based around Carter’s music, this year’s season-opening program. (Carter was born in 1907, and this is his centennial year.) If there was a star, it was a whole bloc within a band: the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra’s saxophone section, playing the tightly harmonized passages that were among Carter’s signatures.

Carter’s arrangement of “All of Me,” from 1940, is a good example. After an introduction, it began with the four saxophonists playing two choruses of harmonized lockstep, running a rewritten version of the melody through the chords, and it had everything an individual solo can have: melodic shape, hesitation, easy swing, double-timing, open space. The same thing happened again, at the same level of execution, in “I Can’t Escape From You.” It was demanding music, beautifully coordinated.

Ratliff is right that the group highlight of the evening were the harmonized sax passages in “All of Me” and “I Can’t Escape from You.” But the solo highlight was Ted Nash’s interpretation on flute of Carter’s haunting “People Time.”

Ratliff is also right about the séance feeling. I went to the rehearsal on Wednesday, and while the band was playing I had the feeling that Benny was going to walk in the room at any moment. I spoke to some of the musicians after the concert who knew Benny, and they also commented that they felt like he was in the room.

MORE:
Lincoln Center Gets Carter (WILL FRIEDWALD, October 22, 2007, NY Sun)

It won't do to describe Benny Carter as a multi-instrumentalist. Even though he may have been the only major jazzman who was equally fluent on saxophone and trumpet, everything he did outside the realm of the saxophone was, if not exactly superfluous, then certainly secondary. You could take away everything else he ever did (and it was plenty), and the equation of his greatness, both as a player and an orchestrator, remains unchanged.

In fact, I'm almost peeved that the central image of Carter (1907-2003) in his placement in the Nesuhi Ertegun Hall of Fame at Jazz at Lincoln Center is of the subject playing trumpet (it must have something to do with a pro-brass bias on the part of JALC's artistic director, Wynton Marsalis). Yet JALC has more than made up for this questionable decision, first by electing the native of Harlem to its Hall of Fame and second by honoring him with an excellent concert on Friday and Saturday.

THERE'S NOT ENOUGH NEATSFOOT OIL IN WORLD TO SAVE THIS MITT:

A tough weekend for Mitt? (Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Julia Steers, 10/22/07, NBC: First Read)

Judging by the number of Thompson vs. Giuliani storylines after last night’s debate, Thompson might be judged the ultimate winner; he seemed much more comfortable than at the CNBC/MSNBC/WSJ debate earlier this month. The GOP primary seems to be a fight between Rudy and those who want to be the anti-Rudy. So as far as the anti-Rudy debate went last night, Thompson topped Romney and Huckabee. And therefore, that arguably makes Romney, by process of elimination, the loser.

LEMAYISM:

One strike, Iran could be out (Niall Ferguson, October 22, 2007, LA Times)

True, after all that has gone wrong in Iraq, Americans are scarcely eager for another preventive war to stop another rogue regime from owning yet more weapons of mass destruction that don't currently exist. It's easy to imagine the international uproar that would ensue in the event of U.S. air strikes. It's also easy to imagine the havoc that might be wreaked by Iranian-sponsored terrorists in Iraq by way of retaliation. So it's very tempting to hope for a purely diplomatic solution.

Yet the reality is that the chances of such an outcome are dwindling fast, precisely because other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council are ruling out the use of force -- and without the threat of force, diplomacy seldom works. Six days ago, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin went to Iran for an amicable meeting with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Putin says he sees "no evidence" that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. On his return to Moscow, he explicitly repudiated what he called "a policy of threats, various sanctions or power politics."

The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, also seems less likely to support American preemption than his predecessor was in the case of Iraq. That leaves China, which remains an enigma on the Iranian question, and France, whose hawkish new president finds himself distracted by the worst kind of domestic crisis: a divorce.

By contrast, Washington's most reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel, recently demonstrated the ease with which a modern air force can destroy a suspected nuclear facility. Not only was last month's attack on a site in northeastern Syria carried out without Israeli losses, there was no retaliation on the part of Damascus. Memo from Ehud Olmert to George W. Bush: You can do this, and do it with impunity.

The big question of 2007 therefore remains: Will he do it?

DEFINING DEVIATIONISTS DOWNWARDS:

Republicans trade blows at fiery debate (Jonathan Martin, Oct 22, 2007, Politico)

After two weeks of sparring from afar, the top GOP presidential candidates took their attacks up close Sunday, using the first round of their debate here to question one another’s conservative credentials. [...]

Thompson, showing a degree of passion unseen in his first debate appearance two weeks ago, offered perhaps the toughest charges of the night.

He blasted Giuliani on abortion, immigration, gun control, taxes and the former New York mayor’s support for Democratic Gov. Mario Cuomo's reelection bid in 1994.

“So I simply disagree with him those issues,” said the former Tennessee senator. “And he sides with Hillary Clinton on each of those issues I just mentioned.”

MORE:
Romney: Beliefs won't influence my presidency (Eric Pfeiffer, October 22, 2007, Washington Times)

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said yesterday that he fully accepts the teachings of his Mormon religion but that as president he would not take dictates from the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

WE ARE ALL INTELLIGENT DESIGNISTS NOW:

Vast Designs: How America came of age (Jill Lepore, 10/29/07, The New Yorker)

Howe’s book is the most recent installment in the prestigious Oxford History of the United States. This would not be worth mentioning except that the book that was initially commissioned to cover this period, Charles Sellers’s “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846,” was rejected by the series editor, the late, distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward, and it is Sellers against whom Howe argues, if with a kind of gentlemanly diffidence. (Oxford did publish Sellers’s book, in 1991, just not as part of the series.) Sellers, a historian at Berkeley, claimed that the greatest transformation of the first half of the nineteenth century—indeed, the defining event in American and even in world history—was no mere transformation but a revolution, from an agrarian to a capitalist society. “Establishing capitalist hegemony over economy, politics, and culture, the market revolution created ourselves and most of the world we know,” Sellers wrote.

Sellers’s energetic, brilliant, and strident book may not have reached readers outside the academy—perhaps Woodward anticipated this—but among scholars it enjoyed a huge influence, not least because “The Market Revolution” was published just after many of the nation’s best historians had written essays sounding urgent calls for synthesis in American historical writing. During the nineteen-sixties and seventies, historians had produced longer and longer monographs on smaller and smaller subjects. A decade in the life of a town. A year in the life of a family. Dazzling studies, many of them, but pieces of a puzzle that no one had been able to put together. “The great proliferation of historical writing has served not to illuminate the central themes of Western history but to obscure them,” Bernard Bailyn complained, in 1981, in his presidential address to the American Historical Association. There followed similar, heartfelt laments by Eric Foner (“History in Crisis”), Herbert G. Gutman (“The Missing Synthesis”), and Thomas Bender (“Making History Whole Again”). Sellers’s paradigm seemed to offer an answer; he had dumped all the pieces out of the box, and put them together, joining decades of meticulous empirical research about Western farmers, Eastern bankers, Southern slaves, artisans, immigrants, politicians, everyone.

Before the market revolution: Americans grew food and made things for themselves or to barter with neighbors; they were humble but happy, rallying around “enduring human values of family, trust, cooperation, love, and equality.” After: they grew food and made things to sell, for cash, to cold, unfeeling, and distant markets; they were frantic, alienated, untrusting, competitive, repressed, and lonely. “Inherent and ongoing contradictions between capitalist market relations and human needs” plagued the nation, as Sellers had it, and plague us still. For leading the anti-market struggle against the “business class” and attacking paper money and credit, Andrew Jackson served as Sellers’s hero, especially for having vetoed, in 1832, the charter for the Second Bank of the United States. But Old Hickory, and democracy, proved no match for the tyrannical business minority of bankers, merchants, and strivers, whose capitalist machinations made the poor poorer; the middle-class smug, pious, and bourgeois; and the rich richer. As Thoreau put it, “A few are riding, but the rest are run over.”

The literary scholar Perry Miller once said that “Walden” is “a manifesto of Yankee cussedness.” Sure, but, even if high-school sophomores forced to wade through “Walden” miss it, Thoreau can be very, very funny. “I have thought that Walden Pond would be a good place for business,” he wrote, mischievously. “It is a good port.” His experiment was, of course, not a business but an anti-business; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything. Instead, he bartered, and lived on twenty-seven cents a week. At his most entrepreneurial, he planted a field of beans, and realized a profit of eight dollars and seventy-one and a half cents. “I was determined to know beans,” he writes in a particularly beautiful and elegiac chapter called “The Bean-Field.” He worked, for cash, only six weeks of the year, and spent the rest of his time reading, writing, hoeing beans, picking huckleberries, and listening to bullfrogs trumping, hawks screaming, and whip-poor-wills singing vespers. “Mr. Thoreau is thus at war with the political economy of the age,” one reviewer commented, after “Walden” was published, in 1854. But Thoreau wasn’t so much battling the market revolution as dodging it, “not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but to stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by.”

What Thoreau tried to escape, historians studying his America have found in every sparrow’s fall. Sellers’s was the thesis that launched a thousand dissertations; evidence of the market revolution seemed to be everywhere; it seemed to explain everything. In “The Market Revolution Ate My Homework,” a thoughtful essay published in Reviews in American History in 1997, the historian Daniel Feller observed that “a monograph that presupposes a market revolution will certainly discover one.” His caution went unheard.

So it is a rare and refreshing kind of heresy that Daniel Walker Howe, who studied briefly under Sellers at Berkeley in the nineteen-sixties, and who is best known for his 1979 book, “The Political Culture of the American Whigs,” refuses to use the term “market revolution” in his grand synthesis. (Signalling his quarrel with the other recent sweeping interpretation of this period, Sean Wilentz’s pro-Jackson “The Rise of American Democracy,” Howe dedicates his book to the memory of John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s political nemesis, and avoids using the phrase “Jacksonian America,” on the ground that “Jackson was a controversial figure and his political movement bitterly divided the American people.”) Howe has three objections to Sellers’s thesis. First, the market revolution, if it happened at all, happened earlier, in the eighteenth century. Second, it wasn’t the tragedy that Sellers makes it out to be, because “most American family farmers welcomed the chance to buy and sell in larger markets,” and they were right to, since selling their crops made their lives better. Stuff was cheaper: a mattress that cost fifty dollars in 1815 (which meant that almost no one owned one) cost five in 1848 (and everyone slept better). Finally, the revolution that really mattered was the “communications revolution”: the invention of the telegraph, the expansion of the postal system, improvements in printing technology, and the growth of the newspaper, magazine, and book-publishing industries.

Howe offered an early version of his critique of Sellers at a conference held in London in 1994, in which he demurred, “What if people really were benefitting in certain ways from the expansion of the market and its culture? What if they espoused middle-class tastes or evangelical religion or (even) Whig politics for rational and defensible reasons? What if the market was not an actor (as Sellers makes it) but a resource, an instrumentality, something created by human beings as a means to their ends?”

DARN THOSE VOTERS!:

We're Not in 2006 Anymore (Michael Barone, 10/21/07, Real Clear Politics)

Things are not working out as Democratic congressional leaders expected. For the first eight months of this year, they struggled to find some way to shut down the American military effort in Iraq.

They took it for granted that we were stuck in a quagmire in Iraq, with continuous high casualties and very little to show for them. They pressed hard to get the Republican votes they needed to block a filibuster in the Senate and were cheered when some Republicans, like John Warner, seemed to lean their way. They worked hard over the August recess to pressure Republican House members to break ranks and vote with them.

But the Republicans mostly held fast. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell skillfully parried their thrusts in the Senate. House Minority Leader John Boehner persuaded most House Republicans to hang on. Then, over the summer, the news out of Iraq started to get better. [...]

Democrats are coming face to face with the fact that there's a war on -- and that Americans prefer success to failure. If the choice is between stalemate and withdrawal, as it seemed to be in November 2006, they may favor withdrawal; but if the choice is between victory and withdrawal, they don't want to quit -- or to undermine the effort.

THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HIM AND O'REILLY IS THE APOSTROPHE:

The secret agenda of Stephen Colbert: In two years, he's turned a 'Daily Show' spinoff into a wacky sitcom (JAIME J. WEINMAN, October 22, 2007, Macleans)

The Colbert Report has no regular supporting cast at all; like the Fox News and MSNBC shows it's parodying, it's a one-man operation. Except for interviews, the regular segments have Colbert alone at his desk, playing the perpetually enraged pontificator. Reviewing the show's premiere, Brian Lowry of Variety pointed out that "the more confining format makes it more difficult to regularly generate laughs."

Instead, the show has managed to generate two years' worth of good ratings for Comedy Central in the U.S. and CTV in Canada. A sign of its success is its current run of tie-ins and promotions: this week sees the release of Colbert's book, I Am America (and So Can You!), written entirely in character, while the show just announced the elevation of head writer Allison Silverman to the rank of executive producer. Silverman told the radio podcast "The Sound of Young America" that the show appealed to her because it's "about news, and satirical, but also with somewhat of a sketch element that's character-based." It's the character element that has taken over and made the show successful -- even to the point of crowding out the satire.

The early episodes of The Colbert Report introduced some ongoing topics for Colbert to obsess over, such as his fear of bears (he usually identifies them as "the No. 1 threat to America!"). But as the series has gone on, it's come to depend so heavily on storylines and character traits that they've basically taken over (except for the satirical "The Word" segment, which fills only three minutes of each show). When Colbert made a joke about marketing his sperm for artificial insemination -- "Stephen Colbert's Formula 401" -- it would have been a one-time throwaway joke on any other show. But it's become a long-running story, with Colbert hawking his "premium man-seed" at every opportunity, even cutting away from guest Garrison Keillor for a singing commercial for the product ("I can't believe I was interrupted by a semen commercial," said Keillor). Another segment, "Cheating Death With Dr. Stephen T. Colbert," has turned into a story about the dangerous drugs being pushed by Colbert's fictitious sponsor "Prescott Pharmaceuticals." Colbert's 2006 Emmy loss to Barry Manilow inspired a running gag in which the host shakes his fist in the air and screams the crooner's name; Manilow recently appeared as a disembodied head and consoled Colbert on losing the 2007 award to Tony Bennett. As with a character on The Office or 30 Rock, you can construct a biography for Colbert's character based on the information given on the show.

SUFFICE IT TO SAY...:

Dice-K shows his worth, wins Game 7: In biggest game of year, righty helps Sox reach Fall Classic (Jordan Bastian, 10/22/07, MLB.com)

It was Daisuke Matsuzaka's redemption song. The Red Sox starter watched his team climb back into the American League Championship Series against the Indians, providing him with the chance to move beyond his recent woes and push Boston back to baseball's promised land.

So with Boston's season on the line on Sunday night, Matsuzaka took the mound at Fenway Park in a decisive Game 7. It was Dice-K's time to show his worth and help the Red Sox reach the World Series for the second time in the past four seasons. In those tasks, Matsuzaka did not fall short.

"I felt very lucky that this start came along and belonged to me," said Matsuzaka, following Boston's 11-2 romp over Cleveland. "But I also felt that with the momentum we had going into the game, there was no way we were going to lose."

THE SPLITTISTS ARE THE rEALISTS:

Dalai Lama Grabs Spotlight From China's Leaders (William Pesek, 10/22/07, Bloomberg)

Hu Jintao can't be happy. Just as 2,200 Communist Party delegates gathered in Beijing to grant him another five years as Chinese president, the Dalai Lama grabbed the global spotlight.

Whether by coincidence or design, the U.S. Congress gave Tibet's spiritual leader its highest civilian award the same week China hosted its National Congress. President George W. Bush defied Chinese protests to become the first sitting U.S. president to appear in public with the Dalai Lama.

China was not amused, particularly with Bush urging it to welcome back to Tibet the Nobel Prize winner who's lived in exile since 1959. Officials in Beijing said U.S. support for what they see as the Dalai Lama's ``splittist'' mission could have ``an extremely serious impact'' on U.S.-China relations.

PALLING AROUND:

German Spy Brokered Deal between Israel and Hezbollah: Arch-enemies Israel and Hezbollah came together last week for a landmark prisoner exchange that has raised hopes that two Israeli soldiers captured in July 2006 may be released. The deal was brokered by a German intelligence officer known as "Mr. Hezbollah." (Christoph Schult and Holger Stark, 10/22/07, Der Spiegel)

The exchange is a possible new beginning between the two sworn enemies. For the first time since the end of last summer's war, there is movement on one of the key fronts of the Middle East conflict. The solution of the prisoner problem is considered a precondition for any further de-escalation that might eventually lead to a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon.

Both sides praised the deal as soon as it was concluded. Shiite militia leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke of having "advanced positively" in the negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, while Olmert commended the "balanced" nature of the exchange.

It's a measure of modest success that both sides could celebrate as a victory. Olmert, under immense domestic political pressure, was able to present himself to the public as an effective negotiator. And Nasrallah could demonstrate his goodwill to the world, helping Hezbollah avoid the international isolation threatened by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which was intended to resolve the Israel-Lebanon conflict. The deal is also important for the United Nations, proving as it does that the world body is still able to effectively mediate international crises. The episode is even garnering kudos for Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency, as it was one of Berlin's spooks who was responsible for piecing the deal together.

ISN'T THAT NEXT WEEKEND?:

Free Songs: Vampire Weekend (Sean Moeller , 22 October 2007, Daytrotter)

The band of four came to Rock Island at the very end of that experience, playing one final show in Chicago and then backtracking to us for a session and a show in our small pizza parlour (Huckleberry’s for those who are sticklers for all of the details) and then red-eyed it back to New York to catch flights two days later. The session was spectacular – all of the evidence in that is following. The show, played before about 50 people who’d never heard one word about the band prior to the night, was much more than that. It was full of so much intangible magic that it felt absolutely impossible. The guys were all smiles as they broke into it. They were all smiles during and huge, gaping smiles after an encore was demanded and they wound up bagging a second taco pizza from the management while they were signing the T-shirts of youngsters and the elderly. It was a dance party that they even recounted for NME a few weeks back. Something as truly memorable as this night doesn’t come along very often. Thank heaven for blue moons.

WHY BOTHER WITH THE REST OF THE SEASON?:

Brady gets 6 more TD passes and Patriots stay unbeaten by defeating winless Dolphins 49-28 (Steven Wine, 10/21/07, AP)

Tom Brady emerged from the locker room Sunday wearing a suit and tie complemented by a pocket scarf, his stylish look marred only by a few small drink stains on his coat.

So he's not perfect.

But he and the New England Patriots are awfully good.

Flawless at the start and off the bench, Brady threw a team-record six touchdown passes to help the unbeaten Patriots rout the winless Miami Dolphins 49-28.

With his team comfortably ahead, Brady came out early in the fourth quarter, then re-entered and threw for New England's final score. His TD total exceeded his career high of five, set last week against Dallas.

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Moss seems to get it: Plan wasn't fancy, but he makes it work (Mike Reiss, October 22, 2007, Boston Globe)

Yesterday, it was Moss, and in a big way.

His 35- and 50-yard touchdown catches in the second quarter were remarkable plays, in part because they looked like they were drawn up at the bus stop. It was nothing fancy, nothing that came from a page deep in the Patriots' playbook to set him free.

Instead, it was about Moss running down the field and quarterback Tom Brady lobbing up offerings that, in his own words, simply gave Moss a chance to make a play in the end zone.

On the first, Moss had safety Cameron Worrell draped over him, with some late defensive help arriving after he made the catch. On the second, it was Worrell and Renaldo Hill attached to both hips.

Each time, Moss positioned his body to shield the defenders, then treated the football like the Frisbee to which Stallworth referred. On the second catch - which came on a third-and-18 play - Moss made it with one hand, securing it close to his body.

Great plays by Moss? Bad plays by the defense?

Some will see it both ways, but there is no question which side the quarterback is on.

"I can't take credit for Randy's touchdown catches," Brady said. "That's all Randy Moss."

INVITING THE BIG DOG TO EAT:

Iran's new hardline nuclear envoy causes jitters in West (Anne Penketh, 22 October 2007, Independent)

The shock resignation of Iran's chief nuclear negotiator has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the country's future co-operation with UN inspectors, heightening the risk of US military strikes.

Iran sought to reassure the West yesterday that Tehran's policy over negotiations with Western powers attempting to curb its nuclear programme would not change after the replacement of Ali Larijani with a reputedly hardline deputy foreign minister, Saeed Jalili.

Mr Jalili is more closely associated with the radical Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than Mr Larijani, who had been a rival of Mr Ahmadinejad in the last presidential elections.

Which would explain this, Iran's leaders in nuclear policy row (David Blair, 22/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

A power struggle within Iran's regime over the nuclear programme came to the surface yesterday when Teheran announced that Ali Larijani, the former national security chief, will join talks in Rome despite his resignation.

Mr Larijani, who stepped down as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and chief negotiator on nuclear issues on Saturday, will still meet Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy representative, in Italy tomorrow.

Mr Larijani will travel with his successor, Saeed Jalili, a key ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who previously served as deputy foreign minister.

WE ARE ALL INTELLIGENT DESIGNISTS NOW:

Global Warming Delusions: The popular imagination has been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis. (DANIEL B. BOTKIN, October 21, 2007, Opinion Journal)

Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life--ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.

Case in point: This year's United Nations report on climate change and other documents say that 20% to 30% of plant and animal species will be threatened with extinction in this century due to global warming--a truly terrifying thought. Yet, during the past 2.5 million years, a period that scientists now know experienced climatic changes as rapid and as warm as modern climatological models suggest will happen to us, almost none of the millions of species on Earth went extinct. The exceptions were about 20 species of large mammals (the famous megafauna of the last ice age--saber-tooth tigers, hairy mammoths and the like), which went extinct about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, and many dominant trees and shrubs of northwestern Europe. But elsewhere, including North America, few plant species went extinct, and few mammals.

We're also warned that tropical diseases are going to spread, and that we can expect malaria and encephalitis epidemics. But scientific papers by Prof. Sarah Randolph of Oxford University show that temperature changes do not correlate well with changes in the distribution or frequency of these diseases; warming has not broadened their distribution and is highly unlikely to do so in the future, global warming or not.

The key point here is that living things respond to many factors in addition to temperature and rainfall. In most cases, however, climate-modeling-based forecasts look primarily at temperature alone, or temperature and precipitation only. You might ask, "Isn't this enough to forecast changes in the distribution of species?" Ask a mockingbird. The New York Times recently published an answer to a query about why mockingbirds were becoming common in Manhattan. The expert answer was: food--an exotic plant species that mockingbirds like to eat had spread to New York City. It was this, not temperature or rainfall, the expert said, that caused the change in mockingbird geography.

WITH APOLOGIES TO GENE McCARTHY:

Line-Item Foolishness (George Will, 10/21/07, Real Clear Politics)

Mitt Romney is an intelligent man who sometimes seems eager to find bushel baskets under which to hide his light. Romney faults Rudy Giuliani for opposing the presidential line-item veto. But Giuliani doesn't, unfortunately.

THE FUTURE OF THE GOP ISN'T TANKREDIST:

Son of Indian immigrants is elected governor of La.: Post-Katrina ire aids Republican (Adam Nossiter, October 21, 2007, New York Times News Service)

Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican congressman from the New Orleans suburbs and the son of immigrants from India, was elected Louisiana's governor yesterday, inheriting a state suffering well before Hurricane Katrina left lingering scars two years ago.

Jindal, 36, defeated three challengers in an open primary, becoming this state's first nonwhite governor since a Reconstruction-era figure briefly held the office 130 years ago. [...]

Yet Jindal, with his decisive victory yesterday, appears to have overcome a significant racial hurdle that blocked him in 2003, according to analysts: race-based opposition in the deeply conservative northern and eastern parishes of Louisiana that once supported the Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

DUMBLEDORE EXPLAINED:

AP: Sexual Misconduct Plagues US Schools (MARTHA IRVINE and ROBERT TANNER, October 21, 2007, AP)

Lindsey's case is just a small example of a widespread problem in American schools: sexual misconduct by the very teachers who are supposed to be nurturing the nation's children.

Students in America's schools are groped. They're raped. They're pursued, seduced and think they're in love.

An Associated Press investigation found more than 2,500 cases over five years in which educators were punished for actions from bizarre to sadistic.

AS LONG AS LADY PENELOPE IS SAFE:

Help! One of my puppets is missing, says T-bird 1: Gerry Anderson appeals for help to find Dick Spanner, missing in action (Jonathan Owen, 21 October 2007, Independent)

Calling International Rescue – one of our puppets is missing. A nationwide appeal was launched yesterday by Gerry Anderson, the creator of Thunderbirds, to find one of his favourite creations. Lady Penelope, Parker and Captain Scarlet are safe and sound, but the producer is determined to find one of his proudest achievements – private detective Dick Spanner.

"I know the whereabouts of everything [else], but Dick Spanner defeats me, although I know he's out there somewhere. If The Independent on Sunday's readers could help track him down for me I would be very happy indeed," the veteran producer said last night.

Missing for 20 years, Dick Spanner was the solo star of a low-budget animation series, using cardboard sets, that has developed a cult following. Mr Anderson said finding the puppet would "make his year".

WHICH IS WHAT MADE MANNY'S COMMENT SO REFRESHING:

Yankees’ Expectations Are Felt in Boston (WILLIAM C. RHODEN, 10/21/07, NY Times)

The door is open for the Red Sox, with a rich baseball tradition and a high payroll, to replace the Yankees as the team the nation loves to hate. The question is whether the Red Sox, after years of being the object of sympathy and even pity, can adjust to being despised.

With the Yankees’ empire in decline, the implications for Boston are significant and perhaps terrifying. The Red Sox could sign Alex Rodriguez, and he and pitcher Josh Beckett could be anchors of a Boston dynasty.

The possibility is there for the spending: no more just missing the brass ring, but rather grabbing that ring season after season. But does Red Sox Nation really want to do this?

Vince Lombardi’s exhortation that winning is the only thing, in retrospect, has caused unimaginable heartache and blues. It sounds good but is probably antithetic to inner peace.

Look around. The pursuit of winning has tempted some of us to break rules, bend moral fiber, take performance-enhancing drugs and jettison a manager who failed to lead his team past the first playoff round for three consecutive years.

The question I’d ask Boston fans is whether they really want to see their team do this. Do they want a franchise whose ethos is that winning titles is the only thing?

For years, there was a sympathetic fascination with the Red Sox and their hapless pursuit of their first championship since 1918. They were the frustrated coyote in pursuit of the roadrunner Yankees. In 2004, the coyote finally caught the roadrunner, conquered the challenge and won the World Series. Someone asked Francona about expectations in New York and in Boston.“Theo and I have talked about this a lot lately,” he said, referring to Theo Epstein, the Red Sox’ general manager.

“Because of the money that’s spent and all the passion that’s been — I’ve only been here four years. I know it started before I got here, but things have gotten a little bit skewed around here, and sometimes the big fight for me, and I’m sure Theo is involved in that, too, is not losing sight of what’s important, what’s meaningful to you.”

FORGET BASEBALL, IT'S ABOUT TV PROGRAMMING:

A-Rod may leave Yankees: Scott Boras, the agent for star baseball player Alex Rodriguez, says turmoil surrounding search for new manager may keep him from staying in New York. (Chris Isidore, October 20 2007, CNNMoney.com)

Scott Boras, the agent for star New York Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez, told CNNMoney.com Saturday that the current uncertainty surrounding the team, including its managerial opening, will make it difficult for his client to sign with the Yankees by the deadline given by team management. [...]

In addition to the managerial change, George Steinbrenner, the dominating owner who has called the shots for the team since he bought it in 1973, is reported to be in ill health. The team has acknowledged he is bringing his sons Hal and Harold into the decision making process.

Boras says all this will make it difficult for Rodriguez to reach an agreement with the Yankees by the deadline. Boras also suggested Rodriguez would want to see if the teams' other free agents -- catcher Jorge Posada, reliever Mariano Rivera and starting pitcher Andy Pettitte are returning to the team, along with outfielder Bobby Abreu, for whom the Yankees hold an option on whether to bring him back or let him be a free agent.

"Without Pettitte, Rivera and Posada, it's not the same team," Boras said. "He's held accountable for being on a playoff team and winning in the playoffs."

Boras didn't seem concerned over the Yankees' statement that it would not enter a bidding war for Rodriguez if he decides to opt out of the contract in the next few weeks.

Vince Gennaro, a consultant to numerous major league teams and the author of "Diamonds and Dollars," a book about the economics of baseball, has done an analysis that suggests A-Rod could produce $48 million per year in revenue and asset appreciation for the Yankees, allowing the team to pay him $34 million in salary, along with a 40 percent luxury tax, and still break even.

Gennaro's estimate includes an extra $3 million a year benefit to the YES Network, the regional sports network of which the Yankees own 36 percent, along with a $9 million a year in the estimated increased value of that stake.

CNNMoney.com sister publication FORTUNE has reported that the Yankees are looking at a possible sale of the team's ownership interest in YES, and that it could fetch $3.5 billion for the entire network. So re-signing A-Rod could be important for the Yankees in order to maximize the network's value.

ONE WOULDN'T EXPECT A LEFTIST TO GRASP THE CORE TRUTH:

Bleakonomics: a review of THE SHOCK DOCTRINE: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism By Naomi Klein (JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, NY Times Book Review)

There are no accidents in the world as seen by Naomi Klein. The destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina expelled many poor black residents and allowed most of the city’s public schools to be replaced by privately run charter schools. The torture and killings under Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile and during Argentina’s military dictatorship were a way of breaking down resistance to the free market. The instability in Poland and Russia after the collapse of Communism and in Bolivia after the hyperinflation of the 1980s allowed the governments there to foist unpopular economic “shock therapy” on a resistant population. And then there is “Washington’s game plan for Iraq”: “Shock and terrorize the entire country, deliberately ruin its infrastructure, do nothing while its culture and history are ransacked, then make it all O.K. with an unlimited supply of cheap household appliances and imported junk food,” not to mention a strong stock market and private sector.

YOU CAN'T GIVE THE STUFF AWAY:

How Green Is My Garden? (THOMAS C. COOPER, 10/20/07, NY Times)

IF the government wants to reduce its dependency on imported oil and, in the words of the Department of Energy, “foster the domestic biomass industry,” it has only to stop by my backyard with a pickup. The place is an unlikely but active biomass production center — especially at this season with countless autumn leaves eddying in every nook and cranny — and I’ll happily donate my production to the cause. [...]

The entire Northeast is similarly an expanding store of biomass that could provide self-sustaining, local energy on a considerable scale. In its agricultural heyday 150 years ago, our region was only 20 percent forested. Today it is 75 percent wooded, a dense, largely uninterrupted forest created by natural regeneration. A similar surplus exists across much of the country.

SO WHY NOT BAT HIM LEADOFF?

Ellsbury in the lineup (Kevin Thomas, 10/20/07, Clearing the Bases)

Jacoby Ellsbury has replaced Coco Crisp in the lineup tonight. Trot Nixon is back in the Indians order.

Here are the lineups:

LET'S GO OUT ON A LIMB...:

The new totalitarians: Burma and the rebirth of a terrible idea (Joshua Kurlantzick, September 30, 2007, Boston Globe)

Burma's transformation bucks the global trend away from such tightly repressive societies. For years, totalitarianism loomed as the West's mortal enemy, a terrifying force that drove the massive purges of Stalinist Russia, the bizarre personality cult of Albania, and the wholesale eradication of intellectuals in Maoist China.

But in the years since the Cold War, totalitarianism has appeared to be in wide retreat. With the advent of mobile phones, satellite television, and cheap, fast Internet access, it has become nearly impossible for any government to totally isolate its people from the world, or to dominate their private lives.

In Laos, where the Communist government once created a personality cult around its revolutionary founder, city-dwellers can watch news reports about their country on television from Thailand. In China, the Communist Party continues to stamp out organized dissent but no longer tracks ordinary citizens' every movement, and many people can afford to buy homes and give themselves a degree of domestic privacy. Even in North Korea, which spent decades walling itself off, cheap cellphones smuggled across the border from China have created some tiny cracks in Kim Jong-Il's regime.

But in Burma, the junta has headed in the opposite direction. Last week's protests most immediately speak to the sufferings of the average Burmese, but they also send an important signal at a moment when a handful of governments - including Zimbabwe and Venezuela - are showing fresh signs of totalitarian rule, building personality cults and infiltrating their citizens' private lives. As it quickly becomes a central topic for the UN and the Bush administration, Burma will prove a test of whether these repressive regimes have any future at all.

DEFINING NECESSITY DOWNWARDS:

The Day of Battle:" | Courage, carnage and obsession: a review of The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson (Thomas Peelem, Contra Costa Times)

Patton's ego seems tame compared to that of Gen. Mark Clark, commander of the American Fifth Army in Italy. Atkinson paints Clark as so obsessed with capturing Rome himself that he pondered turning his own guns on the British if he thought they would enter the city ahead of him.

At the heart of "The Day of Battle," though, is the foot soldier, the men pinned down at Anzio, the troops sent relentlessly into fortified German lines. The Italian campaign was the battlefront that most resembled the battles of World War I, armies flinging themselves at each other again and again over the same ground.

Atkinson juxtaposes the fighting for inches with the grave realities of Allied war-making politics and how much blood was spilled because of clashing egos. He also explores many of the war's darkest secrets, from its largest incident of fratricide (Allied gunners in Sicily opening up on their own planes and paratroopers), to the disastrous results when a ship containing a cargo of mustard gas is bombed in an Italian harbor, to the atrocities committed on both sides.

His deeper exploration is whether the war in Italy needed to be fought at all. It was, history proved, of little strategic importance. But it was, Atkinson concludes, necessary for Stalin's appeasement and diverting German resources from the preparation of defenses for the invasion of France.

The book though is terrific, not just for what it reveals about the "Good War" but for what that reveals about our current "Bad War." Let us set aside, for now, the fundamental mistake of appeasing Stalin and trying to help the Soviets win and assume for the moment that this phase of the war was entirely justified and truly necessary. Consider that just in the initial hours and days of the invasion of Sicily you get not only that friendly fire incident--with an official count of 410 killed but an additional 1400 paratroopers unaccounted for--and several intentional massacres of prisoners, which were covered up not just to prevent Allied embarrassment but in order to possibly protect our own men from reprisals should they be captured. Add the general incompetence in areas from strategy to logistics and the rivalry between commanders of different nations as well as between services and between peers within each service and you begin to see how comparatively flawless the Iraq campaign has been, as well as how much more seriously the government and the press took winning said war, rather than exposing every mistake to be picked over in public and seized upon by the enemy. Note: I'm not actually suggesting that no mistakes have been made in the Iraq War, but that we lack all historical perspective either when we consider them in their worst light and look back at WWII in an absurdly glowing, near sacred, light.

Like all the best histories, Mr. Atkinson's book tells us as much about our own times as it does about the past and what it tells us is pretty unflattering about both.

MORE:
-BOOK SITE: Day of Battle
-REVIEW: of Day of Battle (Robert Killebrew, Washington Post)
-EXCERPT: Land of the Cyclops (Rick Atkinson, The Day of Battle, Thanks to FSB Associates)

Few Sicilian towns claimed greater antiquity than Gela, where the center of the American assault was to fall. Founded on a limestone hillock by Greek colonists from Rhodes and Crete in 688 b.c., Gela had since endured the usual Mediterranean calamities, including betrayal, pillage, and, in 311 b.c., the butchery of five thousand citizens by a rival warlord. The ruins of sanctuaries and shrines dotted the modern town of 32,000, along with tombs ranging in vintage from Bronze Age to Hellenistic and Byzantine. The fecund “Geloan fields,” as Virgil called them in The Aeneid, grew oleanders, palms, and Saracen olives. Aeschylus, the father of Attic drama, had spent his last years in Gela writing about fate, revenge, and love gone bad in the Oresteia; legend held that the playwright had been killed here when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his bald skull.

Patton planned a different sort of airborne attack by his invasion vanguard. On the night of July 9–10, more than three thousand paratroopers in four battalions were to parachute onto several vital road junctions outside Gela to forestall Axis counterattacks against the 1st Division landing beaches. Leading this assault was the dashing Colonel James Maurice Gavin, who at thirty-six was on his way to becoming the Army’s youngest major general since the Civil War. Born in Brooklyn to Irish immigrants and orphaned as a child, Gavin had been raised hardscrabble by foster parents in the Pennsylvania coalfields. Leaving school after the eighth grade, he worked as a barber’s helper, shoe clerk, and filling station manager before joining the Army at seventeen. He wangled an appointment to West Point, where his cadetship was undistinguished. As a young officer he washed out of flight school; a superior’s evaluation as recently as 1941 concluded, “This officer does not seem peculiarly fitted to be a paratrooper.” Ascetic and fearless, with a “magnetism for attractive women,” Jim Gavin was in fact born to go to the sound of the guns. “He could jump higher, shout louder, spit farther, and fight harder than any man I ever saw,” one subordinate said.

His 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, part of the 82nd Airborne Division, had staged in central Tunisia. Gavin harbored private misgivings about the Sicilian mission -- “many lives will be lost in a few hours,” he wrote -- and with good reason. The 82nd had received only roughly a third as much training time as some other U.S. divisions. The amateurish Allied parachute operations in North Africa had been marred by misfortune and miscalculation. No large-scale night combat jump had ever been attempted, and so many injuries had plagued the division in Tunisia -- including fifty-three broken legs and ankles during a single daylight jump in early June -- that training was curtailed. Much of the husky planning had been done by officers who had no airborne expertise and whose notions were suffused with fantasy. Transport pilots had little experience at night navigation, but to avoid flying over trigger-happy gunners in the Allied fleets, the planes, staying low to evade Axis radar, would have to make three dogleg turns over open water in the dark. Airborne units had yet to figure out how to drop a load heavier than three hundred pounds, much less a howitzer or a jeep. An experimental “para-mule” broke three legs; after putting the creature out of its misery, paratroopers used the carcass for bayonet practice. Still, the ranks “generally agreed that training proficiency had reached the stage where the mission was ‘in the bag,’” wrote one AAF officer, who later acknowledged “possible overoptimism.”

At about the time that Hewitt’s fleet neared Malta, Gavin and his men had clambered aboard 226 C-47 Dakotas near Kairouan. Faces blackened with burnt cork, each soldier wore a U.S. flag on the right sleeve and a white cloth knotted on the left as a nighttime recognition signal. Days earlier an 82nd Airborne platoon had circulated through the 1st Division to familiarize ground soldiers with the baggy trousers and loose smock worn by paratroopers. Parachutes occupied the C-47s’ seats; the sixteen troopers in each stick sat on the fuselage floor, practicing the invasion challenge and password: george/marshall. Dysentery tormented the regiment, and men struggled with their gear and Mae Wests to squat over honeypots placed around the aircraft bays. Medics distributed Benzedrine to the officers, morphine syrettes to everyone.

As the first planes began to taxi -- churning up dust clouds so thick that some pilots had to take off by instrument -- a weatherman appeared at Gavin’s aircraft to affirm Commander Steere’s prediction of lingering high winds aloft. “Colonel Gavin, is Colonel Gavin here? I was told to tell you that the wind is going to be thirty-five miles an hour, west to east,” he said. “They thought you’d want to know.” Fifteen was considered the maximum velocity for safe jumping. Another messenger staggered up with an enormous barracks bag stuffed with prisoner-of-war tags. “You’re supposed to put one on every prisoner you capture,” he told Gavin. An hour after takeoff, a staff officer heaved the bag into the sea.

Copyright © 2007 Rick Atkinson from the book The Day of Battle by Rick Atkinson Published by Henry Holt and Company; October 2007;$35.00US; 978-0-8050-6289-2

SARKO KNOWS HOW EASY IT IS TO DEFEAT THE FRENCH:

Support for workers on strike wanes in France (Jamey Keaten, October 20, 2007, Associated Press)

Support for striking transport workers faltered yesterday, with some unions returning to work on the second day of a protest against government plans to scrap some retirement benefits and commuters grumbling about delays and crowded platforms.

More trains, buses, and subways were running yesterday than on the first strike day, and polls indicated only limited public support for the strikes.

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM IS ALWAYS WRONG:

'Values voters' flock to Thompson (David Paul Kuhn, Oct 20, 2007, Politico)

Fred Thompson may have failed to impress Beltway insiders when he finally launched his run for the White House last month, but he is winning over a critical segment of the Republican coalition, new polling suggests.

Conservative Christians favor Thompson by a 10-point margin over his closest rival, Rudy Giuliani.

It’s a sharp reversal for Giuliani. [...]

[W]eekly Republican churchgoers back Thompson by a margin of 29 percent to 19 percent for Giuliani — roughly tying John McCain.

SPLIT PERSONALITY:

Malefactors of Megawealth: THE CONSCIENCE OF A LIBERAL By Paul Krugman (DAVID M. KENNEDY, NY Times Book Review)

Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biannually to an outstanding economist under the age of 40 — a distinction said to be predictive of, and perhaps even more prestigious than, receipt of the Nobel in economic science. His twice-weekly column in The New York Times routinely and authoritatively demystifies complex economic arcana.

And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist — at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”

SHE DID MAKE HIM A TEACHER AT AN ENGLISH BOARDING SCHOOL?

JK Rowling reveals Dumbledore is gay (Bonnie Malkin, 20/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

After reading briefly from the final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the author told an audience in New York that the wizard Albus Dumbledore, head of Hogwarts school, is gay.

Speaking at Carnegie Hall on Friday night, Rowling confirmed what some fans had always suspected - that she "always thought Dumbledore was gay".

THE ONLY QUESTION IS WHEN HE ANNOUNCES HE'S NOT RUNNING:

Giuliani primary strategy is risky (Joseph Curl, October 20, 2007, Washington Times)

Republican presidential contender Rudolph W. Giuliani is counting on surviving the four early primary states and then implementing a national primary strategy that starts in Florida and explodes across the country, from New York to California, campaign analysts and consultants say.

While Iowa and New Hampshire are almost always the bellwether contests, and often the kingmakers, the former New York City mayor is "turning upside down the laws of political gravity," one strategist said.

"It looks like they're going to try to survive early, and he's got 16 million bucks in the bank, more than anybody else but [Mitt] Romney, and they'll try to roll through this thing, get to the big states on January 29 and Super Tuesday," said Scott Reed, a former Bob Dole campaign strategist who is not working for any presidential campaign this year.

"If he survives that long, then we get into these megastates, where he has high name ID, very high favorables, states where people have not dug down and seen that he's a liberal Republican, and he may have a better chance," Mr. Reed said.

GLASS JAWED:

Monument to Che Guevara destroyed by Venezuelans (ETHAN MCNERN, 10/20/07, The Scotsman)

A GROUP of Venezuelans shattered a glass monument to Cuban hero Che Guevara built by the government of leftist President Hugo Chavez, an area mayor told state TV yesterday. [...]

Local media said a group identifying itself as the Patriotic Command of the Plateau took responsibility for ruining the 8ft glass monument inscribed with a message to honour the icon of Cuba's 1959 revolution.

"We do not want a monument to Che, he is not an example for our children," said a note left at the scene of the monument shattered by six gunshots, according to El Universal newspaper.

DOG BITES MAN:

J K Rowling: 'Christianity inspired Harry Potter' (20/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

The pope may have condemned the Harry Potter books, but J K Rowling has now revealed that Christianity has been one of her major inspirations.

Breaking her silence on the much-debated question as to whether religious themes permeate her books, Rowling confirmed that they echoed her personal struggle with faith.

Speaking in America this week, she was open about the Christian allegories in her latest book Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. [...]

"To me, the religious parallels have always been obvious," Rowling said. "But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going."

MIGHT AS WELL PLAY ALONG:

Limbaugh Letter Fetches $2.1 Million on eBay (10/19/07, Fox News)

Rush Limbaugh appears to have the Midas touch.

The conservative radio talk-show host turned an inflammatory letter written by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and signed by 41 of his fellow Democrats into a more than $4.2 million gold mine for the kids of Marines and law enforcement personnel killed in the line of duty, all courtesy of eBay.

The Eugene B. Casey foundation Betty Casey coughed up more than $2.1 million to be the sole owner of the letter sent to the radio host's boss demanding that Limbaugh be reprimanded for a "phony soldier" comment he made on air. Limbaugh has pledged to match whatever was paid for the letter.

Limbaugh described Betty Casey, a trustee of the foundation, as a loyal listener to his show.

“She gives significant sums to hospitals, hospices, colleges and private schools,” Limbaugh said during his radio show Friday afternoon, just after the eBay auction ended. “Betty has been a listener to my program since its inception, and we can't thank her enough for her support. This was kind of the last straw for her, what Harry Reid did here.”

The letter, sent by Reid and signed by his Democratic colleagues, was delivered Oct. 2 to Mark P. Mays, president of Clear Channel, the parent company of the conservative talk show host’s radio broadcast.

In exchange for the $2.1 million, the Maryland-based Eugene B. Casey Foundation, will receive the letter, the Halliburton briefcase in which the letter is secured 24 hours a day, a letter of thanks from Limbaugh and a picture of him announcing the auction at a speech in Philadelphia last week.

The Halliburton briefcase is such a great touch -- the only thing to top it would be printing Mr. Limbaugh's thank-you letter on Diebold Corporation stationery.

Neiman's popovers: Try them yourself (JOYCE SÁENZ HARRIS, 10/18/07, The Dallas Morning News)

If there's a semi-sacred rite of culinary passage for Dallas gourmets, it may be this: going to the downtown Neiman Marcus for lunch at the Zodiac, and starting with Neiman's famous popovers, preferably daubed with strawberry butter. [...]

NEIMAN MARCUS POPOVERS

3 ½ cups milk

4 cups all-purpose flour

1 ½ teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

6 large eggs, at room temperature

Place milk in bowl and microwave on High (100 percent power) for 2 minutes, or until warm to the touch.

Sift flour, salt and baking powder together in large mixing bowl. Crack eggs into work bowl of electric mixer fitted with whisk, and beat on medium speed for about 3 minutes, until foamy and pale in color. Turn down mixer to low and add warm milk.

Gradually add flour mixture and beat on medium speed for about 2 minutes. Turn machine off and let batter rest for 1 hour at room temperature.

Preheat oven to 450 F.

Spray popover tin generously with nonstick spray. Fill popover cups almost to the top with batter and place popover tin on cookie sheet. Transfer to oven and bake for 15 minutes. Turn down oven temperature to 375 F and bake for 30 to 35 minutes longer, until popovers are deep golden brown outside and airy inside.

WE'RE NOT WORTHY, MASTER:

Schilling an Elimination Master, Too (Jim Baker, 10/19/07, Baseball Prospectus)

As you know, Curt Schilling is the Red Sox scheduled pitcher for Game Six of the ALCS. With that start comes the opportunity to become a true elimination master and join Whitey Ford as the only other man with three superior elimination starts (Schilling, Bob Turley, Josh Beckett, Danny Jackson and Dave Stewart all have two each). [...]

While working on today’s piece on pitchers who have excelled in elimination games, I compiled a list of every starting pitcher who managed a Game Score of 67 or better while pitching for a team on the brink of eradication. While I didn’t give Curt Schilling a special entry of his own, I probably should have.

THE DANGER INHERENT IN A DISTRICT THAT'S NOTHING LIKE AMERICA:

Pelosi Makes Political Misstep in Reversal on Armenian Genocide (Laura Litvan and Nicholas Johnston, 10/19/07, Bloomberg)

The two meetings House Speaker Nancy Pelosi attended before a vote on a resolution labeling the massacre of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey a genocide foreshadowed the biggest political misstep of her speakership.

In the hours before a House panel approved the resolution Oct. 10, Pelosi was told in a tense meeting with Turkey's ambassador that the vote would endanger his country's alliance with the U.S. She had a warmer session with an Armenian cleric and representatives of Armenian-Americans, who have a large presence in her home state of California. In both, she made clear she intended to bring the resolution to a full House vote.

Since then, Pelosi, 67, has been in retreat. [...]

The turnaround is the first major failure for Pelosi, who has successfully muscled through the agenda she set out when she became leader of the Democratic majority in January.

RALPHIE COULD CRACK THIS CODE:

Decoding the Enigmatic Republic of Iran (Khody Akhavi, 10/18/07, IPS)

Without losing sight of the brutality of the Islamic Republic and its authoritarian tendencies, Slavin presents a multifaceted Iranian point of view, skillfully weaving the statements of high-level Iranian diplomats with the hopes and fears of everyday Iranian people, trapped in the axis of religion, politics and national pride.

Slavin describes Iran's unique system of government as "a square dance", in which the highly factionalised clerical circle, with strongly conflicting views on foreign and domestic policies, competes for the Supreme Leader's favour.

"Depending on the issue, the leader draws one group or person into the centre of the circle, then switches to another in a kind of political do-si-do. No figure is banished for good so long as it remains loyal to the leader and the system; all in the circle have the chance to influence government decisions," writes Slavin. "The dance can be slow and awkward and the steps can change in unpredictable ways."

In 1997, the unpredictable dance brought the reformist movement, spearheaded by President Mohammad Khatami, to the centre of the circle and into the crosshairs of the clerical establishment. Khatami's ability to mobilise Iran's young voting constituency yielded 70 percent of the eligible voting public, of which 80 percent flocked to the polls to cast their vote. During the mild-mannered cleric's tenure, Iranians flirted with press freedoms, eased restrictions of the hypermoral space, and engaged in contentious political elections.

However, with the ascendance of Ahmadinejad, a "man of the people" who promised to fight corruption and put Iran's oil wealth on the tables of normal Iranians, the last two years have witnessed dramatic reversals in the political gains made by Khatami. And Slavin dedicates an entire chapter of her book to the blacksmith's son who became Iran's president, portraying the leader as a critic of the very establishment from which he emerged.

One of the current president's childhood friend's, Majid Karimi, told Slavin that Ahmadinejad "was a bookish overachiever who was so conscientious that he used to do homework in between pickup soccer games." He didn't drink, smoke or chase girls, was a diligent student who scored well on the state university entrance exam. But the president has also come under attack domestically for his bewildering rhetoric and mismanagement of Iran's economy.

Saeed Laylaz, a former deputy minister under Khatami, tells Slavin that the new chief executive "behaves like a rebel, not a president. Is it his job to say that Adolf Hitler was a clean guy? Is the Holocaust a real problem for the Iranian people? ...He will collapse this country in the long term."

SELF-REFERENCE ALERT:

The High Seas' Man of War: a review of COCHRANE: The Real Master and Commander By David Cordingly (Ken Ringle, Washington Post)

Though far from humble about his creative talents, novelist Patrick O'Brian always stressed that the real-life Royal Navy exploits on which he based his 20-book Aubrey/Maturin saga far outstripped anything he could imagine. He also noted repeatedly that his swashbuckling scourge of the Napoleonic navy, "Lucky Jack" Aubrey, was grounded in the life and adventures of a genuine naval hero named Thomas Cochrane, about whom too little is remembered today.

Now comes British writer and historian David Cordingly, a former curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, to bring us up to date on Cochrane. If his biography is not quite a banquet for the reader, it is still most intriguing and satisfying fare. Within his nearly 85 years, Cochrane packed enough drama and history to shame both Horatio Nelson and Sir Francis Drake.

Not only was he an audaciously brave, sword-waving warrior, boarding hundreds of enemy ships amid cannon smoke and wreaking assorted havoc with shoreside raiding parties and ship-stealing "cutting out" expeditions, he was also a reformist gadfly in Parliament, a tireless tinkerer and inventor of everything from poison gas and tunneling techniques to electrical insulation, an author and pamphleteer, a pioneering advocate of both rocket bombardment and a steam-powered navy, and, just for good measure, a major on-the-scene player in the liberation of Chile and Peru from the Spanish, Brazil from the Portuguese and Greece from the Turks. He was the perfect romantic hero for the romantic age. Wrote Lord Byron: "There is no man I envy so much as Lord Cochrane."

O'Brian fans will find great satisfaction in smoking out similarities and differences between Cochrane and Aubrey.

But this Summer I was listening to Desolation Island and Aubrey and Maturin spend so much time on land and set out on such a mundane voyage--transporting folks to Australia--that it started to become a concern that the narrative was just too slow to even walk to. Then, all of a sudden, the Dutch ship Waakzaamheid attacks when they're in the far south and seas are running so high that it quickly becomes clear that one or the other ship must perish with all hands, since conditions preclude capture. Here the pace was so quick and the sense of dread
so palpable--Jack Aubrey is genuinely outraged by the murderous nature of the attack, which is all out of proportion with his more English understanding of the niceties of war--that the listener/reader can hardly slow down as the action unfolds. This scene is so terrifying it puts the shark attacks in Jaws and the shower scene in Psycho near to shame. Thanks to Aubrey's horror at his action, the Dutch captain -- though we never meet him -- seems as cold-blooded as Bruce or as homicidally crazy as Norman. It's extraordinary story-telling.

THE BNP MAY BE CRACKED...:

As the Poles Get Richer, Fewer Seek British Jobs (JULIA WERDIGIER, 10/19/07, NY Times)

[B]ritain may soon face a novel immigration problem. As Poland’s economy has improved this year, immigration has slowed, which economists say could cause labor shortages in British industries.

When Poland and nine other new members, most of them former Communist countries, were admitted to the European Union, many West Europeans feared an influx of cheap labor. In May 2005 in France, opponents of a new European constitution used the labor threat — personified by an archetypal “Polish plumber” who would steal French jobs — to help defeat the proposed constitution in a national referendum.

But Britain, along with Ireland and Sweden, welcomed workers from the new European Union members — partly because they took physically demanding, minimum-wage jobs that many native-born Britons snubbed and partly because a wide range of industries in this country were suffering labor shortages.

Today, the reputation of Polish construction workers, nannies and caregivers is so high that other East Europeans sometimes say they are Polish to increase their chances of being hired. At Strathaird Salmon, a fish farm in Scotland, more than a third of the employees are from Poland.

Immigration opponents were correct on one point: on average, Poles earn £7.30 ($14.93) an hour, compared with £11.10 ($22.70) an hour for Britons, according to a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research, a British institute.

In some regions, Britons worry that immigrants are pushing up housing costs and crime rates. The Polish influx was much larger than the government anticipated and unlike most previous waves of migrants — from South Asia and the Caribbean, for instance — the Poles did not restrict themselves to the cities.

Some settled in remote towns of East Anglia and the Midlands, areas with little experience in immigration, where there have been some complaints of school overcrowding and a lack of personnel able to teach children whose native language is not English.

But a decline in Polish immigrants could be a bigger problem than a surplus. “People still come,” said Ania Heasley, who arrived from Poland 16 years ago and now runs a recruitment agency, “though with less hurrah and enthusiasm because they have realized the cost of living here is higher than they thought and if you don’t speak English you will only get a low-paid job.”

In addition to a better economic climate in Poland, Britain is also something of a victim of its Polish immigrants’ success. Many who started in low-skilled jobs have improved their English and moved up the career ladder. Many Poles now reject lower-paying jobs, or team up with trade unions to ask for better pay and benefits.

This could present problems for British employers, which have relied on immigrants to fill certain unappealing jobs. The National Farmers’ Union warned last month, for instance, that there are few alternatives to immigration if Britain is to prevent a labor shortage that could damage agriculture.

THE LONG WAR IS JUST ABOUT DEALING WITH REACTIONS TO THE END OF HISTORY:

The ventriloquist: It is striking the extent to which Bin Laden, celebrity terrorist of the MTV era, speaks through Western dummies rather than in his own voice (Faisal Devji, September 2007, spiked review of books)

As a celebrity, of course, bin Laden is part of the West he criticises, remaining firmly inside it despite all attempts to play up his foreign provenance or exotic beliefs. And of this insider’s role, bin Laden himself is fully aware, not least because his attacks on America in particular are given voice in this videotape through the lips of dissenting figures like Noam Chomsky and Michael Scheuer. While not himself a socialist or a liberal, in other words, bin Laden adopts the anti-capitalist stance of such people to voice his opposition to the West. His own critique of the Occident is therefore an immanent or internal one, but more than that it is a form of ventriloquism in which the prince of terrorists speaks through one or more dummies rather than in his own name.

In itself, this adoption of readymade positions is not strange, marking in fact the language of most politicians in Europe and America, but in the case of bin Laden it illustrates additionally the fact that he possesses no position outside the world of his enemies.

It is because he speaks through a disparate set of dummies without occupying a position of his own that bin Laden can be said to turn internal or immanent critique into a form of terrorism, since all he does is to deploy one kind of argument against another in a battle which none is meant to survive. It is a form of rhetorical suicide bombing in which the Muslim critic is destroyed alongside his infidel enemy, given that the Islamic element in bin Laden’s argumentation serves as a false externality, a merely decorative covering for Marxism, Third Worldism and God knows what else. [...]

By contrast, the way in which the West engages al-Qaeda is strikingly different, with bin Laden invariably seen as being irredeemably alien, rarely if ever addressed by his enemies, and usually described as sharing nothing at all with them. And yet what could be more familiar to political life in the West than the spectacle of a leader being fed bits of information and summaries of important books by his research assistants, the very procedures that allow bin Laden to quote Noam Chomsky or assail capitalism?

However, the fragmentation of a position that is truly external to the world of his foes results not only in the fragmentation of bin Laden’s critique, but in the dissolution, as well, of any alternative worldview he might hold. In addition to lacking a unified ideology or even a utopia, therefore, al-Qaeda ends up promoting a perverse and paradoxical moral pluralism instead.

OF COURSE THE ANGLOS WANT ONE OF THEIR OWN:

Sarkozy and Brown push Blair for EU presidency (Dan Bilefsky, October 19, 2007, NY Times)

Maybe we should start calling them British fries and British toast....

FOR WANT OF A POPE...:

How to Understand Islam (Malise Ruthven, 11/08/07, NY Review of Books)

As Kelsay explains, "statements by al-Qa'ida are best understood as attempts to legitimate or justify a course of action in the terms associated with Islamic jurisprudence." He usefully terms this discourse "Shari'a reasoning."

The word sharia, usually translated as "law," refers to the "path" or "way" governing the modes of behavior by which Muslims are enjoined to seek salvation. The way may be known to God, but for human beings it is not predetermined. A famous hadith (tradition) of Muhammad states that differences of opinion between the learned is a blessing. Sharia reasoning is therefore "an open practice." In Islam's classical era, up until the tenth century, scholars exercised ijtihad—independent reasoning—in order to reach an understanding of the divine law. Ijtihad shares the same Arabic root as the more familiar jihad, meaning "effort" or "struggle," the word that is sometimes translated as "holy war." Ijtihad is in effect the intellectual struggle to discover what the law ought to be. As Kelsay remarks, the legal scholars trained in its sources and methodologies will seek to achieve a balance between the rulings of their predecessors and independent judgments reflecting the idea that "changing circumstances require fresh wisdom." The Sharia is not so much a body of law but a field of discourse or platform for legal reasoning. Recently, it has become an arena for intellectual combat.

It is therefore open to question whether the hijackers and the terrorists automatically put themselves beyond the bounds of Islam by killing innocents, as statements by Bush, Blair, and dozens of Muslim leaders and scholars suggest. With no churches or formally constituted religious authorities to police the boundaries of Islam, the only universally accepted orthodoxy is the Sharia itself. But the Sharia is more of an ideal than a formally constituted body of law. While interpreting the law was once the province of the trained clerical class of ulama, any consensus governing its correct interpretation has broken down under pressure of regional conflicts and the influence of religious autodidacts whose vision of Islam was formed outside the received scholarly tradition.

None of the three most influential theorists behind Sunni militancy, Abu'l Ala Maududi (1903–1979), Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949), and Sayyid Qutb, (1906–1966), received a traditional religious training. Yet both they and the authors of the landmark texts examined by Kelsay in his admirably lucid book (including the Charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and bin Laden's 1998 Declaration) claim the mantle of the Sharia, as did the terrorists responsible for the atrocities in New York, Madrid, and London.

Like it or not, these terrorist campaigns were inspired by the example of the Prophet's struggle—his "just war"—against the Quraysh, the pagan tribesmen of Mecca. In the context of the original conflict between the early Muslims and the Meccans, the sources, including the Koran and the narratives of Muhammad's life, suggest that "fighting is an appropriate means by which Muslims should seek to secure the right to order life according to divine directives." In militant readings of the Sharia, the historical precedents are not so much interpreted as applied. For ultra-radicals such as bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri there is, as Kelsay observes, "little room for a sustained process of discerning divine guidance" along the lines enjoined by traditional scholars. An even more striking absence is evident in the criticisms of militant readings advanced by official Islamic authorities, including the widely respected Sheikh al-Azhar, head of the mosque-university in Cairo and once the single most important voice in Sunni Islam. While questioning the methods of the militants on grounds of practical ethics—will the "actions taken in the service of justice yield more harm than good?"—their criticisms usually fall short of challenging them on the grounds of political legitimacy. Conservative Muslim critics of militancy

do not in fact dissent from the militant judgment that current political arrangements [in most Muslim majority states] are illegitimate.... In its broad outlines, the militant vision articulated by al-Zawahiri is also the vision of his critics.

The core of this consensus—shared by traditionally trained scholars and more populist leaders such as al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Maududi, his South Asian counterpart, is the belief that the abolition of the caliphate by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey in 1924 must not mean the end of Islamic government. In this vision, which is also shared by Shia jurists such as the late Ayatollah Khomeini, parliaments and elections are only acceptable within the frame of Islamic supremacy. They "cannot compromise on Muslim leadership," Kelsay writes. Full-blown democracy, where the Muslim voice might simply be one among many, implying a degree of moral equivalence between Islam and other perspectives, would be "dangerous, not only for the standing of the Muslim community, but for the moral life of humankind."

In the majority Sunni tradition this sense of supremacy was sanctified as much by history as by theology. In the first instance, the truth of Islam was vindicated on the field of battle. As Hans Küng acknowledges in Islam: Past, Present and Future—his 767-page overview of the Islamic faith and history, seen from the perspective of a liberal Christian theologian—Islam is above all a "religion of victory." Muslims of many persuasions—not just the self-styled jihadists—defend the truth claims of their religion by resorting to what might be called the argument from manifest success.

AT LEAST HE GETS THE UNILATERAL REGIME CHANGE RIGHT:

Randall Robinson on Haiti's Tortured Past, Troubling Present: a review of AN UNBROKEN AGONY: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President By Randall Robinson ( Theola Labbé, Washington Post)

[R]obinson is most appalled at the way Aristide and his wife (he resigned from the priesthood in 1994) were removed from the country in 2004. By far the most gripping and enlightening sections of the book are ones in which Robinson, relying on interviews with Aristide's helicopter pilot, Frantz Gabriel, describes how U.S. troops whisked Aristide out of the country. Gabriel arrived at the president's house at 3:30 a.m. on Feb. 29, after getting a call from security guard who sensed that something strange was happening and told him to come. When he got there, he found the president alone, but soon U.S. officials pulled into the driveway. One walked into the living room and told Aristide, "I'm the one that has to announce to you that you've got to go."

The Aristides were driven to the airport in a convoy of 10 white Suburbans; they boarded a plane and, after some uncertainty as to where they would be taken, were flown to the Central African Republic. Robinson spoke to Aristide nearly daily after the forced exit and traveled to Africa along with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to find out what had happened.

In recounting these events, Robinson often takes on a crusading tone, using words such as "abduction" and "kidnapping" to describe Aristide's departure. These are more than opinions to Robinson; they are his truth, but with his urgent tone, he risks alienating the kind of reader he may want to edify, someone ignorant of Haiti's unusual history as a rebel slave colony.

AMBULANCES, NOT SKIRTS:

John Edwards's Docudrama: The Anatomy of Innuendo (Daily Intelligencer, 10/11/07, New York)

One of the wonderful things about the Internet is that rumors and scandal take on a life of their own. No one even needs to report anything! Once a story is out there, it's fair game for everyone else to repeat it, often under the guise of media analysis. The story starts at the bottom of the food chain of credibility. Bloggers and tabloid outlets egg each other incrementally on, until eventually more serious outlets pick it up.

We may be about to leave the early stages of such a cycle with the growing scrutiny into the professional relationship between John Edwards and a woman named Rielle Hunter, a.k.a. Lisa Druck, who produced films for his One America prepresidential campaign. Ann Coulter is even involved! The following timeline details the anatomy of an innuendo, including a few steps into the perhaps inevitable future.

WASN'T THE NEXT PRESIDENT SUPPOSED TO RETREAT FROM THE WORLD?:

An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom (John McCain, 10/16/07, Real Clear Politics)

American leadership has helped build a world that is more secure, more prosperous, and freer than ever before. Our unique form of leadership -- the antithesis of empire -- gives us moral credibility, which is more powerful than any show of arms. We are rich in people and resources but richer still in ideals and vision -- and the means to realize them. Yet today much of the world has come to challenge our actions and doubt our intentions. Polls indicate that the United States is more unpopular now than at any time in history and increasingly viewed as pursuing its narrow self-interest. The people who hold these views are wrong. We are a special nation, the closest thing to a "shining city on a hill" ever to have existed. But it is incumbent on us to restore our mantle as a global leader, reestablish our moral credibility, and rebuild those damaged relationships that once brought so much good to so many places.

As president, I will seek the widest possible circle of allies through the League of Democracies, NATO, the UN, and the Organization of American States. During President Ronald Reagan's deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles and President George H. W. Bush's Gulf War, the United States was joined by vast coalitions despite considerable opposition to American policies among foreign publics. These alliances came about because America had carefully cultivated relationships and shared values with its friends abroad. Working multilaterally can be a frustrating experience, but approaching problems with allies works far better than facing problems alone.

Almost two centuries ago, James Madison declared that "the great struggle of the Epoch" was "between liberty and despotism." Many thought that this struggle ended with the Cold War, but it did not. It has taken on new guises, such as Islamist terrorists using our technological advances for their murderous designs and resurgent autocrats reminiscent of the nineteenth century. International terrorists capable of inflicting mass destruction are a new phenomenon. But what they seek and what they stand for are as old as time. They are part of a worldwide political, economic, and philosophical struggle between the future and the past, progress and reaction, liberty and despotism. Our security, our prosperity, and our democratic way of life depend on the outcome of that struggle.

Thomas Jefferson argued that America was the "solitary republic of the world, the only monument of human rights, and the sole depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth, if other regions of the earth shall ever become susceptible of its benign influence." Since that time two centuries ago when the United States was the "solitary republic of the world," more people than ever before have come under the "benign influence" of liberty. The protection and promotion of the democratic ideal, at home and abroad, will be the surest source of security and peace for the century that lies before us. The next U.S. president must be ready to lead, ready to show America and the world that this country's best days are yet to come, and ready to establish an enduring peace based on freedom that can safeguard American security for the rest of the twenty-first century. I am ready.

WE HIRED THE MISSILES:

Mullen: U.S. can strike Iran (Bill Gertz, October 19, 2007, Washington Times)

U.S. military forces are capable of conducting operations against Iran if called on to bomb nuclear facilities or other targets, the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said yesterday.

"From a military standpoint, there is more than enough reserve to respond if that, in fact, is what the national leadership wanted to do, and so I don't think we're too stretched in that regard," Adm. Michael Mullen told reporters when asked if current operations had worn out U.S. forces.

TOO BAD IT TAKES A BOMB TO GET THE POLS NOT TO CAMPAIGN:

'After This Attack, There Won't Be Any Election Campaign': Who was behind the violent attack on Pakistan's opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto? In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, writer Ahmed Rashid makes accusations against government security forces and analyzes the possible effects on elections. (Alexander Schwabe, 10/19/07, Der Spiegel)

Rashid: [...] [T]here is speculation that the attack was not carried out by Islamists, but by certain groups within the regime who don't want Bhutto in the country. The leaders of Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party are accusing the government and the intelligence services of not having done enough to prevent the attack.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you agree with them?

Rashid: I really wonder why the government didn't do more in terms of providing security during Bhutto's return. The fact is that the security forces' presence was very small.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It's been reported that 20,000 men were deployed to protect Bhutto.

Rashid: The decisive factor is that the majority of the security forces came from the provinces and not from national units. Everybody knows that the forces from the provinces are led by an opponent of Bhutto's People's Party. [...]

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What does the attack mean for the country's further development? Will democratic organizations be bombed out of the country?

Rashid: I don't think so. Naturally people are shocked right now. But they'll want to have an election, because they want democracy. They want an end to military rule.

Interview conducted by Alexander Schwabe

THE PESSIMISTS ARE WESTERNERS:

Majority of Afghans want foreign troops to stay and fight (ALAN FREEMAN, October 19, 2007, Globe and Mail)

A strong majority of Afghans approve of the presence of NATO-led troops in their country, including from Canada, and want the foreign soldiers to remain to fight the Taliban and support reconstruction efforts.

In a poll of Afghans conducted by Environics Research on behalf of The Globe and Mail, the CBC and La Presse, respondents expressed optimism about the future, strong support for the government of President Hamid Karzai and appreciation for the work being done by NATO countries in improving security. [...]

According to the survey, conducted between Sept. 17 and 24 with a sample of 1,578 men and women, 60 per cent said the presence of foreigners in the country was a good thing. Only 16 per cent said it was a bad thing, while 22 per cent said it was equally good and bad.

NEVER OVERESTIMATE THE COONKEISTERS:

Jindal maintaining lead up to Louisiana primary (Robert Buckman, October 19, 2007, Washington Times)

Rep. Bobby Jindal holds a commanding lead heading into tomorrow's gubernatorial primary, but it is not clear whether he can avoid a runoff election.

A poll released last week by Southeastern Louisiana University showed the two-term Republican congressman leading the race with 46 percent of the vote. But a candidate must get 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff election Nov. 17.

MORE:
An Improbable Favorite Emerges in Cajun Country (ADAM NOSSITER, 10/19/07, NY Times)

An Oxford-educated son of immigrants from India is virtually certain to become the leading candidate for Louisiana’s next governor in Saturday’s primary election. It would be an unlikely choice for a state that usually picks its leaders from deep in the rural hinterlands and has not had a nonwhite chief executive since Reconstruction.

But peculiar circumstances have combined to make Representative Bobby Jindal, a conservative two-term Republican, the overwhelming favorite. Analysts predict Mr. Jindal, 36, could get more than 50 percent of the vote in the open primary, thus avoiding a November runoff and becoming the nation’s first Indian-American governor. If he fails to win a majority, he would face the next-highest vote getter in the runoff.

Louisiana Democrats are demoralized, caught between the perception of post-hurricane incompetence surrounding their standard bearer, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, who is not running for re-election, and corruption allegations against senior elected officials like William J. Jefferson, the congressman from New Orleans.

IT'S THE CONVICTION HE DOESN'T SHARE WITH MAGGIE THAT'LL DESTROY HIM:

Gordon Brown to defend EU Treaty deal (Bruno Waterfield and Toby Helm, 19/10/2007, Daily Telegraph)

Mr Brown joined other European leaders at a Lisbon summit to crack open the champagne to toast a new EU blueprint that, he hopes, the Government can force through parliament without giving in to the clamour for a popular vote. [...]

But Conservative leader David Cameron has responded by accusing the Government of breaking its promise and treating people "like fools".

He told BBC Breakfast that the "red lines" insisted upon by Mr Brown were "complete red herrings".

"They have signed a constitution that transfers, that gets rid of, our right to say no, our veto, in 60 areas," he said.

"They've created a permanent EU president, a permanent foreign minister, a diplomatic service. This is a really significant transfer of power from Britain to Brussels."

NOT MY TRIBE:

A Local Peace Accord: Cause for Hope? (DARRIN MORTENSON, 10/19/07, TIME)

On Thursday, 32 tribal sheiks from the region — mostly Sunni, but including some Shiites — signed a ground-breaking accord pledging to work together to curb extremism and to shake the sectarian violence that has rent the region since the U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003. The rare gathering at Baghdad's al Rashid Hotel, in the heart of the Green Zone, was the culmination of months of delicate negotiations and a welcome breakthrough for U.S. troops who've been fighting and dying there for the past 14 months. "You know the saying: that all politics is local. Well you really see that playing out here. This is the capstone of the first phase of tribal reconciliation in the region," said Col. Mike Kershaw, the commander of the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, the Fort Drum, New York-based unit which has worked among some 400,000 mostly Sunni Iraqis in the southern portion of Baghdad Province since last year. "Am I saying the war's over? No way. But I am saying that this is an opportunity that we didn't have before."

The political district of Mahmudiyah lies just south of metropolitan Baghdad and includes the violent urban centers of Yusifiyah, Latifiyah and Mahmudiyah. It shares a rough and tumble neighborhood with Anbar to the west and Babil to the south. A mixed region of Shi'a and Sunni, city and country, the mostly agricultural region suffers all the sectarian, economic and political woes of the capital. While the region's Sunni and Shi'ite tribes battled each other for land and primacy, they found a common enemy in the U.S. troops stationed there. But that situation changed about four months ago.

"You look at the graph [of attacks] after about April and it just falls. It's a free fall," said Maj. Austin Miller, head of the U.S. Army's civil affairs mission in the Mahmudiyah district. Military leaders credit the recent lull in violence to Sunni tribal leaders who earlier this year turned on al-Qaeda in Iraq in response to its excesses. It dovetails with a movement that began a year ago in neighboring Anbar Province to the west and has since spread out from there along tribal lines.

THE COMING BOOM:

Afghanistan Faced with Severe Housing Shortage (Anuj Chopra, 18 Oct 2007, World Politics Review)

Six years after the invasion, ask ordinary Afghans the biggest challenge they face, and their answer isn't likely to be the Taliban. It is, in fact, to find a roof over their heads.

Kabul is in particular need, because of the destruction of nearly 70,000 houses in almost thirty years of war. And a steady inflow of returnees has further exacerbated the problem. With a population of 800,000 before the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, Kabul is now home to over four million, many of them refugees that have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. It is estimated that as much as half of Kabul's population lives in squatter settlements.

The city is sinking under the weight of its own citizens. Kabul 's most urgent urban planning issues are linked to its rapid population growth.

The situation is the same in other larger cities as well -- like Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif and Kandahar. According to U.N. estimates, from 2000 to 2015 the national population is expected to increase by 14 million to a total of about 37 million; more than half of this growth will be in urban areas.

So far, foreign firms have invested $4.5 billion in rebuilding Afghanistan, but very little of it has gone into housing construction, according to Omar Zakhilwal, the director of the Afghanistan Investment support Agency (AISA) in Kabul.

PUNCHING ABOVE HIS WEIGHTLESSNESS:

Romney Calls United Nations a 'Failure' (JIM DAVENPORT, 10/19/07, AP)

"The United Nations has been an extraordinary failure of late," Romney said in response to a question at a pancake house along the coast of early voting South Carolina. "We should withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council."

Actually, the United States doesn't have a seat on the human rights council, which it has been boycotting.

GONNA NEED A LOT MORE BATHROOM STALLS:

China's surplus of sons: A geopolitical time bomb (Michael Fragoso, October 19, 2007, CS Monitor)

The unintended consequences of this government policy are staggering. The proportion of male births to female births (the "sex ratio") is not merely unusual, but alarming. Worldwide, there are already 100 million girls "missing" due to sex-selective abortion and female infanticide, according to the English medical journal The Lancet. Fifty million of these girls are thought to be from China. In many provinces, the sex ratio at birth is between 120 to 130 boys for every 100 girls; the natural number is about 104. What will happen in future decades when these boys grow up and look for wives? [...]

Another serious threat is to regional stability and, by extension, international security. As Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer recently wrote in their prize-winning work on demography and security, "Bare Branches," surplus male populations in a region often result in violence – through banditry, rioting, or militarization. The 6 to 5 male-female ratio in China means there are a lot of men who will not be able to start families. If history is any guide, they will either find less savory things to occupy their time, or find women through equally unsavory means.

SHINOLA?:

REVIEW: of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran, by Danny Postel (Farzin Vahdat, Summer 2007, Logos Journal)

The core reasons for the American and western leftists’ being reluctant to embrace the cause of Iranians who are trying to bring about change in their country lies somewhere else. The essential reason for this reluctance is that American progressives are used to advocate those causes that are fighting the Empire and their local lackeys. The Left in the US has developed what Postel calls a “tunnel vision” that deems only the political and social movements that are fighting right wing oppressors who are supported by the United States, worthy of embracing—such as those in Central America in the 1980s. The Iranian dissidents are fighting a government that is a “sworn enemy” of the Empire.

What is more, the oppositional forces in Iran, are not couching their opposition in discourses such as Marxism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, subaltern studies and different mixtures of these. The Iranian progressive forces have by and large adopted western liberal-democratic discourse and its past and contemporary gurus to advance their cause. These are very significant issues that have prevented the western progressive forces, if not opposing Iranians seeking change in their country, at least being aloof to them and their fierce struggle in recent years. For the far left in the west, liberalism is a tool of imperialism and embodiment of Eurocentrism. Why should they support a cause that utilizes a discourse that they deem to be at the core of what they are struggling against? The Iranian reformists are then the friends of my enemy, and therefore, if not my enemy, they are not my friend either.

THE FATAL ABSENCE OF PRESENCE:

Romney's Achilles' Heel: Can Mitt convince voters he believes anything? (John Dickerson, Oct. 18, 2007, Slate)

Mitt Romney has often undermined himself during the presidential campaign. Even as he has asserted that he is anti-abortion, he has been dogged by video clips and statements from his 1994 Senate and 2002 gubernatorial campaigns, in which he robustly defended a woman's right to have an abortion. On several other subjects there also seem to be two stories: gun control (for/against); gays (their champion/not so much); and even Ronald Reagan himself (distance/hug). The individual changes of position have caused minor irritation for him. The cumulative effect of them all is the big problem. Taken together, they suggest, as a nonaffiliated veteran of Republican politics put it, "that he has no core." [...]

[A]sk voters about Romney's flip-flops, and they speak out loud. In a recent Des Moines Register poll, likely caucus attendees listed Romney's multiple positions as his biggest liability—on par with Rudy Giuliani's pro-choice stance on abortion. In a Pew Center poll, only 12 percent of respondents thought of Mitt Romney when the word honest was presented to them, the lowest of the four major Republican candidates. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that only 13 percent of Republicans find Mitt Romney honest and trustworthy, also the lowest of the four major Republican candidates. A CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 15 percent of adults found Mitt Romney to be the most honest—again, the bottom of the field.

Like all of the big questions that dog the candidates, this problem has been with Romney for a while—even before the presidential race. "He's not pro-choice or anti-choice," said Senate opponent Ted Kennedy in 1994. "He's multiple choice." Romney hasn't been able to dispense with questions about his constancy, and the concerns are only becoming more relevant as Republicans fight over which candidate is a more genuine conservative.

FIRST RULE OF DARWINISM--THINK IT, DON'T SAY IT:

James Watson: Master of the scientific gaffe (Michael Marshall, 10/18/07, New Scientist)

London's Science Museum has cancelled a sell-out talk by James Watson this Friday. It follows his remarks in an interview with the Sunday Times, in which he suggested that black people are less intelligent than white people. He was quoted as saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really". He went on to say that his hope is that everyone is equal, but that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". [...]

He has previously argued that stupidity is a disease that should be cured, and that "it would be great" if women were genetically engineered to be pretty.

IF YOU WANT TRULY LETHAL WARFARE...:

A green light to oust Al Qaeda: Bhutto's return to Pakistan signals a democratic alliance to attack the terrorist camps (CS Monitor, October 19, 2007)

Ms. Bhutto's return from eight years of exile came as the Pakistani Army began a new offensive in the largely lawless Waziristan provinces along the border with Afghanistan. The timing was not coincidental.

Such an aggressive operation indicates new confidence that an alliance between the popular Bhutto and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can better stand up to domestic Islamic political foes who support Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

SHE FINALLY REMEMBERED THE SAFETY WORD!

House Speaker Now Unsure if Armenian Genocide Motion Will Reach a Vote (CARL HULSE, 10/18/07, NY Times)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that she was reconsidering her pledge to force a vote on a resolution condemning as genocide the mass killing of Armenians starting in 1915, as President Bush intensified his push to derail the legislation.

MORE:
House fails to muster SCHIP veto override (Martin Kady II, Oct 18, 2007 , Politico)

THERE'S THAT SURGE NOW...:

Howard gets back in fight (Matthew Denholm, October 19, 2007, The Australian)

JOHN Howard is close to holding the vital marginal seat of Braddon in Tasmania and has halved the gap to Labor across the nation.

A Newspoll survey exclusive to The Australian shows the Coalition defying the national drift to Labor in Braddon, complicating Kevin Rudd's bid to win the 16 seats he needs forvictory.

And a Galaxy poll published in The Daily Telegraph newspaper today shows Labor's nationwide lead over the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis halving from 12 to six points.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNISTS NOW:

Intelligent design: A theory of an intelligently guided invisible hand wins the Nobel prize (The Economist, 10/18/07)

The word “mechanism” refers to the institutions and the rules of the game that govern our economic activities, which can range from a Ministry of Planning in a command economy to the internal organisation of a company to trading in a market.

Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson won their third-shares of the $1.5m prize for shaping a branch of economics that has had a broad impact, both in academia, in subjects such as incentive theory, game theory and the political science of institutions, and in the real world. It affects everything from utility regulation and auctions to structuring the pay of company executives and the design of elections. Mr Hurwicz must be especially delighted as, aged 90, he is the oldest ever Nobel winner, and may have thought his chance had gone. He worked long ago with one previous winner, Kenneth Arrow, and was the graduate adviser to another, Daniel McFadden. One of his most influential papers was published when he was 55, about the same age his co-winners are now, which proves, if nothing else, that making big intellectual breakthroughs is not exclusively a young person's game.

Mechanism-design theory aims to give the invisible hand a helping hand, in particular by focusing on how to minimise the economic cost of “asymmetric information”—the problem of dealing with someone who knows more than you do. Trading efficiently under asymmetric information is hard, for how do you decide what price to offer someone for something—a product, say, or their labour—if you do not know at what price they would sell it? On the one hand, you may not offer enough to get them to deliver the product or work, or at least do so adequately; on the other, you may overpay, wasting resources that might have been better used elsewhere.

Mr Hurwicz took up economics at a time when debate was raging about the relative merits of central planning and the market mechanism. While agreeing with the great libertarian, Friedrich von Hayek, that the dispersion of information was at the heart of the failure of planning, Mr Hurwicz saw that it went deeper than that. He observed that there was a lack of incentive for people to share their information with the government truthfully. Moreover, although the market mechanism was far less afflicted than central planning by such incentive problems, it was by no means immune from them.

His big idea was “incentive compatibility”. The way to get as close as possible to the most efficient economic outcome is to design mechanisms in which everybody does best for themselves by sharing truthfully whatever private information they have that is asked for. Even this cannot guarantee an optimal outcome, Mr Hurwicz showed, because the existence of any private information precludes the economist's holy grail, known as Pareto efficiency, even if everyone's incentives are compatible. But it will get closer to it than if incentives are incompatible (ie, when some people can do better by not sharing information or lying). Pareto efficiency means that no one can be made better off without someone becoming worse off. Mechanism design has “incentive efficiency”: given compatible incentives, no one can do better without someone doing worse.

THE TRADITION THAT MUST NOT BE NAMED (via Qiao Yang):

An Anglosphere Future (Christopher Hitchens, 10/18/2007, City Journal)

[P]roperly circumscribed, the idea of an “Anglosphere” can constitute something meaningful. We should not commit the mistake of “thinking with the blood,” as D. H. Lawrence once put it, however, but instead emphasize a certain shared tradition, capacious enough to include a variety of peoples and ethnicities and expressed in a language—perhaps here I do betray a bias—uniquely hostile to euphemisms for tyranny. In his postwar essay “Towards European Unity,” George Orwell raised the possibility that the ideas of democracy and liberty might face extinction in a world polarized between superpowers but that they also might hope to survive in some form in “the English-speaking parts of it.” English is, of course, the language of the English and American revolutions, whose ideas and values continue to live after those of more recent revolutions have been discredited and died.

Consider in this light one of Nelson Mandela’s first acts as elected president of South Africa: applying to rejoin the British Commonwealth, from which South Africa had found itself expelled in the 1960s (by a British Tory government, incidentally) because of its odious racism. Many people forget that the Soweto revolt in the 1980s, which ultimately spelled apartheid’s downfall, exploded after the Nationalist regime made the medium of school instruction exclusively Afrikaans, banning the classroom use of English, along with Xhosa and Zulu.

More recently, in July 2005, Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh came to Oxford University to receive an honorary degree and delivered a speech, not uncontroversial in India itself, in which he observed that many of India’s splendors as a rising twenty-first-century superpower—from railroads to democracy to a law-bound civil service—were the result of its connection with England. “If there is one phenomenon on which the sun cannot set,” Singh observed, “it is the world of the English-speaking peoples, in which the people of Indian origin are the single largest component.” He added that the English language was a key element in the flourishing of India’s high-tech sector. Few would have wanted to point this out, but it was Karl Marx who argued that India might benefit in this way from being colonized by England and not (and he spelled out the alternatives) Russia or Persia or Turkey.

We owe the term “Anglosphere” in large part to the historian and poet Robert Conquest, who this summer celebrated his 90th year of invincible common sense and courage in the fight against totalitarian thinking. In an appendix to his marvelous 2005 book The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History, he offers a detailed proposal for a broad Anglosphere alliance among the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands, and the Caribbean, with the multiethnic English-speaking island of Bermuda as the enterprise’s headquarters. Though he unfortunately does not include India, he does find it “perfectly conceivable that other countries particularly close to our condition might also accede—for example Norway and Gambia, in each of which English is widely understood and in each of which the political and civic structure is close to that of the rest of the states.” Quixotic as all this may sound, it probably understates the growing influence of English as a world language—the language of business and the Internet and air-traffic control, as well as of literature (or of literatures, given the emergence, first predicted by Orwell, of a distinct English written by Indians).

The shape of the world since September 11 has, in fact, shown the outline of such an alliance in practice. Everybody knows of Tony Blair’s solidarity with the United States, but when the chips were down, Australian forces also went to Iraq. Attacked domestically for being “all the way with the USA,” Australian prime minister John Howard made the imperishable observation that in times of crisis, there wasn’t much point in being 75 percent a friend. Howard won reelection in 2004. Even in relatively neutralist Canada, an openly pro-U.S. government headed by Stephen Harper was elected in 2006, surprising pundits who predicted that a tide of anti-Americanism made such an outcome impossible.

Howard’s statement has a great deal of history behind it. Roberts defines that history as an intimate alliance that defeated German Wilhelmine imperialism in 1918, the Nazi-Fascist Axis in 1945, and international Communism in 1989. This long arc of cooperation means that a young officer in, say, a Scottish regiment has a good chance of having two or even three ancestors who fought in the same trenches as did Americans and New Zealanders. No military force evolved by NATO, let alone the European Union, can hope to begin with such a natural commonality, the lack of which was painfully evident in Europe’s post-1989 Balkan bungling (from which a largely Anglo-American initiative had to rescue it).

The world now faces a challenge from a barbarism that is no less menacing than its three predecessors—and may even be more so. And in this new struggle, a post-9/11 America came—not a moment too soon—to appreciate the vital fact that India had been fighting bin-Ladenism (and had been its target) far longer than we had. That fact alone should have mandated a change of alignment away from the chronically unreliable Pakistani regime that had used the Taliban as its colonial proxy in Afghanistan. But it helped that India was also a polyethnic secular democracy with a largely English-speaking military, political, and commercial leadership. We’re only in the earliest stages of this new relationship, which so far depends largely on a nuclear agreement with New Delhi, and with the exception of Silicon Valley, the U.S. does not yet boast a politically active Indian population. But the future of American-Indian relations is crucial to our struggle against jihadism, as well as to our management of the balance of power with China.

In considering the future of the broader Anglosphere tradition, especially in the context of anti-jihadism, it may help to contrast it with the available alternatives. As a supranational body, the United Nations has obviously passed the point of diminishing returns. Inaugurated as an Anglo-American “coalition of the willing” against Hitler and his allies, the UN—in its failure to confront the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur and in its abject refusal to enforce its own resolutions in the case of Iraq—is a prisoner of the “unilateralism” of France, Russia, and, to a lesser extent, China. NATO may have been somewhat serviceable in Kosovo (the first engagement in which it ever actually fought as an alliance), but it has performed raggedly in Afghanistan. The European Union has worked as an economic solvent on redundant dictatorships in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and also on old irredentist squabbles in Ireland, Cyprus, and Eastern Europe. But it is about to reach, if it has not already, a membership saturation point that will disable any effective decision-making capacity. A glaring example of this disability is the EU’s utter failure to compose a viable constitution. Roberts correctly notes that “along with over two centuries of amendments the entire (readable and easily intelligible) U.S. Constitution can be printed out onto twelve pages of A4-sized paper; the (unreadable and impenetrably complicated) proposed European Constitution ran to 265.” (Roberts doesn’t mention the lucidity and brevity of the British constitution, perhaps because the motherland of the English-speaking peoples has absentmindedly failed to evolve one in written form, and thus will, on the demise of the present queen, have as head of state a strange middle-aged man with a soft spot for Islam and bizarre taste in wives.)

But the temptation to construe the Anglosphere too narrowly persists. Another recent book, The Anglosphere Challenge, by James C. Bennett, expresses astonishment at the low price that the British establishment has put on its old Commonwealth and Dominion ties, and some hostility to the way in which European connections now take precedence. But viewed historically, it is surely neither surprising nor alarming that the British decided to reverse Winston Churchill’s greatest mistake—abstaining from original membership in the European common market—and to associate more closely with the neighboring landmass. As Roberts himself concedes, Britain now enjoys a unique Atlanticist partnership along with full and energetic participation in the councils of the European Union.

Meanwhile, the multiculturalism that he claims should be defended elsewhere in the essay is nothing more than an attack on the very culture of the Anglosphere as is the transnationalism of the EU, which is why the European constitution can't be presented to English-speaking people without being rejected.

PHIL HUGHES'S ELBOW BREATHES A SIGH OF RELIEF:

Torre Turns Down Yankees Offer (Tyler Kepner, 10/18/07, NY Times)

The Yankees offered Manager Joe Torre a one-year deal with a base salary of $5 million and the chance to make another $3 million in performance bonuses. But after 12-years and 12 postseason appearances (including four World Series titles), Torre turned it down.

EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT ANCIENT ROME...:

The vital statistics of Asterix: Albert Uderzo has been charming children for almost 50 years with his comic book creation, Asterix the Gaul. Despite the death of its co-creator 30 years ago, the character still dominates his life (Mario Cacciottolo, 10/18/07, BBC Magazine)

The cartoon books of the Gaulish hero and his friends, who live in a village surrounded by invading Romans kept out thanks to a magic potion which gives tremendous strength, have been massively popular since first appearing in 1959.

Inside the Uderzo residence, in the exclusive Neuilly-sur-Seine district of Paris, the artist enters his studio slowly, with the use of a single crutch - his right knee has suddenly swollen up and he had to visit hospital earlier that day.

Although obviously in some discomfort, he refuses to make a fuss.

His office/studio is exactly how one hopes it would be - bright and sunny, stuffed full of figures of Asterix, his friend Obelix and their friends and foes, with models of miniature Gaulish villages, artistic materials and the walls smothered with original artwork.

There are also two desks, to which Mr Uderzo points in turn. "That one is where I work, that one is where I do my taxes."

Asterix, the village of Gauls with their chieftain Vitalstatistix and the "crazy" Romans surrounding them, were created by Mr Uderzo. Since the death of his writing partner, Rene Goscinny, 30 years ago next month, he has taken on the words as well.

Mr Uderzo's office is filled with working materials and memorabilia
Some 325 million copies of the 33 Asterix albums have been sold, with translations into languages as diverse as Urdu, Arabic and even Latin.

NO DEMOTICS, NO DEMOCRACY?:

The talking cure: a review of Why Are the Arabs Not Free? by Moustapha Safouan (Samir El-Youssef, 18 October 2007, New Statesman)

The disparity between written and spoken Arabic is so great that talking to an audience is often a discouraging test for Arab writers. To use the vernacular, one would probably have to avoid sophisticated arguments and deep thoughts. But to talk in standard (written) language is to risk sounding pompous and rhetorical - and, worst of all, to fail to reach those who have had no school education. Given the high level of illiteracy in the Arab world, this means losing the attention of a great proportion of the public.

The dilemma is particularly daunting for those of us bilingual Arab writers who, through writing in English or French, have become used to the idea of written and spoken language being the same. The Franco-Egyptian writer Moustapha Safouan's solution to the problem is a call for writers to abandon standard Arabic and use the spoken dialects instead. Safouan claims that writing in rarefied standard Arabic is a major cause of the absence of freedom and democracy in the Arab world. He calls this the "politics of writing" - written language is the privilege of the elite, the educated few who are faithfully in the service of their paymasters: the despotic Arab rulers and their political regimes.

MORE (via Mike Daley):
Mother Tongue: A review of Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language, by Seth Lerer (Joseph Tartakovsky, Fall 2007, Claremont Review of Books)

HOW YOU CAN TELL HE'S NOT GOING TO RUN:

Rudy in Iowa: Is he or isn't he? (Jonathan Martin, Oct 18, 2007, Politico)

Giuliani’s entire strategy, as made plain by candidate and campaign alike, is based on performing well in the large states that will hold their primaries after the traditional early contests.

Indeed, the tear-sheet next to the main entrance of the former New York mayor’s Manhattan campaign headquarters counts down the days to Feb. 5, the day of “Tsunami Tuesday,” not Jan. 3, the day Iowa Republicans decreed this week as their caucus date.

The attention lavished on the later, larger states is underscored by Giuliani’s travel calendar. He touched down in this Mississippi River town Wednesday as part of a three-stop swing. But that was his first real campaign visit to Iowa in over two months and it came after a two-week period in which he had visited every other state holding a January contest (some more than once).

“Iowans expect to see their governor and their presidential candidates up close and personal,” said former Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. Having visited each of the state’s 99 counties every one of the 16 years he served as governor, he would know.

Asked about how many more visits Giuliani would make in the 78 days before the caucuses, a senior campaign aide said it would be “more than in the last six weeks but perhaps still fewer than other candidates.”